Sellafield is a nuclear fuel reprocessing and nuclear decommissioning site, is northwest of London on the Irish Sea. A great deal of the development and manufacture of U.K. nuclear weapons took place there from the 1950s on. Hundreds of tons of radioactive waste were stored in huge cooling pools and ignored as the facilities deteriorated.
Last August, I wrote a post about plans by the U.S. Department of Energy to ship nuclear waste by truck twelve hundred miles from Canada's Chalk River Laboratory near Ottawa to Savannah River in Georgia. The U.S.
I have mentioned thermionic power generators that use plutonium-238 to provide power for space probes in past posts. Recently there have been some problems with obtaining sufficient Pu-238 for NASA deep space missions. Nuclear propulsion systems for large spacecraft have also been proposed for decades. With the recent expansion of private space industry, interest in nuclear propulsion has increased.
I have often blogged about problems at nuclear power reactors. I have seldom blogged about problems with the nuclear engines that power submarines and ships. The nuclear engines are very well built and usually function reliably and safely. However, occasionally even these nuclear reactors have problems.
