MOX

South Carolina’s Expensive Pit Plant

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Dan Leone is indefatigable in deciphering the DOE/NNSA* budget and congressional hearings on it. He does not disappoint.

He speculates that the cost of repurposing the MOX facility in South Carolina into a pit factory is so enormous that it is impacting the budget for maintenance. Having been the chair of the Buildings and Grounds committee for the Board of Trustees of a small college, I can say that this is a politically easy decision. It’s easy to ignore maintenance until roofs start leaking. DOE goes through these cycles every few years.

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Links – Thanksgiving 2017

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

I know very little about Zimbabwe’s politics, but these sources seem reliable.  Zimbabwe’s clean slate: What brought Mugabe down, and why he didn’t see it coming.  Robert Mugabe’s Inner Circle Implodes. It’s good to see that this hasn’t exploded into a civil war, but it’s not over yet.

Negotiate with North Korea, chapter 3745. Long read on how North Korea may be tracking its missile tests. It’s important to get as much data as possible out of each test, but there need to be receiving stations for the data. Top photo from here. Read More

A Small Russian Overture

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Donald Trump denounced the New START Treaty in his first phonecall with Vladimir Putin. Putin brought up the treaty, which is coming up for renewal in 2021, so talks should be starting soon. The treaty limits the numbers of nuclear weapons for Russia and the United States, preventing an arms race. But the treaty was negotiated under Barack Obama, so in Trump’s mind, it is a bad treaty. Read More

Links – December 12, 2016

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Sorry to be depressing, but we need to be aware of how we can lose our democracy, given many of the things that Donald Trump and his administration-to-be have said and done. It’s not an overnight change, but one little thing after another. The best thing is to avoid getting into those little things. More from Masha Gessen, this time on similarities between how Trump is likely to govern and what we see in Vladimir Putin. Read More

Plutonium Disposal Difficulties

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Back in the 1990s, when the United States and Russia were both drawing down their numbers of nuclear weapons, Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin agreed, in a burst of mutual good will, to make 34 tons each of plutonium from those weapons unusable for that purpose. I was among those working hard on how to do that: the ARIES Project at Los Alamos was designing a plant for plutonium weapons pits in, canned plutonium out, with facilities for IAEA inspections. Read More