I visited NA-YGN’s web site this morning to catch up on some of their recent and near future activities. I followed a link to the Spring 2009 issue of Go Nuke. I could not help chuckling at the front page of the publication; it was a display of the top three posters from the organization’s…
This afternoon I shared an overflowing ballroom at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, DC with about 300 excited young professionals that are members of the North American Young Generation in Nuclear (NA-YGN). The theme for this year’s conference is “Investing in Our Future With Nuclear”. I felt really old when one of the speakers asked…
As a liberal who proudly voted for President Obama, I am disappointed by his recent decision to elevate Gregory Jaczko to the position of Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC has serious public business to address, and the chairman is the organization’s public face and chief administrator. Working backwards from his publicly…
I have frequently written about the need to change the Nuclear Regulatory Commission license fee structure from the current model of a single annual fee for all power reactors, no matter how complex they are or how much power they produce. Under current rules, the annual fee for any power reactor is approximately $4.1 million…
Reliable, accessible and affordable energy has been one of the primary pillars of American prosperity since the dawning of the Industrial Age. Unfortunately, many of the energy sources that we have always used have been seriously depleted or produce a dangerous build up of waste products in our common environment. As the people’s representatives, Congress…
Ray Squirrel is the screen name used by a documentary film maker who is collecting material for a film about nuclear power. You can find some of the work he has done so far at RaySquirrel’s youtube site. I am not sure how the film will come out, but I thought you might be interested…
Anti-nuclear activists, both the vocal kind and the kind that work the decision making bodies behind the scenes, love to point to initial costs as a way to discourage positive hopes for a fission powered future. They emphasize news stories about cost overruns at projects like the Olkiluoto reactor in Finland, the projected costs of…
Sometimes I want to just shout out when I read an article describing a growing problem that has a rather obvious solution. My Google Alert this morning brought me one such article from USA Today (not one of my normal news sources unless on the road). The article, titled U.S. warhead disposal in 15-year backlog…
The Nuclear Energy Institute is hosting a series of workshops in cities around the country and in certain international forums to share information with manufacturers and service suppliers about the needs of the industry. In an economy where half a million or more people lose their jobs every month, these workshops share some encouraging information…
As Dan Yurman at Idaho Samizdat has mentioned, Areva is working hard to become a participant in the online conversations about nuclear energy developments. Though it is natural to think that a company with growth aspirations would put some effort into the interactive media, it is difficult to describe how happy it makes me to…
Some skeptics on the need for the United States to invest in cleaner energy production point to India and China and claim that any investments that we make in that area will be overcome by increased emissions from those large, densely populated countries with more rapidly growing economies. People on the other side of the…
In the past couple of days three major European energy companies (Centrica, GDF Suez, and Total Petroleum Company) have announced partnerships with EDF (Electricite de France). These partnerships will provide EDF with several billion euros of capital to support their development of new nuclear plant development projects in the UK and France. Similar announcements, which…