Forgive me. It’s been almost three months since I last wrote a long form blog or article about the importance of atomic energy as a useful tool for solving many of the world’s most complex and pressing problems. I’ve been stimulated to take a partial break from my blissful state of being a mostly retired grandfather whose primary responsibility is teaching more than a handful of young cuties how to swim, bike, boat, poop, pee…
Search Results for: Reduce reuse recycle
Is it really necessary to have a deep geologic repository for used nuclear fuel?
Keith Pickering Putting SNF into a hole in the ground is silly on a number of levels, but the most obvious one is simply this: we would be digging it all up again in a century or two, as we move to IFRs and MSRs that can use existing SNF as fuel. Mord The finesse for this set of problems is to use fast reactors like the Integral Fast Reactor to recycle current reactor waste as its own fuel, leaving only fission products to be sequestered for a…
Transcript of Atomic Show #61 – Allison Macfarlane, Atomic Agnostic (June 15, 2007)
On June 13, 2012, Allison Macfarlane will be a witness in her confirmation hearing as a new commissioner and the prospective Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Commissioner Kristine Svinicki will also be a witness in her quest to be confirmed for a second term as a commissioner. In June 2007, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Macfarlane for the Atomic Show Podcast. At that time, she proclaimed herself to be an agnostic, neither…
Blast from the Past – Atomic Insights Letter From The Editor, June 1995 – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
After spending a couple of days at the Reactor and Fuel Cycle Subcommittee of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, I had a sense of deja vu that I could not shake. I kept telling myself that I had heard many of the ideas about used fuel management before. I did some looking around and found an editorial I wrote in the third issue of the newsletter that was then called Atomic Energy Insights. (I learned pretty quickly…
Reduce, reuse, recycle – good for aluminum; good for uranium
(Note: Video credit to Barry Brook of Brave New Climate.) The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy is taking issue with the idea of recycling used nuclear fuel to recover the energy that remains after the first pass of the fuel through a nuclear reactor. They have issued a call for action to encourage their members to demand that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stop making any progress towards acceptance of the technology. As part of their…
Recycling used nuclear fuel – Argonne research explained in 4 min video
One of the most frequently used arguments against using nuclear energy is “the waste issue.” When people ask me, “what do you do with the waste”, my standard answer is “recycle it.” The truly curious then ask for more information. A few days ago, Nuclear Street shared a video produced by Argonne National Laboratory that explains their ongoing research into pyroprocessing. This video was first posted in May,…
Fantasy Crossfire debate: Ed Lyman versus Rod Adams on fast breeder reactors
CNN has done a masterful job of seizing the opportunity provided by Robert Stone’s thought-provoking Pandora’s Promise to generate a passionate discussion about the use of nuclear energy — a vitally important topic — at a critical time in American history. The decision makers at that somewhat fading network should be congratulated. Of course, generating passionate discussion about controversial subjects on which large…
“Waste issue” is part of antinuclear movement strategy of constipation
During the 1970s, the antinuclear movement made a collective decision to use “the waste issue” as a weapon to help force the eventual shutdown of the industry. Though the strategy has not succeeded in forcing any plants in the US to shut down, it has prevented a number of plants from being built. Ralph Nader, one of the most visible organizers of the movement, often referred to the waste issue as the Achilles heel of the nuclear…
How Did the MOX Project Get So Expensive?
Over the past week or so, I’ve engaged in a “root cause analysis” project to determine why the US is having so much difficulty implementing a plan to take 34 metric tons of nearly pure plutonium 239 — a fissile isotope with virtually the same energy value as uranium 235 — out of our nuclear weapons program and beneficially use it as a source of fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. It’s a fascinating tale…
Putting excitement back into nuclear technology development
Josh Freed, Third Way‘s clean energy vice president, has published a thoughtful, graphically enticing Brookings Essay titled Back to the Future: Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle Against Climate Change. It focuses on Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie of Transatomic Power, but it also makes it abundantly clear that those two visionary entrepreneurs are examples of a growing wave of people that are excited about developing nuclear energy…
Power cheaper than coal – thorium AND uranium make it possible
Bob Hargraves, the author of Thorium: Energy Cheaper than Coal, recently traveled to Shanghai to present a 30 minute talk summarizing the main points of discussion that he covered in his book. The occasion of the trip was Thorium Energy Conference 2012. Bob is a professor with a good facility for numbers and a talent for clear explanations. He provides reasonably accurate figures for most types of energy production systems available today…
Spamming NRDC about recycling used nuclear fuel
The following tweet led me to an interesting tale about the history of recycling. #Recycling seems like a relatively modern phenomenon. Instead, it has deep roots. http://t.co/5NqweNZVkb via @OnEarthMag — NRDC (@NRDC) January 4, 2014 After reading the article, I composed the following comment, taking care to ensure that it followed the rules for civil discourse that govern NRDC blogs. All comments offered in the spirit of civil discourse…
