NEI Nuclear Notes

The following is a guest post written by NEI's Tom Kauffman. Though Tom now works in NEI's media relations shop, he spent 23 years working at Three Mile Island , seven of those as a licensed reactor operator.  The authors of the recent Weekly Standard opinion piece “ Hucksterism vs. Nonproliferation, Irreconcilable U.S. Nuclear Policies ,” (subscription required) insist that the U.S. government condition all of its peaceful nuclear cooperation agreements with other nations on their renunciation of the technologies used for the enrichment of uranium or reprocessing of used fuel. Proponents of this restriction, known as the “ Gold Standard ,” claim it will raise a higher standard against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It would in fact have the opposite effect. Because enrichment and reprocessing technologies can potentially be used to produce a nuclear weapon, it is important to restrain their spread. But proliferation of these technologies through legal nuclear ene...

A couple of days ago, I expressed a little disappointment that Bahrain was not joining the nuclear family – well, maybe it will, but it doesn’t seem to be on its radar right now. So let’s replace that bit of grimness : Like many others, Jordan is not giving up on its nuclear program, which it considers an essential part of its energy plan. The country has plans to build two reactors in the next decade, and two additional reactors are planned for the next 25 years. Jordan is at the stage where it is scoping out vendors: The country’s atomic commission has pre-selected possible technologies from Atomic Energy of Canada, Russia’s ZAO Atomstroyexport and Atmea, a joint venture between France’s Areva and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Rolling right along. --- Bill Gates has been enough a fan of nuclear energy to invest money in it. Have events in Japan changed his mind? Wired thought it would find out : The good news about nuclear is that there’s hardly been ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin, that’s who . "You couldn't transfer large electric power stations to wind energy, however much you wanted to. In the next few decades, it will be impossible," Putin said, adding that consumption patterns would only undergo minor changes. He said the only "real and powerful alternative" to oil and gas is nuclear energy. He rejected other approaches as "claptrap." Russian has a word for “claptrap?” --- Even though we’ve run a lot of stories about international activities, it’s actually rather hard to keep up with every country that wants to (re)join the nuclear family. So I thought it might be worthwhile to catalog a few countries that haven’t had a post yet – get them on the radar so we can take a better look at their ambitions going forward. -- Argentina has revived its nuclear energy industry, joining its neighbor Brazil. President Cristina Fernandez's government is finishing constructio...