By Paul Lorenzini Part I. Must we destroy the environment to save it? When Jonathan Franzen wrote a provocative piece in The New Yorker earlier this year, “Climate Capture”, Chris Clarke, an influential environmental blogger in California, described it as having “walked up to a hornet’s nest and hit it with a baseball bat.”[1] Franzen…
I’m a progressive liberal who frequently listens to Democracy Now! That makes me a bit of an oddity because I am also fiercely pro-nuclear energy. It has numerous capabilities that should appeal to progressive thinkers; it is abundant, affordable, compact, reliable, and emission-free. Unfortunately, the catechism taught to hereditary or geographical liberals includes such talking…
Cara Santa Maria is an Emmy award-winning journalist who studied and taught neuroscience and psychology before deciding that her primary interest was in communicating about science. She was born and raised in Texas, but now lives in Los Angeles. She told me that she has found a terrific community of scientists, communicators, and other creative…
During the period between 1961 and 1994, an extraordinary machine called the Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 (EBR-II) was created and operated in the high desert of Idaho by a team of dedicated, determined, and distinguished people. In 1986, that machine demonstrated that it could protect itself in the event of a complete loss of flow…
On August 8, 2015 the Saturday Paper [Melbourne, Australia] published a thought-provoking article titled South Australia’s future role in the nuclear industry. It describes how the economic opportunity presented by an expanded involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle is meeting up with a particularly stressed unemployment situation in South Australia to stimulate some frank discussions…
On November 23, 2009 — close to six years ago — the Pacific Gas and Electric Company filed a license renewal application for Diablo Canyon units 1 and 2. That renewal application continues its excruciatingly slow journey through obstacles that continue to be invented by people who are opposed to the use of nuclear energy….
I came across a fascinating little book by Richard Meehan titled The Atom and the Fault: Experts, Earthquakes and Nuclear Power. It was published in 1984 by MIT University Press. Meehan is a geotechnical engineer who participated in several controversial nuclear plant projects in California, including Bodega Head, Malibu, and Diablo Canyon. Though the book…
On March 30, 2015, I gathered a few of my pro-nuclear blogging friends together for a chat about recent events and activity in three separate areas, the Pacific Northwest, the US Northeast, and the eastern provinces of Canada. We also chatted about recent budget hearings for the DOE and the NRC and the way the…
I’ve been spending some time watching, rewatching and clipping interesting excerpts from the Senate Appropriations Energy and Water subcommittee hearings on the FY2016 Department of Energy budget. It’s not everyone’s idea of entertainment, but it’s fascinating to me to watch publicly accessible discussions about how our government makes decisions, sets priorities and spends the money…
South Australian Sen. Sean Edwards sees economic opportunity for his state by taking advantage of other countries’ irrational fear of radioactive materials. He wants to turn what some call “waste” into wealth. He and his staff recognize that there are tens of billions of dollars set aside in government budgets around the world for safe…
On March 4, 2015, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development held a hearing about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s FY2016 budget. The video archive is available for review. The only senators from the subcommittee who took part in the hearing were Sen Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Sen Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) with an invited…
On February 19, 2015, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) transported a substantial contingent of regulators to Brattleboro, VT to hold a public meeting about Entergy’s Post Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report (PSDAR) for the permanently shutdown Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Brattleboro Community TV produced a video record of the event. Watching that video is…