All very true, Mike. However, we have two kinds of waste, the spent
rods that are stored whole and the soup that is rotting the tanks at
Hanford. The spent rods can stay as they are or can be buried whole.
The soup in the tanks is another matter. Sooner or later, the
radioactive soup will get loose. At that point, government officials
will wish they had explored other options, no matter how expensive or
politically unpopular. This will be rather like the present situation
in New Orleans. After the disaster, any moron can see that something
should have been done earlier. It takes intelligence and wisdom to do
something before the disaster. Granted Clinton did little to solve some
of the serious problems and Bush has done even less - even making some
worse. My point is that the criteria to be elected president needs to
be changed. Being conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat is
not working. We need people who are competent. Of course, the general
public can not be expected to pick the person on this basis, but the
people who put up the candidate in the first place can. Also the media
can. A candidate should have to go through the same process that is
used to pick a Supreme Court Judge. This would have weeded out the likes
of Bush.
Ed
Mike Carrell wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "thomas malloy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: CF Suppression?
Ed Storms posted;
For this reason, the government should have a big incentive to embrace
transmutation, if for no other reason to get rid of radioactive waste.
Yet, the government shows no interest. Therefore, rational
self-interest does not play a role in the government's approach. This
leaves only ignorance and incompetence as an explanation. I hope people
who voted for Bush are getting what they want, because the rest of us
are not.
IMHO, there is a third explanation, a blind adherence to the status
quo, which I suppose could be termed incompetence. I never expected
Bush to change it. As Jed pointed out the Clinton administration
ignored this too.
-----------------------------------
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
