BELIZE TO LOOK AT NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION

**** small nuclear generating plants
**** small nuclear plants


BELIZE AND NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION OPTIONS

We probably should start thinking about a nuclear electrical generating plant in Belize. They make them small enough to go into submarines and small enough to go on space ships into space.
The big thing with nuclear energy is not safety so much, as getting rid of the half life radioactive materials left over. Technology has advanced enough, that a nuclear plant today is pretty much safe enough. I remember climbing up on top of the TEA POT reactor at Los Alamos to watch the fissionable rods giving off their heat back in the 1970’s.
To give you some examples of the amount of power available in a couple of pounds of fuel material, versus the millions of gallons of oil products we have to import, plus that enormous draining foreign exchange drain, we could look at Space craft technology. Most of it has been put on hold for the last forty years, due to objections by the mass media to the radioactive dangers they perceive.
It takes about 36,700 feet ( roughly 7 miles) per second for a chemical run rocket to escape the gravity well of the EARTH. You can get up to 20 miles per second with chemical rockets, which makes a trip to MARS, take a couple of years, presuming you got a solar gravity sling shot boost around the Sun. After that, the chemical method of propulsion is regarded as too slow. High School kids back in the 1970’s could easily sketch you out a nuclear power plant, to push a rocket into the solar system at greater velocities than available to the chemical rockets we continue to use today. The solid core nuclear motors of yester-year are still used today, though the technology is not really current, or making maximum use of the energies available. In these you take a basic load of fissile rods, surround them with a moderator which then heated up. This in turn heated water into steam in a parallel piping system, which turned steam turbines and ran a generator. In a space ship rocket you used something like hydrogen in a pipe instead of water and exhaust it out a nozzle for solar system travel. This technology was available back in 1965, but we never built any, due to the mass media hysteria involving contamination of the atmosphere. In the 1970’s the anti-nuclear hysteria was so bad, you could lose your civil service job if you even knew how a nuclear reactor worked. There are other developments in theory anyway, that will give a thrust, or velocity of a million feet per second. They use gaseous-fission engines. A sort of plasma bottle. Lets translate that speed, to 200 miles per second and you could reach SATURN in only a 100 days. Though Jupiter would still take a year to reach, versus the 7 years for our current crop of exploring satellites. Nowadays people stay in the Space Station longer than that! Though the space station technology isn’t very advanced at all. We still cannot create our own environment for humans, get rid of waste, or produce our water, oxygen and atmosphere, or food either. When it comes to Space Station technology the human race has been standing still. We need to build a city of 7000 people out in orbit, to lick the problems of space flight and living. The solution back in the 1970’s by a guy named Maxwell W. Hunter II, pretty much covers it all for space flight using nuclear propulsion technologies. We have a lot of new materials now to handle a lot of the problems with heat, we didn’t have back in the 1970’s. Maxwell proposed a space ship a 125 feet long, 45 feet wide and 20 feet high with a take off weight of 500 tons. 100 tons of which would be just cargo. Remember fuel in nuclear energy is measured in a few pounds. The book MAXWELL wrote way back when, “THRUST INTO SPACE” is still a classic and we are no further ahead 30 or 40 years later.
So what is the state of the art today in nuclear generating plants I wonder? What do we need in Belize, something around one thousand, mega watts for the future?