At his site <http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/> Jim Stone says he recently interviewed an 85-year-old retired nuclear engineer who while working at GE "had closed the nuclear loop" only to have this enormously beneficial breakthrough banned by sleazy Jimmy Carter in a US presidential executive order.  Here is Jim's summary and interpretation of the interview:

 

The following is what he said in the interview:

 

I started in the American nuclear program all the way back at the time of the Manhattan project, and have been involved in reactor design and nuclear engineering my whole life. There was one answer we all searched for, and it was how to close the nuclear loop.

When a reactor such as a boiling water reactor uses fuel, the waste products, which are highly radioactive isotopes that have a different fission characteristic than the fuel, build up in the fuel and poison the nuclear reaction. A reactor such as a boiling water reactor can only use the fuel until it gets contaminated by these isotopes enough to change the nature of the nuclear reactions taking place. The reaction environment inside a boiling water reactor is only one such environment that will work to trigger a chain reaction, and if that spent fuel is put into a reactor made from different materials, those materials can favor the burning of the poisonous isotopes, and use the isotopes as fuel until the fuel is purified of them, and therefore had it's original radiological characteristics restored. Once that is accomplished, the fuel can go back into the boiling water reactor, and used as new.

We perfected the second reactor design, which used liquid sodium as a coolant, and the reactor ran much hotter - 1100 farenheit as opposed to 550 in a boiling water reactor. The liquid sodium circulated inside the reactor in lieu of water, with the heat of the reaction being removed from the system by a heat exchanger which boiled the water outside the reactor for use in producing electricity. The temperature difference and coolant characteristics facilitated the burning of the isotopes, and you got to use both sides of the reaction - one side produced electricity while poisoning the fuel, and the other side produced electricity while burning the poisons out. This process can be repeated 20 times, and when it is finished the fuel is DEAD and no longer hazardous because all of it's radiological potential has been used up. It was a dream come true, and Carter banned it by executive order!

He specifically stated that the burn-down was so complete that the spent fuel was safe to handle directly with bare hands, and needed no special care or maintenance at all.

He then went on to lament about what a waste of money it was, because the fuel is expensive, and they were only using it to about five percent of its total potential. He lamented the fact that his life's greatest accomplishment got banned for no good reason, and it was a tremendous waste of money to not use the technology his team developed. Electricity would have been cheap. REAL CHEAP. So cheap that homes would not have been heated with oil or natural gas, electricity would have been the only sensible choice. Furthermore, with a reduction in the price of electricity by at least 10X, electric cars would have been a no brainer.

This would have been America's free energy future, with the only real cost being maintenance of infrastructure.

His take on it was that we were now paying too much for electricity. I guess that's how an engineer thinks. He had read my article on Fukushima and liked it, so one would guess his eyes were open to the global conspiracy. Even still I think he missed the obvious in what he said.

Here is my take, and it has NOTHING to do with price, preservation of resources, or free energy.

Nuclear reactors are HUGE. They have an enormous amount of nuclear material in them. One boiling water reactor core the size of the ones at Fukushima can easily hold enough fissionable material to make countless atomic bombs. And with the technology that makes re-using that fuel illegal, it builds up at a rate of 25 tons per gigawatt YEAR. This means that even small facilities like Fort Calhoun have approximately a million pounds of highly radioactive "poisoned" fuel sitting in their pools waiting for the right combination of problems to cause a disaster.

When GE and others designed the nuclear facilities both here and abroad, they had calculated that they would indeed succeed in closing the nuclear loop. So they designed the nuclear facilities with approximately a 20X safety margin in the fuel pools, because they did not have a clear date on when the technology would be perfected. It was my impression from this engineer that they got it sooner than expected. So fortunately the fuel pools were over built. But they were never built to withstand the fuel burdens that would result from a political decision to destroy the technology altogether.

So now, 40 years down the road, we have fuel pools around the country that are so full that they have exceeded even the extremely generous safety margins they were originally designed to have, and even modest pools often have over 400 tons of highly active isotope ridden "spent" fuel in them.

Having functional fuel pool cooling systems was never intended to be necessary. GE and others wanted one or two cores worth of fuel sitting in a pool at any one time. This would make it so that even if all cooling failed, there would be no boiling of the water in the pool, no pending disaster possible from equipment failure no matter how severe. But the way it is now, if there is any sort of attack or disaster which prevents fuel pool maintenance at any of the facilities around the country for a period exceeding three days, all hell will break loose and a nuclear disaster of unimaginable magnitude just like Fukushima will take place. And it never needed to be this way, in fact, the situation is criminal.

Upon recognizing the lunacy of America's Federally mandated nuclear sabotage, countries like France and Germany stepped up to the plate offering to buy our 5% spent fuel for billions of dollars. Heck, they were not held political hostage by a hostile government, and could certainly use a "freebie". But instead our government mandated NO transport of the fuel to foreign nations, NO FURTHER USE WHATSOEVER. Use it 5 percent, leaving 95 percent of the radiological hazard remaining, and please let it build up in a pool that needs maintenance. Shills have said it was the import/export restrictions which caused this, but since those are written by the same government that banned the closing of the "nuclear loop", the restrictions are only a further indictment of the FED for causing this problem.

Simultaneous with the intentional building of the threat from having so much nuclear material sitting around came all the government scandals and lies about needing to put the fuel somewhere. Inside a mountain in the desert. Inside a dry cask. Maybe in the ocean, all the while the general American public was kept oblivious to the obvious answer: If we are not allowed to use it because of a nonsensical piece of legislation, why not let someone else have it, when they are willing to EVEN PAY FOR IT?

Here is what I believe is the answer. And this answer needs to be spread far and wide.

Whatever you think of Kennedy, on the day of his death he was our last hope. No one since has been anything other than an enemy infiltrator, The enemy is not only inside the gates, it was getting a pay-check from you 40 years ago.

Consider this. Our government intentionally put in place policies that de-industrialized America. That's an act of war. Our government put in place policies that intentionally destroyed our schools. That's an act of war. And I consider FORCING VIA MANDATE the build-up of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of nuclear warheads worth of perfectly good reactor fuel just waiting for a disaster around the country to be an act of war as well - Only an enemy would intentionally mandate the creation of such a threat, who on earth would, other than someone who hated this country? Not only did we lose a marvelous clean virtually free energy future, that future got converted into a threat that could very easily destroy us. All it would take to kill America, with our nuclear facilities drastically overloaded with spent fuel, is 150 smart bombs. ONE BOMBING RUN AND IT IS OVER.

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Eldon Warman

To: Patrick Bellringer

Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2011 8:49 PM

Subject: GE "had closed the nuclear loop" - A Technology That Would Have Used Up All the Fuel and Left No Hazardous Waste