TVA To Start Making Tritium For Bombs

[CShine]

The Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in East Tennessee is days away from becoming the only commercial nuclear station in the United States to produce both electricity for homes and isotopes for bombs.

The single-reactor station, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, will become the government's new source of tritium, a hydrogen isotope that enhances the explosive force of thermonuclear weapons.

Since early September, TVA workers have been installing tritium-producing rods in the Watts Bar reactor during refueling. The plant is scheduled to go back on line this month.

U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and now-Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tried to kill the idea in 1998, saying that using a civilian reactor to make a bomb ingredient destroys the nonproliferation principle of ''separation between atoms for peace and atoms for war.''

http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/03/10/40448916.shtml?Element_ID=40448916

[Swede]

1. Cry havoc!

and let slip the dogs of war.

[imax2268]

2. I'm going to wait to see...

if any other news agencies pick this up...

but I have to say...what's wrong with this picture...?

[SharonAnn]

3. Oh, we've known about it here for a couple of weeks. Ain't it

just wonderful? The announcements and articles in the Knoxville News Sentinel were that this was a wonderful thing and that it was very cost-effective and would help America's security, yada, yada, yada.

I don't know of anyone in this area (Knoxville) who thinks this is a good idea, but then we weren't asked.

[LearnedHand]

9. What's John Duncan say about it?

(Sigh. Is he still there, even?)

On edit: For that matter, what does Zack say about it?

[oneighty]

4. Nasty stuff Tritium

Reprocessing plant her accidently dumped some years ago. So it was admitted to at the time.

[truthisfreedom]

5. i'm not sure how i feel about this. tritium is useful for research into

fusion power, and if i remember right, it can be used in glowing backpanels without causing dangerous radiation exposure. it's pretty harmless stuff... the average annual whole body dose from wearing a tritium-activated luminous wristwatch is 0.6 mrem, with a range of 0.2 - 1.8 mrem/y, although of course most of it is aimed at your wrist. it's kind of like saying that manufacturing steel that is used in making nuclear weapons would be a violation of separation of atoms for peace and atoms for war, if that steel is used in both cars and bombs. i can see the argument for keeping things like enriched uranium and plutonium separately manufactured from similarly processed materials used to generate power, but tritium in many ways is a pretty trivial component (quantity-wise) of nuclear weapons and isn't particularly dangerous.

if the idea is that in the event nuclear weapons were abolished and a central manufacturing facility would be symbolically shut down, i think that would be the weapons assembly and heavy fuel facilities... it seems like this might be being unnecessarily politicized. i might be wrong, however. maybe there's something i'm not seeing here.

[Aidoneus]

6. but free countries don't develop weapons of mass destruction!

:eyes:

[tlcandie]

7. Iran? So, we can then let them be? If not then we are hypocrites...

Well, hold on we already are hypocrites, so I'm not sure exactly what that would make us!

[soothsayer]

8. I guess we're goiing to start whipping out our nukes again

to test 'em and make the world shudder at our might.

The los alamos bomb makers will be tickled to death. Remember that if you design a bomb that's going to be tested, you get to spend the night in the bunker the night before the explosion. They used to say it's better than an orgasm, and better and more powerful than giving birth. (I believe those were all male scientists at the time).

Sickos.

[ConcernedCanuk]

10. Hmmm - USA making more WMD's ?

shouldn't they be doing a "pre-emptive strike" on themselves then ???