During show number 15 of The Atomic Show, Shane and I discuss the effects of ever increasing gasoline prices on people that need to drive light trucks as part of the way that they earn their living.
We then discuss how nuclear power, specifically smaller nuclear reactors designed to compete in markets currently dominated by large diesel engines and combustion gas turbines, can help reduce the demand for oil and shift power back into the hands of consumers.
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Loved the show, and I see over on the Atomic Insights page you already published some related material. You are right that nuclear electricity plants will reduce the price of gas, because even though the US overall doesn’t generate a lot of electricity from oil (but increasingly so from natural gas) a lot of the world uses a lot of oil to make electricity. The less oil we and they use for producing electricity will directly correlate to lower oil prices. Also, as you point out, replacing oil power in ships with nuclear power would be fantastic.
In the podcast, however, I thought you were implying other applications. I immediately thought of trains and “road trains” like they have in Australia. The problem I would have with those is that trains are very vulnerable to terrorism because you cannot assure the complete security of every inch of track. That was a problem I encountered personally in Iraq, when we tried to take the burden for bulk cargo off of our cargo truck fleet using trains. On the other hand, you could use nuclear power to energize trains without having the reactor onboard the train and use electrical lines like some trains in Europe use with the overhead lines. This is about as vulnerable to terrorism, but at the reactor would be as easy or hard to secure and hardened as any other reactor.
Ships also make me a little nervous, but you can harden these reactors better than you could with a locomotive, but the great success of naval nuclear power is also attributable to the extreme professionalism and attention to detail of the US Navy!
Hello Rod
I think something happened to the show 15 is linking to the 14.
BTW is there a place i can download all episodes?? In the ITunes only the last 20 are downloadable.
Thanks for all.
Pedro
Pedro – Thanks for the heads up. I have fixed the podcast link.
As far as I know, there is no place where you can do a bulk download of all episodes. Using the Archive page and the Podcast topic, you can work your way through each available episode from Atomic Insights.