"I really like HAT and have owned some shares in this company for a few years, can we have a clean energy source?, read the whole Q&A at the link.

http://www.uraniumseek.com/news/Uran...

TGR: Any other emerging nuclear technologies that intrigue you?

JP: Yes, and it involves depleted uranium. The nuclear fuel cycle creates two environmental problems: depleted uranium, which is the byproduct of uranium enrichment, and spent fuel rods. The nuclear industry has been quite clever at recycling spent fuel rods. So the last problem is depleted uranium.

TGR: What’s the issue with depleted uranium?

JP: Some 90% of the output of uranium enrichment is actually waste material called depleted uranium hexafluoride. It’s very toxic, horrible stuff with—to date—no economic value. And the world’s producing 250 million pounds of depleted uranium every year as a byproduct of the uranium enrichment. As new uranium enrichment plants are built to handle the increasing demand for nuclear fuel, that number is going to increase dramatically and there are vast stockpiles already. The Department of Energy has almost 2 billion pounds of depleted uranium in the United States and there are similar stockpiles in Europe and Russia.

The good news is that a U.S. company has developed a fluorine extraction process. This is a potential means of harvesting the fluorine atoms in depleted uranium and producing fluorine gases and other valuable fluorine products out of depleted uranium. That has the effect of actually eliminating depleted uranium, and so it solves its major environmental issue in the nuclear fuel cycle. It also extracts potentially billions of dollars of value from these trapped fluorine atoms.

TGR: It sounds like an amazing technology process. Will it gain traction with Obama focusing on more nuclear facilities?

JP: Any plans to have nuclear be the means through which to meet carbon requirements without really damaging the U.S. economy will have to deal with the environmental side effects of the nuclear fuel cycle. Eliminating depleted uranium would be an obvious and clear step toward improving the political acceptability of nuclear power.