Gary Vesperman is trying to arrange sponsorship by the Nevada Governor's Office for a demonstration of Low-Energy Nuclear Transmutation (LENT) at the Feb. 16th State Summit on Nuclear Waste in Reno. The summit is closed to the general public. A past issue of the Journal of New Energy (an archival, peer-reviewed journal in Chemical Abstracts, etc.) contains a paper: "Operating the LENT-1 Transmutation Reactor" by Drs. Fox & Jin, reporting successful transmutation of 0.1 gram of Thorium 12 times out of 12 runs, using 3 cents worth of electricity, in 30 minutes. Therefore, some scientists now claim that LENT process is a "scientific FACT" rather than an irreproducible anomaly.

Gary Vesperman has contacted Nevada's new governor, Kenny Guinn, claiming it is absurd that so much money is still being wasted on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository when the radioactivity can be transmuted out of the waste nuclear fuel using a trivial amount of electricity. The referenced site http://web.gcis.net/cincygrp shows a color photo of a flake of non-radioactive copper that used to be radioactive thorium!

Terrorist threats like Iraq possibly smuggling nuclear bombs next to some of our nuclear power plants need to also be addressed. A 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant running at full power for one year accumulates the radioactive equivalent of 2,300 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Let's assume a complex of two large elderly nuclear power plants in Illinois has in its waste fuel storage pools 10,000 Hiroshima bombs of radioactivity. Iraq smuggles in just one bomb and blows it up. The Americans would then have a situation in their agricultural heartland far worse than Chernobyl. Italy alone had to dispose of $750,000,000 worth of radioactivity contaminated food. A recent report states that UN inspectors never found and destroyed Iraq's nuclear apparatus. Iraq’s technical people are now free to finish building their bombs within a few months. Iraq has been acting strangely confident lately with their saber rattling. For more info on the Iraq nuclear threat loggon the site for the Nuclear Control Institute at http://www.nci.org/nci-new.htm .

What the low-energy nuclear transmutation technology offers is a method of easily transmuting the radioactivity out of the waste nuclear fuel. Gary Vesperman sent out an e-mail to the environmental community to try to wake them up and stop wasting time and money on Yucca Mountain.  Instead, environmentalists should advocate developing the LENT process so that the risk of nuclear terrorism can be reduced.

Feb. 5 Gary Vesperman got an e-mail from Dr. Hal Fox, one of the physicists developing LENT, indicating that transmuting spent fuel is more complicated than at first thought. Vesperman's understanding is that currently the LENT process works with a diluted solution of mildly radioactive thorium. What Vesperman didn't know until now is that if the radiation gets too intense, charge clusters can not form.

Gary Vesperman's guess is that in order to neutralize spent nuclear fuel, the pellets would have to be divided or ground down into small particles and dissolved in a solution diluted to the point where the radiation is low enough to allow the charge clusters to form. Now LENT can take place and get rid of the radioactive materials. That could be an awkward process since an inconveniently large amount of water, acids, etc. would be required.

No wonder Drs. Fox and Jin had to go look for another way to neutralize the spent fuel pellets. Luckily they found one. They have designed a positive-ion accelerator based on high-density charge clusters. Perhaps some combination of the two processes may work even better than either alone.

For more information about the conference, call the Nevada Governor's office at 775-684-5670.

For more information and literature on LENT, contact Hal Fox, Ph.D, Journal of New Energy, P.O. Box 58639, Salt Lake City, UT 84158-8639 Tel: (801) 583-6232 halfox@slkc.uswest.net

Gary Vesperman can be contacted at 3123 Trueno Road, Henderson, NV 89014-3142 Tel:702-435-7947