> From: Mike Carrell ... > There is something much more obvious that that. Transmutation > is **known** not to happen except under high energy conditions. > Some government money was invested in a method --very > conventional physics -- which showed remediation of specific > isotopes using high energy processes. Even the LENR processes > are specific to certain isotopes. The problem the government > has is the remediation of a whole soup of different > radioisotopes that are dangerous to handle. Consider the > consequences of a failure of some system for remediation that > spills half-processes radioactive soup all over the place. > > Butiding a "safe" plant to do this is itself a very expensive > task even if you had a perfrect process, which is nowhere in > sight. If you were a president or government administrator > would you stake your reputation on sponsoring such a project > on your watch? The easy way out is to bury the problem and > let some future generation take care of it. > > So until there is a sea change of opinion among all the best > and brightest of government technocrats so that in-depth > research is done on LENR processes, it ain't going to happen. > There is no point flailing at Bush, Clinton or whoever your > favorite god/devil is. The technical base for doing this on > an industrial scale does not exist. That doesn't say > that seed money should not be spent on investigations. There > have been hints of this in the past, which bore no fruit under > close inspection. > > Mike Carrell
Assuming in the not too distant future we do discover a reasonably energy efficient way to transmute radioactive isotopes the question then becomes where do we do it? Yucca Mountain? It seems reasonable for me to speculate that the actual engineering may turn out to be a gigantic enterprise, one that perhaps only a government would have the resources to tackle - not only for economical reasons but, more importantly, for security reasons. Hypothetically speaking, if running the proposed transmutation program means the creation of many employment opportunities the economical considerations might outweigh the radioactive dangers involved and senators could eventually end up courting it for their home state. "Come yuck it up at Yucca Mountain!" Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com
