Skip to main content

It’s Friday and the Mood Is Miscellaneous

By

Or maybe pusillanimous.

---

DSCF0373[1] Gizmodo takes a quick look at 1979: the Year We Wussed Out of Nuclear:

The timing of the movie coming out tying in with Three Mile Island may have been lucky for the producers, who suddenly had a huge blockbuster hit on their hands, but it was less lucky for boosters of safe nuclear energy. Since that meltdown, the production of nuclear power plants has gone down significantly despite the fact that there were no deaths or even recorded cases of cancer caused by Three Mile Island—the amount of radiation that the people near the plant were exposed to is said to be similar to that of getting an X-ray.

Too short to really make an argument, the post seems to want to blame The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island equally for the hibernation in building new nuclear plants. We’d likely stress the movie less – movie alarmism usually has a brief half-life – and Chernobyl and the No Nukes movement (that also spawned a movie, in 1980) that arose from TMI. But see what you think.

Jack Lemmon. The perfect actor to go sweaty and twitchy when the dial sticks.

---

Hall14 Speaking of No Nukes and its sponsor, Musicians United for Safe Energy, one of its participants, John Hall of the band Orleans, is now serving a second term as a Democratic Representative from New York’s 19th congressional district. So has Rep. Hall changed his mind about nuclear energy?

Nope.

We should use greater investment in wind, solar, and hydropower, particularly low-head hydropower, to replace the need to rely on polluting forms of energy like old, coal burning plants and nuclear power facilities.

Well, points for consistency, anyway.

Rep. John Hall at a town hall meeting. We were hoping to find a recent picture of him with his guitar, but no love. Hopefully, he still plays.

---

timthumb.php Our friends at NA-YGN (that’s North American Young Generation in Nuclear – they have their annual conference in conjunction with NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly) have a group blog called Clean Energy Insight up and running. Similar to Nuclear Notes, but with a bit less stress on politics (blame our Washington headquarters for that) and a bit more on local initiatives, we cannot find anything to gripe about it – well, maybe the writers could add a little more of their knowledge about nuclear energy to help explicate news stories. Nicely done, complete with estimates of how long it will take you to read their posts.

---

gg11litOffered without comment:

A musical based on the nuclear industry is to be staged this weekend by children from Russia's Sarov region. As part of the NucKids International Children's Kestival [sic?], youngsters from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany as well as Russia will convene in Moscow, where part of their entertainment will comprise songs that dispel myths about radiation and nuclear energy.

Not the group. We just wanted cute Russian kids.

Labels:

Comments

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