NEI Nuclear Notes

The following is a guest post from NEI Senior Vice President of Communications  Scott Peterson, reporting from the  59th General Conference of the IAEA  .  Scott Peterson With the 21st session of Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) just 10 weeks away, one hopes that this week’s United Nations conference in Vienna is setting the stage for negotiations around meeting the 2-degree reduction by 2050. Leaders at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), meeting today in the opening session of its general conference, echoed a resounding statement of support for nuclear energy to increase its share of electricity production globally as one way to meet the carbon reduction challenge. Nearly 440 reactors in 30 countries generate 11 percent of the world’s electricity. “Nuclear power is one of the lowest emitters of carbon dioxide among energy sources when emissions through entire life cycles ...

We've been recognizing Earth Day all day long here on all of our social media platforms , but I wanted to share one image that warmed my heart today like no other. If you pop over to the home page at Reddit , the link that's currently ranked #1 is a story that originally appeared at Scientific American on James Hansen's conclusion that the use of nuclear energy has saved millions of lives all around the world . Click to enlarge. For those of you who haven't read the paper from NASA's Godard Institute , here's the nut graph: The authors come up with the striking figure of 1.8 million as the number of lives saved by replacing fossil fuel sources with nuclear. They also estimate the saving of up to 7 million lives in the next four decades, along with substantial reductions in carbon emissions, were nuclear power to replace fossil fuel usage on a large scale. Impressive. It's indeed a happy Earth Day.

And a lot of interesting information on uranium, too. When I worked at Scientific American during the late eighties, the rule for the magazine was that one story per issue should be comprehensible to laymen, but every other article could go into as much technical detail as a specialist could stand. This appears to have changed – while not nearly at the dumbed-down level of, say, Psychology Today, all the articles in the current set are informative and graspable to any interested party. So you can learn how long the uranium supply will last – 200 years – unless an economical method emerges that can pull it from sea water – then it’s 60,000 years. (No mention of Thorium, which may throw these numbers askew one day.) Or the first nuclear reactor – 2 billion years old and counting. Or what to look for in the next generation of plants. That last story dates from 2003, so they may be pulling some stuff out of the archives to support the newer material. Still, good reads. The cover ...

Matthew Wald , Energy reporter for The New York Times , has written the cover story for Scientific American 's special edition, Earth 3.0 . Wald's piece, " Can Nuclear Power Compete? ", went online Tuesday and is currently the most-read energy story on the SciAm site. The pull quote, ...Like another moon shot, the launch of new reactors after a 35-year hiatus in orders is certainly possible, though not a sure bet. It would be easier this time, the experts say, because of technological progress over the intervening decades. But as with a project as large as a moon landing, there is another question: Would it be worthwhile? A variety of companies, including Wallace’s, say the answer may be yes. Manufacturers have submitted new designs to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s safety engineers, and that agency has already approved some as ready for construction, if they are built on a previously approved site. Utilities, reactor manufacturers and architecture/engineering fi...