If someone pays me to do research and wants a bibliography, I’ll compile one.

Things that I blog, I do so out of my own interest and knowledge. Surely, it is based on some prior knowledge, something I read somewhere, something I learned in a physics class, things that I might have read in a science rag somewhere, but I just do not normally track every source.

I make the basic assumption that most people who read my blogs and are intelligent enough to understand them, have also mastered the use of Google or other search engines and are capable of doing their own research.

Generally, the only time I bother to provide sources is when I’ve either taken a large chunk from some other source and don’t wish to plagiarize so I credit the source, or when I am disputing some popular belief that is wrong.

A good example being the statement, “No super giant oil fields have been discovered in the last twenty years”, which is an outright lie. In my article on that I documented every super giant oil field discovered and included links to the source of that information.

With respect to nuclear reactor efficiency; normal one-pass lightweight or boiling water reactors can burn only U-235, and will breed some percentage of Pu-239 from U-239 present in the fuel and get some partial burn from that, but for the most part the 99.3% of the uranium that wasn’t U-235 isotope, is wasted. A few minutes with Google, you should be able to find this.

And then of that thermal power, conversion efficiencies are generally limited to about 40%, and you can find that with a little searching as well.

If you do some searching for so-called 4th generation actinide burning plants, high temperature fast flux reactors, etc, you’ll be able to learn about some potential alternatives.

I think the point of your assignment in Science is to encourage you to do your own research and to a large degree that’s also what I’m trying to encourage people to do, rather than believing everything your TV, or a blog, says.