The Atomic Show Podcast includes interviews, roundtable discussions and atomic geeks all centered around the idea that nuclear energy is an amazing boon for human society.
Kirk Sorensen is the co-founder and chief technologist of Flibe Energy. He is a member of a tiny club of people who can honestly claim to be atomic entrepreneurs. He is a brilliant man – one of the few people who has been both a rocket scientist and a nuclear engineer. Kirk is best known…
Dr. Arjun Makhijani has been fighting against the use of nuclear fission energy since his college days in the late 1960s. He was influenced by Professor Thomas Pigford at the University of California, Berkeley who lectured on the need to build 1000 nuclear reactors because using fission was better than depending on coal. After hearing…
The last two episodes of the Atomic Show have been conversations with people who responded to the events of Fukushima by sharing accurate information in as many venues as they could reach. Three people who I really wanted to include in those conversations were unable to participate, so I asked them to gather on March…
There was so much to talk about regarding the way that the world responded to the great north east Japan earthquake and tsunami – and the subsequent damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station that I gathered a second group of people in the evening of Sunday March 11, 2012. This group included Will…
One year ago today, one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history occurred less than 100 miles off of the north east coast of Japan. About 30-40 minutes later, a series of 7 tsunamis (tidal waves) decimated a large section of the coast, washing over numerous engineered barriers. The waves destroyed homes, factories, bridges, roads,…
Bud Ryan is a documentary filmmaker who is deeply concerned that the world has forgotten about the fight against nuclear weapons. As part of his effort to remind people that there is still a need for activism in support of disarmament, he produced a film titled The Forgotten Bomb. In it, he interviews a number…
One of the persistent myths left over from the first Atomic Age is that nuclear reactors can only be used to produce electricity in massive, central station power plants. That application is only one of many ways to use the heat from fissioning uranium, plutonium or thorium. In the US, fully 1/3 of the 100…
On Sunday January 8, 2012, I chatted with Meredith Angwin who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee and Margaret Harding, a well known independent consultant who specializes in GE Boiling Water Reactors. Our primary topic was the fate of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power station, which has been embroiled in a several year long battle to…
There have been a number of recent articles about the evacuated area that surrounds the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. One in particular that caught my attention was an article published in the Washington Post titled Around the Fukushima plant, a world left behind. The problem is that the contamination levels outside of the gate…
On November 11, 2011, the Institute of Nuclear Plant Operators (INPO) released a report that provides a detailed timeline of events that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in the days and weeks following the Great North East Japan earthquake and series of seven tsunamis. Releasing that report was a rare event; INPO…
I first met Cal Abel during a flurry of correspondence associated with actions he recommended after the Fukushima event. Cal, a former submarine Engineer Officer and current PhD candidate at Georgia Tech, had produced some rapid response papers with useful ideas for the people responding to the events. One idea in particular that Cal produced…
Hurricane Irene took a path up the east coast of the United States that put a large population at risk from heavy rains, storm surges, and high winds. Before the storm there were stories about the fact that among all of the other parts of the infrastructure that might be affected, there were a number…