The U.S. Energy Department’s fuel-recycling initiative could be a distraction from a more achievable goal: reviving today’s nuclear industry and averting some carbon emissions in the short term. Imagine a nuclear industry that can power America for decades using its own radioactive garbage, burning up the parts of today’s reactor wastes that are the hardest to dispose of. Add technology that takes nuclear chaff, uranium that was mined and processed but was mostly unusable, and converts it to still more fuel. Then add a global business model that makes it much less likely that reactor by-products such as plutonium will find their way into nuclear weapons in countries like Iran, even as economical nuclear-power technology becomes available to the whole world. That is the alluring triple play the George W. Bush administration hopes to turn with the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) it unveiled earlier this year, a proposed long-term research and development program almost as audacious as the Manhattan Project. The basic fuel-reprocessing concepts at its heart have been kicking around for the better part of a half-century. Now they are being touted anew as a way to provide plentiful carbon-free fuel for an energy-hungry world threatened by human-induced climate change.
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¿What is the next for the american dollar? We remember the OPEC MEETING from the last november, when Iran and Venezuela, try to include american dollar in OPEC talks. This time, Saudi Arabia block any kind of talk about the dollar, but the game is not over yet.

During 2007, the Bankers in Iran have complained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to receive Iranian-held money denominated in dollars from European bank accounts. They said that this was because of United States pressure on European banking giants not to allow dollar-denominated funds to be sent into, or out of, the Islamic republic government of Iran.

Iran and Venezuela, are looking to reduce its dependence on the dollar, want to reduce this kind of vulnerability. Foreign income sources and oil revenues should be calculated in euros and want to receive them in euros in order to put an end to its dependence on the dollar.

For Iran, the 60 percent of oil sales are already being carried out in dollars in another hand for Venezuela represents around 90 percent of oil sales.

This week Iran has stopped selling its oil for american dollars, the Iran’s oil minister, Gholamhossein Nozari say: “In line with a policy of selling crude oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, the sale of our country’s oil in U.S. dollars has been completely eliminated,” and, He also said “the dollar is no longer a reliable currency.”

If we remember the last week, Russia through Gazprom is mulling over the possibility to sell natural gas and crude oil for rubbles. Gazprom has 118,367.564 million rubbles in stock capital split into 23,673,512.9 thousand common stocks, 5 rubbles par each.

¿The Dollar has problems? The United States is the hegemony, yet. But its currency is experimenting a real globalization, because now, the dollar needs to fight with the yuan, the euro, and maybe (soon) the rubble but its main enemy is the same american dollar, the real adversary is the american currency policy. For this reason, The United States needs to improve its foreign and currency policy.

|Manuel Torres Laveaga