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WASHINGTON — President Obama plans deep new cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal at a time when the government faces a 15-year backlog of warheads already waiting to be dismantled and a need for billions of dollars in new facilities to store and dispose of the weapons' plutonium.
The logjam of thousands of retired warheads will grow considerably based on a promise made in April by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to get their stockpiles far below levels set by current disarmament pacts.
Yet much of the infrastructure needed to dispose of those weapons don't exist yet, according
I got a really cool idea... Why don't they get all the missiles / rockets they can lay their hands on, top em off with the nukes and send them into space about 3 or 4 hundred thousand miles... Then set them off in the biggest firework display ever!!!!!!!!!
be able to carry about 188 tonnes (414,000 lb) to Low Earth orbit (LEO), and 71 tonnes (157,000 lb) to the Moon
In 1983, physicist Bernard Cohen proposed that uranium is effectively inexhaustible, and could therefore be considered a renewable source of energy.[4] He claims that fast breeder reactors, fueled by naturally replenished uranium extracted from seawater, could supply energy at least as long as the sun's expected remaining lifespan of five billion years.[4] - whilst uranium is a finite resource mineral resource within the earth, the hydrogen in the sun is finite too - thus, if the resource of nuclear fuel can last over such time scales, as Cohen contents, then nuclear energy is every bit as sustainable as solar power or any other source of energy, in terms of sustainability over the finite realistic time scale of life surviving on this planet.
We thus conclude that all the world’s energy requirements for the remaining 5×109 yr of existence of life on Earth could be provided by breeder reactors without the cost of electricity rising by as much as 1% due to fuel costs. This is consistent with the definition of a “renewable” energy source in the sense in which that term is generally used.
His paper assumes extraction of uranium from seawater at the rate of 16 kilotonnes (35×10^6 lb) per year of uranium and that the cost of electricity will rise no more than 1% due to fuel costs.[4] The current demand for uranium is already near 70 kilotonnes (150×10^6 lb) per year. Cohen's paper does not give a date when demand of uranium exceeds the supply of uranium. However, since he calculates using breeder technology uranium would be used at least 60 times more efficiently than today.
[edit on 13-5-2009 by ANNED]