To the Editor: We will have to resort to nuclear power if there is any hope that the next generation will have a standard of living and an environment equal to ours today. And given that a conventional light-water reactor only utilizes about 1 percent of the energy contained in its fuel and produces a high-level plutonium waste that is extremely difficult to manage, it appears equally obvious that we should not build any more of these dinosaurs.

Thus, I was put off by Frank von Hippel's attitude toward recycling spent nuclear fuel and his apparent lack of urgency for dealing with this ever-growing problem. He almost totally ignored integral fast reactor technology, which was developed by a dedicated group of engineers and scientists at Argonne West in Idaho Falls, Idaho, for the specific purpose of improving upon the efficiency, safety, and proliferation-resistance of conventional nuclear reactors. Some relevant facts about IFR technology are that it can utilize spent fuel from LWRs as a fuel source, extract 95 percent of the energy contained therein, and produce only a small volume of waste that is vastly easier to manage.

Joseph T. Hamrick
Roanoke, Va.

To the Editor: It is ironic that articles discussing problems of disposing of nuclear waste and landing on the moon were both published in the May issue. It is my contention that the only good use of the moon is as a repository of nuclear waste.

To the Editor: The article on disposing of radioactive waste was excellent.

But could we answer the one obvious question? The article states that underground storage is limited by heat buildup (page 34). Cask storage is good for at least 100 years (page 35).

Why do we have to bury this waste? Why can't we store it on the surface in the middle of a useless desert in Nevada?

The Yucca Mountain storage facility sounds like a total waste of money.

To the Editor: Professor von Hippel's "No Hurry to Recycle" article in the May issue raises a number of questions.

I worked for General Electric for 20 years, starting in 1962 in the nuclear energy business as a sales engineer/manager in the San Jose Nuclear Energy Division and various U.S. domestic sales offices calling on electric utilities.

The initial light-water moderated nuclear plant was economically justified, largely based on recovery of the valuable fissile isotopes U-235 and PU-239, which of course would be recycled to the reactor.

Mixed-oxide fuel bundles (uranium and plutonium) were installed at a number of operating plants, such as Big Rock Point and Dresden No. 1, with excellent results. In the 1960s, GE built a nuclear fuel recycling facility at the Dresden Nuclear Power Station in Morris, Ill. The plant was designed utilizing all the latest tech- nology developed for the weapons and Naval ship reactor fuel recycling that was taking place at the Hanford and Savannah River plants.

A key feature was that the waste product was discharged in a solid form. Having removed these valuable isotopes would render the waste less harmful and more economic to store at the Yucca site. The plant, although completed, was not allowed to start up.

My understanding of the reason for not starting up the Dresden recycling plant was a matter of a financial risk assessment.

If the National Academy of Sciences was involved in the initial decision to proceed with the light-water reactor business, I wonder if we would have over 100 plants carrying 20 percent of the electric load in the U.S. today. France, Russia, and Japan picked up our technology over 20 years ago, and we remain paralyzed by our own politicians whose leadership re- mains locked in granite by NAS type of data.

To the Editor: In his May article, "No Hurry to Recycle," Frank von Hippel questions the new DOE Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. Frank and I commonly debate reprocessing questions, and his article provides another opportunity.

Currently, GNEP is a program with outstanding goals: transforming the global nonproliferation regime, and enabling the substantial expansion of nuclear energy while keeping waste generation inside the capacity of a single repository site. But as yet GNEP remains an R&D plan that lacks a well-developed business plan. Until a financial model is developed to determine when commercial recycling should be deployed and how it should be paid for, GNEP will remain subject to legitimate criticism that it could be too expensive and that it may have selected the wrong technologies.

Frank's article highlights these issues, but also contains three substantive errors.

Casks for surface storage of spent nuclear fuel.

He states, "The U.S. has been very successful in discouraging other countries from reprocessing by telling them, in essence, 'We don't reprocess and you don't need to either.' " That's great, but this 1970s logic is now perversely backward when we tell Iran that fuel-cycle states like the U.S. and Russia will provide reliable uranium enrichment services, and Iran should not need to perform enrichment itself.

Second, Frank fails to note that GNEP represents the first time that an administration has displayed the political courage to suggest that the U.S. might expand its domestic spent fuel management program by 10 to 20 percent to take foreign spent fuel from countries with small nuclear programs, which might otherwise follow Iran as a role model. This is where GNEP will have its major nonproliferation impact.

Finally, it is important to note that the earlier National Academy study on partitioning and transmutation—which in the vacuum of GNEP cost estimates is now commonly cited—greatly overestimates the likely GNEP costs. This study estimated high costs for an extremely ambitious and likely unachievable plan to transmute U.S. wastes sufficiently to avoid any need for a geologic repository. In contrast, the GNEP goal is much less expensive and is technologically achievable, since it aims only to cap spent fuel accumulation within the capacity of a single repository site.

Editor's note: Per Peterson is a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, as well as a member of ASME. The editors offered Frank von Hippel an opportunity to respond.

To the Editor: I am glad that Professor Peterson agrees that there is indeed no need to hurry to recycle.

With regard to the three "substantive errors" that he believes my article contains:

1. Enrichment is essential to the current generation of nuclear power plants, while reprocessing is enormously costly and technically unnecessary. Therefore, while the world does need to deal with the issue of where Iran's enrichment gets done, it is unnecessarily opening up a whole new front in the proliferation debate for the U.S. to suggest that Iran needs to reprocess its spent fuel.

2. I agree that it would be useful for the U.S. to offer to deal with the spent fuel of some of the countries where we would rather not have plutonium-containing material accumulate. It is premature to praise the administration's political courage, however. The administration is happy for Russia to provide this service for Iran and the world. President Putin is able to override domestic opposition to spent fuel import in a way that U.S. administrations are not.

3. With regard to costs, my perception is that the current administration's version of GNEP is much more costly than the one that was assessed by the National Academy of Sciences. In any case, I welcome the proposal by the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee that the NAS evaluate the impacts of the differences between the administration's GNEP proposal and the separation and transmutation options that the NAS evaluated in 1996.

To the Editor: We respectfully take issue with an article in your May issue ("Beginning the Transformation"), which inaccurately represented competing fuel cell technologies. The authors apparently decided to tell only one side of the fuel cell story and inaccurately concluded that so-called "high-temperature" stationary fuel cells were superior to other technologies, including phosphoric acid. They further suggested that these technologies would be the only solution in the future. Publicly available data and statistics prove that conclusion wrong.

UTC Power, which was credited in the article with leading the commercial deployment of stationary fuel cells, produces phosphoric acid fuel cells for stationary applications. We are the only fuel cell company in the world that has actively worked in all fuel cell technologies and that provides fuel cells for large commercial stationary as well as transportation applications. We pursued and were a leader in developing both molten carbonate and phosphoric acid fuel cell technologies until the late 1980s, at which point we made a strategic decision to commercialize only phosphoric acid due to its superior durability, reliability, and lower life-cycle cost.

The phosphoric acid technology is by far the most durable and reliable fuel cell technology of any commercially available fuel cell system. The installed base of our PureCell 200 phosphoric acid fuel cells has consistently demonstrated a cell stack life of 40,000 hours. In addition, our phosphoric acid fuel cell power plants have a demonstrated reliability, as measured by unit availabilities that exceed 95 percent. We are now actively working to develop an advanced phosphoric acid fuel cell stack with a design life of more than 80,000 hours and significantly reduced life cycle cost.

Further, when discussing efficiencies, it is important to distinguish between beginning of life and average over life. Today's phosphoric acid power plant provides electrical efficiencies of 42 percent at beginning of life and 37 percent average over its proven 40,000-hour life. This compares to a mid-40s range for high-temperature units at beginning of life. Comparisons of average efficiency over life are not possible with high temperature, since their "life" is only 10 to 15 percent that of phosphoric acid.

Editor's note: The author is vice president for business development and general counsel for UTC Power, the fuel cell subsidiary of United Technologies Corp.

To the Editor: Peter Miserendino of Darien, Ill., wrote an accurate portrayal of the current state of mechanical engineering employment (Letters, March).

I have personally experienced downsizing twice since my graduation in 1993. After my last tempest occurred in 2001, I could land but a very few number of interviews and then experienced the same prejudice Mr. Miserendino has felt—too old, overqualified, not qualified enough, etc.

I remember one interview in which the company official told me flat out that I was already too old to be retrained at 40 years of age. They admitted that they did not favor older hires because they were "set in their ways."

I had been under the impression that our engineering training equipped us to take on any new challenge and to learn what we did not already know. What added insult to injury was that there were no questions focused on engineering skills or past accomplishments, but rather on social skills and conflict resolution.

After that fiasco, I decided to take control of my own life as much as that is possible. I started my own business in the solar energy industry and never seriously looked back to the cubicle life I had before.

It has not been easy, as one can imagine, but I continue to enjoy my emancipation. However, I realize that starting a business is not everyone's answer. One answer is to get out of engineering as a profession and do something else. Life is too short to wait for some employer out there to recognize your abilities and give you a chance.

The sad fact is that too many American corporations are throwing good, hard-working engineers overboard for the sake of short-term profits. Our leaders in Washington do not feel your pain. President Bush on his trip to India said again that outsourcing American jobs was good for the overall world economy and that over time American workers would find new opportunities.

What he did not say is that many of those new jobs will be in the service sector, and that we will be competing for those jobs against illegal or guest workers, who will do them for much less. God help us.

To the Editor: I read the letter from Ray Scott in the March 2006 issue. I agree with his comments on the cover photo of the two men working on the pipeline in Kuwait.

The two people shown are breaking almost all the rules on safe working, but did their boss provide adequate and sufficient training? In my country (The Netherlands), the boss is primarily responsible for safety during the job. The concluding paragraph of Ray's letter needs a little addition: "... need to go to a safe area, sit down with their boss, prepare a safe plan of action."

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