Nuclear News Roundup Aug 09, 2017
Donald Trump, the current U.S. President, has been trying to exert pressure on China to curb North Korean nuclear weapons development. China is the main trading partner for N.K. and, since N.K. and China share a border, China definitely has a major stake in developments on the Korean peninsula. China has asked the North Koreans to suspend their missile and nuclear warhead program to little effect.
Both the U.S. and Russia have thousands of nuclear warheads and three types of delivery systems. Both nations have nuclear armed submarines, nuclear bombers and nuclear tipped ICBMs. Both countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade their nuclear arsenals and their delivery systems.
Most of my blog posts have to do with nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons and/or nuclear waste. But occasionally I blog on other nuclear related issues such as the production of radioisotopes for medical use. The radioisotope market was over eleven billion dollars in 2016 and is estimated to rise to almost twenty billion dollars by 2021.
In March of 2011, there was an earthquake northeast of Japan. It created a tsunami that flooded the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the coast of the Japanese island of Honshu. The tsunami flooded the emergency generators which provided power for the cooling pumps in the reactors. Without the emergency generators, the cooling systems failed and three of the six reactors melted down.
Part Two of Two Parts (Please read Part One first)