Cara Santa Maria is an Emmy award-winning journalist who studied and taught neuroscience and psychology before deciding that her primary interest was in communicating about science. She was born and raised in Texas, but now lives in Los Angeles. She told me that she has found a terrific community of scientists, communicators, and other creative…
Sunniva Rose is a nuclear engineer working on her PhD at the University of Oslo. She is also a talented public speaker who likes to capture her audience’s attention, partially by choosing colors like pink and green to highlight facts about nuclear energy, deaths per terawatt hour, and growth in human population. In Nov 2013,…
On September 1-2 2015, the US DOE and US NRC jointly sponsored a workshop on advanced non-LWR [light water reactors]. Your intrepid reporter from Atomic Insights attended and managed to ask a few questions. The presentations are available here. One of the highlights of the first day of the workshop came during the question and…
Moltex Energy has developed a unique conceptual design for a molten salt reactor called the Stable Salt Reactor. In this design, the fuel salt is loaded into tubes that resemble the standard cladding tubes into which solid pellets are loaded in a conventional water cooled reactor. The tubes are arranged into assemblies that resemble the…
A friend pointed me to a heart-rending piece in the New York Review of Books titled Fukushima: The Price of Nuclear Power by Michael Ignatieff. The piece is a first hand account of a visit to Japan’s Fukushima prefecture; it includes vivid descriptions of the devastation caused by the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck…
This is a story that I really don’t want to tell, but bad news is like old fish. It doesn’t smell any better as it ages. All eight AP1000 construction projects are at risk “for want of a nail.” In this case the nail is a reactor coolant pump, the largest one in the world,…
During the period between 1961 and 1994, an extraordinary machine called the Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 (EBR-II) was created and operated in the high desert of Idaho by a team of dedicated, determined, and distinguished people. In 1986, that machine demonstrated that it could protect itself in the event of a complete loss of flow…
Atomic Insights is not standing alone in the effort to push people and agencies to take a hard look at the basis for current radiation assumptions and regulations. Please watch Norbert Rempe, a retired professional geologist who spent much of his career performing work associated with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, describe some of the…
Among one group of friends, we comfort ourselves with the following mantra, “When you’re taking flak, you’re right over the target.” Aside: Several members of the group are old enough to have fathers who flew in WWII when the phrase was common among bomber pilots. End Aside. I thought about that reassuring thought when I…
Rachel Pritzker is a philanthropist motivated to solve problems, even if they require rethinking long held notions. She is the founder and chairman of the Pritzker Innovation Fund, which she operates along with her brother, Roland. The tagline used by her organization is “Supporting the development and advancement of paradigm-shifting ideas to address the world’s…
Edward Calabrese gave Atomic Insights permission to publish a letter he sent to Marcia McNutt, Editor-in-Chief of Science. His letter is quoted between the two lines below with detailed contact information removed. August 19, 2015 Dr. Marcia K. McNutt Editor-in-Chief, Science family of journals AAAS Dear Dr. McNutt: I read your e-mail letter to Dr….
People who do not want to believe or acknowledge Edward Calabrese’s interpretation of the historical documents associated with the BEAR I Genetics Committee report have dismissed its influence. They claim it is just one paper of many and that numerous studies that have been conducted in the years since the report was issued have tested…
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