NEI Nuclear Notes

I can attest that the STEM crisis is real and is causing challenges for the nuclear energy industry. My experiences contradict the conclusions of the newly published IEEE article by Robert N. Charette that declared “ The Stem Crisis Is a Myth . ” According to Charette, industry and government are conspiring to help depress salaries for STEM workers. “Clearly powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate this cycle.” Unfortunately for industries like ours, the STEM crisis isn’t a crackpot conspiracy theory. In fact, it’s all too real. In the nuclear energy business, we have an aging workforce that is rapidly approaching retirement age. We’re facing a significant demographic challenge with 38 percent of our workforce eligible to retire by 2016. Here are some disturbing trends I’ve identified over the last five years that have helped lead me and other workforce professionals to conclude we are facing a real -- and not a manufactured -- crisis: ·     ...

IEEE has published a very strong account of the first 24 hours at Fukushima following the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Japanese plant. Almost novelistic in depth, it is long and impossible to extract – well, not impossible, I just don’t want to. Read the whole thing here . Terrific job by Elizabeth Strickland. We’ll be seeing some official timelines on the accident before the end of the year – consider this a considerably fleshed out coming attractions trailer. --- The folks at IEEE have also put up an interesting if slightly misleading chart called Fukushima Daiichi’s Messy Future. It aims to show how the cleanup will go at the stricken Japanese plant at the 1 year, 10 year and 100 year marks. The misleading part is that setting the future at 10 and 100 years doesn’t really indicate when the cleanup or disposition of various components – reactor buildings, reactor cores, etc. – will be finished, only that they will be finished by then. Maybe this is fair enough ...

After reading a BBC piece on the revival of the American nuclear energy industry , Tech Talk, the blog over at IEEE Spectrum, had this to say: For now, though, the rehabilitation of the nuclear genie is almost complete. We will all now have to witness, once again, whether its promises can ever be matched by its performance. That's a curious conclusion. One wonders if the folks at Tech Talk have been paying close attention to the significant gains in reliability and efficiency at American nuclear plants, including an average industry-wide capacity factor of about 90% .