User:Kmarable

This page is how I get around my high school's internet block because I don't have a jump drive. It contains random research I am working on.

proxy@rfaweb.org. http://censorware.net

"The Department of Energy (DOE) has now spent about $8 billion on research and development for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. The repository is located about 70 miles from Las Vegas (i.e., from the northwest "urban edge" of the Las Vegas valley). President Bush and Congress approved the project in 2002.... In April 2006 the administration sent its Yucca Mountain bill to Congress. Among other things, the bill removes Yucca's 70,000-metric-ton capacity limit for nuclear waste; it abolishes Department of Transportation, NRC, Surface Transportation Board, and state authority over nuclear waste transport; it eliminates any applicability of our nation's hazardous waste disposal and local air quality control laws; and it would withdraw permanently from public use 147,000 acres of federal land in Nevada." http://www.yuccamountain.org/

"Over the last fifty years the principal reason for reprocessing used fuel has been to recover unused uranium and plutonium in the used fuel elements and thereby close the fuel cycle. A secondary reason is to reduce the volume of material to be disposed of as high-level waste. In addition, the level of radioactivity in such 'light' waste after about 100 years falls much more rapidly than in used fuel itself. This has been the government policy in many European countries, Russia and Japan... Although US policy has been to avoid reprocessing, the US budget process for 2006 includes $50 million to develop a plan for "integrated spent fuel recycling facilities", and a program to achieve this with fast reactors will apparently be a major US budget request the following year...All commercial reprocessing plants use the well-proven hydrometallurgical PUREX (Plutonium Uranium EXtraction) process. This involves dissolving the fuel elements in concentrated nitric acid. Chemical separation of uranium and plutonium is then undertaken by solvent extraction steps (neptunium* can also be recovered if required). The Pu and U can be returned to the input side of the fuel cycle - the uranium to the conversion plant prior to re-enrichment and the plutonium straight to fuel fabrication**...The remaining liquid after Pu and U are removed is high-level waste, containing about 3% of the used fuel in the form of fission products and minor actinides (Np, Am, Cm). It is highly radioactive and continues to generate a lot of heat. It is conditioned by calcining and incorporation of the dry material into borosilicate glass, then stored pending disposal. In principle any compact, stable, insoluble solid is satisfactory for disposal."

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf69.htm

Kathryn Marable Gay History News

California history textbooks will have to address the contributions of gay and lesbian Americans if a bill the California Senate passed two weeks ago passes the Assembly and is signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. “[Gay rights are] probably the civil rights movement of the twenty-first century and I think students need to understand where that came from,” said Don Winters, government teacher. “It shouldn’t need to have to be done,” said senior and Gay Straight Alliance president Lisa Voelker. “Gay and Lesbian people are people in history and they’ve accomplished great things and stupid things.” The social studies standards for the Davis School District already require the teaching of aspects of gay and lesbian history, especially the gay rights movement. Winters helped write the curriculum addressing the district’s standards on GLBT history in 1991. However, he suspects many U.S. history teachers have difficulty fitting it in, especially as the gay rights movement came recently in history and thus is taught at the very end of the school year.“That’s always the dilemma, you know, how far we get.” He says that he teaches the topic in his history class, but it is not addressed in the textbooks. “Really you have to supplement it with other materials,” Winters said. He says that he usually brings in guest speakers. Sen. Sheila Kuhl, D-Santa Monica, authored the bill. She herself made history when she was elected in 1994 as California’s first openly gay lawmaker. Voelker said that members of the Davis chapter had lobbied on behalf of the bill, but “there wasn’t a collective GSA effort.” She said that the effect of the bill has been to polarize the two parties, but in the end she’s optimistic. “I think it’ll pass, not by a very high margin, though,” she predicted.