Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (693)	5/19/1998 2:34:00 PM
From: LoLoLoLita	Respond to of 12475

Mohan, Thanks so much for that link on tritium! It has some very interesting technical details that make fascinating reading!!! The U.S. is currently caught in a quagmire vis a vis tritium production capability. Simply put, we're going to run out of the stuff at some (classified) date in the beginning of the next century. Also, I find it worth mentioning that the DOE's Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Tritium Supply and Recycling, DOE/EIS-0161, published 1995 made the following public statement: all nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile require tritium. In other words, we have no nuclear weapons designed to work without tritium. Small or large, they all need H-3. Two options are under consideration fro tritium supply: (1) build the $7 B accelerator facility, which would be a first-of-its-kind facility; or (2) take the simple and cheap route of paying commercial utilities for the right to put lithium-6 target rods in the cores of their nuclear reactors, and process these to recover tritium the same way they've always done at Savannah River Site where the old (now shut down) HWR production reactors were operated. Of course, the U.S. national labs run by the DOE never take the simple and easy route. India is not the first to recover tritium from the cooling/moderator water of their heavy water reactors. Canada does it too, but they may be using a different process. Politics has a great deal to do with tritium when it comes to nuclear weapons. For example, even though Canada is a close ally of the U.S., is under the NATO nuclear umbrella, and has tritium, the Canadian government has always resisted selling their excess tritium to the U.S. for use in our nuclear weapons. But they have no problem selling the stuff to make self-luminescent warning signs containing tritium. We live in interesting times. The nuclear genie has escaped the bottle, and it's simply impossible to turn back the clock. I see no alternative but to forge ahead with these technologies, preferably using them openly as India is doing, rather than hiding the research. David