Atomic politics

  • South Australian nuclear discussion intensifying

    On August 8, 2015 the Saturday Paper [Melbourne, Australia] published a thought-provoking article titled South Australia’s future role in the nuclear industry. It describes how the economic opportunity presented by an expanded involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle is meeting up with a particularly stressed unemployment situation in South Australia to stimulate some frank discussions…

  • The Left Needs to Reconsider its Automatic Position Against Nuclear Energy

    by BILL SACKS and GREG MEYERSON As leftists who have studied the issue of nuclear energy for years, we want to reply to Robert Hunziker’s “Real Story” titled What’s Really Going on at Fukushima? (CounterPunch, June 15, 2015). It’s time for much of the left to reconsider a long-standing opposition to nuclear energy that often…

  • Sierra Club member asks Executive Director Brune to support nuclear energy

    A few days ago, a friend from Californians for Green Nuclear Power shared a letter he had written to Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club. He gave me permission to share his letter with Atomic Insights readers. My friend is a Sierra Club member because he agrees with many of its goals…

  • FOE continues promoting fossil fuel by trying to force Diablo Canyon closure

    As a literature major during my undergraduate years, I was fascinated by the variety of stories that can be told about the same topic depending on the author’s selected point of view. Here is a brief example. Friends of the Earth (FOE) has a page on its web site titled Shutting down Diablo Canyon. The…

  • Atomic Show #239 – Sarah Laskow and the LNT model

    In March 2015, Foreign Policy magazine published an article by Sarah Laskow titled The Mushroom Cloud and The X-Ray Machine. The article described the controversy over the radiation protection model known as the linear, no-threshold dose response. Ms. Laskow conducted some admirable literature research and talked with a number of well-known people. The ones that…

  • Participation opportunity – Turkey Point EIS public meeting

    One of the most prolific anti-nuclear activist groups, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), is distributing posts encouraging their followers to oppose FP&L’s plan to build two new reactors at the Turkey Point Power station. SACE is encouraging people to submit negative comments via the public comment process for the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)…

  • Atom and the Fault

    I came across a fascinating little book by Richard Meehan titled The Atom and the Fault: Experts, Earthquakes and Nuclear Power. It was published in 1984 by MIT University Press. Meehan is a geotechnical engineer who participated in several controversial nuclear plant projects in California, including Bodega Head, Malibu, and Diablo Canyon. Though the book…

  • Time to stop consuming precious resources to harmonize occupational dose limits

    Pressure groups and interested individuals have been striving for more than two decades to force the U. S. to reduce its occupational worker radiation protection limit from 50 mSv/year to 20 mSv/year. The primary justification for this effort is that in 1991 the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) issued publication 60 and provided their…

  • SMRs – lots of noise but DOE budget that’s 1% of annual wind tax credit

    I’ve been spending some time watching, rewatching and clipping interesting excerpts from the Senate Appropriations Energy and Water subcommittee hearings on the FY2016 Department of Energy budget. It’s not everyone’s idea of entertainment, but it’s fascinating to me to watch publicly accessible discussions about how our government makes decisions, sets priorities and spends the money…

  • Lewis Strauss was no fan of useful atomic energy

    Every once in a while, I feel the need to share some of the historical research I’m conducting. This serves multiple purposes; it provides me with an easily searchable log of interesting tidbits and it enables me to continue working on my mission of sharing as much information as I can find about atomic energy…

  • Today Show cheers nuclear power by chanting “Go Nuke!”

    Before readers get too excited, I need to acknowledge that the Today Show in the below video is broadcast from Sydney, Australia, not New York City. However, it is still kind of exciting to have a TV newscaster chanting “Go Nuke!” The broadcaster’s excitement is based on an announcement by Liberal Party Senator Sean Edwards…