...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

In Lieutenant (jg) Carter's case, the lesson seemed moot in the short term, since family exigencies forced him to leave the Navy shortly thereafter and he never actually served aboard a nuclear-powered vessel. However, thirty-five years later, President Carter canceled efforts to establish a system of spent fuel reprocessing in the United States.

He did this primarily as an anti-proliferation measure. In places where it's done, commercial reprocessing of spent power reactor fuel is a major source of plutonium, which is way easier to use in weapons than uranium. It's interesting to me that he was the first, and probably the only, U.S. president in history who understood nuclear technology well enough to know what fuel reprocessing even was, let alone its implications in terms of a bunch more plutonium floating around outside the military-industrial complex--and he just happened to be president at the exact moment when it became an issue that needed addressing.

(Mind you, there's an argument to be made that it was a bad move in the long run, since it contributed significantly to the economic kneecapping of the nuclear power industry in the United States, but that was less obvious at the time than it's become in the succeeding decades.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.