New Energy Watch

Megatons to Megawatts

About 10 percent of America's electricity now comes from recycled nuclear warheads, many of them from the former Soviet Union. In fact about 45 percent of the fuel used in American reactors comes from Soviet warheads, as opposed to about 6 percent from American weapons. The New York Times says that utility companies haven't said much about this Megatons to Megawatts program, which has been in existence for years, because they fear upsetting their customers.

Why would this upset people at even a fraction of the level they were, or should have been, when the warheads were warheads, pointed at them in earnest? This is a brilliant use of dangerous materials, a true swords-to-plowshares operation.

According to USEC, the company that does the processing, "The Megatons to Megawatts™ Program is a unique, commercially financed government-industry partnership in which bomb-grade uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads is being recycled into low enriched uranium (LEU) used to produce fuel for American nuclear power plants.  USEC, as executive agent for the U.S. government, and Techsnabexport (TENEX), acting for the Russian government, implement this 20-year, $8 billion program at no cost to taxpayers."

So far, the program has processed and recycled fuel from the equivalent of 15,000 nuclear warheads.

The current US effort to dilute and recycle weapons-grade uranium into reactor fuel is small compared to Megatons to Megawatts, but there will soon be a plutonium recycling plant in South Carolina that, according to the Times, will produce enough reactor fuel to power a million homes for 50 years.

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Doug Logan

Saltworks Technologies' Low-Power Desalination

The World Congress on Desalination and Water Reuse met in Dubai last November. One of the most promising innovations showcased there is called Thermo-Ionic™ desalination, invented by the principals at Saltworks Technologies in Vancouver.

The advantage of the system is that it requires far less energy to remove salt from water than other desalinating methods like reverse-osmosis or heating-evaporating-condensing.    

The Thermo-ionic process uses energy produced by low-temperature heat and dryness in the ambient atmosphere to separate the positively charged sodium ions from the negatively charged chloride ions in salt to produce a pure-water stream. It actually works best in arid desert areas -- right where water is most needed.

-- Doug Logan

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