And just think, they didn't even pay any taxes on the $14 billion dollar profits last year -- and even received a $3.2 billion gift from taxpayers via Uncle Sam.
"Laser process adds to worry over bomb" by William J. Broad, New York Times / August 21, 2011
NEW YORK - Scientists have long sought easier ways to make the costly material known as enriched uranium - the fuel of nuclear reactors and bombs, now produced only in giant industrial plants.
One idea, a half-century old, has been to do it with nothing more substantial than lasers and their rays of concentrated light. This futuristic approach has always proved too expensive and difficult for anything but laboratory experimentation. Until now.
In a little-known effort, General Electric has successfully tested laser enrichment for two years and is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that would make reactor fuel by the ton.
That might be good news for the nuclear industry. But critics fear that if the work succeeds and the secret gets out, rogue states and terrorists could make bomb fuel in much smaller plants that are difficult to detect.
Iran has already succeeded with laser enrichment in the lab, and nuclear scientists worry that GE’s accomplishment might inspire Tehran to build a plant easily hidden from the world’s eyes.
Like Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons plant?
Backers of the laser plan call those fears unwarranted and praise the technology as a windfall for a world increasingly leery of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.
They use that fraud argument to generate support for $omething more noxious and poisonous makes one want to puke.
And I do notice that wind and sun fall off the energy radar grid pretty quick.
But critics want a detailed risk assessment. Recently, they petitioned Washington for a formal evaluation of whether the laser initiative could backfire and speed the global spread of nuclear arms.
“We’re on the verge of a new route to the bomb,’’ said Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist who advised President Clinton and now teaches at Princeton University. “We should have learned enough by now to do an assessment before we let this kind of thing out.’’
New varieties of enrichment are considered potentially dangerous because they can simplify the hardest part of building a bomb - obtaining the fuel.
GE, an atomic pioneer and one of the world’s largest companies, says its initial success began in July 2009 at a facility just north of Wilmington, N.C., that is jointly owned with Hitachi. It is impossible to independently verify that claim because the federal government has classified the laser technology as top secret. But GE officials say that the achievement is genuine and that they are accelerating plans for a larger complex at the Wilmington site....
The company foresees “substantial demand for nuclear fuel,’’ he added, while conceding that global jitters from the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan “do create some uncertainty.’’ GE made those reactors....
You mean the ones criticized way back when for being unsafe, so much so that people resigned in protest (a much more honorable time, no?).
Related: The Silver Lining In Japan's Nuclear Cloud
Well, NOT REALLY!
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Update:
"Efforts to replace a disputed nuclear dump in Nevada are doomed unless officials generate local support for alternative sites, a presidential commission said yesterday....
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