Thanks for the kind words, Claymore, but I'm not exactly a one-trick pony. I'm no physicist, nor am I an expert on weapons of mass distruction (although I'm not exactly ignorant when it comes to such matters). Nor do I defer to the experts without asking at least a few questions, because I'm just curious about things.

Some of what I've heard about depleted uranium (i.e., material from spent fuel rods) comes from across-the-table conversations some years ago with nuclear physicists and engineers who worked at Hanford. I was news director in a radio station in the Tri-Cities, just south of Hanford, and thus had access to some pretty interesting and informative people. This was a matter of some local interest, because we were "downwind." One conversation concerned the problem of what to do with the increasing number of spent fuel rods. According to the physicists and engineers, the bloody things consist mostly of U-238 and are still dangerously radioactive, although no longer as radioactive as they once were. Safe storage. They hoped it was just a temporary problem and that someone somewhere sometime soon would figure out a way of disposing of them "permanently" (glassify them and bury them deep beneath the earth or dump them in a deep ocean trench, perhaps). 4.2 billion-year half-life, remember, and that's not debatable. Look it up in any physics book. You may have heard a few things in the news about the extent, the problems, and the massive expense of the "Hanford Clean-up." Well, that, and the problem of radioactive fluids leaking from storage tanks into the ground-water and seeping into the Columbia River are what it's all about.

Well, it looks like someone has finally found a use for the fuel rods. . . .

Don Firth