RobertEarl states:
It's odd, don't you think, that we are spending big money on Russian ex-bomb material, yet you say ""... the nuclear weapons program has never had enough money to meets its needs...""
It isn't odd AT ALL.
You have to realize that we are talking about TWO DIFFERENT parts of the Government.
The "big money" that we are spending on Russian ex-bomb material is allocated to USEC - the United States Enrichment Corporation.
Hanford doesn't belong to USEC; it belongs to the Dept. of Energy.
It's analogous to a little while back when the FAA was cutting back on air traffic controllers due to the sequester and the air traveling public was severely impacted. Could one say, "It's odd because we are spending billions of dollars in the Pentagon budget on aircraft, and we don't have money to pay air traffic controllers".
The Pentagon doesn't pay the air traffic controllers; the FAA does. The Pentagon may be flush with money; but the FAA isn't. So why would it be "odd" that the FAA had to furlough air traffic controllers?
Likewise, Congress spent the money on USEC so that we could take the Russian highly-enriched uranium out of Russian weapons ( good for us ), and have that uranium "down-blended" to low-enriched uranium which is suitable as reactor fuel, and then it was "burned" / destroyed in US power reactors. There's no more energy in that material to make it go "boom". All the energy in the material was extracted by the reactor, and the power plant turned it into electricity. So no energy in the fuel - it's not useful to make bombs.
Congress hasn't seen fit to spend the money necessary to clean-up Hanford. Yes, there has been money spent at Hanford; mostly on doing tests to see what the true composition of the Hanford waste is. However, Congress has NOT appropriated the money to extract that waste from the tanks, process it, and put it away in permanent storage.
Part of the problem was that the plan called for that waste to be buried in a geological repository at Yucca Mountain. The Yucca Mountain project was stopped dead in its tracks. That's where Congress planned for the Hanford waste to go. Since Yucca Mountain was stopped; there was no place to put the waste; so Congress didn't fund removing the waste from the vulnerable tanks; because they didn't have anywhere else to put it.
There's ZERO nuclear power plant spent fuel waste at Hanford. ALL nuclear power plant waste is sited at the power plants.
NO - I do NOT work for one of the contractors at Hanford.
An entity of the University of California signs my paycheck.
PamW
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