Skip to main content

Educating the Educators

Saturday marked the end of the 2006 Science Teachers’ Workshop, so a report is in order. The Virginia Section of the American Nuclear Society, the Virginia Chapter of the Health Physics Society, and North American Young Generation in Nuclear sponsored this three-day workshop, which was held at Virginia Commonwealth University. Here are my personal reactions.

It was fun! We had about 45 interested, open-minded individuals, and they were appreciative of the effort we had made. I’m hopeful that the workshop will be helpful for their lesson preparations.

It was educational! Naturally, it was educational for the students (the science teachers) but it was also educational for the instructors (the nuclear professionals who presented the workshop). It is often said that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it, and I found that to be true. Preparing a lecture on radioactive waste management required me to brush up on my facts and figures, try to put historical events in perspective, and think about what is of interest to the general public. It also provided an excuse for me to do some simple calculations that I had never done because they were not necessary for my work.

For example, I found that about 22 grams of matter are converted to energy during irradiation of a typical modern PWR fuel assembly, and that about 87% of the fission products decay to stability within one year after that fuel assembly is discharged from the reactor. From my visit to the North Anna Nuclear Information Center, I learned that Dominion’s largest customer is not the Pentagon or the Newport News shipyard, but America Online. It makes you think that conservation-minded Al Gore might need to apologize for inventing the Internet.

It was a lot of work! I did not help with the detailed planning, so it was impressive to see the lectures, breaks, meals, and tours proceed smoothly. The number of details that were considered was staggering.

I would like to express my thanks to the various sponsorsof the event, which ranged from big corporations to small businesses and individuals. Many volunteers also contributed to the workshop at levels of participation from trivial to heroic. My contribution was hardly heroic, but it included preparing a lecture and attending the entire workshop to help out with odd jobs. I hope we will hear some reports from the heroes.

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin