“Inside a highly classified facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee — the same facility that enriched uranium for the first atomic bomb in the era of the Manhattan Project — workers are turning old, unexploded warheads into fuel that will power cities,” reports CNN:
The recipe to create advanced reactor fuel involves melting weapons-grade uranium with low-enriched uranium in a crucible — a massive, metal cauldron heated to around 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit to turn its contents into molten soup.
Emerging from its furnace, a glowing orange cast filled with the hot liquid uranium is slowly lowered into a cooling chamber. The hardened finished product, which looks like black charcoal, can be safely held in-hand.
This fuel is set to power the next generation of America’s nuclear reactors — small, modular power stations that are easier and cheaper to build. They require far less upkeep and physical space than the aging fleet of large nuclear power plants.
This is helping reduce the need for America to rely on Russia for enriched uranium. Until 2023, America received a large majority of its enriched uranium from Russia.
Right now, nuclear energy produces around 20% of the electricity generated in America. Nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gas emissions or air pollution. Nuclear plants generate most electric power in countries like France and Slovakia, but in the U.S., it has been much more difficult and costly to construct a nuclear power plant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes it very expensive to construct a nuclear plant — even the application process is incredibly expensive and usually takes years of unnecessary delay. Even when nuclear plants are already operating safely and providing badly needed power, anti-nuclear activists sometimes get government officials to shut them down. Recently, however, the NRC approved the construction of a nuclear plant with an innovative design and a non-water cooled reactor.
A recent study found that nuclear power is better for the environment than wind energy, solar power, or fossil fuels. Yet green activists in places like Germany have still forced the closure of nuclear power plants, making Germany more reliant on coal for energy. And they have done so even though “every major study, including a recent one by the British medical journal Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity,” says a long-time environment activist. “Solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.” Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. And “wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants.” “Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University professor Steven Novella.
