Skip to main content

Unleashing Your Inner Auteur for Nuclear Energy

Erich von Stroheim Here’s something fun for your teens, or if you are a teen, you:

Students in middle and high schools are encouraged to prepare a three to seven minute video (VHS or DVD) on positive aspects of the various forms of energy, including nuclear energy. The purpose of the video contest is to enhance students' researching and fact-finding skills, and to educate them on the various forms of energy that we use today. Students are encouraged to be creative in their entries, yet informative. The video can be staged as a short play, commercial, news broadcast, talk show, music video, documentary, etc.

This is being sponsored by Westinghouse, via their N-Vision program. N-Vision is a nuclear advocacy program that focuses a lot on teacher-student materials and projects. You can find a pdf with instructions here. There’s prize money involved but not to buy X-Box points, iTunes music or whatever else the whipper-snappers of today are into – it all goes for school stuff.

(We’re a bit leery of industry-sponsored advocacy groups that hide their provenance, largely because they often becomes sinkholes of junk science, but Westinghouse is right up front with N-Vision. And it’s an interesting site, too – take a spin around it.)

Erich von Stroheim, considered one of the best directors – considered by some the very best director – of the 1920s. His career was wrecked by excess generally and, specifically, a contentious encounter with actress Gloria Swanson on the film Queen Kelly (1929), his last job of direction. Later, as an actor, he and Swanson reteamed to play fictional, and highly ironic, versions of themselves in Sunset Boulevard (1950) – which is where this photo comes from.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should