Skip to main content

Unleashing Your Inner Auteur for Nuclear Energy

Erich von Stroheim Here’s something fun for your teens, or if you are a teen, you:

Students in middle and high schools are encouraged to prepare a three to seven minute video (VHS or DVD) on positive aspects of the various forms of energy, including nuclear energy. The purpose of the video contest is to enhance students' researching and fact-finding skills, and to educate them on the various forms of energy that we use today. Students are encouraged to be creative in their entries, yet informative. The video can be staged as a short play, commercial, news broadcast, talk show, music video, documentary, etc.

This is being sponsored by Westinghouse, via their N-Vision program. N-Vision is a nuclear advocacy program that focuses a lot on teacher-student materials and projects. You can find a pdf with instructions here. There’s prize money involved but not to buy X-Box points, iTunes music or whatever else the whipper-snappers of today are into – it all goes for school stuff.

(We’re a bit leery of industry-sponsored advocacy groups that hide their provenance, largely because they often becomes sinkholes of junk science, but Westinghouse is right up front with N-Vision. And it’s an interesting site, too – take a spin around it.)

Erich von Stroheim, considered one of the best directors – considered by some the very best director – of the 1920s. His career was wrecked by excess generally and, specifically, a contentious encounter with actress Gloria Swanson on the film Queen Kelly (1929), his last job of direction. Later, as an actor, he and Swanson reteamed to play fictional, and highly ironic, versions of themselves in Sunset Boulevard (1950) – which is where this photo comes from.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin...

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap...

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

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...