During the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) earliest years, the General Advisory Committee was sometimes viewed as a source of discouraging, delaying advice. Made up of selected members of the scientific establishment, the group habitually sought more studies and inserted costly delays aimed at making the perfect next step instead of taking steps that were good…
In January 1947, after more than a year of focused public attention and debate, the civilian U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took control of all atomic energy matters from the Manhattan District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This takeover was a major victory for the atomic scientists and others who worked diligently to…
During the contentious effort that resulted in passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, Sen Eugene D. Milliken (R-CO) played an important role in establishing an attempted US government monopoly over all atomic energy information. During the House-Senate conference committee to resolve differences between versions of the bill passed by the two legislative bodies,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…