Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl and Fukushima all had two things in common: conventional fission reactors and human error. Even the Fukushima disaster, though initiated by an earthquake-induced tsunami, ultimately failed due to human error: the backup generators were placed in the basement of the reactors where they flooded and failed.  Without power, the reactors and spent fuel pools overheated and burned.  Radioisotopes contaminated much of Japan and were detected in San Diego, CA a week after the event.  But in all three cases, as with all nuclear power plants, the production of enriched uranium, reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and the long term storage of spent nuclear fuel remains problematic.One application of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) is to fission natural, fertile, uranium via fast neutrons, without relying upon a chain reaction in fissile uranium.  This has the advantage of a fuel cycle that can burn natural uranium without enrichment and uses the 95% of a conventional fuel rod that goes untapped, ending up in long term spent fuel storage.  Fusion-initiated fast neutrons will also burn plutonium and all long half-life trans-uranics that require hundreds of thousands of years of safe storage.  LENR is an alternative to uneconomical laser fusion and magnetic tokamak-driven fusion-fast-fission schemes.This talk reviews Fukushima data analyzed by UT Austin students, NIST and JWK indicating the radiation sources.  The same radiological techniques were then used to establish LENR-induced fission in natural and depleted uranium.  The advantages of this Green Nuclear Reactor, or GeNiE�, will be discussed.

Fukushima revisited and the nano-nuclear alternative

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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