There is a convention against setting followups to a newsgroup
not in the newsgroups header so I've crossposted to
alt.engineering.nuclear AND set follows there.

Duane Bozarth wrote:
wrote:
...
I'm not clear on how government action, by Carter or any other
adminstration created a problem the utilities need to clean up.

Perhaps you could explain via email, or followup to an appriate
newsgroup as that would no longer be a woodworking topic.

Perhaps I could, but your address doesn't appear to be a valid one

Then can you post the bounce message so I can investigate?
I have my blacklists set to Tag not block and in any event
they should not be bouncing anything back to you.

so
I'll just post as OT response...I guess if you want to followup you
could go to alt.engineering.nuclear.

Re the question, I wasn't totally clear what was meant either, hence the
multiple question marks. I thought I'd take a chance however and was
alluding to the cessation of consideration for review and ultimate
approval/licensing by the NRC of reprocessing which was one of Mr
Jimmy's edicts and which ultimately ended up in monitored retrieval and
the snafu at spent fuel pools...

Fuel reprocessing creates more readioactive waste, not
less. The fission products and decay daughters, which
are the hottest (highest specific activity) materials
in the fuel rods are not reused and so must then be
disposed of after separation from unspent fuel and U-238.
And since they are no longer contained inside of sealed
control rods the reprossing expands the volume of material
contaminated with those decay daughters.

On the plus side, those are shorter lived than the Uranium
and Plutonium.

As you may recall
Jimmy Carter's stated reason for killing reprocessing was
concern that creating a Plutonium-based nuclear power
economy would necessitate much trasnportaion of Plutonium
which has terrible potential for misuse if diverted to
organizations like Al Queda, or rogue nations like North
Korea or Iraq.

Notably, those nations that have developed the
bomb, aside from Israel, most likely have all done so
without material diverted from US sources.

I do not know what snafu you refer to, could you elaborate
on that now?


As for your apparent wish for an unspecified something else,

You totally lost me here, I do not recall stating a wish for anything
else specified or not.

I'll simply
note the investment in environmental cleanups for fossil isn't
inconsequential, either, and aren't over. That ratepayers will pay for
power costs is a given in a market economy. I'm not sure exactly what
your contention is here in order to actually respond....

My point about ratepayers was in response to the comment
"It looks like the electric utility industry is trying
to get the public to pay for the clean up costs"

My point is, "of course". No matter how the costs are paid
for, the money will be coming from the public via one route
or another. The public will pay for it through taxes, or
rates, or if the utilities are forced to divert investment
capital into clean-up activities THAT will reduce their
investment money for other improvements that would have
kept rates down so the public still pays.

One of my biggest gripes with both utilites and the PUCs
is their short-sightedness. Although utilities ARE very
farsighted IRT reliability, they typically will not commit
investor's money to improvements without an expected return
on investment in nine months. This, for plants with a
40 year design lifetime. Meanwhile the PUCs typically
will not allow ratepayer dollars to be used for capital improvements.

One consequence of
the synergy of these two idiocies is that there were still
coal-fired power plants using volumetric feeders decades
after it was clearly demonstrated that conversion to
gravimetric feeders reduced fuole used by at least
20%. Fuel costs ARE passed straight through
to the ratepayers, so a capital investment that reduces
fuel costs, even if it reduces those costs to ZERO, has
no directly return on investment at all, let alone one
in nine months.

Meanwhile, the PUCs
would not allow the utilities to bill the ratepayers in
the short term for improvements which would save
them quite a bit in the future, plus provide all the
environmental benefits associated with burning less coal.

That is the way it was when I left that industry 20 years
ago. For all I know now, there may STILL be power plants
using volumetric feeders, or there may be better technology
than gravimetric feeders that is not being implimented
for the same reasons.

--

FF