At Common Sense She Gaily MOX

Here's a good summary article about a nuclear fuel that is not new but is newly highlighted in the wake of the Fukushima disaster: mixed oxide, or mox. The idea is to dispose of an excess of weapons-grade plutonium (America has 43 tons of the stuff) by mixing it with uranium and using it as a fuel for commercial power reactors.

Supported by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one project is underway at Savannah River to build a plant to produce mox. To date, the project is partially finished and has cost five times the projected amount ($5 billion rather than $1 billion) to build. And customers for the fuel are not exactly lining up at the door.

Yes, one of the reactors that melted down at Fukushima is a mox-fueled reactor. There's no necessary causal relationship there... the other two partial meltdowns were in conventionally uranium-fueled reactors, and the cause of all three catastrophes is a combination of earth-shattering natural forces and all-too-human screw-ups, not the choice of fuel. But plutonium, though safe enough to handle, is vastly more deadly (if, for example, inhaled as dust) than uranium. And of course it can be stolen and returned to its original use... nuclear weapons... much more easily than uranium.

Read the article and see what you think. Me? I doubt seriously that this is a suitable long-term solution to our industrial energy needs. But then again, as a child in America I grew up with two things: the threat of The Bomb, and the conventional promise of "power too cheap to meter." I didn't believe that promise even when I was a kid. But I certainly believed, and still believe, the threat. Good luck to us all; we're going to need it.

(A note about the subject: it's almost a quote from Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance: "How quaint the ways of Paradox! / At common sense she gaily mocks!")