Skip to main content

Looking Back at #NEA16

By
Here at NEI, it seems as if the first five months of the year has gone by in a blur. January featured Third Way's Advanced Nuclear Summit and Showcase. February was our annual Wall Street Briefing.

March saw us participating in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory's Commission's Regulatory Information Conference. The Nuclear Industry Summit straddled March and April. And then the last two weeks of May rocketed past as we participated in a Department of Energy summit on preserving at-risk nuclear reactors, and then, just two days later, headed south to Miami for the 2016 Nuclear Energy Assembly.

Not that we're complaining. Our industry is facing some strong headwinds, and while the future is bright with prospects for a number of advanced reactor designs, we need to #ActForNuclear now in order to preserve the current fleet and the benefits it contributes to the nation in order to get there.

Many of those themes were echoed in the words of NEI Chairman Don Brandt in the annual State of the Industry address, where he urged his colleagues to help change the conversation about nuclear energy:
We also need to change the conversation. The nuclear industry has the facts on its side—about safety, reliability, clean air benefits and more—but a dry recitation of data does not stir people’s emotions or their imaginations. Unless we get people’s attention to nuclear energy’s benefits, our data mean little or nothing to them. We must promote the benefits of carbon-free nuclear energy as a critical part of a diverse, cleaner electricity supply.

[...]

Let’s do a better job of tuning in to stakeholders. Make sure we are talking about things that matter to them! Tell people why they should care about nuclear energy.

Tell them why it matters to them. Step out from behind our stacks of data and analysis and connect with people.

Because nuclear matters.
One person we managed to connect with was Australian climate activist Ben Heard. We first discovered Ben and his nuclear conversion story back in 2012, but this was the first time we got to meet him in person as he appeared in a panel discussion alongside Rachel Pritzker of the Pritzker Innovation Fund and Matt Bennett of Third Way. Ben was pretty direct about the need to humanize what we do, and his message met with a very receptive audience inside the hall in Miami.
Ben's appearance on stage was something of a watershed moment for us, as it was only a few minutes before that the Twitter hashtag for the conference, #NEA16, began to trend, just as #ActForNuclear had a few days before during the Department of Energy summit.

And speaking of that bright future, one couldn't help but be encouraged by what we saw from the younger industry employees in attendance. NEI's Tara Young arrived in Miami a few days ahead of the formal start of #NEA16 in order to attend the annual meeting of North American Young Generation in Nuclear, and with iPhone in hand, she did her best to get as many of her industry colleagues on video to help tell the story of our industry. Along with this blog feature by Entergy's Natalie Wood, it's a reason to cheer for what's coming up from the next generation of nuclear energy industry employees.

NA-YGN Videos
Sandra Stewart, Energy Northwest
Bristol Hartlage, Curtiss-Wright
Robert Ashworth, MPR
Ana Pisani, Duke Energy
Umar Faraz, AREVA
Gary Mingo, Southern Nuclear
Alexander Bauer, Dominion
Kirsty Gogan, Energy for Humanity

What else is there to say? Plenty. So much in fact, that we still haven't had time to unpack it all. So for now, here are the links to all of our exiting coverage from the Nuclear Energy Overview (NEO)team. Before the end of the week, we'll be posting more videos with industry employees talking about the future of the business and why despite the interesting times we live in, our industry is one with real purpose and hope for the future.

NEO Coverage
NEI Re-Elects Pinnacle West’s Brandt, TVA’s Johnson as Board Leaders
Next Era Energy Employees Win Top Industry Innovation Award
Ex-INPO CEO James Ellis Earns Nuclear Industry’s Leadership Award
Without More Nuclear, Global Climate Goals Won't Be Met
Now Trending: Advanced Nuclear Energy Technology

#NEA16 Panel Discussions (YouTube)
Building the Foundation for the Future
Preparing for New Reactor Development
Global Climate Panel
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