Time for an atomic career change
It is time for a career change. For the foreseeable future, I am going to write books and articles for a living. This career move has been a long time in the making.
During my first interview for a nuclear-related job, Admiral Rickover asked me, “English major? Why are you an English major?” I responded “Because I like to read and write, sir.” He followed up with “Write? Have you ever written any books? I have. Three of them. Have you read any of them?” My response was “Not yet, sir.” My entire interview with Admiral Rickover lasted less than 3 minutes.
At the time, I did not understand that I had answered his questions in exactly the right way. Rickover was a voracious reader and a writer who thought deeply about important, far reaching topics; I think my answers helped him to decide to accept me into his program. In the intervening years, I have learned a great deal about Hyman Godalia Rickover and many other fascinating people who have made impacts, both positive and negative, on the development of nuclear energy technology.
Aside: I found Rickover’s given middle name during a recent rereading of Francis Duncan’s Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence, Naval Institute Press, 2001 on page 11. When he filled out the form for his oath of office, Rickover decided to tell the Navy that his middle name was George. End Aside.
I’ve gathered an increasingly interesting collection of books, articles, papers, presentations, and notes that are crying out for an effort to weave them into narratives that provide a currently unavailable perspective on how the technology has developed — or not — how it can develop, and how its continued development will help to make the earth a richer, cleaner, and more comfortable place to live.
It was not easy to decide to leave my former colleagues at B&W mPower, Inc. It was rewarding to be a part of a growing team that is working diligently and creatively to develop technology that will be able to provide reliable, emission free electricity to millions of people. I realized, however, that there are plenty of people who can accomplish the tasks that I was assigned there, but there is no one else who can organize my collection of energy-related information into a valuable resource.
Part of my decision process was driven by a recognition that energy markets in the US are developing in a very risky way. Providing reliable power to people is not a sprint; it is not even a marathon. It is a task that will endure far longer than any of us, but decision makers seem to have been hypnotized into thinking that it is okay to build a supply infrastructure with a high level of dependence on natural gas. They forget its volatile nature, both in physical form and in market price behavior.
In the parable of the tortoise and hare, the slow, steady tortoise beats the jumpy, often distracted hare. The US — and Canada — seem intent on rewriting the parable. They (we) have allowed financially motivated spectators to influence the race results by actively stepping on the tortoise or erecting seemingly insurmountable barriers to his progress. Fortunately, nuclear fission’s energy density is a very tough shell that cannot be broken, even if it seems like the crowd has forced a temporary halt in progress.
This story begs to be more fully understood and exposed. One or two easily forgotten blog posts will not suffice; successful transmission requires repetition and access to a stronger microphone on a taller soapbox. I’ve decided to take on the challenge, but the effort will take more time than is available after subtracting a 40-50 hour work week.
Atomic Insights and the Atomic Show podcast will continue in their present forms as platforms for communications among a growing community of people that are intensely interested in energy-related topics. I continue to gain strength and stamina from our interactions; please continue to contribute.
Our Creator has endowed us with an incredible reservoir of creativity and also provided us with access to some amazing raw materials. Our capacity for growth is only limited if we collectively decide to limit ourselves. One of my self-assigned missions is to show how we can make a choice to pursue almost infinite development in spite of the long ago decision by bankers and oil interests to spend tons of our money promoting the notion that there are “Limits to Growth” as a way to slow nuclear energy development and maintain their current economic dominance.
Sounds like a good move, best of luck!
A great move. Congratulations!
Good luck Rod!
I hope you let us know when it’s available for purchase. I for one am very interested in reading your material.
Hopefully, it’ll kick up a real stink with the media and the established ‘energy pundits’.
So are we witnessing he beginning of the “Adams Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies”?
If so, where do I donate?
Aside: Say what you will about the Anti’s, then do know how to give themselves official sounding names, and figure out all the tax angles.
Not a bad guess on the name. Not exactly right, but not bad.
Best wishes in your latest move. You are a tremendous voice for the importance of nuclear energy and now we (and the public) will get to hear more of it. G-d speed you on your new journey.
Glad to hear it. I am excited to see what the future holds!
-Cory
Best of luck Rod. I look forward to you storming the barricades of the reflexive anti-nuclear media and broadcasting rational and long-view positions in all sorts of venues. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow.
So you are the chosen one. Step aside Gates, Branson and Roderick….
I wish they will get you for the NRC one day. I really do.
You have knowledge , energy and credibility with a very very good pen.
Danny Roderick ?
Yesterday’s news …..
Remember the Detroit Red Wings hockey strategy.
Wanna win. then
Take the game to them.
Go ahead and put me down for a standing order for every book you write.
Ditto.
I bet the first book is “The Smoking Gun”. I’ll buy all your books.
Go Rod,
You know the questions. You know the arguments for and against. You are well prepared.
Rod,
Glad to hear you are stepping into the breach so to speak.
The nuclear industry needs someone of your caliber to step up and speak truth to the lies the cottage industry of nuclear fearmongers continually publicizes.
Wish you the best of luck. Look forward to seeing what you write and finding ways to help you get your message out.
Regards,
A bigger audience. Exactly right. Congratulations.
Rod,
Congratulations!
Thank you for continuing the fight against those who seek to constrain our natural ability. I am there with you in action and spirit.
Cal
Thank you, Rod, for fighting to make all our futures better.
A long time ago, the band Genesis was looking for a replacement for the position of lead singer due to Peter Gabriel’s departure.
They searched for a replacement. Auditioned hundreds to no avail. Without noticing it, the band was measuring everyone thru Phil Collins’ own singing abilities.
The drumer, Phil Collins, had it all. Those who lived confronted to his talent could not see it.
Rod, this is a the best news in a long time.
Now I wish a little mishaps would happen in a nuclear facility in the South Eastern USA.
I can just see a level fight between the US Navy nukes with Rod against the uneducated press. I honestly wish for such a event to happen.
Great move!
Now all we need is for nuclear professional organizations like NEI and ANS to gut-up to the plate and take you on as a major PR consultant or chief — or far better and best, an unfettered nuclear Carl Sagan spokesperson!
Good luck (for us all!) and any support you need if I can swing it you got it!
James Greenidge
Queens NY
And Gates, Roderick and Branson.
Chip in or shut up.
Hear! Hear!
Any other energy subject or environmental position id probably cringe here at the prospect of another voice to be honest. But NP obviously needs more people who understand the technical aspects covering it. Not to mention more critical coverage of other energy tech. The days of simple blind advocacy, of anything, are coming to a necessary end.
I’m excited to see what’s next. I’ve learned a lot from you over the years — and plan to keep doing so.
Is Shane in too? I miss him.
I am glad to hear that there will be a great writer on our side. I will also buy every book.
When can we start posting comments to your articles on the Huffington Post?
What will this book be like? Will it have illustrations, diagrams and photographs? I think it helps a lot to use visual aids for a subject like nuclear power.
There was a book called Nuclear Power written by an Englishman that was written in 1974 that helped me learn a great deal about the subject for both American and British reactors. I will try to find the author but take a look at it if you can. I think the fact the author was an Englishman made it a more informative book.
I always also thought that is Westinghouse wanted to make a commercial or infomercial that it should be in the form of anime. Might you also consider a nuclear power book in the form of a graphic novel?
So did you read Admiral Rickover’s three books, and were they any good ?
Yes. My favorite was Education and Freedom. Unfortunately, not enough educators read that book and implemented even parts of its advice.
I don’t know what that book was like but I thought you might like this article I came across. It is about why American high schools and teens do not know as much as from everywhere else. My high school was all into sports too.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/
Rod, I have always been a Rod Adams fan. I even suggested that President Obama make you his Energy Czar. I was serious. I have had fun arguing with you too. I consider you to be the dean of Nuclear Bloggers Good luck to you in your new undertaking.
Personally, I’m hoping for easy access to signed copies of the books.
Fortunam bonam, Rod!
(Good Luck, Rod!)
Deus te in tuo opere pro salva, pura energia nucleare benedicat .
(May God bless you in your work for safe, clean nuclear energy.)
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum…………
Good luck Rod! I really hope to see you on the television soon defending nuclear power against the FUD spreaders.
Your pen (or microphone) can do more positive for the nuclear industry than many lifetimes of engineering in the industry. You are a truly skilled communicator and have the knowledge to back up your argument. Again, good luck to you Sir!
Congratulations on your move, and best of luck on your new old career! 😉
Now, if we could do the same with Shane Brown and get the two that started The Atomic Show back together, that would really be super awesome!
Looking forward to your next moves, Atomic Rod.
Interesting story this morning on NPR about a researcher at (I think ) Harvard who submitted a scientific paper for publication in 300 journals. The paper was intentionally seriously flawed in methodology. Over 100 of the journals accepted the paper for publication, proving that they did not actually engage in any meaningful peer review. I think his research was published in “Science” or maybe “Nature”. I was getting breakfast into my son before school, so the academic brain wasn’t ticking over yet.
I find this relevant to the topic at hand, because of the amount of FUD the antis try to legitimize by publishing it in meaningful sounding journals. Then the media never bothers to sort out whether the journal is reputable or not, it just parrots it and doesn’t care whether it’s good science or not.
Our whole science publishing system is in trouble. Reliability is poor. Apparently, we shouldn’t trust a lot of the research which gets published, and how is anyone able to sort out the good from the bad without repeating the research personally? My partner’s father edited the main pathology laboratory manual for years, (perhaps decades) and he won’t submit papers to certain journals because he knows they’re trash. So at least some researchers in individual fields know which journals are bogus, but that doesn’t help the wider public trying to obtain reliable information.
It’s a horrible, larger problem which has and has had catastrophic implications for the nuclear electricity industry.
Read about it here.
For those of you who don’t know who Alan Sokal is, he’s the guy who, in 1996, demonstrated just how intellectually bankrupt the “postmodern philosophy” movement (and much of the liberal arts these days, I’m sad to say) is by successfully publishing a completely nonsensical hoax paper in an academic “postmodern cultural studies” journal.
Conditions for validity operate differently across academic fields.
Devices, mechanisms and perspectives in one are not necessarily the same as others. Indeed the concept of mixing them is probably only valid from particular perspectives in certain fields and not in others. Its confusing but not impossible.
Technical with respect to mathematical and logical is not technical with respect to narrative, historical reference, chance and abstraction. People in the sciences like to blame people in the arts, but really its their own fault for not laying the ground work of their own fields decisively and assuming everything operates on the same principles.
It never did and perhaps never will. At least not at the resolutions we view things at.
See … this is the kind of weak thinking and gobbledygook that gave birth to Postmodernism. Notice that it focuses on “perspectives” and laying blame on others, almost exclusively to everything else. Taken to the next level, it’s a codification of mediocrity — in an appropriately sloppy and overly verbose fashion. 😉
Re: “Then the media never bothers to sort out whether the journal is reputable or not, it just parrots it and doesn’t care whether it’s good science or not.”
Respectfully, you’re being far too generous with “doesn’t care.” The media, with VERY few exceptions is coyly and rabidly anti-nuclear, and they make no bones about their follow-feeling desire with greens to eliminate it and the “curse” and sin the U.S. inflicted on the world by first developing this new source of power and somehow uniquely killing innocents en masse at Hiroshima. The subtly alarmist tone of their nuclear event reporting are intentionally dark and ominous and devoid of competent rebuttal sources and always stresses the maximum hazard any nuclear incident can incur. The shamelessly shameful way the NYC metro media aligned themselves with anti-Shoreham forces made a mockery of fair and accurate reporting, and this permeates even “science” and “history” TV programming. If a student went against the PC grain in an essay test and cited the quiet Chicago pile as the birth of atomic energy instead of a terrifying explosion in a desert years later that student would royally flunk despite being in the right — and forget the media sticking up for them in truth and accuracy. Target zero for best attacking FUD is attacking and deconstructing and exposing and correcting the anti’s main silent sponsor and sycophant and shield, that being the mass media’s anti-nuclear biases. We have nuclear pro groups and organizations already in place with the resources to take them on. All they need is PR leadership with passion and guts.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Bravo Zulu, Rod.
I look forward to your books and articles, and will assist you in any way I possibly can.
All the best!
MJH ’75
keep up the good work
and to illustrate the fragile grip we have on the energy we rely on I found this
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php
made by a engineer making available to all the info we need
its worrying to me that the collective view that all will be alright without nuclear is so false and complacent It must be publicized
keith
Ron.
I support your move. let me know how I can help.
Good luck!!
You are the man for the job.
Let me know if I can help in any way with info about this neck of the woods.
Best of Luck, Rod !
Way to go, Son. I had to listen to your dad moan about your being an English major. I hope that he is now one of your “heavenly champions”
Any chance that a new project at Adams Atomic Engines might be part of your future?
Best of luck!
It takes talent, experience and courage, Rod. Along with many of our colleagues, I wish you all the best with this new endeavor.
It takes talent, experience and courage, Rod. Along with many of our colleagues, I wish you all the best with this new endeavor.