Skip to main content

Podcast of ANS's Vice President/President Elect

By
The American Nuclear Society's Dr. Burchill spoke to students at Vanderbilt University about...
...the factors that are producing the renaissance of nuclear power in the United States, the current status of that renaissance, and the challenges that it presents. These challenges include re-establishing the United States nuclear infrastructure, addressing proliferation concerns, building public confidence, licensing the Yucca Mountain High Level Waste Repository, and closing the nuclear fuel cycle.
You can listen here for the podcast.
Labels:

Comments

Rod Adams said…
With all due respect to Dr. Burchill and the American Nuclear Society, this talk needs some serious fact checking.

I am listening to the talk and on minute 11 of 55 with the first five minutes or so being introductory.

So far, I have heard the following statements that are a bit less than accurate:

- The price of natural gas 10 years ago was about $2 per million standard cubic feet (the real number is either $2 per million BTU or $2 per thousand cubic feet),
- No one ever uses natural gas for baseload (and this is from a guy who used to teach at Texas A&M and lived in a state where the grid is more than 50% natural gas powered)
- Most of the 3% of the US electricity that comes from renewables is coming from homes where people feed the power back to the grid. The reality there is that about 2/3 of the "renewable" electricity in the US today comes from burning wood and wood waste to produce paper and from municipal solid waste to electricity plants.

Can someone please help Dr. Burchill provide better information to his important audiences?
March 18, 2008 at 9:20 AM
David Bradish said…
Dr. Burchill also stated that the Comanche Peak units were the last two nuclear units to come online. Watts Bar 1 was actually the last unit to come online in 1996.
March 18, 2008 at 10:34 AM
Unknown said…
this is off topic, but I couldn't find an email link to send this story in. I found this article today and was wondering if this photo of Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant is doctored or photoshopped. http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=260&NrSection=4&NrArticle=19455

I don't know about you, but sure looks like an awful lot of black smoke above a nuclear plant.
March 18, 2008 at 12:17 PM
David Bradish said…
dash, to me it looks like a storm above the nuclear plant. Here's the link to the story dash was referencing.
March 18, 2008 at 12:23 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...
6 comments
Read more