Cut Corners on a Plutonium Plant? Ugh
A chemical engineer points to serious safety concerns at a South Carolina facility being built to convert recovered plutonium into fuel rods for nuclear power plants. Dan Tedder, emeritus professor of chemical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a former independent technical reviewer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), says the NRC “want(ed) me to water things down (and didn’t) want me to criticise … When they go operational, there’ll be safety problems. Or they’ll be in there with jackhammers tearing things out and rebuilding.”
Just what you want to hear about a mixed oxide fuel fabrication facility designed to handle weapons-grade plutonium, huh? You can read the whole account here (PDF).
Image credit: U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons.
