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Proposal to securely and sustainably fund the cost of State government and

1) Eliminate all state income and sales taxes in California.

2) Pay each legal California adult resident not in jail a variable yearly dividend of approximately $20,000 from a California Permanent Fund.

Citizens of the State of Alaska pay no State personal income tax or sales tax. The full cost of Alaska State government is paid for from energy royalties. These State energy royalties also permit regular dividend payments (2008 Alaska Permanent Fund dividend was $3,269.00) to every legal adult Alaskan resident. I propose creating similar arrangements in the State of California, securely and honesty paying the full cost of State Government.

Each year America's current 104 LWR reactors produce 2000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. The energy value left in 2000 tons of spent fuel rods after they are considered expended and are removed from operation in America's LWRs is approximately

7.0 x 10^12 KW hours of additional energy [1]

if all fissile and fertile uranium in the spent fuel is completely burned in an appropriately designed alternate technology molten salt reactor. The value of the electricity that would result from fully burning all of the 2000 tons of spent nuclear fuel is

$685 billion dollars a year

presuming a 2009 average cost of electricity of 9.79 cents per KW hour.

2000 tons of spent fuel are produced by US LWRs every year, year in and year out, and the potential exists to consistently produce a sizeable revenue stream that could help pay the cost of government from the combined sale of electricity and nuclear industry waste fund payments from nuclear waste generators. The magnitude of this combined revenue steam is on a par with the magnitude of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which Congress provided to kick start the US economy. The funds that would come from completely burning the energy left remaining in spent nuclear fuel would produce a tremendous lift to the California economy. Two thousand tons of spent fuel is produced every year, year in and year out, and the potential exists to consistently produce sizeable revenue in sale of electricity and waste fund payments from nuclear waste generators for the State of California on a long term basis.

California Double Win - Solve the National Nuclear Waste Problem and Securely Fund the cost of California State Government

We should resolve a multi generational long term headache relating to the secure storage (~25,000 years) of spent fuel nuclear waste and transform it through use of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory designed LIFE (Laser Inertial Confinement Fusion Fission Engine) [2] or alternately the Idaho National Laboratory pioneered IFR [4] to burn all Uranium and Minor Actinide wastes in Spent Nuclear Fuel into much shorter half life fission products. Use of either reactor technology would permit full extraction of all of the energy in the spent nuclear fuel waste instead of ~3% burn up as is achieved by current US LWRs. The final spent nuclear fuel fission product wastes would be of greatly reduced volume and would have a much shorter half life. Approximately 83% of the final fission products would decay to the radiotoxicity level of the natural background within 10 years. The remaining 17% of fission products could be stored in a California underground repository located in one of the remote seismically stable parts of the State to allow them to safely decay to the level of the natural radioactive background within ~350 years. The complete burning of spent nuclear fuel would produce large amounts of valuable commercial electricity with value on the order of ~$685 billion dollars per year which would help to sustainably pay the cost of state government on a long term basis. The program outlined above could convert California from a miserable net energy importer subject to the vagaries of exploitive western states energy suppliers to a major regional energy exporter. The current California State budget is approximately 105 billion dollars. Excess funds generated by using spent nuclear fuel to generate electricity would produce

$685 billion (SNF electricity sales) - $105 billion (Ca. budget costs) = $580 billion (excess funds).

We could, from the $580 billion in excess funds produced from sale of electricity generated from spent nuclear fuel, pay the total cost of State government on a sustainable basis and pay all 26.1 million legal adult Californian residents over the age of 18 an energy dividend payment of 20 thousand dollars on a year in year out basis as long as America’s 104 nuclear reactors continue to operate and generate spent nuclear fuel. The exact amount of the yearly California Permanent Fund payment would vary depending on the prevailing current price of electricity and the yearly magnitude of waste fund payments from nuclear waste generators.

(During the current recession it may be difficult for some California families to provide one nice Christmas present for every child in the family at the Holidays - Excess funds generated by the generation of electricity from depleted uranium and nuclear waste could help).

Every California Child deserves at least one good Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa present. The excess funds ($580 billion) produced by this energy plan should permit a $1000 present for every child in California regardless of whether their parents are in prison or not.

If the State Legislature of California increases State spending beyond the $685 billion that would be generated by the complete burning of the nation’s yearly production of spent nuclear fuel, I might add that additional revenues could be had by using appropriate alternate reactor technology to fully burn all of the nation's production of depleted uranium. Depleted uranium is produced from mined uranium ore in the process of enriching the fissile U-235 content of fuel pellets for reactor fuel rods. The nation yearly produces in excess of 12,000 tons of depleted uranium which is largely treated as a controlled waste product. Approximately six times the amount of energy is available in the nation's yearly production of depleted uranium as is available in the yearly production of spent nuclear fuel. The total value of the electricity that could be generated from fully burning all of the spent nuclear fuel and depleted uranium now completely wasted while producing the nation's enriched uranium fuel for its commercial power reactors is approximately $4.9 trillion dollars presuming a 2009 average retail cost of electricity of 9.79 cents per KW-h as reported by DOE EIA.

If the State Legislature’s spending should exceed $4.9 trillion per year I would suggest investigating Thorium nuclear fuel which is three times as abundant as Uranium and currently goes unused for energy production but would make excellent fuel in appropriate alternate technology reactors (either LLNL LIFE engine or ORNL Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor).

Source(s): Thorium Molten Salt Reactors are good science. Dr. Edward Teller, the founding director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote his final paper a month before his death on the subject of the advantages of Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. http://www.geocities.com/rmoir2003/moir_teller.pdf

[1] "Spent Fuel is too valuable to be Nuclear Waste", Dr. John K. Sutherland EnergyPulse Insight, Analysis, and Commentary on the Global Power Industry (2003)

[2] Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory LIFE Project

https://lasers.llnl.gov/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/project_plan.php

A significant amount of work inside and outside the United States has gone into the concept of waste reduction using a combination of Partitioning and Transmutation. While no hardware has yet been built there are decades of academic scholarship available to support this approach. The most applicable studies to directly accomplish the waste disposal goals outlined in this proposal are:

[3] Vergnes, Jean and Lecarpentier, David "The AMSTER concept (actinide molten salt transmutER)" (2002)

http://www.nea.fr/html/pt/docs/iem/madrid00/Proceedings/Paper17.pdf

Ignatiev, Victor "Integrated Study of Molten Na, Li, Be/F Salts for LWR Waste Burning in Accelerator Driven and Critical Systems” Proceedings of GLOBAL 2005 Tsukuba, Japan

http://tauon.nuc.berkeley.edu/references/2005_10_Global_Tsukuba/GL0xx/GL027DF.pdf

[4] Argonne/Idaho National Laboratory Integral Fast Reactor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

I am retired and am no longer employed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The opinions expressed are my own. I cannot speak for the Laboratory.

Robert Steinhaus - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Retired)