Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Atomic history

Atomic Show #277 – Simon Wakter, pro-nuclear engineer in an ambivalent country

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Simon Wakter is a strongly pro-nuclear engineer in a country that passed a referendum officially phasing out nuclear energy since several years before he was born. He has to round up to be called a thirty-something.

Simon works in the nuclear energy branch of AFRY, a well-established 17,000 employee, all-of-the-above. engineering company that recently adopted a new brand name.

During this show we talked about his research and professional work investigating new markets for smaller nuclear power systems, his interest in risk management and analysis, his participation as an active member of the young generations group of the European Nuclear Society, and his work as the editor of a newsletter that covers nuclear energy from a Nordic perspective.

We talked about the complicated political history of nuclear energy developments in Sweden, delved into the sources of antinuclear activities, and chatted about recent improvements in nuclear energy acceptability as a powerful tool to address climate change and energy poverty.

Simon is young man who appreciates the importance of abundant clean energy in helping humans to develop their full potential. He is enthusiastic about technological advances that are revisiting some aging and possibly obsolete assumptions about the limitations of nuclear energy’s contributions.

I enjoyed this conversation and hope you do as well.

Please provide your comments and suggestions.

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Atomic Show #266 – Seeing the Light about atomic energy potential

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Facing the immense threat of climate change, the need to power several billion more people and the continuing reluctance to use the most powerful tool available, Scott L. Montgomery and Thomas Graham Jr. realized that there was an information and perception gap about nuclear energy of roughly equivalent magnitudes.

Their desire to help fill the gap with reliable, carefully researched information inspired them to write Seeing the Light: The Case for Nuclear Power in the 21st Century.

On March 7, 2019, I spoke with Dr. Montgomery. I learned that he, like so many of today’s effective nuclear energy communicators, once considered himself part of the antinuclear movement. He was influenced by the activists of the 1960s and even laid down in front of a bulldozer to protest of building the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant.

Like many of the protesters of that era, he did not trust big business or the government; after all, they had been working together to keep the war going in Vietnam for more than a decade and apparently – to the protesters – didn’t care much about the opinions of the public.

As a geologist, he worked for a while in the oil and gas industry. Then, when reentering academia, he was assigned to teach courses about energy. He realized during his preparation for those courses that he needed to learn more about nuclear energy.

As a scientist, he approached the topic willing to understand and to revise his position if evidence proved that he had been wrong in his initial reaction to nuclear energy. The fact that he decided to write a book emphasizing the importance of nuclear energy in the dual goal effort to both reduce emissions and increase the amount of power available to society provides a hint about where his research took him.

The discovery of the evidence that changed his mind makes a fascinating story. You might learn something new from listening to it.

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Documentary evidence that fossil fuel industry knew–by 1948–that it faced prospect that atomic energy would make it obsolete

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No industry cheerfully accepts the prospect that a newly developed technology could make it obsolete. Executives and investors earn much of their wealth by constantly evaluating potential threats to their business. They invest time, energy and resources in conceiving and implementing response or prevention plans. “Inside the Atom” is a 1948 vintage snapshot of the […]

Did the Nuclear Renaissance in the U.S. falter because people ignored lessons from the First Atomic Age?

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During the ANS Student Conference 2017 in Pittsburg, PA, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison made the effort to find me and introduce himself. Among several other topics, he wanted to exchange thoughts about an article that I first published more than 22 years ago. The student indicated his interest in becoming an atomic […]

Myth Buster: Atomic energy excitement actually pre-dates atomic bomb efforts

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There are incredible archives available to us within a few keystrokes. The following article from the October 22, 1939 edition of the New York Times might be useful to dispel the myth that interest in using atomic energy to replace coal came from a desire to domesticate the atomic bomb. This is a transcript that […]

History and promise of high temperature gas cooled reactors

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By: Diarmuid Foley A small modular nuclear reactor to replace coal plants could be on the market within 5 years. In 2014, the Generation IV international forum[1] confirmed the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) as one of 6 promising reactor technologies that should be pursued in order to develop advanced reactors suitable for deployment in […]

Congressmen Wanted to Control Gasoline (Parable about atomic power)

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On April 17, 1958 the Brownsville (TX) Herald published an editorial titled “Congressmen Wanted to Control Gasoline.” It was aimed at actions by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission to maintain nearly total control of all aspects of atomic power generation. As described by Snopes, excerpts from this ancient editorial […]

Atomic Show #249 – All-Electric America by Freeman and Parks

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S. David Freeman and Leah Y Parks have published a book titled All-Electric America: A Climate Solution and the Hopeful Future. There are a number of visionary sections of the book that appeal to me. However, I was not surprised to find out that the book takes a strong position in opposition to nuclear energy. […]

Why James Hansen might be underestimating nuclear energy’s growth potential and why Joe Romm is wrong

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Joe Romm, an energy industry and climate change pundit who was once mentored by Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute, recently sat down at his keyboard to produce a piece providing the basis for his opinion that James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Tom Wigley and Kerry Emanuel — and hundreds to thousands of other nuclear […]

The First Atomic Age: A Failure of Socialism

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As atomic innovation and entrepreneurialism gains momentum, I thought it would be a good time to revisit an article that I wrote more than 21 years ago. It was first published in the January 1, 1995 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. The first Atomic Age began with high hopes, but it has languished, […]

Treasure trove of documents about the ML-1, the US Army’s trailer-mounted, nitrogen-cooled, atomic fission-heated generator

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I recently published an article featuring a video from the Army Nuclear Power Program that focused on the Army’s mobile, low power closed cycle nitrogen cooled nuclear reactor designated the ML-1. The article generated a good discussion that indicated a strong desire for more information about the program. My initial searches didn’t turn up a […]

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