They have changed hands a few times. Toshiba owned for a while. The owning holding company may be in the UK now. Still has American offices for design and support work.
That has been coming for at least a decade, if not longer. 50 mpg cars have already put the squeeze on highway tax dollars. A lot of states have toyed with implementing a mileage tax. EV drivers need to pay their share, either in increased vehicle registration fees or mileage tax.Somewhere back a few days the discussion turned to "pay by the mile" road fees. Now the pilot is just around the corner...
(It might have been in another, similar discussion but it was on TBN.)
When Chrysler went out of business, nobody noticed.
Both times. Twice now, we've bailed them out.
Spent fuel rods contain plutonium, which can be extracted chemically without the massive centrifuges. They're concerned about bombs in the wrong hands. We have enough fuel sitting in spent rods to run America for the next century, but we aren't using it.Relatively speaking there is isn't much spent fuel and for some Head-Up-@ss reason the USA does not reprocess used nuclear fuel which still contains 90% of its usable energy but for some reason is no longer optimal for current reactor designs.
Proposed new designs which get more out of a uranium fuel pellet:
3 Advanced Reactor Systems to Watch by 2030
These 3 advanced reactor designs are cleaner, safer and more efficient than previous generations. They could also debut as early as 2030.www.energy.gov
I *think* trucks pay significant taxes beyond the taxes on the fuel they use. Whether or not their total tax is proportional to the wear on the roads that they cause is somewhat of a moot point. We essentially pay their taxes as consumers of the products that they are transporting.
Trucking is heavily subsidized by the government, and has grown beyond all reason as a result. Many times, over half the capacity of our freeways is occupied by freight trucking, leading to endless traffic jams. Rail is many times as energy and labor efficient, but America is still limping along on 19th century rail technology. We lost our chance to nationalize our rail system in the 1930s, and it has been deteriorating ever since. Many communities no longer have rail service, which would have been unthinkable a century ago.
