nuclear power plants

Could the Cold War be heating and lighting your home? If you are one of many Americans whose life is powered by a nuclear power plant, there's a good chance it is; while not widely publicized, decommissioned nuclear warheads provide much of the fuel powering America's 104 nuclear reactors. But here's the real kicker: nearly half of that low-enriched uranium comes from recycled Soviet nukes.

Over the past 20 years, nuclear disarmament has become a huge part of the electricity industry, making President Obama's talks with Russia on a new arms treaty as poignant to utilities as carbon caps, smart grids and climate change bills. But if those talks don't extend the current program for dismantling Soviet nuke cores beyond its 2013 expiration date, there could be a supply gap for nuclear fuel just as the industry is pushing nuclear power as a workable, eco-friendly transition fuel until better biofuels become economical.

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Attack of the Jellies

Several companies are planning to build new nuclear reactors in the United States, and they'd like to speed up the approval process to get these plants online as soon as possible, but that might not be happening. All plant designs have to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so if a company wants to construct a new model, or import a proven one from France or Japan, it still has to get the NRC's OK, and this can take a while.

According to the New York Times, three companies have filed applications to build and operate five new reactors - but they've all either substantially modified approved designs or suggested models that haven't gotten NRC approval yet. Which means they're probably not going to be breaking ground as soon as they'd like. For many environmentalists, this is good news, considering the fact that we still haven't figured out what we're going to do with the waste yet. But others insist that we need nuclear, and we need to start planning new plants now, to meet our growing energy needs and assure that fossil fuels don't consume an increasing slice of that budget in the coming decades as today's nuclear power plants are retired. For more on that idea, settle down with this enormous study.-Gregory Mone

Wind power is the world´s fastest-growing energy source. Existing capacity worldwide is approaching 50,000 megawatts-roughly equivalent to that of 50 nuclear power plants. But there are problems with this seemingly benign wellspring of pollution-free electricity. Aside from being noisy, the whirling turbines interfere with television reception and are generally considered terrestrial eyesores rendered useless when the wind stops.

When the FBI gets a credible tip about a terrorist nuclear weapon inside the U.S., the agency calls in the Department of Energy’s elite and secret Nuclear Emergency Search Team. Since its inception in 1975, NEST has been largely a volunteer organization. Most of its 1,000 or so scientists and engineers work at the national laboratories where America’s nuclear weapons are designed: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore. Thanks to that experience, NEST volunteers know better than any law-enforcement agents how to identify and disable a nuclear device.

Scanning the slate-gray waters of San Francisco Bay on an overcast spring day I spot more eider ducks and gulls than barges or ships. We're patrolling past Alcatraz in a 41-foot Coast Guard utility boat that's almost as old as its blue-eyed 30-year-old coxswain, Chuck Ashmore. Ironically, this old workhorse, with its aging marine radio and soon-to-be-installed Vietnam-era .60-caliber machine gun, is on the cutting edge of a revolution in homeland-or, I should say, home water-security.

If space is devoid of oxygen, how does the sun burn?


Strictly speaking, the sun does not burn. At least, not the way that, say, a wick on a candle does. The small fires we're all familiar with are created by a chemical reaction betweena fuel, such as oil or coal, and oxygen. The sun's writhing surface is the result of "a nuclear reaction that fuses hydrogen to form helium," saus Jerald Navratil, a physicist at Columbia University.