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An important detail to go with the statement that we rely on Russia for most of our nuclear fuel is that the market for nuclear fuel was disrupted for ten years

An important detail to go with the statement that we rely on Russia for most of our nuclear fuel is that the market for nuclear fuel was disrupted for ten years by the Megatons to Megawatts program [0] Centrus, the company cited in the ieee article, was the US based side of that exchange, then under the name of the US Enrichment Corporation. [1] While the program was successful at nuclear disarmament ( to the tune of 20,008 warheads [wiki] ) it tanked the market by effectively 'dumping' the fuel, driving centrifuge operators out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program [1] https://www.centrusenergy.com/who-we-are/history/megatons-to-megawatts/ https://www.centrusenergy.com/who-we-are/history/megatons-to...

irjustin 3y ago
I argue: it goes back further than that - Chernobyl and 3-mile island[0]. Deeply ingrained in the collective psyche that nuclear - when it goes wrong goes _really_ wrong. That really set the tone for where US was willing to go and even if it's overall a better solution people weren't willing to back it while it was too easy to kill politically. Jack Welch's book "Straight from the Gut" talks about how they shifted their entire business to nuclear servicing from development because they saw the changing winds - the correct bet. I'm super excited by this latest development as we accept that we need to learn how to tame the beast that is nuclear fission because the benefits really do outweigh the drawbacks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
- Civitello 3y ago
  I believe that a significant part of the reason the nuclear is so unpopular is due to the influence of the Simpsons.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Nuclear had PR issues long before the first episode of the simpsons.
  - acyou 3y ago
    How do we separate cause from effect here? Anti nuclear sentiment is quite a bit older than Homer Simpson.
  - toyg 3y ago
    The Simpsons came out when the mainstream view of nuclear had already long been developed, with Chernobyl and 3Mile being the cherries on top. By the '90s, the anti-nuke protesters of the '70s / early '80s had grown up and got into power.
- kalessin 3y ago
  What really went wrong at 3 mile island? No one died or was injured afaik.
  - lazide 3y ago
    it was a lot closer call than should have been possible. And everyone got very scared, and the gov’t lost a lot of credibility. It was no Chernobyl, but it made it clear the US wasn’t perfect either.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      That is what happened, but I can't pass by without highlighting how irrational the response was. I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy. And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish. Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.
      - nickpp 3y ago
        That irrational response was heavily fueled by fear mongering from environmental activists and financed by oil producing hostile countries. In the 70s and 80s leftists couldn't much keep pushing socialism (like they are now) since the horrors of their ideology was quite visible to everybody in the example of USSR. So they embraced environmentalism - just another way for them to fight capitalism and consumerism. Russia (through the KGB) was quite happy to finance their cause. It meant Western countries (and especially Western Europe) stayed dependent on them for their energy. The folly of our strategy became quite apparent during the last few years with the Ukraine invasion and revelations of EU politicians fully paid and owned by the Russians. Together with infiltrating the Western Academia, this was probably one of the most successful undercover secret service operation ever.
- doubloon 3y ago
  don't forget Silkwood. now i know a lot of people are not convinced by her story, but the fact remains that even without her story, the nuclear energy industry in Oklahoma was a complete shit show, they were spreading nuclear waste on farm fields for cows to eat, to save money, and one time they blew open a huge container of uranium hexafluoride, killed a guy, injured a bunch of people, and sprayed a cloud of material over several counties because they couldn't follow simple procedures.
  - albert180 3y ago
    So all this Simpsons Moments (Homer pushing a button where nuclear waste sprays on fields etc...) were actually references to Silkwood?
    - doubloon 3y ago
      that would be funny if true, had never made the connection.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > the nuclear energy industry in Oklahoma was a complete shit show Any enterprise needs to be sufficiently safe as a complete shit show, because it will happen.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
  I would be hesitant to use Jack Welch and correct bet in the same sentence. His overall strategy at GE was to shift it from it's traditional roles in heavy industry to instead focus on finance and real estate. This worked temporarily as the company rode the real estate bubble. When the bubble pop'd the company lost half its value. In other words, don't evaluate his statements on nuclear without context or critical thought.
  - avar 3y ago
    He retired in 2001, and GE matched or outperformed the S&P 500 until 2017: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4141020-ge-true-value-stock https://seekingalpha.com/article/4141020-ge-true-value-stock They had a relatively larger fall from grace in the recession than the rest of the index. In any case, even if he was a terrible executive what does that have to do with whether he was correct about general trends in the nuclear industry?
    - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
      Jack himself said he should be judged by where the company was 10 years after he left. That comment did not age well. I'm saying he had a larger agenda at the time that comment was made, one that had him divesting not just from nuclear but many other of GE's historic heavy industry and power related business lines.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > Jack himself said he should be judged by where the company was 10 years after he left. That comment did not age well. How so? Don't you agree with it?
        jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
        His bets proved to be bad bets long term. They looked good initially because he was riding the real estate bubble.
- meroes 3y ago
  Nuclear fuel used to mean give an entire town radiation induced cancers while gas lighting them. Dark Circle is required watching. You’re super excited and all I see is super excited for poor people who can’t move towns getting cancer, while misdirecting toward 3-Mile. There’s no reason we can’t have safe nuclear power but we won’t get there if past wrongs aren’t fixed, and it seems like everyone is focusing on the wrong things.
  - outworlder 3y ago
    > Nuclear fuel used to mean give an entire town radiation induced cancers while gas lighting them. Dark Circle is required watching. If you are talking about Rocky Flats, wasn't that related to nuclear weapons production? It's plutonium, not uranium. We have safe nuclear reactors, today. What we need to do is build more, with newer designs, and retire those that are past the end of their lifetime. Most importantly, this discussion doesn't even make sense when we have coal plants spewing all sorts of terrible stuff in the atmosphere, including radiation.
    - meroes 3y ago
      "Wasn't that related to nuclear weapons production? It's plutonium, not uranium" One of the contentions of the movie is that nuclear weapons and nuclear energy production are inextricably linked in the US. I felt it made a decent argument that "there is no clean coal" but for nuclear energy as well, because of this historical link.
- jakobson14 3y ago
  Learn? We've known for decades. When did Chernobyl break ground? 1972, operated by lying soviet bureaucrats. When Fukushima Daiichi break ground? 1967 When did Three Mile island break ground? 1968 There have been a half-dozen whole generations of nuclear reactor developed since then, drastic reductions in the amount of waste they generate through advancements in nuclear chemistry, and now a whole new paradigm of SMRs. All in pursuit of greater safety from a bogyman that is nothing but an echo of the past. It's like the Mill architecture people, still trying to design a CPU to beat the itanic when the rest of processor design has moved on.
ren_engineer 3y ago
we rely on Russia for nuclear fuel because our government approved selling many of our own uranium mines to state backed Russian organizations using shell companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_One
- hef19898 3y ago
  And then the Russians shipped those mines to Siberia? Impressive! A lot of Germany's gas storage facilities were owned by Russian companies, or rather Germans subsidiaries of Russian companies. As soon as the war in Ukraine hit, those have been quickly nationalized. What makes you think US uranium mines would be any different? Or that there are now export restrictions forburanium in the first place?

irjustin 3y ago

I argue: it goes back further than that - Chernobyl and 3-mile island[0]. Deeply ingrained in the collective psyche that nuclear - when it goes wrong goes _really_ wrong. That really set the tone for where US was willing to go and even if it's overall a better solution people weren't willing to back it while it was too easy to kill politically. Jack Welch's book "Straight from the Gut" talks about how they shifted their entire business to nuclear servicing from development because they saw the changing winds - the correct bet. I'm super excited by this latest development as we accept that we need to learn how to tame the beast that is nuclear fission because the benefits really do outweigh the drawbacks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Civitello 3y ago
I believe that a significant part of the reason the nuclear is so unpopular is due to the influence of the Simpsons.
- lazide 3y ago
  Nuclear had PR issues long before the first episode of the simpsons.
- acyou 3y ago
  How do we separate cause from effect here? Anti nuclear sentiment is quite a bit older than Homer Simpson.
- toyg 3y ago
  The Simpsons came out when the mainstream view of nuclear had already long been developed, with Chernobyl and 3Mile being the cherries on top. By the '90s, the anti-nuke protesters of the '70s / early '80s had grown up and got into power.
kalessin 3y ago
What really went wrong at 3 mile island? No one died or was injured afaik.
- lazide 3y ago
  it was a lot closer call than should have been possible. And everyone got very scared, and the gov’t lost a lot of credibility. It was no Chernobyl, but it made it clear the US wasn’t perfect either.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    That is what happened, but I can't pass by without highlighting how irrational the response was. I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy. And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish. Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.
    - nickpp 3y ago
      That irrational response was heavily fueled by fear mongering from environmental activists and financed by oil producing hostile countries. In the 70s and 80s leftists couldn't much keep pushing socialism (like they are now) since the horrors of their ideology was quite visible to everybody in the example of USSR. So they embraced environmentalism - just another way for them to fight capitalism and consumerism. Russia (through the KGB) was quite happy to finance their cause. It meant Western countries (and especially Western Europe) stayed dependent on them for their energy. The folly of our strategy became quite apparent during the last few years with the Ukraine invasion and revelations of EU politicians fully paid and owned by the Russians. Together with infiltrating the Western Academia, this was probably one of the most successful undercover secret service operation ever.
doubloon 3y ago
don't forget Silkwood. now i know a lot of people are not convinced by her story, but the fact remains that even without her story, the nuclear energy industry in Oklahoma was a complete shit show, they were spreading nuclear waste on farm fields for cows to eat, to save money, and one time they blew open a huge container of uranium hexafluoride, killed a guy, injured a bunch of people, and sprayed a cloud of material over several counties because they couldn't follow simple procedures.
- albert180 3y ago
  So all this Simpsons Moments (Homer pushing a button where nuclear waste sprays on fields etc...) were actually references to Silkwood?
  - doubloon 3y ago
    that would be funny if true, had never made the connection.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > the nuclear energy industry in Oklahoma was a complete shit show Any enterprise needs to be sufficiently safe as a complete shit show, because it will happen.
jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
I would be hesitant to use Jack Welch and correct bet in the same sentence. His overall strategy at GE was to shift it from it's traditional roles in heavy industry to instead focus on finance and real estate. This worked temporarily as the company rode the real estate bubble. When the bubble pop'd the company lost half its value. In other words, don't evaluate his statements on nuclear without context or critical thought.
- avar 3y ago
  He retired in 2001, and GE matched or outperformed the S&P 500 until 2017: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4141020-ge-true-value-stock https://seekingalpha.com/article/4141020-ge-true-value-stock They had a relatively larger fall from grace in the recession than the rest of the index. In any case, even if he was a terrible executive what does that have to do with whether he was correct about general trends in the nuclear industry?
  - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
    Jack himself said he should be judged by where the company was 10 years after he left. That comment did not age well. I'm saying he had a larger agenda at the time that comment was made, one that had him divesting not just from nuclear but many other of GE's historic heavy industry and power related business lines.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > Jack himself said he should be judged by where the company was 10 years after he left. That comment did not age well. How so? Don't you agree with it?
      - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
        His bets proved to be bad bets long term. They looked good initially because he was riding the real estate bubble.
meroes 3y ago
Nuclear fuel used to mean give an entire town radiation induced cancers while gas lighting them. Dark Circle is required watching. You’re super excited and all I see is super excited for poor people who can’t move towns getting cancer, while misdirecting toward 3-Mile. There’s no reason we can’t have safe nuclear power but we won’t get there if past wrongs aren’t fixed, and it seems like everyone is focusing on the wrong things.
- outworlder 3y ago
  > Nuclear fuel used to mean give an entire town radiation induced cancers while gas lighting them. Dark Circle is required watching. If you are talking about Rocky Flats, wasn't that related to nuclear weapons production? It's plutonium, not uranium. We have safe nuclear reactors, today. What we need to do is build more, with newer designs, and retire those that are past the end of their lifetime. Most importantly, this discussion doesn't even make sense when we have coal plants spewing all sorts of terrible stuff in the atmosphere, including radiation.
  - meroes 3y ago
    "Wasn't that related to nuclear weapons production? It's plutonium, not uranium" One of the contentions of the movie is that nuclear weapons and nuclear energy production are inextricably linked in the US. I felt it made a decent argument that "there is no clean coal" but for nuclear energy as well, because of this historical link.
jakobson14 3y ago
Learn? We've known for decades. When did Chernobyl break ground? 1972, operated by lying soviet bureaucrats. When Fukushima Daiichi break ground? 1967 When did Three Mile island break ground? 1968 There have been a half-dozen whole generations of nuclear reactor developed since then, drastic reductions in the amount of waste they generate through advancements in nuclear chemistry, and now a whole new paradigm of SMRs. All in pursuit of greater safety from a bogyman that is nothing but an echo of the past. It's like the Mill architecture people, still trying to design a CPU to beat the itanic when the rest of processor design has moved on.

ren_engineer 3y ago

we rely on Russia for nuclear fuel because our government approved selling many of our own uranium mines to state backed Russian organizations using shell companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_One

hef19898 3y ago
And then the Russians shipped those mines to Siberia? Impressive! A lot of Germany's gas storage facilities were owned by Russian companies, or rather Germans subsidiaries of Russian companies. As soon as the war in Ukraine hit, those have been quickly nationalized. What makes you think US uranium mines would be any different? Or that there are now export restrictions forburanium in the first place?