Spring
FAS Spring 2007 Public Interest Reports
On Saturday, 17 February 2007, FAS organized a session on the promise of information technologies in learning. Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists; Lorne Lanning, CEO of OddWorld, Inc.; and Anne Murphy, executive director of The Digital Promise Project, addressed a crowded room filled with people who wanted to learn how to integrate digital technology and education… read more
Radiological dispersion device, more commonly called a “dirty bomb,” is one of the most frightening and one of the most frequently discussed type of possible terrorist attack. Radiation is silent and invisible, potentially deadly, and poorly understood and much feared by the great majority of the population. A dirty bomb is intended to spread contaminating radioactive material…. read more
Nuclear power is undergoing a reevaluation because it potentially offers electricity generation with much lower carbon dioxide emissions than fossil fuels and could mitigate future global warming. Among several uncertainties clouding the future of new reactors is the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive waste that is inevitably produced. As a solution, or at least contributor, to the global warming challenge and the waste problem, the Department of Energy is promoting the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a program to restart plutonium reprocessing and recycling in the United States after a three decade hiatus…. read more
Today some 103 nuclear power plants in the United States produce about one million kilowatts each of electrical power, supplying some 20% of US electrical needs. They do this by the use of the neutron chain reaction in uranium-oxide ceramic pellets, sustained by the regeneration of neutrons through the fission process. Each fission in the light isotope of uranium— U-235 that constitutes 0.7% of natural uranium and is enriched to about 5% concentration in the 25 tons of fuel loaded into the reactor each year, where it produces eat for about 85% of its 4-year sojourn—liberates about 2.5 neutrons on the average, and 0 billion fissions contribute about 1 joule of heat. If your personal computer runs at 3GHz r 3 billion operations per second and consumes about 50W or 50J/s, it is fed by about 50J/s of reactor heat or 4,500 billion fissions per second—about 30 fissions per arithmetic operation, or about 8 fission per bit. Of the 25 tons of fuel–heavy metal—loaded each ear into the reactor as essentially nonradioactive fuel rods and fuel elements, about one on is fissioned during its 4-yr stay in the reactor— that is, the U-235 is split into a light nd a heavy fission product largely retained in the solid fuel pellets in their tubular metal heaths…. read more
New leadership in Congress creates possibilities for a new policy agenda of intense interest to FAS. Much of our most important work over the past few years has been easy to characterize by what we were against: blocking dangerous developments in nuclear weapons, new constraints on government information, and cuts in research spending. We now have, with a fiscally restrained but politically more receptive Congress, the challenging task of helping construct positive solutions to fundamental problems. During the next few months we will seek the counsel of the FAS board, advisors, and members on where best to focus our efforts. I will take this opportunity to present some thoughts to start the conversation… read more
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