On June 13, 2012, Allison Macfarlane will be a witness in her confirmation hearing as a new commissioner and the prospective Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Commissioner Kristine Svinicki will also be a witness in her quest to be confirmed for a second term as a commissioner. In June 2007, I had the opportunity…
Two young graduate students describe their plans to develop something called the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR). The biggest applause line in the talk was the following: Right now in the world there are about 270,000 metric tons of high level waste that exists. We can take that waste, put it into our reactors…
Gordon McDowell, the film maker who produced Thorium Remix, has released some additional mixes of material gathered for that production effort. One in particular is aimed at those people whose main concern about using nuclear energy is the often repeated question “What do you do with the waste.” Many people who ask that question think…
I have an all-star team of people I can assemble to debate your position on the urgency of fast reactors (top DOE brass, nuclear industry, environmental leaders, etc). You pick the place and time. Near the end of 2010, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a summary of a report titled The Future of the…
The US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology has released a report of its findings on the politically motivated budgetary maneuvers that NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko employed to starve his own staff of the funds required to complete their legally mandated review of the DOE Yucca Mountain repository application. He took that…
NNadir is a diarist at Daily Kos. He is a Democrat who encourages support for clean, safe nuclear power. He is also a chemist who is enthusiastic about materials found in used nuclear fuel. I recently posted a blog on Atomic Insights about nuclear fuel recycling that broke a record for the number of comments…
On occasion, people write to Atomic Insights with questions whose answers might be beneficial to a number of other people. We will be sharing some of those questions and responses with you in the Ask Atomic section of the publication. John Mahler holds an almost invisible, but extremely important job. He is in charge of…
For more than forty years, the United States and the Soviet Union built nuclear weapons and aimed them at each other’s heartlands. The process of building those weapons was expensive in strict monetary terms and in terms of sacrificing investments in more productive enterprises. Now, however, the confrontational attitude between the two countries has been…
There are some legitimate questions raised by the opponents of Yucca Mountain. There are also some arguments that have little basis and are simply a continuation of the scare tactics that anti-nuclear groups have been using against the technology for nearly three decades. The opposing groups normally make the following claims in their papers and…
Theodore Rockwell is the author of The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference. He was one of Rickover’s key team members in the early days of the Navy nuclear power program. This letter is published with his permission. The following letter was written by Mr. Rockwell to the Washington Post. It was not…
By nature, I am a procrastinator. I often live by the motto “Never do today that which you can put off until tomorrow.” In fact, I sometimes extend that idea to “Never do at all that which you can put off indefinitely.” Some of my associates vehemently disagree with my way of thinking, but I…
There is a current sense of urgency that “something” must be done about spent nuclear fuel. The Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the interests of the nuclear utilities and the nuclear plant vendors, has placed the issue of the front page of its bimonthly newsletter no fewer than six times in the past year. Short…