Atomic Show #149 – Pro Nuclear Bloggers Reaction to SOTU Address

During the 2010 State of the Union Address, President Obama took the handcuffs off of the nuclear industry revival when he said:

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

On January 31, 2010, I gathered a large group of active bloggers and nuclear industry professionals to find out what they thought of the statement and its impact on the deployment of new nuclear power plants. My guests were:

• Kelly Taylor, a 24 year nuclear industry professional and frequent Atomic Show guest.
• Meredith Angwin, a physical chemist and small businessperson who has recently started publishing a blog titled Yes, Vermont Yankee.
• Charles Barton, who blogs at Nuclear Green and Energy from Thorium.
• David Bradish, a statistician and blogger at NEI Nuclear Notes.
• Dan Yurman, who blogs at Idaho Samidat, writes for Fuel Cycle Week and is the blogger with the highest readership at The Energy Collective.
• Robert Margolis, a 24 year nuclear engineer who has supported reactors on 3 continents and is currently working in Florida.

In addition to the State of the Union statement, we discussed the increase in the loan guarantee program, and the formation of the blue ribbon commission about used nuclear fuel policy.

We also spent quite a bit of time talking about Vermont Yankee and the incredibly tiny quantity of tritium that has people demanding a full investigation and possibly a plant shutdown because someone found 0.000000029 curies/liter of tritium, an amount that would have a mass of just 0.0000000000029 grams distributed in 1000 grams of water.