New Nuclear Power Plants underway

The United States Department of Energy has expressed an intention to begin securing loans for the construction of new Nuclear Power Plants. Details and references are contained in the Nuclear Waste Cannon site: www.buildnwc.org . It is only a matter of time that this initial effort will become a landside of expansion of Nuclear Power generation in the U.S. Disposal of nuclear waste, already an urgent problem, will become an emergency problem - particularly if a nuclear waste site is exploited in some manner by terrorists.

New Cost Estimates

The cost of the program has been reviewed. The cost of each individual cannon round is now estimated to be about $20,000 each. This put the total cost of moving all 1,000,000 tons of nuclear waste off the earth closer to $100 billion. But at the same time the Government has recently re-estimated the potential cost of Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository as being closer to $92 billion; but that only includes a little more than a 100,000 metric tons of metallic wastes. So the Nuclear Waste Cannon is becoming the best alternative to what to do with the rapidly accumulating pile of hazardous nuclear waste material.

STATUS UPDATE 16 APRIL 2009

I continued to update the Phase I Plan for the development of the Nuclear Waste Cannon (NWC). I also published a new logo on the www.buildnwc.org and on this blog. I had to learn how to use INKSCAPE (a free vector drawing program) in the process of fine tuning the logo.

I also continued to research sources of information on the history of the cannon. A key report was developed by MIT in 1980 that asserted that the NWC was not only feasible but would be economical, at least for the amount of nuclear waste identified at that time. The MIT projectile, if launched from sea level would burn off about a third of its weight in ablation of the nose cone. Our projectile would be launched from about 19,000 foot altitude if we can use Mount Chimborazo in Equador; this should reduce the need for such an extensive ablation shield.

Status Update 15 Mar 2009

Made more progress on the detailed Program Plan. It was obvious that the Program had to be split into three Phases. Phase I would get the basic development accomplished and provide an initial operating capability. Phase II would do the reliability and accuracy testing needed to ensure that the cannon could safely launch nuclear waste projectiles. Phase III would be the transition into full operation. Have a pretty good handle on Phase I schedule and a preliminary estimate of cost. But still have a lot of fine tuning to do. Also a new logo has been introduced; not exactly spectacular be should get the point across. Have posted the new logo on this site and on the cannon program site.

Trying out OPENPROJ

I am taking a chance and trying out the free project software called OPENPROJ. It seems to be almost in the beta state. But it may just be that I am having trouble finding the documentation. In any case I have loaded about 120 project/tasks into the System and so far it seems to have accepted them without crashing. I haven't yet figured out how to adjust the scale on the Gantt chart. I can only see a few months at a time. I need a scale that shows about 15 years. I am not completely clear on how the precendents work. It does not seem to allow progress to be dependent on more than one prior task. But, again, it may just be a matter of finding the documention. The same outfit that offers OPENPROJ offers another more comprehensive system (ON DEMAND I think) that lets the project to be run on line with many teams involved. We may have to convert over to that kind of system when the number of actual participants grows. They want about $20/mo for the system.

buildnwc.com site has link to us.

I finally got a simple page up on the buildnwc.com website. It has an email reference as well as a link to www.buildnwc.org. There is still no indication that anyone has visited the site except Gary and I. I plan to add a bunch of key words to the .com site. This may help people seeking us.

Link from old website working

The orginal web site we purchased was buildnwc.org. Later we used google applications because of some enhanced features. In the process we lost the link between buildnwc.org and the google site at www.buildnwc.org. Gary fixed that problem. Today if you sign in to http://buildnwc.org there is a link to the google site.