Okay... "Downtown Cambridge" was hyperbole. I used to live near Kendall Sq. and downwind of the Necco factory. As far as I was concerned that was "downtown."
People I knew who worked at MIT told me "weapons grade." I simply took their word for it. Still, it is my understanding that older reactors like this one needed to use more highly enriched fuel than ones of more recent design. Thus, the "weapons grade" story was an easy buy-in.
My problem with people who are against nuclear power is not because I disagree that it CAN BE dangerous. RattyMouse has a point. The problems with the reactors in Japan were and still are serious. No doubt! My problem is with the idea that many people have which seems to say that nuclear power is so dangerous, in every case and for any use that nobody should ever use it, not even for research to find out if it can be put to better, safer use or how that can be done if it is, indeed, possible.
If, after WW-II, we spent more time figuring out how nuclear energy can be used more efficiently instead of figuring out how to blow each other up, we would surely know much more about it than we do, even now. Using nuclear energy to make bombs and simply to boil water seems like trying to play a violin with a baseball bat, to me. Maybe, if we had spent the last 67 years more constructively, we could be playing concertos on those violins instead of bashing each other over the heads with them.
I like to imagine that, some day, we could all have a refrigerator sized device in our basements, right next to the furnace which supplies all the heat and electricity we could ever need to keep the lights on and warm our houses. I know this is mostly a pipe dream but, I believe it's a worthy goal we should have been working for much sooner than we have been.
Meanwhile, we have people standing on one side of the street protesting the use of nuclear power in any form while we have Presidents standing on the other side of the street proposing that we build more "nuke-you-lar" power plants.
Yeah, I know. High-fallutin' ideas combined with simplistic thinking... But, wouldn't it be really cool if we could all buy cars that never had to be filled up with gas because there was a migma cell reactor under the hood instead of an internal combustion engine? Maybe not in my lifetime, but I am hopeful that we can come close to this goal if we don't totally achieve it.
That's why I said I'm peeved when people get their knickers in a twist. That's why I am happy to see places like MIT and Kodak have nuclear reactors, so we can figure out how they work and how to put them to better use.