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To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (7529)	8/29/2004 4:18:42 PM
From: Seeker of Truth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11633

Hello William Hickman, About five years ago I had lunch with a chap who was working at MIT on precisely what you describe, uranium isotope inside of graphite. The graphite clumps came in various sizes from the size of a rice grain to that of a tennis ball. He said that they were vastly safer than the conventional methods of handling radioactive materials and could generate plenty of heat without melting the graphite. He was extremely enthusiastic about their findings. Afterwards I heard he divorced his Canadian wife and went to work in Switzerland. I have been waiting for years to read any public document on the topic. It's hard not to think that Switzerland is also working on this. I suppose that some Busheaucrats in Washington DC killed the MIT project. So more power to China. This raises the question as to what ever happened to the MIT results. Are they secret? Were they published? Who knows about it? Before we call the energy crisis conquered there is the sobering thought that there actually isn't enough uranium or thorium available to largely replace fossil fuels. Remember we are dealing with fission not fusion. However if we combine the pebbles you describe with all kinds of energy conservation measures, and industrialize the planet so that the population decreases, then we can possibly pull through without decreasing the population by wars. Time for governments to do the development work on clean use of coal to generate electricity. 10 billion US $ should handle the matter, according to experts. High sulfur coal would then become usable and give off almost zero pollutants, since the sulfur is isolated as such. This would remove the need to use NG or oil to generate electricity. By the way, hydrogen is a problem not a solution. It's a really expensive source of energy, requiring much more energy to make than what its burning can release.

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (7529)	8/30/2004 12:13:03 PM
From: AuBug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11633

Do you have any references on Chins'a plans? I've heard of this pebble approach as being much safer. Also, anyone have any thoughts on these new US closed end funds: Tortoise Energy Infrastructure (TYG) and Energy Income & Growth Fund (FEN)? I saw them in the latest Forbes and her discussion of pipeline MLPs vs oil & gas production MLPs made sense but I suspect these funds will take a shotgun approach and buy 'em all. forbes.com Absolute Return Money Out of a Pipeline by Lisa W. Hess, 09.06.04 Master limited partnerships in energy are a good place to be during this market funk. They offer good yields, tax breaks and strong growth potential.

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (7529)	8/31/2004 10:22:43 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11633

snip... Dr. Kudak, a nuclear-engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is leading an effort to design a ''pebble-bed'' reactor - a nuclear reactor that he says could be built quickly, operated cheaply and have no chance of meltdown. Some of the group's leaders said Dr. Kudak's concept might be a natural fit for such a park - especially because, according to proponents, pebble-bed reactors are adept at burning plutonium-based fuels. A proposed $2.4 billion plant at SRS would make plutonium-based nuclear-reactor fuels using surplus plutonium from the nation's nuclear-weapons stockpile. Unlike current reactor designs, which are fueled by long, thin rods filled with pellets of radioactive uranium, the pebble-bed concept would use graphite ''pebbles,'' about the size of billiard balls, filled with thousands of uranium particles. The reactors would use 360,000 pebbles to heat helium, the pressure of which would spin the turbines needed to produce electricity. The gas also would act as a coolant, much as water acts in most current reactors. But where a loss of water in current reactors would likely lead to an accident, loss of helium in a pebble bed would not cause a meltdown, Dr. Kudak said. The graphite shells surrounding the uranium fuel would prevent that, the professor said. But the graphite is what concerns Dr. Edwin Lyman, the scientific director of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington. Graphite can burn, Dr. Lyman said, raising the possibility of a fire in a pebble-bed reactor under some accident scenarios. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Russia was fueled by flaming graphite, Dr. Lyman said. ''There are a lot of serious unresolved questions with the reactor,'' Dr. Lyman said, ''I think it's premature for the people who are promoting it to make a lot of the claims that they are making.'' snip .... psratlanta.org