• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
  • Podcast
  • Archives

Atomic Insights

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

Discussion about the UCS report about "unlearned lessons"

September 23, 2006 By Rod Adams

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has recently published a report titled Unlearned Lessons from Year-plus Reactor Outages that makes some rather absurd claims. The most glaringly wrong comment from the web site that has been set up to market the report is the following:

This event—an outage at a nuclear power plant that lasts more than a year—has happened 51 times at 41 different reactors around the United States and shows no signs of stopping.

Any reasonably competent scientist or statistician would immediately look at a statement like that and demand to see the data so that the trend can be plotted to see if there really are “no signs of stopping.” Fortunately, the UCS is honest enough to provide us with the dates of the outages that are being discussed. Here is what those dates (I chose to plot the dates when the reactors were restored to service) look like on a graph. (Each green dot represents the number of long term shutdowns in a given year. The first dot is 1970, the last is 2005. My Excel graph control skills let me down – I could not convince the program to label the x-axis the way I wanted it to.)

If you can see from this data how one can say that there is no sign of stopping or improvement, please let me know how to do the best fit line. What the graph tells me is that in the past five years, long enough for someone to finish an engineering bachelor’s degree in a good school, there has been just one long term shutdown.

There is a good discussion about the report and the NY Times coverage of it on The Energy Blog at Nuclear Saftey Issues. (I really can spell – or at least operate a spell checker, but if you want to find something on the web, you had better spell it the same way as the author did.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized

About Rod Adams

Rod Adams is an atomic energy expert with small nuclear plant operating and design experience, now serving as a Managing Partner at Nucleation Capital, an emerging climate-focused fund. Rod, a former submarine Engineer Officer and founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., one of the earliest advanced nuclear ventures, has engaged in technical, strategic, political, historic and financial discussion and analysis of the nuclear industry, its technology and policies for several decades. He is the founder of Atomic Insights and host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast.

Please click here to subscribe to the Atomic Show RSS feed.

Primary Sidebar

Categories

Join Rod’s pronuclear network

Join Rod's pronuclear network by completing this form. Let us know what your specific interests are.

Recent Comments

  • David on Atomic Show #297 – Krusty – The Kilopower reactor that worked
  • Rod Adams on Atomic Show #297 – Krusty – The Kilopower reactor that worked
  • David on Atomic Show #297 – Krusty – The Kilopower reactor that worked
  • Rod Adams on Atomic Show #297 – Krusty – The Kilopower reactor that worked
  • paul wick on Atomic Show #297 – Krusty – The Kilopower reactor that worked

Follow Atomic Insights

The Atomic Show

Atomic Insights

Recent Posts

Atomic Show #297 – Krusty – The Kilopower reactor that worked

Nuclear energy growth prospects and secure uranium supplies

Nucleation Capital’s Earth Day in Atherton

Atomic Show #296 – Julia Pyke, Director of Finance Sizewell C

Solar’s dirty secrets: How solar power hurts people and the planet

  • Home
  • About Atomic Insights
  • Atomic Show
  • Contact
  • Links

Search Atomic Insights

Archives

Copyright © 2022 · Atomic Insights

Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy