User talk:Rabqa1

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Howdy, Rabqa1, Welcome to Wikipedia!

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Be Bold!!

You can find me at my user page or talk page for any questions. Happy editing, and we'll see ya 'round.

Joe I 14:46, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Reformat of material from your Help desk question

Below I have reformatted the material you submitted to the Help desk, to take advantage of wikitext markup. See Help:Editing for details. Also note: there is a GNEP article already, so perhaps the place to add the GNEP links is there. In any case, the excerpts from the personal communication are much easier for other Wikipedia editors to read when marked up properly for Wikipedia. --Teratornis 03:54, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Excerpts from the personal communication (4-7-2007) from nuclear physicist G.S. to User:Rabqa1

Here are a few comments on the Nuclear power article. I take it you are undertaking to do some editing thereof. Excellent!

Fuel resources

The first two sentences of Fuel resources could be improved. They read:

"As opposed to current light water reactors which use uranium-235 (0.7% of all natural uranium), fast breeder reactors use uranium-238 (99.3% of all natural uranium). It has been estimated that there is up to five-billion years’ worth of uranium-238 for use in these power plants.[13]"

I suggest substituting something like this (paragraph):

As opposed to current light-water reactors, which get more than half of their energy from uranium-235 (0.7% of all natural uranium) and only about 40% from U-238 (99.3% of all natural uranium), fast breeder reactors can use essentially all of the uranium -- they can extract over a hundred times as much energy from a given amount of ore. It has been estimated that there is more than five billion years’ worth of uranium for use in these power plants,[13] in which case nuclear power is just as inexhaustible (sustainable) as the sources currently considered "renewable."

Reprocessing

There's also a problem with the first two sentences Reprocessing. They now read:

"Reprocessing can recover up to 95% of the remaining uranium and plutonium in spent nuclear fuel, putting it into new mixed oxide fuel. This also produces a reduction in long term radioactivity within the remaining waste, since this is largely short-lived fission products, and reduces its volume by over 90%."

I suggest something like this (paragraph):

Reprocessing the plutonium from the used fuel back into thermal reactors in the form of mixed oxide (MOX) can increase the energy extracted from the original fuel by about 20%. However, recycling that used fuel into fast breeder reactors can make available virtually all of the energy in the remaining uranium and plutonium, for a 2,000% improvement in fuel utilization. This also reduces the long-term radioactivity in the remaining waste, since it consists almost entirely of short-lived fission products, with greatly reduced repository requirements. Also, the needed waste isolation time becomes 300 years instead of 10,000.

Nuclear Proliferation

In Nuclear Proliferation, 4th-last paragraph. The last sentence reads:

"Breeder reactors have been banned in the U.S. since President Jimmy Carter's administration prohibited reprocessing because of what it regarded as the unacceptable risk of proliferation of weapons-grade materials."

Better:

Development of fast breeder reactors in the United States was halted in 1994 by President Bill Clinton's administration, because of fear that the required reprocessing would lead to unacceptable risk of proliferation of weapons-usable materials. This decision was largely reversed in 2006 by the Bush administration, in announcing the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). [64]

References

(Add)

1. To Reference 13. Add NOTE: See the Cohen paper [63] posted at [1].
• Note: There is a typo in Reference 13. The McCarthy reference should read "Facts From Cohen..."
2. Reference 28. NOTE typo: remove the s before the c in "Association".
3. Reference 63. Breeder reactors: a renewable energy source by Bernard L. Cohen, Am. J. Phys, 51 (1), Jan. 1983 (Professor B. L. Cohen, Department of Physics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260)
4. Reference 64. GNEP references:
• January 10, 2007. "Department of Energy Releases Global Nuclear Energy Partnership Strategic Plan." [2]; A descriptive press release.
• The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). [3]; The official GNEP Web site.
• Vic Reis, Senior Advisor, Department of Energy, "Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)." Presented at the American Nuclear Society meeting, Reno, NV, June 5, 2006. [4]; A comprehensive technical overview of the GNEP

External links

(Add a new link after the Brookings link)

• CFRI (The Center for Reactor Information)—The sustainability and renewability of nuclear power (http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/)

What happened to the edits i posted this AM?

Editor of nuclear power category:

I posted my edits before 8AM chicago time today.

Got inadvertently disconnected before i could signoff with tildes.

How can I access what I entered to verify it all got through to Wiki?

Will I be notified if and when my contribution is accepted and actually entered in Nuclear Power?

Rabqa1 22:47, 16 April 2007 (UTC)