Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear via The New York Times

 

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Published: August 20, 2011

Scientists have long sought easier ways to make the costly material known as enriched uranium — the fuel of nuclear reactors and bombs, now produced only in giant industrial plants.

Centrifuges for purifying uranium at a plant owned by the energy company USEC in Piketon, Ohio. A breakthrough with lasers promises to make the enrichment process easier and cheaper, allowing for much smaller plants.

“The issue is too big” to leave to the federal status quo, said Francis Slakey, a physicist at Georgetown University and American Physical Society official.

One idea, a half-century old, has been to do it with nothing more substantial than lasers and their rays of concentrated light. This futuristic approach has always proved too expensive and difficult for anything but laboratory experimentation.

Until now.

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One Response to Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear via The New York Times

  1. yukimiyamotodepaul says:

    It is a serious concern that we don’t differentiate (it seems) any more between what we can do and what we should do (or not do!).

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