A good friend shared a link to a blog titled Taking physics to new audiences: a realisation. It is a wonderful story about a particle physicist who has a twin sister who is a professional historian. Following a conversation about nuclear energy, the physicist has avoided talking to her sister about what she does at…
Darryl Siemer is a professional chemist who spent his career in nuclear waste remediation at the Idaho National Laboratory. While there, he developed a reputation as someone who will not go along to get along and apparently made quite a few waves by suggesting improvements in processes or technical decisions that might have resulted in…
Matt Wald of the New York Times recently reviewed a new book on America’s nuclear waste storage saga titled Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste. Aside: Sadly, Matt’s post was one of the last posts ever published on Green, which just announced its demise due to budget constraints. It’s a crying…
The first Atomic Show of 2013 is a geeky, chemistry laden discussion aimed at helping to answer the question that many people who fight nuclear energy try to use as their trump card “What do you do with the waste.” It often makes their head spin or makes them put their fingers into their ears…
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…
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