Nuclear power is dead with President Obama

Nuclear power is dead with President Obama Don Lutz January 20, 2010 Nuclear power is dead with this group. Carol Browner was on Clinton and Gore's staff. Vinod Khasia is bankrolling a solar plant being built in California. It is a looser, but it will take 20 years to prove that. Many others are not energy people.

Jeff Immelt may be on our side, but he is a flash from Harvard and does not wish to put GE in a bad light. He is happy to make wind machines. Only Steven Shu is on our side, but they will override him as being a scientist not noted for commercial energy system.

They will all have a good time and go away with the idea that green is the answer and we will go back to 1975 when then Governor Brown said California will be 40% renewables by the year 2000. It was 10% then and only 11% now.

I believe that the Southern States will bring us into the nuclear revelation, but it will be a while for them to do so.

As for the IFR and Breeder, we might as well as prevail on Russia who has these plants operating now. We do not have a plant. choice yet. EBR I has a plant now, but it is a sodium heated steam generator that is not acceptable to the modern system folks. EBR II has steam generators that has straight double wall tubes and double tube sheets at each end. They went over 30 years without a leak. This will not be acceptable to the new developers and heaven knows what they will do to offset this. The Clinch River units had single tubes bent into a hock stick configuration and single welded tube to tube sheers at each end.

I was on the FERMI project when they chose single wall coiled tubes and single tube sheet welds. They were zippy units that did not take much space. B& W suggested double wall straight wall 90-foot-long tubes. They were faffed out of the placer. APDE suggested that I arrange a large system to accommodate a sodium- water explosion. I did and sure enough there were many sodium to water leaks and it made quite an explosion.

If DOE gets the job of backing and developing a Fast Breeder system, they will make every zippy feature they can to justify their existence. They did this in making the sodium components testing facility at Washington State. Us EBR II people were poor developers because we were one million dollars over the 32 million budget we were to meet in developing EBR II. Some of the EBR II staff were degraded, including Dr. Harry Monson who I thought was one of the best I ever saw.

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Well Russia might have something there with their Lead-Bismuth coolant for their Breeder Reactors. At any rate the Russians will be way in front of us especially if the Obama chosen people get through with their decisions. They will probably put all the spent fuel away so it cannot ever be used by our future descendants.

Don Lutz

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