South Africa requires safe affordable distributed base load energy, one way to achieve this is use nuclear power integrated with renewable energy sources on a decentralized basis. This suggests the development of its own micro modular reactor, supply towns, small communities, mines and processing plants. Large Light Water Reactors (LWRs) are expensive require large infrastructure development. A...

Currently, China is pursuing a long-term expansion of its nuclear power program and plans to reprocess the resulting civilian spent fuel, recycling the plutonium in MOX fuel for LWRs and in fast breeder reactors. China presently operates three civilian nuclear power reactors, but it plans to build about 20 reactors by 2020. A pilot civilian reprocessing plant has been built at Lanzhou, with a c...

FUSE far-UV spectroscopy of the nearby metal-deficient (Z⊙/8) cometary Blue Compact Dwarf (BCD) galaxy Mrk59 have been used to investigate element abundances in its interstellar medium. The lack of diffuse H2 (N(H2)≤ 10cm) is due to the combined effect of a strong UV radiation field and a low metallicity. By fitting the line profiles with multiple components having b = 7 km s and spanning a rad...

A personal history of the development of molten-salt reactors in the United States is presented. The initial goal was an aircraft propulsion reactor, and a molten fluoride-fueled Aircraft Reactor Experiment was operated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1954. In 1956, the objective shifted to civilian nuclear power, and reactor concepts were developed using a circulating UF4-ThF4 fuel, graphi...