This allows use of plutonium to fuel certain conventional reactors.
If America was supplied with such reactors, supplies of uranium fuel needed by conventional reactors could be made to last 100 times as long.
In effect, the billions of tiny capsules act like the far more massive containment systems of conventional reactors.
The Government and the utilities now say that a mixture of plutonium and uranium can be burned in these conventional reactors.
Sometimes conventional biological reactors are used to clean-up groundwater and/or contaminated soils.
There are several advantages to using conventional biological reactors:
These reactors use uranium-238, which is more common than the uranium-235 required by conventional reactors.
But then along came Toshiba, which performs maintenance and repair work on conventional nuclear reactors around the world.
In a conventional reactor, a moderator is needed to slow down the neutrons so that they are more likely to fission atoms.
President Bush should offer financial and technical aid to Iran to help build conventional reactors not using enriched uranium.