NEI Nuclear Notes

An energy professional with the great name of Jude Nuru writes on Ghanaweb : It is worth mentioning that the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission has over the years successfully operated a nuclear plant on a small scale which has been of significant benefit to Ghanaians health wise. Now is the time to rally support for the Commission as it prepares to build Ghana’s first nuclear power plant which has immense potential not only to halt the recurrent power outages, but also bring additional revenue to mother Ghana through the exportation of excess power to neighboring countries. Mr. Nuru is mostly interested in dispelling nuclear myths, at which he does a fine job. He even tackles the tough-to-simplify idea of the risk benefit ratio – nuclear is low risk and huge benefit, but that can be a hard proposition to hear over a din of fearmongering. But he does it. The question is: is Ghana moving forward with a nuclear facility ? A bill is being prepared to establish an independent ...

The Huffington Post has a story about the waste generated by items you use in the morning, though it stretches things a bit by including your cell phone and clothing. The interesting one is coffee: [O]ne of the major sources of river pollution in Central America is coffee processing plants since large volumes of wastewater are generated from the separation of the coffee bean from the cherry. The story recommends you buy “shade-grown” or naturally grown coffee, though I imagine it is processing coffee that creates the problem not growing it. Still, I wondered whether coffee processors, whether on their own or by government regulation, might have a means to do something about the wastewater. Why, yes, at least some do: The Energy from Coffee Wastewater project by UTZ Certified has proven that is possible to generate energy, tackle climate change and protect water resources by treating discharges from coffee mills. How does it generate energy? Through the production of biogas tha...

The following post was sent to us by Westinghouse Electric Company’s Laura Goossen for NEI’s Powered by Our People promotion . Powered by Our People is part of the Future of Energy campaign that NEI launched earlier this year. This promotion aims to communicate innovation in our nation’s nuclear facilities in the voices of the people working at them. Laura is the Nuclear Safety Culture program manager at Westinghouse Electric Company in Cranberry Township, Pa.  She’s worked in the nuclear industry for seven years, after earning a Systems Engineering degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point and then holding positions of increasing responsibility within the U.S. military before joining Westinghouse.  For more on this promotion, take a look at the featured content on our website and follow the #futureofenergy tag across our digital channels. Laura Goossen What I do matters  A focus on safety is an overriding priority at Westinghouse and ...

The Associated Press yesterday ran a sensationalized account of an internal Nuclear Regulatory Commission dispute over the seismic safety of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. It actually wasn't much of a dispute insomuch as one NRC voice advocated to have Diablo Canyon shut down until additional seismic testing of the site could be conducted, while the larger regulatory body over many years has exhaustively analyzed seismic threats at Diablo Canyon,  always concluding that the site is safe .    Diablo Canyon Power Plant Federal regulations require that nuclear plants be able to withstand extreme natural events that may occur in the region where they are located, and the NRC most recently required that nuclear utilities have seismic experts re-evaluate the potential earthquake impact at their sites using the latest available data and methodologies. But earlier this year the NRC reminded the pub...

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has never hidden his support for nuclear energy. In 2011, before he took up his current post, he wrote an article for Foreign Affairs surveying the nuclear landscape, finding some sump holes and crevices (as well as gold-infused hillocks and verdant valleys), and concluded : As greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, finding ways to generate power cleanly, affordably, and reliably is becoming an even more pressing imperative. Nuclear power is not a silver bullet, but it is a partial solution that has proved workable on a large scale. … The government's role should be to help provide the private sector with a well-understood set of options, including nuclear power -- not to prescribe a desired market share for any specific technology. And: The United States must take a number of decisions to maintain and advance the option of nuclear energy. As energy secretary, he has embraced President Barack Obama’s “all-of-the-above” energy ...

More from the world of venture capital : Less than a couple hours ago, we were highlighted in a TechCrunch article disclosing that UPower is a Y Combinator company.  This article is currently trending at story number 1 in HackerNews . Almost all of that is way too millenial for me, but it does raise the question: what is UPower? and Y Combinator , for that matter? Let’s start with the second part first: When Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham passed the keys of his uber-successful seed accelerator program to Sam Altman in February, he did so with an eye on the future. Graham’s interest was largely in internet startups, but Altman seems to have a taste for nuclear energy and biotech: “I’ve always loved it when we can fund companies that, if we don’t fund them, they won’t exist,” Altman said in an interview with Re/code on Tuesday. “No one is funding energy, and I think it’s a good business and really important for the world. “Really important for the w...

One could use a story like this to slag solar energy, but that’s not the point : According to the Associated Press, up to 28,000 birds per year might be meeting an early death after burning up in the focused beams of sunlight, with birds dying at a rate of one bird every two minutes. The burned-up birds are being dubbed "streamers," after the poof of smoke produced by the igniting birds. Assuming plant workers came up with “streamers,” well, that’s pretty tasteless. It gets (potentially) worse. A quasi-food chain is being established around the solar plant, with predators eating birds and bats that burn up in the plant's solar rays chasing after insects which are attracted to the bright light from the sun's reflected rays. That prompted wildlife officials to refer to Ivanpah [the solar farm’s name] as a "mega-trap" for wildlife. It turns out this is the consequence of what sounds like an interesting design. (You can view a very fancy Goog...