Recycling Russian Nukes into US Electricity - Stewart Brand

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/10/09/Stewart_Brand_Rethinking_Green

Environmentalist pioneer Stewart Brand addresses worries about nuclear energy concerning proliferation of material and waste disposal. He describes a recycling program that converts old nuclear warheads into energy and a facility designed to safely bury spent nuclear fuel.

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Environmentalist pioneer Stewart Brand talks about his book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in a discussion at the Long Now Foundation. This program was recorded in San Francisco, CA, on October 9, 2009.

Stewart Brand is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, founded and runs the GBN Book Club, and is the president of The Long Now Foundation.

Brand is well known for founding, editing and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (01968-85), which received a National Book Award for the 01972 issue. In 01984, he founded The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 11,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre.

Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity, since 01989. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year.

He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting adviser to Ecotrust, Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forest from Alaska to San Francisco.

Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now in 01999, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built in 01994, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT in 01987, and Two Cybernetic Frontiers on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science in 01974. It had the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers.

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[Fordi]

@welkinator

Stewart is not a conservative. Support for nuclear power is not a conservative value. It's a sane choice, once you get past all the fearmongering that Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the like do around it.

They're worried about nuclear weapons proliferation, and the ignorantly associate weapons proliferation with the only solution for climate change - at all of our peril. Were it not for these groups spreading bollocks, we'd probably be recycling our spent fuel by now.

[Fordi]

@justonemorename

"i don't see any diffrence from Geo-Thermic or HydroElectric ..or a wind power..any other label that is used to confuse."

You're obviously not in a position to implement these things, then. Those labels aren't meant to confuse; they're there to describe. A perpetual motion is one that moves, perpetually, without energy loss or input. Renewable energy is energy whose source is continuously renewed by action of nature - that action of nature being energy input.

[Fordi]

@justonemorename

How does the water return to the top of the hill? Sunlight heats it, evaporates it, and it rains. There's energy input. Therefore, not perpetual motion.

[Fordi]

@planetdarwin

About 10,000 years worth, by which point we'll have hopefully wrangled gravity well enough to have portable fusion.

[Fordi]

@justonemorename

"Uranium is finite"

Addressed in the video. There is roughly 10,000 years' worth of uranium and thorium in cheap mining veins.

[Fordi]

@justonemorename

"because they take water and soak Uranium in it?"

Ah. Yeah, they don't do that. Look up the "Light Water Reactor" design, and you'll see that the small amount of very pure water that they allow in the neutron flux (isolated by zircaloy cladding from the uranium) never leaves the plant. What goes in and comes out is in a tertiary cooling loop.

[Fordi]

@ytmugwump

"...plutonium with greater enrichment..."

Greater than what? First run spent fuel contains about 0.6% Pu (~50% 239, ~24% 240, ~26% 241). Second run, 0.9%, with a similar mix. You can't make bombs from these concentrations, and even if you PUREX to get a stream of pure Pu, it's still got too much of the spontaneously fissioning and gamma emitting stuff to be practical for bomb making.

[mrdashes1]

Its not going to work. Where will the U.S. get the money?

[TheAlexagius]

russia would not give you all thier nukes! the US is so thick they don't get that the US nor the Russians will get rid of thier power, also a lack of a nuclear threat would encorage wars between major countires

[pieface1726]

@pieface1726 ANTI*