After hearing that lecture, Makhijani questioned the need for using so much power in the first place. He spent the next year developing what he called one of the first papers on energy efficiency. Makhijani earned his PhD in 1972. That PhD was awarded in Electrical Engineering. Here is the description of his PhD from his CV:

“Area of specialization: plasma physics as applied to controlled nuclear fusion. Dissertation topic: multiple mirror confinement of plasmas. Minor fields of doctoral study: statistics and physics.”

After earning his PhD, Makhijani spent the next two years working on the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project. He was one of the principle authors of the report. He held a variety of academic positions during the period from 1979-1988

In 1987 Makhijani started working part time for the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) which is located in Takoma Park, MD. In 1988 he became the President and Senior Engineer at IEER.

Takoma Park is also the home of NIRS and Beyond Nuclear. Robert Alvarez lived there at the time that he served in the Department of Energy.

It is a place where antinuclear activism is commonplace.

Dr. Makhijani abruptly ended the call, but I think you will enjoy the conversation anyway.

Links to documents mentioned during the discussion:

Carbon Free Nuclear Free (PDF download version)

NUREG 1738

My primary goal is to record and share their thoughts and experiences to add to the growing body of nuclear communications lessons learned or still to be learned.

This show includes an informed conversation about what really happened to the spent fuel pools, particularly the one associated with Unit 4. That is the one that the Chairman of the NRC mistakenly announced to the world as being on fire and being the source of the concern that caused him to add to the panic and confusion of the evacuation by increasing the area by a factor of 4 – shifting the radius from about 12 miles to 50 miles.

There was never any danger from the Unit 4 spent fuel pool. There was never any indication that there was any danger from that pool. The Chairman did not follow the EPA’s Protective Action Guides and did not do his job to maintain calm, effective response to the actual events as a means of protecting human health. Instead, he unilaterally increased the confusion and contributed to the mistrust that the Japanese people have recently developed for their government.

The following guests were on the show:

Dan Yurman (@djysrv), who blogs at Idaho Samizdat and at the ANS Nuclear Cafe
Margaret Harding (@M2harding), the former GE fuel system designer who was widely quoted in newspapers and who made numerous, calming appearances on commercial television shows.
Bob Apthorpe (@arclight) who is a degreed nuclear engineer and currently employed by a firm that specializes in severe accident analysis models. He is an active Twitter contributor who has more than 4,000 people following his musings.

This group included

Will Davis, whose Atomic Power Review became one of the most respected and informative English language sites on the web for up to date data about the events at the power station.

Laura Scheele, a professional staff member of the American Nuclear Society who helped to match real, qualified experts with media requests and who helped to turn the ANS Nuclear Cafe blog into a new aggregator for both ANS members and the public.

Cal Abel, a Nuclear Engineering PhD student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Cal is also a former submarine engineer officer and a member of a family owned construction business. When he saw the futile attempts to fill used fuel pools from helicopters flying over the plant, he told himself there had to be a better way. Within hours he had figured out that the concrete pumper trucks that his wife’s construction business uses to precisely direct concrete into forms as the part of building tall buildings would work perfectly to deliver water to elevated fuel pools.

He worked his contact networks and convinced his advisors at Georgia Tech that he knew what he was talking about. Within 24 hours, his idea was being discussed on NPR and within 48 hours there were concrete pumper trucks on the Fukushima Daiichi site refilling the used fuel pools and restoring their ability to provide shielding to the used fuel.

You can hear the first group discussion by visiting the following link Atomic Show #180 – The Year After Fukushima (Part 1).

To my great regret, technology failed and prevented the participation of Margaret Harding, the former GE manager who put her 30+ years of experience with boiling water reactor engineering to good use by serving as a calming, rational voice in the mainstream media.

On that same coast, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station lost all AC power when the grid supplying it was destroyed and all but one of the 12 diesel generators on the site were flooded. The electrical switchgear where emergency power sources could connect to the station was also flooded. Eventually three of the reactors at the site experienced core melting and released gaseous and water soluble radioactive materials. Most of the materials decay to innocuous isotopes within a few months, but two isotopes of cesium, Cs-134 (2.1 years) and Cs-137 (30 years) decay more slowly and will be in the environment for a long time to come. A total of 11 kilograms of cesium were released.

On the anniversary, I gathered a group of people who participated in an effort to share accurate information to counter the purposeful scare mongering provided by professional antinuclear organizations and lapped up by a news media that makes most of its money by selling advertising – often to fossil fuel competitors to nuclear energy.

Joining in on the conversation were:

Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy
Meredith Angwin, publisher of Yes Vermont Yankee
Suzy Hobbs, Director of PopAtomic Studios
Steve Aplin, publisher of Canadian Energy Issues

The show was hosted by Rod Adams, Publisher, Atomic Insights

In it, he interviews a number of people who have been personally affected by nuclear weapons – the hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) in Japan, downwinders affected by testing programs, politicians concerned about international nonproliferation efforts, and activists who have invested their careers in efforts to force reductions in the numbers of weapons. On those topics, Bud and I came to a rough agreement, even though I am a former “boomer sailor.”

Unfortunately, like many people who become antinuclear activists because they are opposed to nuclear weapons, Bud has also been convinced that peaceful use of nuclear energy should also be avoided. He makes the false statement in his film that nuclear reactors have never turned a profit and he even interviews a few people who seem to believe that the only reason that we have developed nuclear medicine is because the government wanted to find something beneficial to do with nuclear materials.

On that topic, Bud and I strongly disagreed, but the conversation was interesting. Bud agreed that he would keep reading and learning and might even be willing to read some of the materials that I plan to send him about the real health effects of low level radiation and about the value of nuclear energy to enable people to live abundant lives.

(On that last one, I have a real challenge – Bud lives in a remote area of sun drenched New Mexico – 3 miles from the nearest phone line. He and his wife are quite comfortable living in a solar powered home that has a bank of deep-cycle lead acid storage batteries that they can make last for 4-5 days. They dislike air conditioning. I would bet that they never go water skiing or out for a Sunday drive – just for fun.)

The Forgotten Bomb is available on DVD. Even if you favor the use of nuclear energy, it is worth watching – if only to understand the arguments and emotions that you will face as an atomic advocate.

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 quadrillion BTUs (Quads) of energy used each year is consumed by industrial process heat applications. Nearly all of that is supplied by burning hydrocarbons (some is supplied at paper mills and lumber processing plants by burning biomass).

With some clever engineering that takes advantage of research initially conducted to attempt to enable solar heat to be made available when the sun is not shining, Cal Abel is working on ways to produce, distribute or store nuclear fission heat.

We are joined in our discussion by Bob Apthorpe, another man with a degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin, the same place where Cal earned his BS and MS.

If all of the electricity that Vermont Yankee produced every year was sold into the state of Vermont, it would supply 85% of the state’s total load. Since the plant is located just a few miles north of the Massachusetts border and just a few dozen yards from the state line with New Hampshire, only 30% of the power stays inside state lines.

In other words, the plant is, and always has been, engaged in interstate commerce. It still confuses me why people who live in Vermont have such a basic misunderstanding of the country in which they live; no state has the right to control interstate commerce. All of them gave that up when they signed on as members of the United States of America.

Anyway, enough ranting. Hope you enjoy the show. I apologize for the echo chamber sound quality. I will do better next time – if I ever get around to doing some simple set-up upgrades.

The problem is that the contamination levels outside of the gate of the nuclear power station are low enough so that the projected radiation doses to someone residing in the area are lower than the doses received from natural sources in many inhabited areas around the world. Due to an excessive level of fear and the resulting “conservative” limits established by government bodies, tens of thousands of people have been forced to abandon their homes, communities and sources of livelihood.

I invited some friends to discuss ways to communicate the reality of the situation to the rest of the world to try to mitigate the damage being done by stories aimed at spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Meredith Angwin has a master’s degree in Physical Chemistry, has worked in both the renewable energy industry and the nuclear industry and has been working to reduce the fear of nuclear energy with her blog at Yes Vermont Yankee.

Cal Abel is a former nuclear submarine engineer officer and a current graduate student seeking his PhD in Nuclear Engineering at Georgia Tech.

I asked two nuclear energy experts, Cal Abel and Margaret Harding to read the report and then to share their perceptions and interpretations with you. I hope you enjoy their commentary, though it might help your understanding if you have the report handy while you are listening.

One idea in particular that Cal produced and promoted sometime before March 17 (based on our email thread) was using a concrete pumper truck to reach up and aim water directly into the elevated spent fuel pools. He had determined that trying to fill a pool by dumping water from a helicopter was completely futile. Based partly on his experience in a family construction business he knew that machines designed to pump concrete for upper floors of tall buildings could be used to pump water just as easily. When the task was filling up an elevated pool from a safe standoff distance, the concrete pumper was the right tool for the job.

A few days after Cal managed to get his idea publicized, Tokyo Electric Company contacted SANY Heavy Industry, a company that owns large concrete pumping trucks.

On March 19th, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which runs the plant, mailed Sany Heavy Industry, hoping to purchase Sany 62m concrete pump to support the water spraying operation in the nuclear plant.

Cal and I have continued to exchange email and even had the opportunity to meet face to face at the ANS Student Conference held in Atlanta in April of this year. I have been meaning to invite him to share some of his current research with you. He is working on some interesting technologies that could vastly expand the market reach of nuclear energy into areas that are currently the exclusive domain of fossil fuel.

I hope you enjoy the show.

People who have any experience or knowledge of the nuclear industry know that nuclear plant operators take storms quite seriously and make preparations years to decades in advance to ensure that the plants ride through nearly anything that nature can throw at them. Nukes do not take storms for granted, but we are pretty confident that the combination of good design, excellent training, careful preparation, and redundant back-up power systems will ensure that the public is never harmed by any impact that might be felt at the plant when it is attacked by a storm.

Even though Irene took a path that gave it at least 18 opportunities to damage nuclear facilities, the good news is that the quiet confidence was well-placed. With the exception of a large piece of aluminum siding that was peeled off a building and thrown into the switchyard for Calvert Cliffs Unit 1, none of the nuclear units were forced off line by the effects of the hurricane. There was no damage to any safety related equipment.

During the storm, a number of the companies who operate those nuclear plants took advantage of social media tools to keep the public informed about their preparations and the condition of the plants.

On August 28, 2011, after the storm had made its way up the east coast and was at the Maine-Canada border, I gathered a group of four nuclear communicators to discuss lessons learned or relearned from the event. I hope you enjoy the show.

Dan Yurman, who blogs at Idaho Samizdat and ANS Nuclear Cafe
Margaret Harding, an independent consultant who blogs at 4Factor Consulting
Mimi Limbach, a partner at Potomac Communications Group
April Schilpp, the senior manager for communications at Exelon Nuclear

Additional Reading

Cool Hand Nuke – Hurricane Irene caused no damage to any reactors in its path

Ben grew up assuming that nuclear energy was bad, but after a logical process of evaluating all available options, changed his mind. He is now running a campaign that he calls Decarbonise SA. Since his home state of South Australia has only 1.5 million residents, his goal could be achieved in less than a decade with the construction of 3 large nuclear plants – or 30 small modular reactors like the B&W mPower^TM.

Barry (or should I say, Dr. Brook?) is a scientist who focuses on the earth’s climate, never opposed the use of nuclear energy, but did not immediately recognize just how effective a weapon it could be in what he considers to be an extremely important battle to keep the Earth as hospitable as it has been for humans for the past tens of thousands of years.

I think you will enjoy the conversation. I apologize for any sound issues – from my point of view it is almost magical that I could speak to two people in separate locations in a time zone that is 13.5 hours farther along in the day than my own. The fact that I could do it with essentially no lag and at no cost is even more incredible. Thank you, Skype.

Disclosure: I work for B&W on the mPower reactor project.

For a variety of reasons, The Energy Collective never got around to publishing the show. During a recent chat with Amelia, I asked her if she still had the file and if I could have permission to publish it as an Atomic Show podcast. Fortunately, Amelia is as much of a pack rat when it comes to computer files as I am.

Here is the show. As I said in the introduction, I am quite proud of the quality of the information and the advice that Dan and I were able to offer fairly soon after the events began to unfold. I would like to challenge other information sources who commented on the event in the early days to go back and listen to what they told people and compare that to what actually transpired.

Here is a quote from that article:

In the e-mails, energy executives, industry lawyers, state geologists and market analysts voice skepticism about lofty forecasts and question whether companies are intentionally, and even illegally, overstating the productivity of their wells and the size of their reserves. Many of these e-mails also suggest a view that is in stark contrast to more bullish public comments made by the industry, in much the same way that insiders have raised doubts about previous financial bubbles.

“Money is pouring in” from investors even though shale gas is “inherently unprofitable,” an analyst from PNC Wealth Management, an investment company, wrote to a contractor in a February e-mail. “Reminds you of dot-coms.”

As part of the damage control effort from the natural gas industry in response to that article, Aubrey McClendon, the Chief Executive Officer of Chesapeake Energy, wrote a lengthy letter to his company employees and posted it on the company’s public Facebook page. In that letter, McClendon identified who he thought was responsible for the NY Times article and he issued a call to action to Chesapeake employees. Here is what he said about the motive for the article:

The story is misleading, at best, and is the latest in a series of articles produced by this publication that obviously have an anti-industry bias. We know for a fact that today’s NYT story is the handiwork of the same group of environmental activists who have been the driving force behind the NYT’s ongoing series of negative articles about the use of fracking and its importance to the US natural gas supply growth revolution – which is changing the future of our nation for the better in multiple areas. It is not clear to me exactly what these environmental activists are seeking to offer as their alternative energy plan, but most that I have talked to continue to naively presume that our great country need only rely on wind and solar energy to meet our current and future energy needs. They always seem to forget that wind and solar produce less than 2% of America electricity today and are completely non-economic without ongoing government and ratepayer subsidies.

After reading both the NY Times article and Chesapeake Energy’s response, I thought it was time to share an audio message from Thomas Price. At the time that he gave the talk I am sharing with you, Price was identified as Chesapeake Energy’s Senior Vice President for Corporate Development and Government Relations. The occasion of the talk was a panel discussion held during Energy Epicenter 2010, an annual gathering of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. The panel discussion was titled Colorado Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act Panel and it featured a series of invited speakers talking about the team that had been formed to push through an act that favored use of natural gas over coal.

After describing how Chesapeake has 125 active drilling rigs and how it has developed a “swat team” with more than 100 employees that works with environmental groups to produce legislation designed to slow the development of new coal fired power plants and to hasten the closure of existing coal plants, Tom Price said the following:

“It’s been said before, but the demand side of the equation is extremely important right now. I mean this really is a zero sum game. I think that there are a number of very progressive utilities out there that recognize the challenges that they are facing with regard to climate change, but the Transport Rule, Clean Air Act and various others.”

Please listen carefully to the way that Price described Chesapeake’s activities to a group of oil and gas producers and compare that to the way that McClendon describes the people who are fighting against the development of shale gas and who are pointing out faults with the idea that shale gas is a sustainable, low-cost bridge to a cleaner energy future.

Disclosure: I freely and frequently announce that I have a pro-nuclear agenda. I have convinced myself using a number of pieces of evidence that the natural gas industry – which has a large overlap with the multinational oil industry – is engaging in a price war against new nuclear power plants. The leaders in the oil and gas industry understand how even a small number of new nuclear power plants would affect the long term “demand side of the equation”. (Quoting Tom Price again.)

My theory is that by holding down prices temporarily, the industry guesses that it can insert several years of delay into the inevitable arrival of new nuclear power plants that will run reliably for 60+ years, rarely, if ever, needing back up from natural gas.

I hope you enjoy the show.

PS – I have to apologize to the people who have taken the time to visit and comment recently. I have not been diligent about moderating and approving the comments. I will try to do better in the future.

That proposed rulemaking would add backup power and cooling water source requirements for used fuel pools to enable them to operate unattended for at least two years following a loss of all offsite power. One of the proposed technologies advocated for this capability is a large array of solar panels with battery back up.

As you might imagine, I find the whole notion ridiculous and I told Tom that when I responded to his email. Used fuel pools are adequately supplied with cooling systems, there is no reason to think that any system should be able to operate without human intervention for 2 years, solar power systems have designed failures every 12 hours or so, and even if used fuel pools did lose their water, there would not be a risk to the public. Based on the results of the theory to practice event in the spent fuel pool of Fukushima unit 4, loss of water causes locally high radiation levels due to the loss of shielding, but that is about the extent of the real effects.

The fuel in that pool did not suffer any damage, despite all word to the contrary from the breathless, but technically ignorant, sources of initial information. Though the Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that the pools were dry and at risk of catching fire, his statements were issued when there was still some conflicting data being released.

After several exchanges, I decided that it would be a good idea to invite Tom onto The Atomic Show to allow him to share his worries and to give me a chance to challenge his assumptions in a public forum. Unlike many critics of nuclear energy, Tom took me up on the challenge. I hope you enjoy the show. I would be happy to hear your thoughts on whether you thought it was a valuable exercise.

Should I try to invite more nuclear doubters or outright opponents onto the show? During a discussion on Margaret Harding’s 4 Factor Consulting Blog, someone suggested a debate between me and Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Consulting. What do you think?

Last week, the Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a press release indicating that the commission had determined that there were “technical issues” that must be resolved before a final design certification rule can be issued for the current iteration of the plant design.

Westinghouse has responded to publicity that resulted from that press release with a press release of its own, detailing its position on the remaining technical issues and providing its opinion that the issues will not require any redesign – just a completion of the requested details calculations.

I decided that there was a need for some addition information in this “he said”, “she said” drama, so I made contact with Jeff Merrifield. We chatted on May 27, 2011 via Skype and cell phone while he was waiting for a delayed flight.

Jeff served on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1998-2007. He is now a senior vice president of the Shaw Group which is a partner (and part owner) with Westinghouse Electric Company, the designer of the AP1000. There are eight units of that Generation III advanced light water reactor plant in various stages of construction, with four units in China, two units at the Vogtle site in Georgia and two units at the VC Summer site in South Carolina.

On this show, several of us got together for a brainstorming exercise discussing what we could do to help get that initiative moving and develop its own critical mass – so to speak. The speakers on the show include the following:

Rod Adams – Publisher, Atomic Insights
Suzy Hobbs – Director, PopAtomic Studios
Andrea Jennetta – Publisher, Fuel Cycle Week
Nancy Roth – Managing Editor, Fuel Cycle Week
Dan Yurman – Publisher, Idaho Samizdat, Contributing reporter, Fuel Cycle Week, contributor, ANS Nuclear Cafe.

Guests on this episode of the The Atomic Show include:
Margaret Harding, 4 Factor Consulting
Dan Yurman, publisher of Idaho Samizdat, frequent contributor to ANS Nuclear Cafe and contributing reporter to Fuel Cycle Weekly
Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World
Steve Aplin, publisher, Canadian Energy Issues

Outside of the plant, there are thousands of fatalities, and thousands of destroyed structures and industrial facilities. Many of those facilities are total losses and have been such ever since the tsunami hit. Perhaps 500,000 people are homeless and the logistics infrastructure that normally delivers clean water and fresh food to an even larger population has been severely damaged. The probability that additional negative health effects from lack of shelter, food and water is very real.

In spite of reality, if one spent time watching the advertiser supported media in most North American and European countries, you would be justified in thinking that the catastrophe is a nuclear disaster rather than a natural disaster with a minor nuclear component. The old saw about media being driven by “if it bleeds it leads” seems to have been overturned by a new one “if it involves radiation from man-made sources like a nuclear power station, it must be at the top of the news, even if there is no blood and even if there is no danger because the levels are barely above detection limits.” (That is not so pithy, but it seems to be true in this case.)

The guests on the show include:

Meredith Angwin who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee
Gwyneth Cravens, the author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy
Suzy Hobbs, Director of PopAtomic Studios
Margaret Harding, owner, 4 Factor Consulting
Dan Yurman, who blogs at Idaho Samizdat and is a consultant with the American Nuclear Society for its Outreach Program and the ANS Nuclear Cafe blog

Meredith Angwin blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee and is the Director of the Ethan Allen Energy Education Project.

Gwyneth Cravens is the author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.

Julie Ezold is the Californium Program Manager for the Nuclear Material Processing Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Margaret Harding runs 4 Factor Consulting after working for nearly 30 years as a nuclear core design engineer for GE.

It has been far too long since the last episode of The Atomic Show. Life got in the way with a career transition and a move to a new home.

However, there is always a bit of motivation to use the turning of a calendar as the stimulus for long deferred activity. I sent out some invites and got immediate positive responses from some of my pro-nuclear blogging colleagues. We got together for a lengthy conversation about loan guarantees, financial challenges, competition from natural gas, the uncontrollable nature of wind and solar energy, the underlying motives of the smart grid sales pitches, and some predictions for the future. I hope you enjoy the show.

Rod Adams and Gwyneth Cravens recently spoke with Ray the Squirrel, the man behind the camera, who is working feverishly to put the finishing touches on what promises to be an important story full of lessons available to be learned.

Ray is a struggling film school graduate and is could use some assistance in getting to the finish line of the project due to some unexpected costs and a desire to distribute his work for free on the Internet. Please listen to the show and if you are intrigued by the project and want to see the end results, consider offering a donation. Ray has set up a project page on Kickstarter, a web based fund raising tool for struggling artists looking for patrons to support their valuable work.

You can find Ray’s Shoreham project at http://kck.st/cKdAmV. You can also follow his updates on the project via Twitter at RaySquirrel. He has a YouTube page at http://www.youtube.com/user/RaySquirrel where he will be posting updates on the project.

Meredith Angwin and Charles Barton joined Rod Adams to talk about some of the reasons and effects of that slowing progress. They also discussed a nuclear education outreach program involving art being run by PopAtomic Studios and an exciting nuclear video documentary project being developed by a couple of sharp and involved high school debate students.

If you are interested in finding out how to support the video project, please send Rod Adams an email at rod(underscore)adams(at symbol)atomicinsights(dot)com

The trip also provides the students a chance to meet with congressmen, senators and their staff members that work on energy issues so that they can share thoughts and learn a bit more about how the political processes work.

This year, the NESD visit to Washington took place during the week of July 24-July 29. On August 1, 2010, I spoke with three of the 12 students who participated. The guests included Rachel Slaybaugh from the University of Wisconsin – Madison (one of the co-chairmen of the group), Will Sames from Texas A&M University, and Kevin Robb from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. The students shared their thoughts about the policy statement that they created on the first day of their trip, issues that concern nuclear engineering programs, federal support for research reactors, importance of faculty development programs and the importance of efforts to ensure that nuclear energy is defined as clean energy for the purposes of counting as an effort to reduce CO2.

I also want to take this opportunity to remind you that there are a couple of high school students who are undertaking a video project in which they will visit with four nuclear energy pioneers who helped them prepare for a series of competitive debates. The Team Policy combo of Price Baker and Mary Claire Birdsong debated the resolution: “Resolved: that the United State Federal Government should significantly reform its environmental policy.” Baker/Birdsong advocated the use of Nuclear Power as the most effective way to reform environmental policy. You can find out more about the project at Opportunity to Support an Exciting Nuclear Technology Video Project.

If you are interested in participating by providing a donation, please send me an email at rod(underscore)adams(at symbol)atomicinsights(dot)com.

Rod discusses the evidence that he documented on Atomic Insights with regard to the specific kind of plutonium used during the often referenced 1962 test at the Nevada Test Site. People opposed to plutonium recycling from commercial nuclear fuel often point to that test as proof positive that plutonium from power reactors can be used as raw material for a bomb, but the historical evidence proves that the material was far closer to “weapons-grade” that has previously been acknowledged. It bore no isotopic resemblance to the plutonium that can be extracted from modern commercial reactors, which remains exposed to neutrons for a much longer period of time.

That long neutron exposure produces plutonium that is a complex mix of isotopes, some of which have characteristics that prevent them from being useful in constructing a weapon. These plutonium isotopes (Pu-238, Pu-239, Pu-240 and Pu-241) cannot be easily separated from each other. In fact, the effort would be significantly more difficult than separating the two isotopes of uranium from each other in an enrichment facility.

Recycling programs involving used commercial nuclear fuel do not represent a nuclear weapons proliferation threat. Any technically competent person who claims that it does is not telling the truth and are most likely using this untruth as an argument against the widespread deployment of nuclear energy production plants because they favor increased use of a different, competitive energy source.

The discussion also turned to the economic potential for smaller reactors that can be installed in series on a common site. Dan, who has previously been a bit skeptical on The Atomic Show when the topic of small reactors has come up, has started to see the financial benefits of being able to build nuclear power plants in smaller steps, each of which can generate revenue as the step is completed.

At the end of the show, we briefly discussed fund raising ideas for an interesting video project to document the experience of two high school students who took a pro-nuclear energy position in a high school debate competition all the way to the national finals. They obtained much of their supporting information from nuclear pioneers/experts including Ted Rockwell, Len Koch, Charles Till and Robert Schenter. The video envisions the debaters obtaining face to face interviews with these pioneers. If you are interested in helping to support the travel and production expenses for this project, please send me an email at rod(underscore)adams(at symbol)atomicinsights(dot)com.

Comments are always welcome.

Joe talked about the opportunities and challenges facing the ANS and discussed his priorities for the upcoming year. Look for some technological improvements, new opportunities for the ANS to provide independent scientific reviews, and some initiatives to help younger members realize more value from their memberships.

After signing off with Lisa, Rod asked a poll type question. How many people would be willing to support an effort to build an independent atomic advocacy group that would not be dependent upon industry contributions and industry decision makers? Would you be interested in helping to establish a pro-nuclear voice that can work to establish a comparable level of activity and credibility as what has been developed over several decades by the anti-nuclear activists?

Please respond either via the comment section or via an email to rod at rod(underscore)adams(at symbol)atomicinsights.com (to actually send an email, replace the parenthetical words with the appropriate symbol – this is a spam limitation measure.)

Links to items discussed on the show:

American Public Power Association sponsored study on replacing coal with natural gas

US Nuclear Regulatory Commission FY2011 press briefing on its budget submission

From Lisa Stiles: Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Greg Jaczko told attendees at the 2010 American Nuclear Society (ANS) Annual Meeting Opening Plenary in San Diego that he has commissioned from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) a study of cancer risks in areas surrounding nuclear facilities. He said that the last comprehenisve study was completed in 1990 by the National Cancer Institute. Since then, the availablility and quality of data has improved and Jaczko believes an updated study is needed.

Jaczko mentioned the study as part of the NRC’s efforts to enhance public confidence. He said that stakeholders frequently ask questions about radiation risk and the data that support NRC and licensee assumptions and analyses.

Conference attendees asked several questions expressing concern about the need, scope and goals of the initiative. Dr. Lee Dodds, Nuclear Engineering Department Head at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, asked if the NAS report would also study the health effects of other energy fuel cycles so that the public could make an informed comparison. Jaczko responded that his agency’s only jurisdiction is in the nuclear arena.

Chairman Jaczko agreed to discuss the study in more detail with me. Unfortunately, my recorder missed the first 30-60 seconds of the interview. In that time I asked him about the scope of the study: Would it include only new data since 1990? By “nuclear facilities” did he mean only commercial plants or other licensees? Would the study include all historical data including that from government facilities? The chairman said that the details are not complete and that the NAS would have most of the responsibility for determining the appropriate scope.

I next asked him about the goal of the study and what he expected to be different from previous analyses. The audio picks up as he responds. I look forward to discussion of Jaczko’s remarks!

Meredith Angwin is a physical chemist with long experience in the energy arena including both nuclear and geothermal energy. She is the principal at Carnot Communications and blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee.

Dan Yurman is an independent consultant, experienced nuclear professional and blogs at Idaho Samizdat.

Charles Barton has been immersed in nuclear technology since birth as the son of a nuclear scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He blogs at Nuclear Green and Energy From Thorium.

Margaret Harding started her nuclear energy career 29 years ago as a nuclear engineer with GE. She is a principal at 4FactorConsulting and blogs at www.4factorconsulting.com

Rod Adams is the publisher of Atomic Insights and the founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. He has been involved in nuclear plant operations, management, training and design since entering the Navy Nuclear Power School in September 1981.

I spoke with her on April 28, 2010. Her enthusiasm is infectious. If you want to find out more about Suzy, her studio or how you can employ her little army of artists to help you communicate challenging subjects to a wider audience, please visit PopAtomic.org

We spoke on March 30, 2010 about Dave’s research into the nuclear policies promised by Governor Jimmy Carter during the 1976 campaign for President. Those policies were later implemented by President Carter after his election success. As Dave says during our talk, until President Carter, many people could legitimately dismiss campaign promises, but President Carter actually made a book of his various promises and worked to try to keep them.

Much to the detriment of nuclear energy development in the United States, two of his kept promises were to halt used fuel recycling in the US and to avoid creation of a “plutonium economy” by stopping the breeder reactor program.

Unlike Dr. Rossin, I am a suspicious guy who believes that many important decisions in the politics can best be understood by following the money. The obvious beneficiaries of a policy to avoid a “plutonium economy” are those entities who already have control over “the hydrocarbon economy”. No commodity supplier profits by being replaced. Dr. Rossin disagrees, but that made for a bit of a lively discussion.

We took up the offer. In this episode, you will hear questions from the following members of the pro-nuclear blogging community:

• John Wheeler from This Week in Nuclear
• Margaret Harding from The Energy Collective
• Dan Yurman from Idaho Samizdat and The Energy Collective
• Meredith Angwin from Yes Vermont Yankee
• Rod Adams from Atomic Insights and The Energy Collective

Dr. Klein talked about his experiences on the commission, the challenges that his successors will face, the foundations that have been laid to enable new nuclear power plant developments, the importance of baseload power generation, the importance of communications from nuclear professionals, and the importance of communications between the NRC and the entities that it serves.

I hope you enjoy this episode. Please use it to motivate your own efforts to share what you know in your local community. Atomic ignorance must be eliminated. That will only occur with a lot of individual and group efforts to educate, inform and share by people who really understand the technology.

Margaret Harding, Kelly Taylor, John Wheeler from This Week in Nuclear, Dan Yurman from Idaho Samizdat and I talked for about an hour about our cautious optimism. The optimism is hard to overcome; the caution comes from the understanding that there is a lot of hard work left to do.

Between us, we have more than 100 years of professional experience with the technology; none of us believe that it is easy or “cheap”. We do believe that it is far better than all other competitors and that it is less expensive – if done correctly – than any other alternative when all costs are considered.

We also talked about the potential of smaller nuclear power plants to overcome some of the well known limitations of the “extra-large” plants that some utility companies and established nuclear plant vendors believe are the only way to make the technology “economical”. That view is a fallacy, perhaps engendered by the fact that large companies have to do large things in order to move the needle. They like instilling the belief that only large organizations can move forward with nuclear energy – even if they move with the agility of dinosaurs.

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

On January 31, 2010, I gathered a large group of active bloggers and nuclear industry professionals to find out what they thought of the statement and its impact on the deployment of new nuclear power plants. My guests were:

• Kelly Taylor, a 24 year nuclear industry professional and frequent Atomic Show guest.
• Meredith Angwin, a physical chemist and small businessperson who has recently started publishing a blog titled Yes, Vermont Yankee.
• Charles Barton, who blogs at Nuclear Green and Energy from Thorium.
• David Bradish, a statistician and blogger at NEI Nuclear Notes.
• Dan Yurman, who blogs at Idaho Samidat, writes for Fuel Cycle Week and is the blogger with the highest readership at The Energy Collective.
• Robert Margolis, a 24 year nuclear engineer who has supported reactors on 3 continents and is currently working in Florida.

In addition to the State of the Union statement, we discussed the increase in the loan guarantee program, and the formation of the blue ribbon commission about used nuclear fuel policy.

We also spent quite a bit of time talking about Vermont Yankee and the incredibly tiny quantity of tritium that has people demanding a full investigation and possibly a plant shutdown because someone found 0.000000029 curies/liter of tritium, an amount that would have a mass of just 0.0000000000029 grams distributed in 1000 grams of water.

This is the largest panel yet invited to an Atomic Show, but I think that the guests did a fine job of taking turns and sharing information. It was a lot of fun to produce.

Your comments are always welcome.

“But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.”

They took the time out of their schedule to provide some details on the current state of the design of the Hyperion Power Module. We were able to delve into some significant detail on the fuel, the coolant system, the reactivity control system, the coolant temperatures, and the steam conditions. We talked a bit about the target markets, the licensing strategy, and the potential for a more instrumented prototype that will enable the company to demonstrate its safety and operating concepts.

This episode has a high geek factor warning, but I think that most of you will learn a lot and enjoy the experience. Your feedback is always welcome.

Topics discussed during our chat include the development of South Korea as a formidable competitor in the world power industry, the almost criminal decision to follow through on an old agreement to shut down the Ignalina nuclear plant in Lithuania, the use of a nuclear powered ship to provide clean water as part of its contribution to the Haiti earthquake relief effort, and some of the political maneuvering that is going on in relation to the President’s budget for fiscal year 2011.

In addition, we talked for a bit about the letter to Dr. John Holdren, the President’s Science Advisor. This letter, signed by a distinguished group of accomplished leaders, engineers and scientists describes the importance of nuclear energy as a tool for solving many of the world’s most pressing problems.

I made contact with Rick Turk, the engineering project manager for the effort to obtain a US Nuclear Regulatory Commission design certification for the Combustion Engineering System 80+, which is an ancestor of the current APR-1400. On December 29, 2009, Rick Turk, Dan Yurman and I chatted about the evolution of the APR-1400 and the way that South Korea has worked to develop its capacity as a nuclear power plant supplier capable of winning a competitively bid $20-40 billion project.

During the interview, Dr. Feltus mentioned a few web sites. Here are some of the links that will help you find what she was discussing.

News Release Dated November 17, 2009 – Advanced nuclear fuel sets global performance record

Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy

She also mentioned a “radar plot” of fuel attributes that is being used to brief and describe how the characteristics of the fuel compare to previous experience. The below graphic is what she was talking about.

I also thought that the below slide from her presentation would help you visualize some of the test systems and assembly devices that she described.

Lisa Stiles, Margaret Harding, John Wheeler and Dan Yurman together have nearly 100 years of experience in various aspects of nuclear technology and the nuclear power industry. Add in my 28+ years and you get a pretty experienced group sharing their impressions about one of the more positive and exciting ANS meetings for quite some time.

Watching the Nuclear Renaissance over the past half dozen years or so may have been about as exciting as watching grass grow. However, like growing grass, the natural progression of people recognizing that nuclear fission has serious advantages is happening steadily enough so that if you do not pay attention you will find that the process can overwhelm any attempts to mow it down.

During our conversation we talked about the technology opportunity that brings the group together. They have a vision for a world with abundant, emission free energy supplied by thorium reactors that fully fission a material that is not even in high commercial demand, leaving only relatively short lived fission products behind as a byproduct.

If you want to learn more about the meeting or about the Thorium Energy Alliance, please visit http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com

I caught up with him this morning while he was waiting to be able to check into his hotel in Rome.

As described in the lab’s press release and during our conversation, Sandia’s definition of “right sized” reactors fall into the thermal power output range of 100 to 300 MW, which would produce an electrical power output of about 30-150 MW depending on system thermal efficiency. The cores would be long lived breeders that create a sustaining quantity of new fuel as they operate.

The coolant would be sodium, the primary coolant configuration would be a pool, and the secondary heat engine would be a supercritical CO2 closed Brayton cycle gas turbine.

Tom believes that these systems can be made simple enough to operate in remote areas; they would have no need for refueling equipment, and no need to have any access to the fissile core materials. By making these systems appropriate for export markets, Tom realized that they will also be appropriate for a number of domestic customers, particularly those who have filled out weak spots in their grid configuration through the addition of moderate sized gas turbines.

Comments are welcome.

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Additional reading about Sandia’s right sized reactors

• re505.com – Sandia To Work On “Right Sized” Reactors
• Next Big Future – Sandia Designing Factory Mass Producible Right Sized Reactor
• Ceramic Tech Today – Sandia Announces New Small Fission Reactor Design
• Nuclear Green – The Right Size Reactor and the Human Future

The conversation ranged from thorium, to uranium supplies, to chemistry versus engineering, to the history of Oak Ridge, to the unreality of energy solutions that require continuous cash transfers from the public to the developer.

For more information on the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference, visit http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com

We also had a bit of a discussion about my assertion that <a href=”http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2009/08/nuclear-energy-provides-on-demand-power.html”>nuclear energy is on demand power</a> that can be designed to supply people the power they need wherever they need it. There are several examples of how this has already been proven, we mention how reactors have been operated under the polar ice cap, on the Antarctica continent, under the ice sheet in Greenland, and even in earth orbit.

We discussed a recent Moody’s special report on companies considering new nuclear power plants – not very positive, TVA nuclear plans, small reactors, the DOE semi-decision on a loan guarantee for The American Centrifuge Project proposed by USEC, and Russian energy deals in Turkey.

The topics we discussed included the following:

• History of PBMR as a stand alone company
• Change in technical direction
• Customer focused design efforts
• Licensing challenges for unfamiliar nuclear technology
• Potential for process heat supply market
• Interest from petrochemical industry
• Interest from American company talking about unit volumes in the thousands
• PBMR as a national technical asset for South Africa

Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. PBMR has a unique role in the nuclear industry and might be pointing the way to new sources of revenues and new customers that have never before considered using atomic fission as their heat source.

A couple of weeks ago, Michael had the opportunity to testify in front of a group of Senators on the topic of building new nuclear power plants in the US. He talks about that experience, what he has learned in the industry, the value of his experience as a Marine, and the value that he sees that nuclear energy can contribute to the world’s prosperity while at the same time leaving the world better for his children than it was when he arrived.

I really enjoyed talking with Michael and I hope you enjoy listening to the conversation. Warning – listening to this podcast can be hazardous to your current career satisfaction if you are NOT in the nuclear industry. (Grin)

Other topics discussed during our conversation include:
TMI regulation changes as good for nuclear industry
Engineers as businessmen
Alternative financing for emerging nuclear businesses
Making industry vibrant and respected
Early confusion over anti-nuclear movement, young and inexperienced in recognizing what was going on.
Straightforward guy, did not appreciate the tactics of the other side, engineers tend to be direct and do not try to work an angle
Anti-nuclear attitudes seem to be almost a religion, practitioners will not be convinced otherwise.
It is almost analogous to a conversion from one religion to another to get them to change their mind.
Ownership and passion versus religious fervor.
Story about his attendance at Sierra Club meeting one year after 9-11 – tactics of fear.

People at the table included:
John Wheeler – This Week In Nuclear
Kirk Sorensen – Energy from Thorium
Nick Touran – What is Nuclear?
Rod Adams – The Atomic Show and Atomic Insights
Jess Gehin – Oak Ridge National Laboratory – Nuclear Science and Technology Division

Note: Upon further reflection and discussion, we have decided to produce a new conversation based show at a different meal. This time we are going to try to ensure that Dan Yurman (Idaho Samizdat) will be there. We are targeting tomorrow evening for a better performance.

In Atomic America, Todd Tucker, a Notre Dame history major who spent five years in the US nuclear navy, explores that story in great detail and puts names and descriptions to the three operators on duty that night. He also explains clearly why that event was a one of a kind within the nuclear power programs of the military services and within the US nuclear power industry.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Warning – this podcast is the longest Atomic Show yet at about 105 minutes.

He asked a lot of good, probing questions with an open attitude. Topics include Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., small nuclear power plants, the nuclear renaissance, French nuclear power experiences, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, nuclear waste, hazards of other energy sources, my thoughts on large scale renewable energy systems, and the importance of understanding commercial energy competition.

During the interview I mentioned a local natural gas explosion that injured 8 firefighters and one employee of the Washington Gas Company. Here is a link to more information about that accident – which had more serious effects on the public health than the far more widely publicized Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident.

Explosion a good reminder there are no ‘routine’ calls

It is well known that much of the opposition to nuclear power in the US, Europe, and Australia comes from people who are normally considered to be on the political left. David Walters, a self confessed socialist and long time labor activist has a different point of view. He believes, like I do, that abundant, clean, reliable, atomic energy is a boon for the working class.

Power plants provide good, stable jobs, often at union wage scales. They enable a vibrant local economy and good public infrastructure based on the plant’s addition to the property tax base and the salaries of the workers that get spent in local establishments. They allow generational employment with opportunities for young people to keep living and working in the towns where they grow up if they want to.

Comments always welcome. Please visit The TPN Pledge Drive if you would like to support the network that allows this show to remain independent and not beholden to corporate views.

Here are some links to articles or podcasts discussed during the show.

Democracy Now! Thursday April 9, 2009 With High Unemployment, Carolinas Reel from Economic Crisis. This segment is the entire interview with Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies.

Atomic Insights – Hard to Believe Story About TMI.

We Support Lee – Al Gore, Sr., Alvin Weinberg, Climate, and Al Gore, Jr.

It is important to understand – the president’s call is for a world free from nuclear weapons, not a nuclear-free world. There is an important difference.

This episode of The Atomic Show is my first attempt at an enhanced podcast using chapter markers and trying to add a slide presentation. The constraints of the file format truncates the edges of the slides, but I think you will get the gist of what they are trying to show. Here is a link to the presentation in PDF format (warning – it is a 12.4 MB file), just in case you are interested in seeing the full size slides.

As always, feedback and constructive criticism is welcome. Of course, if you have something nasty to say, feel free to add that as well – I can always used the delete button if necessary.

Promised link to Australia Broadcast Corporation (ABC) Catalyst program about China’s HTR-10

NUCLEAR CHINA (22/02/2007)

However, it was a learning experience where every single person involved walked away – no one died or was even injured as a result of the event. There was a bankruptcy and a lot of financial distress in the industry as a number of plants under construction had to undergo numerous design changes and as a number of operating plants had to prove themselves all over again.

In this episode, I discuss some of my thoughts about what TMI meant to the industry and I get into another virtual debate with a man who insists that there were deaths, though he cannot point to any bodies or name any names. In the fantasy world of Harvey Wasserman, repetition, denial and insistence on ignoring countless studies and considered legal opinions is enough to overcome reality.

You get to decide for yourself, but I hope that this show will point out some of the important items to think about.

Here are the promised links:

NRC Fact Sheet on Three Mile Island

PBS: Frontline The Judge’s Decision

American Council on Science and Health Report – Nuclear Energy and Health, And the Benefits of Low-Dose Radiation Hormesis

A Review of the Source Term and Dose Estimation for the Three Mile Island Accident

I will add some more notes to this post later today, but now it is time to get ready for my day job.

The forcing function for holding the debate on that date was the fact that the Senate has included an additional authorization for $50 billion in loan guarantees for clean energy as part of the stimulus package. Though all forms of low emission energy can qualify, the fear among the virulent anti-nukes like Harvey Wasserman and the O’Connor family sponsored Texans for a Sound Energy Policy Alliance is that the vast majority of the loan guarantee authority will be captured by the nuclear power industry.

That is a reasonable evaluation of the current situation. After all, utility companies interested in building new nuclear power plants already have $122 Billion in shovel ready projects waiting in line for loan guarantees. The project applications were turned in several months ago and are being ranked and evaluated by the Department of Energy.

During the debate, Wasserman focused on telling lies about nuclear power plant insurance, about the risk of living and working near a plant, and about the expense associated with recycling used nuclear fuel. He also attempted to attract some strange bedfellows from conservative groups like Cato by focusing on what he called the market failure of nuclear power.

Moore admitted that he had been totally wrong in his youth by not recognizing the difference between nuclear weapons and beneficial uses of nuclear technology. He talked about the benefits of clean, reliable nuclear power that can reduce the need to burn coal, about the myth that we do not know what to do with the waste, and also wondered why Wasserman, a man with no history of love for the free market, is so certain that government should not be involved in electricity supply enterprises.

Of course, you can view the full debate uninterrupted at the Democracy Now! web site: Should the Economic Stimulus Bill Include Billions in Loan Guarantees? but I think this interrupted version adds some entertainment and informational value. I hope you agree and come to the site to share your thoughts.

In addition, please do make the effort to contact your senator and congressman to let them know how you feel about loan guarantees. (If you do not like them, that’s okay. I would be interested in hearing why or why not.)

One more thing – Harvey Wasserman is still an idiot.

This week I spent a several hours listening to the first hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the current congressional session. Former Vice President Al Gore, the founder of an organization called Alliance for Climate Protection was the only witness during the 2 hour and 50 minute hearing. Watching that hearing, no one would ever know that the former VP is also a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with significant financial interests in the very topic of conversation – non-nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel energy power production.

This is a matter of collegial privilege offered to a very few.

After watching the hearing and producing a rather extensive blog post about the hearing for Atomic Insights, I happened to choose to listen to NPR Environment Podcast for January 29, 2009. There was an amusing juxtaposition of stories; the first one talked about Gore’s visit to Capitol Hill, the second one was an interview with Ray Lane, also a partner in KPCB, about the need for federal assistance to the alternative energy industry in the fact of the global economic crisis.

None of the NPR correspondents made the connection between Gore and Lane.

It was also amusing to hear Gore explaining to Senator Corker and Senator Isakson, two strong nuclear advocates and former independent businessmen, why he talks down the potential for nuclear power as a tool in the fight to save human civilization against the twin threats of climate change and fossil fuel addiction.

I know that this might sound like I am picking on the former VP, but if I am, it is not because I am on a different political team. I happen to agree with some of the things that he says and stands for.

I just think that he should be more open about his financial interests in ensuring that climate change is recognized as a crisis big enough to force the taxpayers to subsidize the very companies into which he is putting his “private risk capital”. At the same time, I think he needs to do a better job of explaining why the crisis is not big enough to allow the expansion of a proven technology that supplies massive quantities of emission free power already.

His claim is that fission either costs too much or presents too big of a risk of “proliferation” means that he puts those factors higher on the priority list than saving human society from choking on deadly fossil fuel waste.

My interpretation is that fission simply presents too big of a risk to the success of his investments in alternative forms of energy production. None of the projects that KPCB is financing in alternative energy could compete without both a direct boost from the government and unreasonable handcuffs on competitive energy source from that same government.

Update posted Feb 2, 2009 at 0641: Ausra is one of the companies that KPCB has funded. During the hearing, John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee specifically mentioned that company, its Las Vegas, NV location and its expansion plans, stating that it was “the future”. I just ran across an article about the company in the San Jose Mercury News dated January 29, 2009, the day after the hearing took place. Here is a quote:

Today, the Palo Alto company says it has responded to the financial crisis by downsizing its goals and now plans to make smaller energy-generation plants and to sell its technology and equipment to utilities and other companies. Ausra’s chief executive said he now doubts the viability of the large-scale solar-thermal segment.

“What a lot of people thought when they went out and signed 500- or 900-megawatt power-purchase agreements was that it was easy to go from a 1-megawatt demo plant to a 900-megawatt project,” said Robert Fishman, Ausra’s chairman, president and CEO. “That’s simply not reality. The finance market will not support it.”

You can also read more about the hearing over at Atomic Insights.

On Sunday January 25, 2009, I invited three of the most active pro-nuclear bloggers for a chat about the state of the nuclear industry, clean atomic energy versus “clean” coal, renewable portfolio standards, effects of the current economic crisis.

Charles Barton blogs at Nuclear Green and Energy from Thorium
John Wheeler produces This Week In Nuclear Podcast
Kirk Sorensen blogs at Energy from Thorium

In addition to the planned topics, we also spent some time talking about the effects of the laws of supply and demand, the difference in economic computations between competitive electricity suppliers and monopoly utility companies, and the reasons why restarting Zion might make sense (or not.)

Hope you enjoy the show.

On January 20, 2009 Rod Adams spoke with Alexandra Prokopenko to get a local view of the effects on Eastern Europe of the Ukraine/Russia natural gas supply dispute. Alexandra is a citizen of Belarus who currently lives and works in Sweden. Her husband is living in Kiev, Ukraine and she speaks to him each day. Alexandra is a journalism instructor, writes an energy focused blog and learned to speak Swedish during her multi-year evacuation from the Chernobyl area as a 4 year old.

In other words, she has a very interesting perspective that I find fascinating.

During this discussion, we talked about Russian gas price ambitions, explanations for the EU’s policy on nuclear power plants owned by former members of the “Eastern Bloc”, energy supply security, the thirst for independence and even a bit about the European reaction to the inauguration of a new US president – since our discussion took place just hours after President Obama took office.

I will apologize in advance if some of the conversation sounds a bit disjointed. I once again forgot my nuke training and neglected to use a checklist when setting up to record our discussion. I forgot to tell WireTap to record both the system audio and the incoming mike, so I had a great recording of what Alexandra said to me, but dead silence on what I said to her to cause her responses.

Oh well – sometimes it is hard to get good help.

I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Chu and for his ordered way of thinking, but I do have some concerns that he is too focused on a scientific approach to problem solving rather than an engineering one.

Let me explain. Though many people mentally link science and engineering, there is a fundamental difference in philosophy between the practitioners of the two important fields. Scientists like to study and find answers to questions that no one has yet solved. Engineers like to design and make things using the knowledge they can find in textbooks, graphs and reference material along with the practical knowledge that they can gain from actually engaging in their craft.

They know that they do not have a perfect knowledge of the universe, but they also know that their knowledge is good enough to create many amazing things. If they find a hard roadblock during the creation process, they are reasonably confident that they will find a way around the obstacle. Both science and engineering are important disciplines, but there is a time and a place for each to have primary influence. When it comes to addressing the world’s energy, climate and water supply challenges, there is no doubt that it is mainly an engineering problem, not a science project.

Unfortunately, Dr. Chu’s approach to the problem seems more influenced by his scientific bent than informed by a strong understanding of what is possible TODAY. His comments during the hearing lead me to believe that he does not yet have a good grasp of the approach needed to empower the people who ALREADY know how to reduce pollution, make energy available and affordable, and who know how to use that energy to reduce supply challenges for other important commodities like water and food.

As you listen to the Senators’ questions, Dr. Chu’s response and my interspersed commentary, you will realize just why I have more concerns about the department’s priorities and initial actions than does the Nuclear Energy Institute. There are a number of things we could be doing now, that do not necessarily involve a great deal of expenditure by the American taxpayers to simply encourage and enable proceeding with due haste to building and operating a new generation of devices that use fission instead of chemical combustion to provide an almost unlimited amount of emission free, reliable, energy.

Fission is not just an option, it is an imperative that has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of everyone on the planet – except those who have been unable to read the handwriting on the wall and continue to depend on selling fossil fuels at elevated prices to enable them to remain powerful and secure.

I know this is a minority view that would not be popular in the Senate committee with all of its competing interests – that is why I am a writer, a podcaster and an analyst, not a politician.

During the show, we talked a bit about an article that I wrote for Atomic Insights more than a decade ago titled Light Water Breeder Reactor: Adapting a Proven System and I promised that I would insert a link to that article in the show notes.

I find myself having a bit of a challenge summarizing a conversation that lasted for nearly an hour and a half and covered a lot of ground. Please listen to the show and let me know what you think.

Additional Reading

David Walters on Daily Kos – Toward a Thorium Economy

As a progressive thinker who cares deeply about human suffering and looks for ways to raise the living standards of the underdog, I frequently feel the need to wave my hands to try to tell the established “Progressives” that they need to reevaluate their biases about the future of nuclear power. Democracy Now! is one of the more thought provoking shows available on a number of topics, but the producers, guests and host have a blind spot when it comes to nuclear energy applications.

Last week, Amy Goodman asked Andrew Revkin who writes the Dot Earth blog for the New York Times, for his opinion about President-elect Obama’s choice of Steven Chu as his nominee for the Secretary of Energy. Andrew had some favorable comments, but was not able or willing to discuss Dr. Chu’s long time stance favoring the continued use and development of nuclear energy.

Amy also talked with Bill McKibben, who has been writing about environmental and progressive topics for more than 25 years. McKibben praised James Hansen as the greatest climate scientist in the US. Bill either is unaware or simply prefers to ignore the fact that James Hansen has recently written an open letter to President-elect Obama describing a plan for responding to the hazard of climate change through technical measures that include a large portion of nuclear power, especially 4th generation nuclear power plants that enable fuel recycle.

I added my thoughts and knowledge about the pro-nuclear positions of both scientists, just in case there are any Progressives that listen to both Democracy Now! and The Atomic Show. My hope is to open dialog and conversation that can overcome established bias. People like Goodman, Revkin and McKibben pride themselves on their critical thinking skills; it is time to challenge them in an area that might make them uncomfortable. They would be excellent spokesmen if, after full discussion and expanded thinking they recognized that they had been misled or misinformed over the years.

Clinton Bastin is an atomic pioneer who worked on used fuel recycling for most of his 42 year career. He recently published We Need to Reprocess Spent Nuclear Fuel, and We Can Do It Safely, At Reasonable Cost (924 kB PDF). After I read that detailed opinion piece, with its critique of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) and its comparisons between projects that have worked consistently with those that have not, I got in touch and began an email dialog.

After several exchanges, I had to get Clinton on the show to share some of his vast knowledge. It is a true privilege to be able to talk with a pioneer in an industry that has been as important to the world as atomic fission; especially in an specialized area that has gained considerable political attention.

As a teaser, I want to share an recent op-ed that Clinton wrote and submitted to the New York Times. It was not published there, but these days being overlooked by the major media does not mean that the voice or the opinion is silenced.

As a long-time reader of The New York Times, chemical engineer and nuclear scientist for the Department of Energy and its predecessors for 42 years, and President of a DOE Headquarters Employees’ Union from 1983 through 1996, I am dismayed that The Times never explains to its readers that the DOE:

● has spent about one trillion dollars and failed to address the energy challenges that were the reason for its creation;

● lost the ability to produce nuclear materials needed for medicine, space exploration, defense, industry, and research;

● suppressed information that should have been used to correct false allegations of dangers of radioactive waste stored at DOE sites in order to obtain many billions of dollars for so-called “cleanup” of the wastes which has been simply to remove it from where it is safely stored to other locations which resulted in much more danger and radiation exposure to humans than if nothing had been done;

● helped maintain a 34-year moratorium on new nuclear power plants, our safest, least polluting and potentially most abundant energy source;

● failed to provide full and accurate information to Americans about energy and nuclear technology;

● ignores the laws of thermodynamics, which is the science concerned with the relationship and conversion of heat to mechanical (usable) energy or work, in its development of usable energy with low-temperature energy sources such as geothermal, solar, tidal and wind;

● continues to fund expensive experiments for development of controlled nuclear fusion on Earth, for which there is no scientific basis;

● exaggerates threats of nuclear weapons proliferation from fully safeguarded nuclear power programs in other nations;

● interacts with its national laboratories in a manner virtually identical to that of the former Soviet Union Ministry of Atomic Energy with its Institutes; and

● has (with the help of The Times) dismissed all of the competent, experienced corporations that managed safe and successful nuclear programs for the Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission.

During the Administration of President Bill Clinton, my major effort as union president was to work as partner with Energy Secretary :Hazel O’Leary, Deputy Secretary Bill White and other DOE leaders for major downsizing of the DOE in a manner that would minimize adverse impact on employees.

The downsizing, planned and projected to extend well into this century, was reversed by the Administration of President George W. Bush.

Clinton Bastin
Avondale Estates, GA

During our interview, Clinton stated that during the 20 years that he worked at the Department of Energy (formed in 1978 from the rubble of the Energy Research and Development Agency), the organization did not accomplish anything of real value.

More and more people who are sincerely concerned about the impact that human activity is making on the planet are recognizing that nuclear fission has a role to play in our future energy supplies. Some even believe that it has reached a state of art where it can save the planet.

Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur, philanthropist and respected member of the business and social community in Silicon Valley was sure that the US could get by without nuclear fission power. In August 2008, he learned about the Integral Fast Reactor and has immersed himself in learning more.

Last week, he published an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News titled How a 24-year-old technology can save the planet. Now, it is certainly possible for experts in the field to take issue with some of the technical details in Steve’s commentary, but just remember, he only started really studying the field a few months ago.

In my opinion, he has progressed rather well. That MIT education (Bachelor’s and Master’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) has come in handy. With friends like Steve Kirsch, fission advocates can make some real progress.

Joe Shuster has founded or co-founded 8 companies in his 50 year career in engineering, consulting and manufacturing. His retirement project is to share what he has learned during a focused research effort to figure out how to solve the world’s energy, climate and water challenges.

His book, Beyond Fossil Fools: Roadmap to Energy Independence by 2040, is a clear eyed analytical approach to computing the scale of the problem, the possible approaches for solving the problem and his computation of the best way to minimize all of the challenges associated with continuing to enable an abundant lifestyle for human beings.

He has pledged that any proceeds from the book will be invested into energy research, he is spending 3-5 days per week talking with groups, schools, and conferences, and he is writing additional op-ed pieces in order to share his conclusion that the world needs to develop and expand the use of nuclear fission energy NOW. He believes that wind and solar have a role to play, but that they are destined to be bit players in the unfolding drama.

I recently received a review copy of John Rubino’s Clean Energy: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom. I almost did not read the book after reading the first few pages where John disqualifies nuclear power as a green investment, but I decided it would be worthwhile to dig a little deeper.

Though I do not agree with everything in the book and I found a lot of nuggets that stimulated thought. I also found myself wishing that I had been able to read the book back in December of 2007 when I was smugly confident that I had picked a winning strategy since I did not have a dime invested in either real estate or financial stocks. If I had read John’s chapter about how the weakness in those sectors could spread through the economy, my portfolio would be in much better shape now than it is.

During our conversation, John had much more positive things to say about nuclear power than I expected.

I recommend that you add Greenstockinvesting.com to your investment reading list.

Please consider a donation to The Podcast Network as part of your seasonal giving plans. The technical infrastructure and support provided by the network are making an important contribution to the world of independent thought and commentary. You can find out more about how to donate by visiting the TPN Pledge Drive page.

Ted Rockwell is a nuclear industry pioneer. He served as Admiral Rickover’s Technical Director during the formative years of the Navy Nuclear Power Program. He wrote the book on reactor shielding design and has continued to write and speak ever since.

The cover of the November 2008 issue of Nuclear News, the monthly publication from the American Nuclear Society, featured Ted’s opinion piece titled “Nuclear energy: Not a Faustian bargain, but a near-perfect providential gift”. In that article, Ted tells nuclear professionals that they are not so special after all – their industry is much safer than almost any other industry. The materials that they handle do not pose unique hazards, they are simply materials that can cause harm if not properly handled.

If that information leaks out, it could put a number of researchers at risk of losing their grants; after all, even the generous US government might begin to wonder why they are spending so much to “solve” a problem that may not exist in the first place.

Kelly Taylor and Robert Margolis, two long time nuclear professionals join in the conversation. I think you will find a lot of food for thought here.

More about Ted:

Ted Rockwell was honored twice during the fall of 2008 for his contributions to technology and to literature. On September 4, 2008, in London, the World Nuclear Association (WNA) gave him a Pioneer’s Award for “Distinguished Contribution to the Peaceful Worldwide Use of Nuclear Energy.” Former Ambassador John Ritch, Director General of the WNA, praised Rockwell’s “immensely valuable role in building the foundations and future of nuclear power.”

On October 20, Rockwell’s book, “The Virtual Librarian: A Tale of Alternative Realities,” was chosen as an award-winning finalist in the Visionary Fiction category of the National Best Books 2008 Awards, sponsored by USA Book News. Publishers competing for this award ran the gamut from mainstreamers like Simon & Schuster, Tarcher/Penguin, HarperCollins, Hyperion, St. Martin’s, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley, to hundreds of independents.

Dan Yurman and I had a great time on November 21 talking about a number of different nuclear news items including a large new power plant deal in India for Russian reactors, Dan’s first hand report of a GNEP meeting held in Idaho Falls, Kentucky’s energy plan that includes nuclear power and coal to liquids, RWE’s interest in new nuclear plants for the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, and Vermont Yankee controversies.

Here are some links that you might find useful if you want to do more research on the topics covered:

• Lithuania nuclear shutdown information
• Gerhard Schroeder’s Sellout
• Gerhard Schroeder wikipedia page
• Gerhard Schroeder’s Answers.com biography
• Old King Coal’s Comeback in Scotland
• RWE nuclear expansion projects
• Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear’s energy plans
• LiquidCoal
• International Herald Tribune – NRG rejects Exelon takeover bid
• Vermont Yankee Protest clears Public Service Board offices
• Feasibility study for new nuclear power plant in New Brunswick

Please consider carefully the TPN pledge drive and give generously to help support continued availability of independent media.

Since March of 2006, a loosely connected team of people has been working with available time to provide you with the best shows we know how to produce about a topic that is very important to us. As the host of the show, I have received a lot of encouragement, attaboys, and other psychic income that helps to make the effort worth while.

I have also had some minor successes in finding paid advertisers to defray any of the actual costs that I incur to travel to meetings, purchase equipment etc. In short, I am pleased with the returns that I currently get from The Atomic Show and hope to keep producing it for a long time to come.

HOWEVER, there has been a rather unsung hero in this story. Cameron Reilly, the founder and sole owner of The Podcast Network, has put his heart and sole into providing an excellent and reliable platform for The Atomic Show and all of the rest of the great shows on The Podcast Network. His ride in the past four years has not been an easy one – he has focused on establishing a truly independent media company that can speak and write on any topic of interest to the host. That kind of media company is vital in today’s world of ever consolidating companies and increasingly homogenized shows.

It is a challenge – sponsorships are more difficult to obtain for narrowly focused niche shows that have people with intense interest in the topic. Most consumer companies want to reach broad audiences and many focused companies do not do much advertising.

I would appreciate it very much if you would read the following and impulsively consider a donation to the network that helps to keep The Atomic Show and other niche market shows alive. If you want to continue listening to shows that cover topics that are not currently “popular”, please give generously.

Thank you for all of your emails, comments, questions, and contributions. For those of you who continue to help where you can (Kelly, Robert, Shane, John, Ted, Joe, Dan, Charles, Kirk, Reese) a special thanks and holiday wishes.

Rod Adams
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast

_____________________________________________________________________________

Dear TPN listeners, viewers and friends,

You know that we spend a LOT of time producing our shows for you.

And as we aren’t making money out of advertising, we’d like to ask for your support to help us keep TPN running. We have real costs in IT support, hardware, bandwidth, etc., as well as our time and effort. For the last four years, we’ve covered these costs ourselves. Outside a small amount of advertising that we have run, the majority of TPN’s costs have been covered by myself and the TPN hosts have donated their time.

Now, we know that paying for online content is probably new to some of you. You are used to getting it for free.

However, we do ask you to think about the idea of the people funding their own media. We all know that if corporate advertising is the main source of funding for the media, it influences the kinds of media that is produced and the messages they carry. We don’t want that kind of media to be the only kind out there. We want an independent media, run by the people and for the people.

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Founder, The Podcast Network

Kelly Taylor and I got together for a Sunday evening chat to discuss President-elect Obama’s nuclear energy policies and their implications for the nuclear industry’s growth and development. We also talked about the joint venture to manufacture large nuclear power plant components between Areva and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding, and about the long term implications of Warren Buffett’s purchase of Constellation Energy.

Hope you enjoy the show. Comments are always welcome, though getting more and more rare. Go ahead, step up and make a liar out of me. :-)

William Tucker has been writing about energy issues for decades. He first started following the nuclear energy controversy in the mid 1970s when he reviewed Amory Lovins’s book about Soft Energy.

He has now written his own book to explain why he believes that Lovins, Al Gore and other mainstream environmentalists are dead wrong to dismiss or minimize the potential of nuclear energy to meet their desire for a cleaner, less carbon intensive world.

We chatted about his book, responses he has received during his efforts to promote the book, and about America’s energy future. Hope you enjoy the conversation.

You can find Terrestrial Energy on Amazon.com.

Dan Yurman, who produces the excellent blog titled Idaho Samizdat visited the Atomic Show for a discussion about the exciting world of nuclear power developments. We talked for well over an hour and covered projects in locations ranging from Florida to Idaho, Vermont to India, Utah to Brazil, and Finland to Texas. Dan is a great source of detailed information that is difficult to find if you are not fully engaged in the industry.

Stick it through to the very end and you will find out just what Samizdat means.

Dan is going to be participating in a web seminar with some heavy hitters – Jim Rogers of Duke Energy and Aston Poole from Morgan Stanley – in a couple of weeks. If you can possibly fit it into your schedule, I highly recommend listening in.

If you want to learn more about nuclear energy careers, a great place to start is to visit Entergy at nuclearenergycareers.com

Here is the mission of Energize America as found on the organization’s web site:

EnergizeAmerica is a comprehensive and compelling 20-point plan developed by informed citizen activists to wean the U.S. from its fossil fuel addiction and provide the U.S. with Energy Security by 2020, and Energy Freedom by 2040.

Energize America seeks to Make the Right Choice the Easy Choice as we move toward an Energy Smart culture.

One of the components of the proposed energy plan left me wondering a bit about the real goals and missions – here is what the plan says about nuclear power:

Nuclear
Nuclear power is experiencing a political resurgence of sorts, and several new plants are in various
stages of planning. However, the nuclear industry enjoys huge subsidies that shield the industry from nuclear disaster liability. The nuclear industry and our government have also failed for decades to solve the nuclear waste problem. These issues must be addressed before nuclear power is more widely used.

I think you will find the discussion lively, challenging and worth the effort it takes to listen. Kelly did a bang up job of asking probing questions.

I would be interested in your responses.

John Kotek, Executive Director, American Council on Global Nuclear Competitiveness and I chatted for a while about the Council’s recently released state by state study of the potential job creation in the coming Nuclear Renaissance.

If you are interested in learning more about job opportunities at Entergy, one of the leading nuclear power operators in the United States, visit nuclearenergycareers.com. There you can learn about a company that not only operates a well respected fleet of nuclear plants, but also offers a traditional pension plan, great health benefits, competitive starting and continuing salaries and a supportive working environment. In addition, they are leaning forward and looking at technologies like high temperature gas reactors, one of my favorite nuclear power concepts.

On September 29, 2008 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) hosted the 4th International Topical Meeting on High Temperature Reactor Technology. Following the plenary session, there was a press conference attended by a grand total of three members of the press plus some additional interested meeting attendees.

Though the press was lightly represented, there were three high level leaders in the high temperature gas reactor field ready and willing to answer questions. Regis Matzie is a Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Westinghouse Electric Company and also served as the co-chairman of the HTR 2008 conference. Linden Blue is the vice chairman of General Atomics, and John Grossenbacher is the Director of the Idaho National Laboratory, the leading federal integrator for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) project.

I had the opportunity to ask some probing questions and to listen to others in the press ask additional questions about markets, licensing challenges and building plans. Please let me know what you think about the format and the content of this episode of The Atomic Show since it is a bit different from most of the rest.

If you want to find out more about jobs in the nuclear field, you can start by visiting nuclearenergycareers.com. That visit might also help keep The Atomic Show coming to you on our current nearly regular basis.

You can find more information about Idaho National Laboratory’s projects at http://www.inl.gov

INL also has a YouTube site at http://www.youtube.com/user/IdahoNationalLab. Here is one of the videos that you can find there:

More information about NGNP is available at http://www.nextgenerationnuclearplant.com/

Charlie Porter had a nice little horse farm in northwest Missouri. He now really wants to sell that farm and move away because his neighbors are driving him crazy. Those neighbors are 6 or 7 large wind turbines located about half a mile from his home. They provide an unpredictable background noise, sometimes screech to a halt, and produce annoying shadows, especially in the early morning or late evening.

Roger Hale is a retired Army mechanic living in North Carolina on a small farm near the Virginia border off of I-85. He had a remarkable career, and, as he says, he could tell stories for weeks about his time with the First Arctic Task Force in Greenland. Since none of us have weeks of time available, we limited our conversation to talking about the power supplies at the various base camps.

When Roger first arrived in Greenland, the camps all got their power from diesel generators supplied with fuel constantly being haul in and stored in “extremely large storage tanks.” (Roger’s words.) In October 1958, the US Army Corps of Engineers wrote up specifications for a pre-fabricated, transportable nuclear power plant and requested bids from two pre-screened companies – ALCO (formerly known as American Locomotive Company) and Martin. The companies submitted bids in December and the Army awarded the contract to ALCO in January 1959.

By July 28, 1960, the pre-fabricated and tested plant arrived in Thule, Greenland. On November 12, 1960 the PM-2A was providing power and heat to Camp Century, a small base in one of the most remote places inhabited by human beings. (Source for dates The Army’s Nuclear Power Program: The Evolution of a Support Agency by Lawrence H. Suid, Greenwood Press 1990.)

Listen to Charlie and Roger and think about the implications of their stories in a world dependent on fossil fuel energy sources that spew dangerous waste gases and come from increasingly more difficult to access reservoirs. The album art for this episode is a photo of the Ice Chapel that Roger described so vividly.

For more information on nuclear energy careers with Entergy, visit nuclearenergycareers.com

Press release with information about Entergy’s recent application for a combined construction and operating license.

Related Links

Camp TUTO and Camp Century 1955-1958

Camp TUTO and Camp Century 1964, 65, 66

Here is another video that details some of the mechanical and business risks associated with wind energy developments. This is not a spectacular failure, but one where a manufacturing or engineering problem has resulted in a lengthy shutdown and a failure to produce electricity.

I recently posted a blog on Atomic Insights about nuclear fuel recycling that broke a record for the number of comments received. Normally, the people that hang out at Atomic Insights are a select few who have accepted the notion that nuclear fission has useful capabilities, but there were plenty of naysayers involved in that conversation.

Apparently, discussing the possibility of nuclear fuel recycling operations stirs up the opposition. Of course, their preferred term is “reprocessing” and they continue to point to characteristics of processes that were developed in the 1950s to explain their opposition. From a purely technological point of view, that is like saying you do not favor the use of computers because the Motorola 6809 is not very reliable. (For the non-geeks in the crowd, the Motorola 6809 was the brains behind the TRS-80, one of the very first personal computers in the mass market.)

During this episode of The Atomic Show, NNadir and I talk about the incredible energy store that is already mined and above ground in the form of used nuclear fuel and the tailings from uranium enrichment operations. We also talk about the other valuable materials – outside of fissile and fertile isotopes – that are found in used nuclear fuel.

Materials like the noble metals of ruthenium, rhodium, and palladium are extremely rare in the natural world, but they could be extracted in ton quantities from the residues of nuclear fission. Isotopes like strontium and cesium have proven uses in nuclear batteries and as irradiation sources. Gold, silver and platinum are famously valuable and are also produced in the amazing alchemy called fission.

Have a listen.

If you want to learn more about careers in nuclear energy, please visit nuclearenergycareers.com.

One of our show sponsors is by Entergy Nuclear. (They take no responsibility for any of the comments by the show host or the guests.)

Imagine how cool it would be to work for a traditional utility company far sighted enough to invest advertising dollars in the Atomic Show Podcast!

Hans and Mary Lou Gougar are two of my favorite nuclear specialists. They are both currently living and working in South Africa as part of the large international team developing the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). Hans is doing safety and pebble flow analysis while Mary Lou is working on methods of treating and recycling graphite.

They have visited with me on The Atomic Show before ( The Atomic Show #094 – Hans and Mary Lou Gougar (with Charlie and Betty) – a nuclear family living in South Africa) and have returned to provide an update on their respective research projects and on the challenges and rewards of living and working abroad.

We talked about recycling graphite from legacy reactors like Magnox, THTR, French gas-graphite systems, and various Russian programs. We talked about modeling the flow of pebbles through a core, about dust accumulation and carbon-14 production. It was a great conversation full of enough details for even the most geeky of the geeks. (I just wish that Shane could have participated!)

During the show, I promised to share contact information for Hans for anyone interested in learning more about working on PBMR. You can reach him via email at Hans.Gougar(at symbol)pbmr.co.za.

For those of you who are interested in domestic opportunities in the nuclear industry, you can find out more information at nuclearenergycareers.com

The following gets a bit off topic for The Atomic Show, but I wanted to write it down somewhere.

During episode 105, I promised to share a link from Nader.org to a 1983 article that promotes Breed Corporation’s air bag system.

New Airbag Developed, at Lower Cost, for Crash Protection – Dated Friday, November 18, 1983

Here is how this story got mixed up in a discussion about the PBMR.

Hans and I were talking a bit about the tension between the scientists and engineers working on PBMR and the business people that want to get the product “out the door” so it can begin generating electricity. Until that happens, there is no return on the large investment of time and money from Eskom and the South African taxpayers.

Hans mentioned that the engineers typically wanted to ensure that they satisfied the regulators and then moved on, while the scientists often got distracted by “interesting” work leading to lots of new paths of study.

The conversation turned to a comparison to automobile air bags, which brought me to a mention of Breed Technologies. I had some personal familiarity with the company from my time as the General Manager of a small manufacturing enterprise on the west coast of Florida. Breed was one of the largest manufacturing companies in the area. I met several people over the years doing business there who were intimately familiar with the story of how Breed Technologies grew rapidly from a small transplant company from “up north”.

Allen Breed was a fine engineer who had put his expertise in designing weapons fuses and explosives to use in a unique concept for an automobile air bag system. He knocked on doors for years without much success. My contacts indicated that the key factor in the company’s success was getting government regulations put into place that encouraged and later required manufacturers to install the equipment.

What I did not know when I mentioned Breed during the conversation with the Gougars was just how relevant that story is to the story of nuclear power. I learned that during some fascinating Googling during the show editing and notes preparation. (I know – I have trouble focusing on a single topic at times. Personality flaw.)

The link between nuclear power and air bags is the fact that a participant in Allen Breed’s successful effort to promote his “safety improvement” invention was a Ralph Nader organization.

For my cynical mind, the air bag story is a very interesting chain-of-events case study. It shows how an engineering company with an idea that they cannot sell in the normal way enlisted the help of activists to make it mandatory equipment. Breed Technologies owed a good deal of its business success to Nader’s skills in agitating for federal regulations.

In other words, there is money to be made from pressure group activism and not all of the money goes to the lawyers. I cannot help but assume that safety invention promoters know the importance of this marketing technique and invest time and money in trying to ensure its success.

Here are some additional links:

• BREED Technologies, Inc. Loses Founder, Allen K. Breed
• History of Key Safety Systems, Inc (the current name of the company that was originally Breed Technologies)

Just in case you do not follow the links and read the articles, here is a brief summary:

Breed Technologies was a spin off from the Breed Corporation that was promoted in the Nader article focusing on air bag systems. It sold products to both Ford and Chrysler and eventually to all new cars. The company raised more than $60 million in a 1992 IPO. By 1997, when Allen Breed retired as Chairman and CEO, the company had annual sales in excess of half a billion dollars. The company was taken private by Carlyle Management Group – a company owned by people firmly entrenched in the power elite of the US – in 2003. It is now part of a billion dollar company focused on automobile safety equipment.

Who says that the efforts of activists and regulators benefit just leftist trial lawyers?

Hyperion Power Generation was formed in 2007 to commercialize a nuclear reactor technology first developed by Otis G. (Pete) Peterson of Los Alamos National Laboratory and patented under US Patent number 2004/0062340 A1.

One of the design criteria driving Peterson was a requirement that the system should be able to fit on a standard over-the-road flat bed truck, a criteria that drove the reactor core design, the shielding design and the system power output.

The Hyperion Power Module is described by company literature as being about the size of a deep hot tub and will produce approximately 70 MW of thermal power. As you will learn if you listen to the interview, the company expects that the cost per unit heat once the systems are in production will be approximately $3 per million BTU – anywhere in the world. Assuming a 90% capacity factor, that leads to an annualized cost of $5.6 million US dollars.

For comparison, the current price of natural gas delivered via pipeline in the US is approximately $8 per million BTU while the cost of fuel oil delivered to remote areas via trucks can be as high as $40 per million BTU assuming that no one is shooting at the trucks. If they are, the cost can really skyrocket.

John and I had a chat that I think you will find very interesting.

If you are interested in pursuing opportunities for employment in the nuclear industry, a good place to start is nuclearenergycareers.com. There, you will learn more about Entergy, one of the more visionary nuclear power plant owner/operators in the US.

Additional information

• Hyperion Announces First Customer For Small Nuclear Reactor
• NuScale Power and Hyperion Power Generation – Nuclear Power Systems That Are Not “Extra Large”
• Hyperion Power Generation announces receipt of its first Letter of Intent (to purchase)

Kelly Taylor, Joe Montague and I meet to chat about PBMR, nuclear events and nuclear industry history. Hope you enjoy the show.

If you want to find out more about careers in the nuclear industry, please visit nuclearenergycareers.com.

Kelly Taylor, Robert Margolis and I got together on August 17, 2008 to discuss the events of the week in nuclear energy. Kelly and Robert had been involved in an interesting discussion with people from itsgettinghotinhere.org regarding the expansion of Dominion Power’s North Anna facility.

I reported on my recent trip to Calvert County where Unistar Nuclear is planning Calvert Cliffs Unit III, and we talked about some of the benefits that result to local communities when a “costly” nuclear plant gets constructed in their backyard.

When a utility or generating company pays billions of dollars to build a new nuclear plant the money goes somewhere; much of it goes into the paychecks of the people constructing and later operating the plant. When the plant begins producing power, that displaces power generated by burning fossil fuels. Not only are fossil fuels dirtier than fission, but the money spent to buy them generally goes someplace far from where the fuel gets burned and the emissions get released.

Since fossil fuel companies have pared down their work forces, a lot of the money ends up concentrating in the hands of a small number of wealthy individuals.

As usual, our conversation veered into several tangentially related topics. Hope you enjoy the show. Remember, if you want to learn more about opportunities offered by Energy, a sponsor of The Atomic Show, please visit them at nuclearenergycareers.com.

Show 101 is a bit longer than normal, but I think you will want to listen carefully to every word. I invited some innovative thinkers and observers of the nuclear scene to discuss small nuclear power plants and their potential impact on the energy market.

Kirk Sorensen blogs at Energy from Thorium and is nearly finished with his MS in Nuclear Engineering.

Charles Barton blogs at Energy from Thorium and Nuclear Green.

Dan Yurman blogs at Idaho Samizdat: Nuke Notes and also writes for Fuel Cycle Week.

Our conversation ranged over a number of topics including the NuScale Power 45 MWe reactor, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, licensing issues, waste handling constructs, Dale Klein’s recent speech including his comments on small reactors, and radiation health effects.

Here are some links to articles or papers discussed:

Dan Keuter, Entergy Nuclear – The NGNP in Perspective
UPPU – Fifty Years of Plutonium Exposure to the Manhattan Project Plutonium Workers: An Update – Abstract.

If you want to find out more about nuclear energy career opportunities at Entergy Nuclear, visit nuclearenergycareers.com. The Atomic Show thanks Entergy Nuclear for its support of the show and for its forward leaning participation in new media endeavors.

This episode sponsored by Entergy Nuclear.

Imagine – a traditional utility company far sighted enough to invest advertising dollars in the Atomic Show Podcast!

One of the more exciting developments in the nuclear industry is the growing recognition that one size does not fit all, especially if that size is – to use the words of Al Gore – “extra large”. In many markets, 1200-1600 MWe units simply are not a good match for the power needs or the grid capacity.

NuScale Power is a new, venture funded company that has developed a product designed to address that issue. Paul Lorenzini is a former PacificCorp president who came out of retirement to help lead the company and provide the business expertise. Jose Reyes is the company’s Chief Technical Officer who has been working on the product development for about 8 years. I reached them in their office at 6:00 pm on a Friday evening – after a very busy week.

The company’s 45 MWe natural circulation nuclear heat source grew out of a Department of Energy funded project originally known as the Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor (MASLWR) at Oregon State University in partnership with the Idaho National Laboratory and Nexant Inc. That project, funded under the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative, lasted from 2000-2003. The DOE issued a final report and moved on.

Even though the federal funding stopped at that point, the university recognized that they had something worth pursuing. The system will produce only about 1/30th as much power as a large light water reactor. Its advantage is that it produces power with a greatly simplified system that has no valves, pumps or external piping systems. It operates at temperatures and pressures that are familiar in the industry, uses fuel that can be manufactured on the same lines as conventional reactor fuel, and uses conventional pressure vessel technology that is small enough to be produced in a number of qualified factories.

One key feature of this small reactor is that it will be completely assembled in a factory and shipped to the site ready for installation.

Have a listen. For more information about small reactors, please visit some or all of the following articles:

• NuScale Power and Hyperion Power Generation – Nuclear Power Systems That Are Not “Extra Large”
• More small reactor discussions
• Small reactors have NRC’s attention
• Small reactors seek market share

If you are interested in finding out more about career opportunities at Entergy Nuclear visit nuclearenergycareers.com

Rob McNealy of StartupStoryRadio.com and I had an interesting chat on Tuesday about Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. (AAE). We discussed the 15-year effort to build an independent, atomic energy focused company that can be self sustaining. (Aside – any any navy nuke will know, achieving a self-sustaining condition is a very important milestone.)

We – right now mostly “I”, but I have had a lot of help over the years – are now focusing on efforts to share energy information and market the potential that nuclear fission has to change the world’s energy market dynamics. Some may wonder how you make money by sharing, but there is incredible value in knowledge and information.

AAE has been a ‘C’ corporation since 1993, but we have been searching for a business model that works under the current legal and regulatory constraints that make it exceedingly costly – with substantial regulatory and financial risk to success – to set a course for building our simplified atomic generators.

After many meetings and discussions with investors, team members, and potential investors, we think we have a fuzzy plan that will work while retaining one of our most important assets – independence. As you continue listening to the Atomic Show and reading the Atomic Insights Blog, you will begin hearing from our sponsors. Please understand that any supporters are welcome, but they will choose to support because of what we are already doing and saying.

As I have told people many times, and hope that I have demonstrated to you over the years, my soul would be too expensive for anyone to purchase. If our message happens to attract an audience and that audience happens to be attractive enough so that commercial enterprises pay to talk to that audience, that’s good.

It will not change the message development process, which involves a serious effort to figure out the right path, not the path that will make the most money over a short period of time. My messages may not be popular, but I am okay with that.

That is a long way of saying that you will hear interesting sponsor messages on the Atomic Show, but you should not expect us to change our tune.

I was recently offered the opportunity to read a review copy of Profit from the Peak by Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder. The book, despite its attention grabbing title, is really a thoughtful work that digs deeply into the challenges that the world faces in the near future in providing the plentiful energy that has made the modern economy possible.

The authors and I agree on many of the symptoms of trouble and even on the diagnosis that the people on the earth are running headlong off of a cliff if they do not take action to change direction. When it comes to the prescription for the cure, however, we have a rather substantial difference in perspective.

Chris Nelder agreed to come on the show and discuss his book, his analysis of the energy situation and his prescription.

Chris is a former software engineer and technical writer who developed a deep interest in energy topics. I am a former nuclear submarine engineer officer who also has developed a deep and wide interest in energy topics.

I think you will enjoy the discussion.

I hope you all forgive me, but it sure would be nice if someone made contact and told me that they were looking forward to the next episode of The Atomic Show. That’s right – I am blatantly asking for some fan mail. Hope you are having a great 4th of July holiday if you are in the US and simply a great weekend if somewhere else.

John Wheeler, Kelly Taylor and I talked about workforce development and John’s impressions from the American Nuclear Society Annual meeting, recently held in Anaheim, California. With regard to workforce development we chatted about the opportunities that the Nuclear Renaissance will bring for people that like math and science, hands on applications, working in teams, and seeing the physical products of their labors.

We also talked about the importance of the role of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the quality of the work that it does, and the cost of regulation.

As often happens on The Atomic Show, we also discussed a number of aspects of smaller reactors and how they would fit in a developing nuclear industry. We talked about how smaller plants do not have to wait in the same lines for massive forgings as large plants do, how they might be able to take advantage of assembly line techniques and how they can meet market demands in areas where 1000 MWe and larger plants simply cannot fit.

A side topic was the visionary decision by people like Donald Hintz, who recognized the value of nuclear plants that others did not want. The market consolidation that resulted has produced some strong, nuclear focused companies and helped significantly improve the reliability and productivity of the plants.

We also talked about the decision to shut down Zion Nuclear Power Plant and the possibility that it might be restored to operation. This particular topic ended with a call out for people with an interest and knowledge about the plant to contact me at rod_adams(at symbol)atomicinsights.com. I am really curious about whether or not the plants could be restored to operation at a significantly lower per megawatt cost than building a new facility. If anyone knows something or wants to get involved in the discussion, please contact me.

(MP3 – 3.5 MB – 00:03:46 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_Better_Way.mp3]

Listen to Better Way (Atomic Song) here!

If there is anyone out there who is inspired to use this song as the backing track for a short video, I am open to suggestions and might even supply someone with the right set of storyboards with a enough cash to cover the costs of production with a bit to spare.

Bonne Posma is a serial entrepreneur whose latest company is called Liquid Coal, Inc.. He has developed a concept for using the heat from high temperature reactors as a way to improve the cleanliness of well known chemical processes for converting coal – which is mostly carbon and hydrogen – into a liquid hydrocarbon. The process requires adding hydrogen to coal since it is deficient in that element compared to the hydrocarbons that exist as liquids.

The idea has been around a long time, but the traditional process burns some of the input coal to provide heat. Not only does that reduce the amount of liquid fuel produced per unit of coal mined, but it also releases vast quantities of pollutants. Bonne recognizes the value of liquid hydrocarbon as an almost irreplaceable building block of modern society and he strongly believes that processes that make it cleanly have incredible value for today and for the future.

I agree with his assessment. What do you think?

I met Nichole Ellis last fall when she was the leader of a well run conference for young nuclear professionals. As a 30-something engineer who started her nuclear career in the early 1990s, she is something of a rarity – when she entered the field there were not too many people in the US choosing to major in nuclear engineering and planning to make a career in the field.

We spoke about the kinds of people she has worked with over the years, how she became a qualified nuclear criticality safety engineer, how she has made career choices to allow her to balance work and family responsibilities, and how her particular branch of the nuclear profession works to mentor and train its up and coming members.

One of the reasons that I am so excited by the prospects for new growth in the industry is that there are people like Nichole who are ready, willing and able to take on the responsibilities that the technology demands.

I got up bright and early this morning (0400) to prepare to record a conversation with two fascinating people. Hans and Mary Lou Gougar are friends who I have known since I gave a presentation about Adams Engines to their American Nuclear Society student chapter at Penn State University in 1994. They were a bit more – shall we say, mature – than some of the other students since they had already been working for several years as teachers before deciding to go back to school to earn their doctorates.

Hans’s permanent job is as a PhD engineer working on pebble bed reactor design and other advanced reactor projects at the Idaho National Laboratory. Mary Lou is a professor at Idaho State University, specializing in nuclear waste chemistry. Several months ago, Hans accepted a consultant position with PBMR Pty Ltd for a two-year stint in South Africa. As he explains it, there are only two places in the world that are actually developing pebble bed reactors, China and South Africa. As a specialist in that area, he felt a strong desire to put his knowledge to practical use.

Mary Lou is also working for PBMR Pty Ltd in a rather fascinating area of carbon isotope separation. You’ll have to listen to her explain.

In addition to enough technical talk to make even Shane smile, we spent some time talking about what it is like to live and work in South Africa. If you listen to the whole show, you will get a chance to hear Charlie (11) and Betty (9) talk about their experiences and share a couple of the new words that they have learned.

Enjoy the show! Feedback is always welcome.

During my 27 years of association with atomic technology, I have engaged in a number of conversations with people on the topic of “why don’t people like us?” There is little doubt that choosing to be a nuke is NOT the way to gain immense popularity; there are few technologies that have inspired so much visceral dislike despite having some very useful properties.

Within the nuclear field and number of theories have been offered, some not well thought through. Here are some of the more common completions to sentences in water cooler conversations that start with “People do not like nuclear power because”:

• the media has misinformed them.
• the bomb scares them.
• Ralph Nader and the environmentalists have scared them.
• they do not want to take the time to learn the necessary math and science to allow them to understand.

I think all of the above are weak answers that need to be overcome, but it will take some concerted effort. One of the ways that I have been working on the list is to engage in conversations with influencers in the media, with a lot of focus on “the new media” of podcasts, blogs and other on-line publications.

For more than 2 years, I have had a running, intermittent conversation going with Adam Curry, the host of one of the most popular podcasts on the web. In the past week, the conversation has expanded with responses by a number of other listeners who have comments and questions about the technology. One of Adam’s thoughts is that nuclear power or atomic fission needs a new “brand”.

Since Adam has a big show to run that covers a lot of topics, there simply is not enough time available on his show for me to properly respond to all of the commentary, so I figured I would put together an old fashioned “answer show”. That way, any audience members that we share who want to focus a little more on the specifics of the fission discussion can get my thoughts and perhaps even get motivated to submit some of their own comments to Adam.

As a dedicated nuke who believes deep down that the world needs more fission and needs it now, I cannot allow a comment like “the media does not like us” without working to change the equation.

Link to previous episodes of The Daily Source Code. Warning – Adam’s show is aimed at adults and his demographic base tends to be educated males between the ages of 24 and 50. If you get embarrassed by “four letter words” or casual discussions with adult themes, you might not want to listen.

Chuck DeVore is a California State Assemblyman representing the 70th Assembly District. Among a number of other issues, he has recognized that the state desperately needs more energy and believes that it is past time to overturn the state’s de facto ban on new nuclear power plants.

He is an eloquent speaker with a good grasp of the technical details of why nuclear power plants should be built in California to serve the current and growing needs of the state’s large population base.

You can find out more about Chuck by visiting his personal web site at ChuckDeVore.com

To learn more about his efforts regarding power and energy, visit his web site titled PowerForCalifornia.com

This show truly demonstrates the individual power and freedom provided to the world by the Internet. While we talked via Skype video conferencing (without additional charges above our internet connection fees) Alexandra was in Kiev, Ukraine celebrating the Orthodox Easter holiday while I was in Annapolis, Maryland on drizzly Sunday afternoon. Disregarding the two hard drops of our Skype connection, it sounds like we are in the same room or at least in the same town talking over a very clean phone line.

I recently “met” Alexandra online through the introduction of a mutual friend. She is a young woman who was a four year old in Belarus at the time that the operators of the Chernobyl power plant decided to perform an undocumented test procedure and ignored all warning signs to the point where they blew up the reactor.

Alexandra, like many of her contemporaries, has an enlarged thyroid and a few other medical problems that she attributes to the effects of the materials released during the subsequent fire, but instead of becoming a bitter victim, she chose to become an inquisitive journalist and fact seeker.

We talked about a number of different topics including the accident, energy supplies in Eastern Europe, the Ignalina reactor in Lithuania, Sweden’s current plans regarding its nuclear future, Russia’s recently announced plan to build a large power station in Kaliningrad for the electricity export market, and the business practices that she observed as a translator working for Gazprom.

Alexandra is a fascinating person, an experienced print, radio and television journalist, a linguist (she speaks excellent English, Russian, Swedish, Belarusian, and can get by in Polish, German, French and Japanese), and a world citizen with a questioning attitude.

Please listen carefully to this interview and share it with your friends. I am sure you will not be disappointed and may even be energized – like I am – to find out that there are people like Alexandra in the business of informing the world about what they know and what they can find out.

Mark Seall is a Brit living in Switzerland who has developed a strong interest in environmentalism and in the European activities aimed at reducing the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Last year he started a blog titled TalkClimateChange.com and he also is a contributing blogger at Green Options.

He recently determined that he wanted to participate in the nuclear power debate that has been growing in the UK and in Europe, but upon consideration decided that he did not yet know enough to make a well reasoned comment. Instead, he set up a debate forum on Green Options that he titled Nuclear Energy “Live” Debate and invited me to play the role of the pro-nuclear “expert”. I enjoyed the experience and decided that it would be useful to invite Mark onto The Atomic Show so that he could talk about his efforts, what he learned about nuclear energy from the debate and how he now feels about its potential for good in the future.

We talked about a range of topics including risk perception, Chernobyl (who can avoid that topic in any pro or con discussion about nuclear energy), technology improvements in nuclear power, personnel training programs, and energy system marketing efforts.

Hope you enjoy the conversation.

Okay – I cannot help myself. It is time to brag just a little. Yesterday, Mark made an announcement on his blog that he was Coming Off The Nuclear Fence and stating that “However, when faced with pressing realities and faced with a choice between relieving poverty, aggravating climate change, or accepting a manageable risk it looks like nuclear is our option – for now.”

I like to think that my atomic evangelism effort has had something to do with this decision.

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Feinberg of Capitol Valley interviewed one of the new heros of the pro-nuclear world, Dr. Patrick Moore. You can hear the interview and read Andrew’s thoughts at Everything Old is New Again: From “No Nukes” to “Nukes Now” with Dr. Patrick Moore.

Here is a sample quote from that blog entry:

Here at CV we spend most of our time looking at new technologies, the future, and how a rush to judgment or a poor public relations decision can doom a promising technology, service, or company to failure. We see how sensationalism, poor reporting and massive “click to complain” campaigns can generate outrage where there should be none, and amplify the shrill cries of a few to the point where they dominate the public discourse.Now, instead of looking forward, we look back to the 1960′s, when the relatively new technology of nuclear power brought a promise of unlimited, clean energy. Those days also were the height of the cold war, when the fear of atomic weapons clouded the nation’s judgment of atomic power.

I made a comment on that blog entry that resulted in Andrew thinking that I might be a “crackpot”, so I decided to invite him onto the Atomic Show so that he could see for himself that I really am kind of kooky.

We had a great chat that I think you will enjoy. It is fun to share thoughts about history with someone just about half your age. Our personal experience lenses are quite different; the mixed points of view result in a good conversation.

There is an assumption that underlies most of the world’s radiation protection standards called the Linear, No Threshold dose assumption. This hypothesis – which has never made it to the scientific stage of being even a theory – claims that the negative human health effects from radiation exposure can be plotted on a straight line that extends from the high dose/death regime down to a minute hazard from the very lowest possible dose.

This assumption has been used to compute something called “collective dose” where exceedingly minor doses to very large populations result in a statistical prediction that the dose will cause several deaths. If the population that is assumed to be affected is large enough, the predicted deaths can even turn into rather scary numbers in the thousands.

There is no science that backs the linear no threshold dose assumption, but it remains the basis for regulations and is used to cause excessive fear of radiation, which happens to be a natural part of our earthly environment. An old friend of mine – Jim Muckerheide – has devoted a major, sustained effort to collect and provide ready access to thousands of peer reviewed studies, journal articles and even reports from the advisory committees that supposedly influence the regulatory decision bodies. You can find them at http://www.radscihealth.org/rsh/.

Here is a blurb about the organization that Jim founded, Radiation, Science and Health, an international non-profit organization.

RSH was organized by independent individuals knowledgeable in radiation health effects science, and related radiation protection, and medical applications, public policies. They know the scientific literature, misrepresented data, and wasted public funds, that do not protect public health.

• RSH seeks to change public policy in the public interest.
• It advocates for appropriate research and policy changes.

When you visit the site, remember that it is a voluntary effort produced by scientists and engineers; they are not graphic artists or web designers. (I hope I do not offend any of the members of RSH, but their site is darned ugly. However, look past that and read some of the valuable information that they have collected and made readily available. If the RSH web site was a high school student, it might be described as having an excellent personality.)

Jim was not able to join us for this show, but I did find some extremely knowledgeable guests. Ted Rockwell is the author of one of the seminal books on radiation shielding. He was Admiral Rickover’s technical director for about a decade and was a key member of the team that built the Nautilus and the Shippingport power station. Robert Margolis is a reactor engineer with 21 years of experience in the nuclear industry; he is regularly affected by the extreme conservatism imposed by the LNT based regulations. Michael Stuart started his career as a health physics specialist who was charged with finding ways to continually lower doses. He is now a technical instructor for Dominion Resources and is an exceptional communicator.

During the show we talk about the costs imposed by the LNT assumption, the logical fallacies that it imposes, the hazards that can result from excessive fears and controls of low levels of radiation and the people who view the excessive costs as important sources of revenue. We also mention the interests of nuclear power competitors in keeping the LNT obstacles in place as a way to improve their position in the very lucrative market for commercial heat and power.

I think you will enjoy this episode.

Ben Kenney is studying for his PhD in chemical engineering, with a focus on solid oxide fuel cells. He expects to be finished by early summer 2008. As part of his education on energy matters, he started up theWatt Podcast several years ago and has built it into one of the most respected and frequently referenced energy discussions on the web.

Ben and I had a great time chatting about CANDU reactor technology, the future of Ontario’s electrical power supply, New Brunswick’s interest in increasing its share of the electrical power market in the Northeast US, and the future of suburbia in the face of ever increasing gasoline prices.

I promised Ben that I would invite him back, but I highly recommend that you subscribe directly to theWatt Podcast. You will enjoy his style and his guests.

Howard Shaffer is a retired nuclear engineer who received his initial nuclear training and experience as a member of the Nuclear Navy. He attended nuclear power school at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, served on the USS Seawolf at sea and in the shipyard during a conversion to SUBSAFE, and he spent a long an active career in the nuclear industry.

He was involved in the startup of several plants in the US and in Taiwan and often voluntarily represented his company and nuclear technology in general in discussions involving anti-nuclear activists. One of the successes of his efforts was during the licensing and start-up of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant – the site of a lengthy anti-nuclear effort led by the Clamshell Alliance.

Many of the people on the other side of that effort are still actively pursuing their anti-nuclear goals – as Howard said during our conversation, some of them give every appearance that they will go to their graves before they give up their almost religious aversion to all things nuclear.

We had a good chat, hope you agree.

On February 29, 2008, I visited the American Nuclear Society Student Conference 2008 Career Fair and talked to a number of organizations that had booths set up to find out what kind of opportunities were available. I tried to get a reasonable selection of contractor, government agency, national laboratory and operating utilities to provide a flavor.

As I reviewed the clips, I realized that I did not talk to any of the reactor plant vendors. Oh well, I will learn from that oversight and try to do better the next time.

There are a total of eight different interviews that are spread out over two episodes. This second section includes talks with the following potential employers:

• Duke Energy
• Ameren
• US Navy Nuclear Power Program
• Dominion

If you hear a particular segment that interests you and you want to make contact with the speaker, send me an email (rod_adams(at symbol)atomicinsights.com) and I will try to help you make the direct connect. That way, you can tell them that you heard about the opportunity on The Atomic Show.

On February 29, 2008, I visited the American Nuclear Society Student Conference 2008 Career Fair and talked to a number of organizations that had booths set up to find out what kind of opportunities were available. I tried to get a reasonable selection of contractor, government agency, national laboratory and operating utilities to provide a flavor.

As I reviewed the clips, I realized that I did not talk to any of the reactor plant vendors. Oh well, I will learn from that oversight and try to do better the next time.

There are a total of eight different interviews that are going to be spread out over two episodes. This first section includes talks with the following potential employers:

• US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
• Black and Veatch
• Southern California Edison
• Argonne National Laboratory

If you hear a particular segment that interests you and you want to make contact with the speaker, send me an email (rod_adams(at symbol)atomicinsights.com) and I will try to help you make the direct connect. That way, you can tell them that you heard about the opportunity on The Atomic Show.

Please forgive the background noises. Just think of having a conversation in a coffee shop.

For this show, John Wheeler (This Week In Nuclear), Kelly Taylor, Michael Stuart and I talked about coal versus nuclear generation, CO2 capture challenges, Michael’s birthday present of a zero gravity experience, space nuclear power (a natural progression from the zero gravity discussion), storage systems that might enable renewable energy to flourish, hydrogen production, battery technology, and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Here are some links to sources for some of the discussion.

The Space Show interview with Dr. James Dewar, author of To The End of the Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket

Senator Harry Reid’s testimony about Yucca Mountain and nuclear power

John Wheeler, Lisa Stiles and I talked about our passion for nuclear technologies. We also talked about job opportunities in the nuclear business, the need for large infrastructure investments in electricity generation and delivery, the competition between nuclear and LNG projects, and the fact that we need large new sources of energy in order to maintain our current prosperity.

We also touched on the fact that maintaining our own prosperity is simply not enough when there are so many people who have no access at all to the quantities of energy consumed by the average American.

You are going to enjoy this show! Jill Buck is an energetic community leader with a vision for a cleaner world and she has been working for a number of years to make that vision a reality. As the founder of the Go Green Initiative she is having a measurable effect on the lives of thousands of school children in more than 30 states and 10 countries outside the US. By some measures, it is the world’s largest environmental education organization. Here is what her organization believes:

• People care about protecting children’s health and safety through environmental stewardship.
• People will do the right thing when given trustworthy information, expert training and simple tools.
• People appreciate a program like the Go Green Initiative, which provides a framework for success, many options and the freedom to choose the options that work best for them.
• People want a panoramic, three-dimensional approach to environmental education, which will equip young people with the skills necessary to manage the environmental impact inherent in all activities.

I found Jill’s organization because her blog had an entry that caught the attention of my Google alert on “new nuclear power plants”. Here is the entry that caught my attention:

Electricity: While I saw many remaining coal-fired electricity plants, I saw numerous nuclear power plants as I peered out the tour bus window. Coal is abundant and inexpensive in China, but contributes to poor air quality. More nuclear power plants will create a clean energy source that will fuel China’s growing economy without depleting natural resources, or creating air pollution. According to Chinese sources, in Nov. 2007, the State Council approved the National Medium- and Long-term Nuclear Development Plan (2005-2020) submitted by National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). The plan sets clear goals for nuclear power development as follows: by 2020, the installed capacity of nuclear power will reach 40 million kilowatts and the capacity under construction in 2020 will reach 18 million kilowatts. The percentage of electricity generated by nuclear power will increase from less than 2% today to 4% in 2020, with the annual amount of electricity reaching 260-280 billion kilowatts.

I decided right then that I needed to try to get Jill on as a guest of The Atomic Show.

During our chat we spent a lot of time talking about her trip to China and about the overall benefits that a renewed focus on nuclear power development could bring to the US and to the world. I think you are going to like this show.

You might even end up doing what I did after learning more about Go Green Initiative – visit the organization’s donation page and provide a few dollars to support its mission.

Virtual round table discussion with four guests whose total nuclear experience is more than 100 years.
John Wheeler – host of This Week in Nuclear Podcast
Kirk Sorensen – publisher of Energy from Thorium
Kelly Taylor – work at home mom and 20+ year veteran of the nuclear power industry
Robert Margolis – reactor engineer and 20+ year veteran of the nuclear power industry

During the discussion, we covered a variety of topics including the move back to gas for new electric power plants, the pressure against coal, an economic analysis from an independent group on the cost of shutting down Indian Point Nuclear Station, and ways to improve the speed to market for new nuclear power plants.

Charles Ferguson, Fellow for Science and Technology – Council on Foreign Relations paid a visit to The Atomic Show. We engaged in a wide ranging discussion. We started with some of Charles’s impressions of the views of Indian colleagues following his recent visit to the world’s largest democracy. Other topics included Japan’s Monju reactor, highly enriched uranium, using special nuclear material for small reactors, long term protection of distributed reactors, commerce in HEU and plutonium, South African views on HEU, Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Plowshares and probably a lot more.

Hope you enjoy.

Here are some links that you might find useful after listening to the show:

Plowshare Project video from Atomic Energy Commission

Executive Summary: Plowshare Program

First of all, I apologize for the sound quality. I goofed something up with the settings this week and could not make enough adjustments in post production to fix the strange background noises and echoing voices. I’ll try to do better next time.

On Sunday, 13 January, I got together with four atomic friends. John Wheeler of This Week In Nuclear, Kelly Taylor and Michael Stuart who both are occasional contributors to NEI Nuclear Notes Blog and Robert Margolis, a current reactor engineer at FPL’s St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant.

Robert started off the show with some interesting commentary about his experience as the shift engineer who was on duty at the Ft. St. Vrain nuclear power plant on the day when it shut down for good. He also talked a little about FPL’s recent outage where the company added new life to its plant by replacing steam generators, the reactor vessel head, one main coolant pump, and made a major modification to the containment sump.

We also talked a bit about the various fuels available for producing electricity, the cost of various forms of space heat and how they have changed in recent years, and about the prospects for new nuclear power plants in the US and UK.

John brought up the recent Union of Concerned Scientists report that indicated a rather surprising ranking of new nuclear power plant designs, and we chatted a bit about the conservatism of the electric utility industry.

In other words, it was a pretty good first attempt at a round table format that you might hear on this show on occasion. You might hear it on This Week In Nuclear instead – John and I have not yet figured that one out.

Please make comments here or send me an email if you have particular suggestions for topics – as you will hear, this is a very experienced and knowledgeable group of people. I think all of us have north of 20 years of experience, training and education associated with nuclear power, but we are also amusing (at least among ourselves) human beings with some passion for our craft.

On January 8, 2007 I chatted with Armond Cohen, the Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). Here is an excerpt from their About Us page:

Founded in 1996, the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring clean air and healthy environments through scientific research, public education, and legal advocacy. Our unique and singular focus on atmospheric issues has allowed us to go deep on the issues, and be persistent and effective.

Made up of 20 senior scientists, lawyers, MBAs, economists, and public outreach professionals, CATF is headquartered in Boston but located throughout the United States. Our work is augmented by collaboration with nationally recognized technical and economic consulting organizations such as The Northbridge Group, Environmental and Energy Analysis, Inc., Abt Associates, and MSB Energy Associates.

Armond and I discussed coal gasification, carbon capture and sequestration, and the CATF position on nuclear power. We also talked a bit about how his organization is governed and what issues they choose to tackle with particular regard to CATF’s currently “neutral” position on atomic energy.

To save you a little trouble, here are some links to the organizations that employ the members of the CATF board.

• Mechanology – Eric Ingersoll, the CEO and Chairman is a member of the CATF Board of Directors.
• General Compression LLC – Mr. Ingersoll also serves as Chairman of General Compression, LLC
• Natsource – Bill Tyndall, Managing Director of Natsource Asset Management LLC is a member of the CATF Board of Directors
• The Northbridge Group – Bruce A. Phillips is Director, The Northbridge Group and a member of the CATF Board of Directors.
• Environmental Defense – Elizabeth Thompson, Legislative Director, Environmental Defense is a member of the CATF Board of Directors
• Southern Environmental Law Center – Jeffrey M. Gleason Board Chair of CATF, is Deputy Director of the Southern Environmental Law Center and Director of Regional Programs

As Armond made clear during our discussion, his organization’s positions are guided by the board of directors. I will leave it to you to connect the dots and conclude why CATF might be so forceful about implementing and enforcing regulations that accept continued use of large quantities of coal as long as the plants implement the latest and greatest in emissions controls.

Robert Bryce, the Managing Editor of Energy Tribune is an energy journalist who likes to do math. I like this guy A LOT.

A November 2007 article titled Guru or Fakir? Amory Lovins is America’s favorite green energy advocate. Does his rhetoric match reality? really caught my eye. In about 400 words, Robert discusses a number of different predictions that Mr. Lovins has made during his 30+ years as an energy writer and prescriber of energy solutions and traces how each of those predictions or prescriptions has turned out.

We also discussed ethanol and its history as an important farm program and provider of profits for ADM – while not making much impact on America’s thirst for fossil fuel.

As we talked, I tried to gradually slip in my theory that there is a reason that Lovins and biofuels are often supported by well heeled environmental groups – each of them are actually quite beneficial to the interests of established fossil fuel suppliers.

Though he has supported a number of oil alternatives during his career, including coal, natural gas, wind, solar, biomass and, most famously, conservation, Lovins has consistently opposed nuclear power. By doing so, he has fought against the only technology that has ever taken significant markets away from coal, oil and natural gas.

Biofuel consumption also does not hurt the fossil fuel suppliers – it is an energy intensive business itself and generally only produces a modest amount of excess energy compared to the amount needed to produce it.

I think you will enjoy the interview. If you do, you might also want to read some or all of the books that Robert has written about energy:

• Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate (Hardcover)
• Pipe Dreams: Greed Ego and the Death of Enron

On New Year’s Eve morning, John Wheeler, Kelly Taylor and I got together for a chat about the nuclear industry’s prospects for 2008. We agreed that the year would be an interesting one for nuclear power, with additional license applications, more attention from discussions during the US Presidential campaign, and increasing opportunities for employment for people who want to work in a safe, clean, challenging, high tech environment.

We all agreed that the industry is one where errors are not overlooked, where talented young people can find rewarding work, and where people who have left the industry during its challenging times of the late 1980s and 1990s may find new opportunities.

We made a few predictions, talked about the potential applications for smaller plants, and generally agreed that now is a great time to be a nuke.

John also posted a version of the conversation as Episode 54 – Happy Nuke Year!!.

Anyone who listens to both and can point out the difference wins a $20 iTunes gift certificate!

Hope you all have a happy healthy and prosperous Nuke Year!

On December 18, 1957, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station started supplying electricity to the Duquesne Light Company grid. By 7:00 am, it was producing 12,000 kilowatts of electrical power, enough to power about 12,000 homes. That development of that power station established an entire industry and led to the construction of more than 300 Pressurized Water Reactors that together produce about as much energy each day for global consumers as all of the oil exported by Saudi Arabia.

On December 18, 2007, I had the opportunity to have an hour long chat with Dr. Theodore (Ted) Rockwell, one of the key players on the team that designed and built the pioneering reactor. He provides us with a lot of insight into the exciting work and dedicated people who produced a reliable plant just 4.5 years after being initially assigned to the task.

Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Brian Paxton and I talked for about 50 minutes about a wide range of topics related to Africa and energy developments. Brian knows a lot about both topics and shares some valuable insights into markets, developments and attitudes.

We talked about hydropower, alternatives sources of light and heat, oil and gas, and the potential for moderately sized nuclear plants. At the very end of the interview we briefly talked about the strengthening of ties between Algeria and Russia and the implications that development has for European power markets.

Hope you enjoy the show. Sorry for the long silence.

With any luck, there will be a show on the feed within a week and within a month or two, we should have some really exciting news to share. There might even be some new regular voices on the show; it is time for some new blood. I still miss Shane and have been searching my contact lists for an altergeek to help make show preparations disappear as a necessary chore.

Please keep in touch and let me know what topics are interesting you as we move forward into the second Atomic Age.

Oh yeah, almost forgot – if you get a chance, please head over to iTunes and write a review for the show. This request has been on my to do list for months and I need to try making some progress. You can find the show on iTunes by going to the podcast section and doing a search with author = Rod Adams or title = Atomic.

Once you see an iTunes page with the Atomic logo on it click on the logo to go to the page about the show and then click on the link under Customer Reviews. Right now, the opportunity exists to be the first one to write a review for the show – please do not let that opportunity continue for too long. It will bruise my fragile ego.

The Young Professional’s Congress is a joint effort between North American Young Generation in Nuclear (NA-YGN) and the American Nuclear Society’s Young Member Group.

The meetings are taking place in Washington at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. One thing you can say about ANS Meetings is that they are never held in low cost areas or in cheap hotels. I will be commuting each day from Annapolis. I am not poor, just cheap.

I hope that any Atomic Show listeners that might be there will try to find me and say hello. I will be the guy with the iPod nano recording sessions and looking for interesting comments from people on the meeting topic “Making the Renaissance Real”.

This is part II of a rather long interview with Gwyneth Cravens a former anti-nuclear activist who has switched sides to write a book that is strongly in favor of increased nuclear power developments. Her book is based on her personal research and actual visits to nuclear facilities while guided by Rip Anderson a scientist who has worked on a number of nuclear projects during his lengthy career.

You should be able to find Power to Save the World at your local bookstore. It is scheduled for a national release on 30 October. If your local store is not stocking it, ask them why not.

Of course, you can also order it from Amazon at Power to Save the World.

If you want to find out more about Gwyneth and her journey, visit her site at Gwyneth Cravens: The Truth About Nuclear Energy and Our Changing Climate.

Gwyneth Cravens is an accomplished journalist and novelist who also fought vigorously against the Shoreham nuclear power plant project on her native Long Island. Years after being involved in that successful effort to halt the use of a plant that took more than a decade to build and cost more than $6 billion dollars, she began a lengthy conversation with Rip Anderson.

Rip is a scientist with a wide range of interests including oceanography, chemistry and probabilistic risk assessment. He has worked on a number of nuclear projects during his career and he patiently answered Gwyneth’s probing questions as she became less and less sure of the basis for her opposition.

The end result of the long conversation spread over several months was an invitation on a journey of discovery – Rip volunteered to guide Gwyneth on a series of personal visits to various stages in the uranium business. She visited mines, processing facilities, storage sites, and a power plant. She also visited the competition; her book includes a description of a coal fired power plant that would fit well in Dante’s Inferno.

Please have a listen to part I of this interview and then immediately ask your podcatching client to go look for the second part. I think you will enjoy this chat – Gwyneth and Rip are fascinating people with a real story to tell.

You should be able to find Power to Save the World at your local bookstore. It is scheduled for a national release on 30 October. If your local store is not stocking it, ask them why not.

Of course, you can also order it from Amazon at Power to Save the World.

If you want to find out more about Gwyneth and her journey, visit her site at Gwyneth Cravens: The Truth About Nuclear Energy and Our Changing Climate.

Dr. Jeremy Whitlock is a second generation nuclear profession who lives with his family in Deep River, a town he describes as an Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) company town. Others have talked about Deep River as the Canadian equivalent of Los Alamos.

Jeremy was one of the first nukes to recognize that the web was a powerful communications tool, especially for people whose voice is often not heard. As a nuclear professional living in a town full of PhD’s who like to sprinkle their conversation with terms like neutron and resonance absorption region, he did not feel that the general public was well informed about the technology that he has spent his life studying.

Topics in the conversation include Energy Alberta, DUPIC, Remembrance Day, ANS Winter Meeting (Washington DC November 10-15), used fuel plans in Canada, recycling, economics, atomic energy entrepreneurs, and several others.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Nick Bruse of The Cleantech Show, hosted by The Podcast Network, invited me to his show to discuss nuclear power as a potential clean technology. As Nick said, it is one of the identified wedges that can provide enough power to make a difference when it comes to the global emissions of greenhouse gases.

The original show is available from Nick’s blog at The Cleantech Show #024: Nuclear Alternatives, Interview with Rod Adams, Adams Atomic Engines Inc.

I hope that you enjoy the show and that it encourages you to subscribe to The Cleantech Show. Nick does a great job each week of bringing information about clean technology developments, entrepreneurial efforts in clean tech, and some of the other societal issues associated with human development.

(MP3 – 19.1 MB – 55:16 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070929_070.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #070 Here!

In the fall of 1954, the US Atomic Energy Commission learned that the Soviet Union was planning to participate for the first time in the annual International Atomic Energy Agency conference on nuclear energy. Up until that time, both the US and the Soviet Union sent scientists and engineers to the conference, but neither actually participated or presented papers.

The AEC did not want the Soviets to gain propaganda points. The leaders of the Commission determined that they needed to show that they were working on civilian applications of nuclear energy. That was especially true in light of the Atoms For Peace speech that President Eisenhower gave in December of 1953.

The only problem was that the AEC’s first reactor designed for electrical power production – the Shippingport reactor – would not be ready in time to present it as a completed action at the conference. The AEC turned to a small team at the National Reactor Testing Station who had just begun operating a small, boiling water reactor that could produce steam at a high enough pressure to turn a turbine and produce enough power to supply a nearby town.

Ray Haroldsen was part of the team that cobbled together enough new and left over components to turn an experimental reactor into a power station and to use a nearby feeder line to actually send the power produced to a real, live American town named Arco. As is the case with most good stories, there were some bumps in the road that needed some creative solutions.

The following links might be useful to you if there are some technical discussions that are not completely clear.

Xenon: A Fission Product Poison (pdf from CANDU fundamentals)

How Stuff Works: How Power Grids Work

Last week, Ray Haroldsen shared some of his memories as a member of the technical team at the National Reactor Testing Station near Idaho Falls, Idaho. We chatted for nearly an hour, but decided that there was plenty more to tell. I thought it would be a great idea to continue the conversation. Based on the comments that I have received on this blog, on Atomic Insights, and via email, it appears that many of you agree.

During Atomic Show #069, Ray talks about some specifics of the design and operation of EBR-1 and about the AEC leadership’s decision to keep the news about the core melt that occurred in November 1955 out of the public domain. Even at the time, Ray and his team were not comfortable with the decision – they thought that it would be better to open and to investigate the cause of the problem to gain understanding that would be valuable in the future.

One thing that people need to understand about the core melt – though it actually caused more damage to the core than was first assumed – more than 60% of the core material was fuzed into a single “clinker” of enriched uranium, zirconium and stainless steel – the only effect of the accident outside the core was to slightly increase the activity levels that could be measured in the inert gas in the reactor tank. No one was exposed to excess radiation as a result of the melt and the core container was not damaged at all. In fact, the same container was later used when EBR-1 was reassembled and continued to operate until 1963.

Hope you enjoy listening again to a first hand account from an atomic pioneer.

To learn more about EBR-1 and see some pictures and sketches, check out an online version of the official history of the NRTS: Proving the Principle Chapter 6 (7.9 MB PDF)

A good friend of mine contacted me recently and told me that I needed to interview Ray Haroldsen for the Atomic Show. He told me that Ray had a lot of interesting stories to tell about his experiences with many of the early test reactors developed at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho.

Ray is a good storyteller with a real depth of experience and a fantastic memory of long ago events. I guess that certain important days remain so clearly in memory that the stories can be told even after 55 years. Though these events happened even before I was born, they are still important parts of atomic history and influenced the development of major technical breakthroughs.

For this episode of the Atomic Show, Ray and I talked about his experiences with the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1 (EBR I) and his experiences with the BORAX (Boiling Reactor Experiment) series. I think you will find his stories worth a good listen and maybe even a repeat.

As we have discussed on a number of occasions, the renaissance in atomic energy has begun. For show 67, I had a chat with Bob Bromm, an old friend of mine who will be starting a new assignment on Monday, September 17, 2007.

His employer – Fluor – has recently won a contract to supply the architect-engineering services for a two reactor addition to the South Texas project. (Contractors in flux for South Texas Project) Bob has been reassigned from the Hanford site to Greenville, South Carolina to be part of the design team.

Bob has a long history with the nuclear industry and has some great stories to share. As a 56 year old professional, who cut his teeth as part of the design team for one of the most recently constructed nuclear power plants (Palo Verde), he is a shining example of what is both right and wrong with the industry.

He really knows his stuff and has vast experience, but at age 56 he is one of the youngest people in the industry to have actually designed a plant that was built and operated. As I told him during my sign-off, I sure hope that his company has planned to match up younger engineers with all of the experienced ones so that they can grow their capacity as the renaissance continues.

Once I get out from under the pile of email, snail mail and household chores that build up during a vacation I will be putting out new shows – hopefully on a more regular, weekly basis. Stay tuned!

We will have a lot of information to catch up on when I return. Talk to you next month.

He invited me on to his show for an interview the other day – you can find the resulting discussion at The Cranky Middle Manager #105 Nuclear Leadership- Rod Adams. (Truth be told, I have been begging Wayne for months to get me on the show and he finally relented. Perhaps he was just tired of my persistence.)

Please go over and have a listen. I think you might find it useful.

(MP3 – 16.3 MB – 47:05 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070731_066.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #066 Here!

Among nuclear advocates, it is commonly believed that “the media” is one of the reasons for the end of the first Atomic Age. If I have heard it once, I have heard it 1,000 times – “the media does not like us.”

In that view of the world, the fact that the media sensationalizes minor events and provides confusing, scary stories is one of the main reasons that people banded together to oppose new nuclear power plants.

I have a different opinion, but even so, I agree that the mainstream media has not done a good job of explaining nuclear power technology. That is not surprising; most journalists have never taken physics, math, or engineering courses. They are pretty quick studies, however, and have done a pretty fair job of repeating what they have been told.

Unfortunately, they have been talked to far more often by people that oppose nuclear power than by people who understand its intricacies and can explain them in a way that makes sense to people with liberal arts educations.

One of the really exciting things about the Internet and the tools that have been build to make use of the internet is that it is now possible for technologists to have a better chance of explaining complex subjects to a wider audience. No longer are we limited to sound bites that are distributed by enormous companies who need to please their audiences (and advertisers.) Instead we now have the power to create and distribute our own message.

Of course, as Cameron points out, the availability of new tools does not automatically change the calculus. Pro nuclear activists need to learn to use the tools effectively to communicate in a manner that reaches people and makes their message something that is worth sharing.

We also spent quite a bit of time on the topic of “following the money” to determine who is really behind the anti nuclear activist organizations.

Hope you enjoy the show.

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070724_065.mp3]
Listen to Atomic Show #065 Here!

A couple of weeks ago, a listener suggested that I invite Stewart Peterson the blogger who writes the excellent Nuclear Is Our Future. Stewart provides his insights on the nuclear industry from the perspective of a person who was still in preschool at the time that the Integral Fast Reactor was shut down by the Clinton Administration.

We talked about that project and its lost opportunities, the way that the nuclear industry developed, some of the ways that Stewart proposes to share the nuclear story with young people and his desires to be a pro-nuclear activists that helps to establish the policies that will enable the industry to succeed.

I hope you enjoy the show. Feel free to comment, challenge and ask questions.

(MP3 – 9.2 MB – 26:35 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070719_064.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #064 Here!

This is my first show as a solo podcaster. On the show I talk about the recent earthquake in Japan, the GAO’s sting operation targeting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Kazakhstan’s investment in Westinghouse, an interesting blog post titled Rethinking Nuclear, and my desire to create some new atomic evangelists.

I hope you enjoy the show and provide plenty of commentary. This show needs to be a team effort; your participation makes it better.

Here are some useful links:

DIRTY BOMB VULNERABILITIES
STAFF REPORT
PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE

Energy Outlook (Search for Rethinking Nuclear)

(MP3 – 21 MB – 1:00:46 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070626_063.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #063 Here!

As the host of The Atomic Show, I have occasionally shared some information about the Adams Engine(TM), my own design for an atomic power source that can be scaled to compete against large diesel engines and combustion gas turbines. Several listeners and recent guests have expressed an interest in learning more about the design, so I thought it might be more interesting and fun to have one of them interview me than to have me read from some of our sales and marketing literature.

NNadir, who recent appeared as a guest on The Atomic Show, kindly volunteered to ask me some unscripted questions about the engine, the history behind the project, and some of the design choices that we have made already and may make in the future. We talked about why the Adams Engine(TM) uses nitrogen as the coolant, the reactor conversion ration, our thoughts about future uses for used fuel materials, and some of the markets where we believe that the Adams Engine(TM) will be particularly competitive.

I hope you do not mind hearing about my “baby”. It has had a long gestation period and there is still a ways to go before it is time to apply for family leave after the birth. However, I think you will find some thoughts and ideas here that you may not have heard anywhere else, unless you happen to have engaged me in casual conversation during the past 17 years or so. If you have, you have probably had the experience of having me try to work in some of these thoughts – I am a little obsessed with the idea.

One small technical correction: I said that the turbine outlet temperature is about 600 C – I went back and checked the system process flow diagram – it is more like 360 C.

(MP3 – 10 MB – 28:54 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070623_062.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #062 Here!

I have been intrigued by the populist message and the Internet savvy of the John Edwards campaign. I like the ideas of implementing programs for peace, for improving access to college education, for reducing poverty at home and abroad, and for restoring the understanding of the importance of working people (as opposed to executives). I decided to go listen to Senator Edwards in person.

On June 19, 2007, Senator Edwards held a “Small Change for a Big Change” campaign fundraiser at a Washington, DC bar called MCCXXIII located at 1223 Connecticut Ave, just south of Dupont Circle. (In case your Roman numeral skills are rusty, the name of the bar is simply the street address – 1223.) The entry donation – which kind of felt like a cover charge – was only $15. There was a good crowd of several hundred people, mostly young professional types that might frequent that location anyway.

One thing that I did not really think much about until I was leaving the event was the fact that I do not recall seeing any blacks – which seems odd to me for an event in Washington held by a Democratic candidate for President.

I had brought my recording gear – an 8G iPod nano with a Griffin iPod microphone. I find that set-up to be pretty good at picking up amplified voices in a crowd, and it is really easy to stick in a shirt pocket.

The recording turned out pretty well, though I did miss the first couple of seconds and the first applause gathering promise – to stop the war in Iraq. The show includes a brief introduction and some post speech commentary.

The energy vision that Edwards provided indicates to me that neither he, nor his staff, can do math very well. None of them seem to have much understanding of the way that energy is produced right now. He promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 and to do that by supporting wind, solar and biofuels. He promised to invest at least a billion dollars in technology for carbon capture and sequestration and to discourage the construction of any new coal fired power plants while that research was being conducted. He said, “oh, by the way, we do not need any new nuclear plants either.”

However, the most disturbing part of the speech for me was the following passage. I thought it was important enough to transcribe word for word so that it could be available through search or for those people that do not listen to the Atomic Show. I would be very interested in hearing what you think about the implications of this vision. I am especially interested in the views from places like the Middle East, Europe, Japan and most especially Africa (all mentioned in the below passage.) This passage came after he talked about the energy sources that would supply America.

“What do we do with the rest of the world? We know that in the Middle East there are bad governments, bad leaders that have absolutely no incentive for economic development to educate their kids. Why, because they are on a drug called oil and they are mainlining that drug. Until we force them off that drug they will not change.

Suppose that America leads on this effort, that we clean up our own house. Europeans follow, Japanese follow. All of a sudden the price of oil plummets. Then they have no choice. They are going to have to educate their children. They are going to have to engage in economic and political reform. And all of a sudden the Middle East is completely changed, completely transformed. And even, take another step with me. Not only have we strengthened America, not only have we dealt with the crisis about whether the planet is going to exist, not only have we transformed the Middle East, but here’s another one.

For those of us who worry about issues like global poverty, which I care deeply about. Suppose that when America – which it can do – produces its own biofuels. You know we have the land base, we have the farms, we can do it here in America, but the Europeans don’t, the Japanese don’t, so hopefully they will buy some of their biofuels here in America, but, in addition to that, they are going to be looking for cheap land. They are going to be looking for a place that they can go to grow their own crops, produce their own biofuels. Where are they going? They’re going to Africa. And as a result, millions of families and children in Africa are lifted out of poverty. Look at what America can do if we have a little vision, if we have a little leadership.

Hope you find the show interesting, useful and passion generating.

(MP3 – 21.2 MB – 1:01:30 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070614_061.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #061 Here!

About a month ago a friend sent me a link to an interesting panel discussion that was held at MIT on March 1, 2007 titled The Future of Nuclear Energy.

Dr. MacFarlane was one of the participants on that panel. Her comments during that video intrigued me since she expressed some comfort with the record of currently operating nuclear plants and their importance in the world economy, but she also expressed strong reservations about the idea that there would be any kind of strong resurgence of the technology anytime soon.

I thought it would be fun to talk with her and ask her some of the questions that I would have liked to ask if I had been able to attend the session in person (and if there were no bouncers to take me out once I had worn out my welcome.) (Remind me someday to tell you about the time that I was kicked out of a nuclear industry gathering for asking too many hard questions of the invited NRC representative.)

Anyway, Dr. MacFarlane and I talked about energy economics, long term used material concepts, weapons proliferation, global climate change, carbon sequestration (she thinks it is completely within our current state of technology to consider storing the material for a few thousand years), and the importance of planning for future generations.

At the end, I do not think either one of us really learned much from the other, but my hope is that you listeners can take something of value from the conversation and make your own choices about the future viability of new nuclear power plants.

(MP3 – 25.3 MB – 1:13:22 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070531_060.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #060 Here!

NNadir of The Daily Kos stopped by for a visit – wearing a shirt that said “I am in my element – Seaborgium”. What a great way to start a new friendship with a fellow atomic geek!

We immediately began chatting about topics near and dear to both of us – the liberal case for atomic energy development and beneficial uses of used nuclear materials.

We had never before met, but talked non-stop for more than an hour, finishing the conversation with an agreement to meet again soon. If you have never read any of NNadir’s diaries on The Daily Kos, you are in for a treat – if you have read and enjoyed them, you should really enjoy this show and the opportunity to put a voice with the mighty pen.

Topics discussed include nuclear pioneers, technetium-99, beneficial uses of nuclear materials, the difference between “spent” and “used” nuclear fuel, the importance of recycling, what do you do with fossil fuel waste, and the spectrum of reactors that have not yet been fully developed but show potential.

(MP3 – 13.4 MB – 38:51 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070523_059.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #059 Here!

Shane and I discuss a delayed reactor project in India, the importance of unit conversions and the reasons why it is not easy to change a system of measurements. We also divert into other interesting topics including the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, atomic fuel banks and the Baruch Plan.

At the end of the show, we get a little sentimental as Shane informs the world that he has decided that this is his last episode as a co-host of The Atomic Show. I know I will miss him and I am sure that many of you will as well.

Please drop by and tell Shane how much you have appreciated his wit and intellect during the past 14 months. Leave a comment to show you care.

(MP3 – 12.3 MB – 35:39 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070508_058.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #058 Here!

Shane found some good follow on information relating to our uranium availability story a few weeks ago and listener John asked some questions that provided some good fodder for discussion about thermal plant water use, power plant scaling and design considerations. Hope you enjoy and keep that feedback coming.

It was a blast to participate in the show and try to share some nuclear knowledge in a more light hearted manner than usual. It was also quite rewarding to hear a creative and accomplished entrepreneur volunteer to hook Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. up with some of the VC’s that he knows. Stay tuned for more developments along this vector. (I have been hanging around with too many aviators recently.)

(MP3 – 15.3 MB – 44:11 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070424_057.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #057 Here!

There are two main types of light water reactors, pressurized water reactors (PWR) and boiling water reactors (BWR). They share some characteristics, but also have a number of differences.

There are plenty of sources of information on the web about the tradeoffs between the two technologies. You can seek them out, or you can listen to Shane and I muddle our way through an audio explanation on this show. We think that you might find the show entertaining and educational enough to spur additional interest. Enjoy.

Here are some sources of additional information:

• ESBWR fact sheet from Energetics.com
• Large view (1.16 MB) of ESBWR from GE. Shane and I are impressed by the details and clarity of this drawing. It looks best on a large screen.
• Natural circulation in ESBWR fact sheet
• Hitachi’s ABWR Key Features and an Update
• Video of the opening of the first private Atomic Power Plant at Vallecitos, CA

Go and see the trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7L-R_a6rwk and tell me if you agree. Then support this effort by visiting the web site and ordering the DVD. I already have my copy on the way.

Wow!

The man behind the movie has a serious resume that indicates just how credible his movie will be. Here is an excerpt:

A retired Mechanical Engineer, H. Douglas Lightfoot graduated from UBC in Applied Science in 1952, and received an MBA from Concordia University in 1976. He spent eighteen years with Domtar Inc. at the Research Centre in Senneville, Quebec, working on research, engineering and economic studies of alternate energies as well as a wide variety of projects for the pulp and paper, chemicals and construction materials businesses. Prior to joining Domtar, he spent five years designing, building and starting up chemical plants at Dupont of Canada, and 12 years of project engineering at Standard Chemical Limited.

He is a retired member of the Order of Engineers of Quebec and the Professional Engineers of Ontario, and a Life Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He continues to have an active interest in energy and energy related subjects and is a member of the Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre (GEC3) at McGill University.

His list of publications is even more interesting.

Thanks to JF from Safe_Clean_Nuclear_Power@yahoogroups.com for the tip about this valuable work.

(MP3 – 18.2 MB – 52:46 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070417_056.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #056 Here!

Shane and I talked about my Google Tech Talk titled “Fission is the new Fire”, the power of competition and human interests, the difference in atomic success between the US and France (emphasizing the fact that the US produces 2 times as much electricity with nuclear power as France does), and then we jumped from topic to topic.

We touched on the Russian project to build floating nuclear power plants, the US Army’s experience with the Sturgis, and the benefits that small nuclear power plants could bring to people stationed at remote bases in a cruel and hot desert.

Hope you follow the stream of consciousness and enjoy the geeky conversation.

(MP3 – 16.4 MB – 47:33 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070410_055.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #055 Here!

TXU, Exelon, NRG and Amarillo Power have all proposed major new nuclear power plant projects in Texas, already the home of 4 of the US’s largest operating nuclear power plants.

The main current fuel for electrical power production in the state is natural gas, with coal and nuclear sharing most of the remaining market. Recent activity against a proposal by TXU to build 11 large coal fired power plants has added to the interest in nuclear power as a low cost, low emission source of electricity.

For the past several years, Texas, which deregulated its electricity generation several years ago, has experienced some of the highest electrical prices in the nation, averaging somewhat higher than 10 USD cents per kilowatt hour, or more than $100 per megawatt hour.

The average cost of generating electricity using existing nuclear power plants is about $16 per MW-hour. In a deregulated market, that spread between price and cost represents a tremendous profit opportunity, one that might even cause private companies to take the risk of building nuclear power plants without the guaranteed cost recovery that is available in regulated markets.

Texas will continue to be an interesting place to watch the nuclear industry develop its competitive juices and might even be a good place to build some Adams Engines(TM).

(MP3 – 17 MB – 49:20 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070403_054.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #054 Here!

The Russians are very traveling the world marketing their nuclear power plants and services. They have been in South Africa and Canada recently looking for cooperative arrangements to share technology and skills.

Shane and I also discussed some of the historical reasons why nuclear power had a tough time getting started in Europe during the 1960s – a big contributor was the flood of cheap oil from North Africa.

(MP3 – 17.1 MB – 49:28 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070328_053.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #053 Here!

Commercial nuclear powered ships were tried in the 1960s and 1970s with little follow on units. The United States built the NS Savannah, Germany built the Otto Hahn, and Japan built the Mutsu. None of these remain in operation today and all demonstrated various levels of success.

The only non military surface ships current operating with nuclear power are Russian icebreakers which benefit by the high power capacity and long endurance provided by their power systems.

Shane and I carried on a lively (at least in geek terms) discussion about various aspects of nuclear ship history and the future potential for the technology. Hope you enjoy!

Promised links:

• National Historic Landmark Nomination for NS Savannah
• Why did the Savannah fail?
• US Maritime Administration Status report on NS Savannah decontamination and decommissioning

The International Herald Tribune published a story on March 28, 2007 titled High price of uranium prods U.S. mines to life that gives some indications about the natural response from mining companies and independent explorers. A close read of the article will provide some feel for the productive capability within US borders that has remained dormant during the long hiatus in new nuclear plant construction.

The high current prices are having the exact effect that textbook economics says will happen with a dramatic rise in the price of a commodity – the suppliers recognize the opportunity and rapidly ramp up production to meet the demands.

Once again a warning – it is rarely a good time to buy a commodity or a commodity play in a situation where there has been a 900-1000% price increase over a five year period.

It is articles like this one that makes me put up my defenses against a headlong rush to a dogmatic belief that human activity that produces CO2 is threatening the very existence of life on earth as we know it. Here is a quote attributed to a spokesman from the Royal Society:

Mr Ward said: “It is now more crucial than ever that we have a debate which is properly informed by the science. For people to be still producing information that misleads people about climate change is unhelpful. The next IPCC report should give people the final push that they need to take action and we can’t have people trying to undermine it.”

When a group is so afraid of opposing theories and information that they feel compelled to move beyond debate and into an effort to simply keep the information quiet, I get very curious.

When someone tells me that I should not be allowed to read something, I really want to read it to find out why not. Of course, I wonder why I am taking this one on – after all, a belief in human caused climate change may help motivate support for nuclear power.

(MP3 – 20.6 MB – 59:39 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070321_052.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #052 Here!

Unless you live under a rock, you have an opinion about whether or not man’s activity is causing a coming global catastrophe. Two recent films – Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and The Great Global Warming Swindle have sparked a increasing number of heated discussions.

Shane and I wade headlong into the complex and often confusing subject and have our own kind of geeky discussion.

As you may remember, I am an atomic entrepreneur who is very interested in developing and selling atomic engines in the world market. It might appear that I have a vested interest in emphasizing the dangers of continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere. My favorite source of power does very little of that. (I put a couple of links to a detailed studies below that attempt to show the emissions levels from a variety of energy sources including all construction, fuel production, and eventual decommissioning.)

However, I am interested in understanding and not willing to accept anyone’s “belief” system without question. Some of what is passing for climate science today has more in common with religious dogma than with facts, figures, and research. Any time people begin to be shouted down and subjected to ad hominem attacks for the simple affront of asking for data, I begin to get skeptical in reaction.

• VATTENFALL’S ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION SYSTEM -A QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE STUDY OF EMISSIONS OF GREENHOUSE GASES THROUGHOUT THE LIFE-CYCLE
• ExternE – Externalities of energy production, a study by the European Commission
• Energy subsidies and external costs

We would like to hear from you – what do you think about the controversy, its implications for near term policy changes, and its potential for significant disruption of the world’s economic power balance?

(MP3 – 19.3 MB – 56 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070314_051.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #051 Here!

Uranium is as common as tin and can be found in measurable quantities almost anywhere in the world. Its price often varies by several hundred percent over short periods of time, often encouraging booms, busts and much speculation.

Each kilogram of the material contains as much potential energy as 2 MILLION kilograms of oil or three MILLION kilograms of coal, but we use only a tiny portion of that potential energy in currently operating nuclear plants.

Have a listen. We hope you find our conversation interesting and thought provoking.

We had a great chat about uranium and the hazards of investing in uranium as a commodity. We even chatted a bit about the fact that we were coming up to our one year anniversary on The Podcast Network. I was really pleased until I started doing my quality control check and realized that I had managed to record just half of the conversation.

I never bothered to verify my setup for WireTap Pro. That program is great and offers the ability to record from a microphone, from the MAC’s internal audio, or from both. If you have it set to record MAC audio, it obeys and DOES NOT record the operator’s voice.

Mea culpa. Come back this week and we will definitely have a show for you. In fact, I might try to put something together before our normal Tuesday show – today is the second day of our second year as podcasters.

(MP3 – 12.3 MB – 36 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070220_050.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #050 Here!

Half of Atomic Show 50 comes to you from a food court in Norfolk, VA – I am on travel this week. Shane and I pressed forward despite the background noises and had a good chat on a variety of industry news topics. We talked about the new international symbol that has been developed to provide warning of immediate, potentially deadly radiation hazards like those that might arise from attempts to disassemble shielded sources like those used in irradiation or radiography.

Here is a link to the announcement of that new symbol from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2007/radiationsymbol.html.

We also talked a bit about France’s interest in selling large reactors to South Africa, a new mixed oxide fuel plant in Japan, the revival of interest in nuclear fuel recycling in the United States, and the recent expressions of interest in nuclear energy at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) energy executives conference.

If you can use your personal noise filters to listen past the background sounds, I think you will enjoy the show. We’ll try to improve the audio quality next time.

Here are a couple of additional links that might be of interest:

Japanese MOX development information:

http://www.jnfl.co.jp/english/reprocessing.html

And in compact fluorescent lighting (CFL) news of interest to our Aussie friends; the Australian government is phasing out incandescent bulbs over the next three years:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21258888-421,00.html

(MP3 – 18.3 MB – 53 M)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070213_049.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #049 Here!

Rod and Shane discuss a variety of topics including DTE’s recent announcement of a plan to apply for a new nuclear plant site license (quite a change from the company position of five years ago), TXU’s plan to build as many as 15 new coal fired power plants in Texas, the first privately constructed nuclear plant in the US at Vallecitos, CA and the potential to build modern plants that fit in nicely with the countryside.

(MP3 – 21.6 MB – 1:02:44)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070208_048.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #048 Here!

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, a fascinating and independently minded geophysicist and chemist who is best known for a theory known as the georeactor. He has extended and built upon this work and now has published a web site titled understandingearth.com.

Shane and I have discussed the georeactor theory before – way back on Atomic Show #010. For me the idea works and answers a lot of questions. In addition, it directly contradicts the notion that nuclear fission is somehow unnatural. The theory is not well liked by other geophysicists – they do not seem to spend much time disputing it as they do ignoring it. The popular science press, however, has made a different evaluation – Dr. Herndon and his georeactor theory landed on the front cover of the August 2002 issue of Discover magazine.

If our very planet has a fission heat source at its core, and that fission heat source is responsible for such characteristics as geothermal power, then it seems quite natural and logical to capture that kind of power for human consumption. How many times have you heard a fusion supporter describe it in warm, fuzzy terms like “the same power source as the Sun.” I think it is great that fission reactors use “the same power source as the Earth.”

Anyway, listen to Dr. Herndon – he explains his ideas far better than I can. Go and visit his web site at www.understandearth.com and read the papers that he has posted there. It does not take a specialist to understand his thoughts and explanations and to see how logical and well constructed his arguments are.

You might also be interested in visiting Dr. Herndon’s other site at http://www.nuclearplanet.com.

Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code (DSC) is one of the most popular podcasts on the web. One of the on-going segments on the show is a discussion about the use of biodiesel, and the way that this entertaining show introduces the rather serious topic is to involve a character named Trinity.

Trinity (now there is a name with rather ominous undertones in the nuclear world) is a 1984 “baby poo” yellow Mercedes station wagon that has been converted to using straight biodiesel produced from vegetable oil. Adam has been playing around with Trinity for almost a year, but with his jet setter schedule (he shares time between his UK home and his Podshow main office in San Francisco) Trinity sits in a parking garage much of the time.

As anyone who has ever operated a diesel engine of any kind knows – they really do not like to sit around for weeks at a time. It is almost inevitable that without some real TLC, such an engine will become a bit unreliable due to issues in the fuel system. Trinity has experienced such issues, so Adam decided that it is time to get rid of the car.

He put out a call on his show for ideas and one of his listeners came up with the concept of “Free Trinity”. This new promotional idea is getting a lot of traction. The idea is that this listener and his son (who happens to be a student at a maritime academy and a trained diesel mechanic) will fly to San Francisco – on Curry’s dime – and pick up Trinity for a cross country trip powered exclusively by biodiesel.

Listeners from all over the country are getting into the idea by suggesting stops along the way, uses of social media and geolocation sites for keeping tabs on the trip, and gadgets that Trinity should have to make the trip more interesting. Adam is playing audio feedback from these listeners in a segment of his show – I thought it might be an opportunity to highlight some of the thoughts about energy that we have shared on The Atomic Show.

Adam played my feedback with an interesting introduction and reaction. My comment was at the end of a series of Trinity comments and here is how he introduced it – “One more on Trinity – and again the whole idea about backyard biodiesel – that’s exactly what I am looking for. I’m looking for Mom and Pops, just people who are doing something independent, and in my mind, completely revolutionary.” Here is the text of my comment:

I love the Free Trinity idea. Maybe you can route her through Washington DC and make a stop by the Pentagon where there is an alternative fuel station that sells both ethanol and B-20 (20% biodiesel). I fill my Jetta TDI there whenever possible.

On DSC 537, you made some excuses for the excessive profits of Big Oil.

I agree that they will need tons of investment dollars if they are going to keep us supplied with as much oil in the future as they are today – it is getting harder and harder (translate that to more expensive) to find and produce the massive quantities of oil that the economy demands.

My preference would be for oil companies to invest some of their cash into atomic power, where the technology offers huge room for improvement. As I told you on DSC 367, I spent a few years driving around a few hundred feet under water on a zero emission atomic submarine that ran for about a decade and a half without any new fuel.

The boats that my friend, Rear Admiral Willie Hillardes, is building today will operate for a full 30 year lifetime without any new fuel at all.

Just imagine what the world could do if we would do a better job of harnessing the incredible power of the Atom for peaceful purposes like electricity and maybe even airplanes!

If you want to hear more about a better way to produce power, check out The Atomic Show at atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com.

You can also find out about a really cool engine technology company at adamsengines.com.

Good luck on the Free Trinity tour and think about getting more Power from Adams.

Adam’s reaction was energizing and made my day. (Keep in mind that the following is a transcript of an audio show that the host/producer does not edit – speech is sometimes much less refined than we think if we try writing down every word we say. Adam is a very smart guy with a long history of business success.)

“Oh, dude! I’m telling you, if you could put an atomic engine in Trinity – absolutely! I am all for that. I don’t know much about it, and I do not want to sidetrack the Free Trinity project with a whole bunch of talk about atomic energy and the pros and cons and what you do with the waste and all that. But I’m TOTALLY into it. I want to try all that stuff and maybe that is the next step. But still, that’s not something that you do in your backyard. Or can you? Does all that it really takes is a flux capacitor and you’re set? Please, don’t send anything about atomic energy. Let’s just – definitely go listen to that podcast, but let’s keep it on track here.”

Here is an interesting exercise – put the following search term into Google – “backyard nuclear power”.

I think that a cross country biofuels trip is a great idea for showing the state of the art in US biofuels production and distribution capacity in an interesting way. The concept of converting waste materials to fuel is terrific, but has some limitations like the actual availability of the material. Often what seems to be a lot of waste becomes a small amount of raw material once a good use is found.

In one of my previous lives as a plastic product manufacturer, we often used “regrind” materials left over from other suppliers sprues and seconds. As long as our product market was small enough to be supplied by the waste material, life was good and profitable, but if the market expanded past the waste that was available or if the supplier figured out how valuable his waste material was to us, we could get squeezed by rising raw material costs in a market where the selling price of our finished product was limited by the competition. I hope that effect does not kill the biodiesel industry – I think it has more potential than ethanol.

Anyway, all of the above is a long winded way to provide background for one of those minor accomplishments that can make your day. Since Adam specifically requested his listeners not to derail his show’s path by discussing atomic energy please honor that request but feel free to comment and discuss it here.

(MP3 – 15.3 MB – 44 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070130_047.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #047 Here!

One of our listeners – Bruno Garcia – asked us to talk about nuclear (atomic) batteries. These devices make use of the energy that radioactive isotopes emit on a continuous basis to provide heat and electricity for devices that need to operate for a long period of time.

With the right isotope, nuclear batteries can contain thousands of times more energy per unit mass than chemical batteries. They have been used by NASA for space research, by the Coast Guard for remote navigation devices and by medical equipment suppliers to power pacemakers.

Shane and I were happy to oblige and enjoyed our conversation. We hope you do too. Here are some additional links to other sources of information about this fascinating and valuable use of nuclear materials.

• Batteries That Last For Decades – an article from the first issue of Atomic Insights and one of the most popular articles from that magazine over time.
• Nuclear Microbatteries – this presentation from a 2002 ANS meeting has some useful data.

(MP3 – 11.4 MB – 33 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070123_046.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #046 Here!

Shane and I talk about the somewhat counterintuitive request by the heads of ten major US corporations (Including GE, FP and L Group, PG and E, Duke Energy, Caterpillar, Alcoa, DuPont, BP America, Lehman Brothers, PNM Resources) for the federal government to impose mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. These organizations favor a consistent approach in all jurisdictions and believe that mandatory limits are easier to manage and more effective than voluntary measures. For these corporations, uncertainty is more disturbing than a predictable additional cost of compliance.

We also touch briefly on nuclear heated desalination, whale diving and electricity service recovery following major hurricanes. In other words, we ramble on as usual, but for a shorter period than most of our weekly chats. As atomic geeks, we cut the show short to go listen to see if President Bush would have any new announcements about energy and/or climate change in his State of the Union address.

Here is a link to an interesting note about a nuclear desalination project that appeared recently on the World Nuclear News:

Pakistan embarks on nuclear desalination

(MP3 – 16.7 MB – 48 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070116_045.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #045 Here!

Alberta Canada is one of the few areas in the world where oil production has increased rather dramatically during the past 5 years. The area has a vast resource of unconventional oil in the form of oil sands, where the concentration of oil in the sand to a significant depth is in excess of 10%. However, the oil tightly adheres to the sand and will not flow with normal drilling techniques. There are several ways to gather the oil in this region, but the one with the most potential requires the use of large quantities of steam in order to cause the oil to flow so that it can be pumped.

Even after the oil is gathered, it needs additional processing and upgrading steps, which also adds to the amount of energy investment needed to produce this oil. The current source of the energy is natural gas, but the supply growth is limited and the cost is increasing with the market price of natural gas.

The solution that appears ever more likely is to build some CANDU (Canadian Deuterium) nuclear reactors in the oil producing region to provide vast quantities of steam and electricity. See, for example: Oilsands tax incentives questioned.

Shane and I like the idea and provide some comments about why it might be good to pursue the possibilities.

Here are some links that might be useful if you want to do some additional research.

Argonne has a good introductory page with pictures of processes;
also good facts that are backed up by Wikipedia references:

http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/tarsands/index.cfm

This is the original paper that Shane found a few years ago concerning
the natural synergy between nuclear energy and oil sand extraction;
He especially likes the fact that the oil sand resources, after they are
cleaned of their bitumen, are often good zirconium ores:

http://www.cns-snc.ca/events/CCEO/nuclearenergyindustry.pdf

(MP3 – 17.7 MB – 51 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20070109_044.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #044 Here!

The desire for electricity and the services that it provides is growing throughout the world. In many places the main source of that power is burning diesel fuel in small generators. Much of the conversation was spurred by an article in the New York Times titled Paying in Pollution for Energy HungerOne of the key markets that the Adams Engine is designed to address is the rural power market, so Shane and I discuss how the system is designed to be very forgiving and resistant to damage.

After solving the problem of rural electrification, we mention the Blue Origin project, the new iPhone, and atomic aircraft. In other words, keep up if you can!

(MP3 – 13 MB – 38 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061227_043.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #043 Here!

On Wednesday, 27 December, I woke up bright and early so that I could have a chat with Professor Wade Allison, who teaches physics at Oxford University. I contacted Professor Allison because of a recent lecture that he gave to his colleagues titled “How dangerous is ionizing radiation?”

We had a great chat, even though it had to start at 4:15 am in order to allow our schedules to mesh with the five hour Atlantic time zone difference between Annapolis and Oxford.

Please have a listen to hear why Professor Allison, like many other people that are outside of the Radiation Protection industry (see, for example, Radiation, Science and Health) have determined that the linear, no threshold (LNT) model of radiation hazards has no basis in science and should be abandoned for more accurate models.

The key statement made during the conversation is that radiation safety, as it is currently practiced, is more dangerous than the radiation itself.

(MP3 – 19 MB – 55 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061221_042.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #042 Here!

After many years of relative calm, the nuclear business is heating up in many different areas of the world. Opportunities continue to grow, so Shane and I talk about some of the recent mega deals that will have a positive impact on employment and income from the industry.

Specifically, we mention the recent agreement between China and Westinghouse that includes the sale of four AP-1000 pressurized water reactors along with the transfer of substantial technology to the Chinese purchasers. We also spend some time talking about the opportunities presented to the US based portions of the industry by the recent agreement to allow them to begin selling their nuclear related products in India, another large, densely populated country with growing energy supply challenges.

Finally, we talked about the recent announcement by Fresno California businessmen that they were interested in developing a nuclear power plant on the grounds of the local water treatment plant.

Along the way, we take a few detours – as usual – and mention such topics as the weather in the San Francisco bay area, Thomas Malthus, Operation Plowshares, coal burning hazards in China, and the relationship between gold mining and uranium mining.

We hope you enjoy the show. If you want to learn more about some of the topics that we discuss, I recommend that you visit some or all of the following links:

• Wikipedia article on Operation Plowshare
• India Nuclear Forces article from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
• NY Times article titled Pollution From Chinese Coal Casts a Global Shadow
• PubMed article titled Chronic Arsenic Poisoning from Burning High-Arsenic-Containing Coal
  in Guizhou, China
• Resource Investor article about First Uranium’s IPO
• Op-Ed in East Texas Review titled Clarity, honesty needed in power plant debate

Note: If you had trouble downloading the show, please try again. I put in the wrong file name for the MP3 file during the initial load.

(MP3 – 16.8 MB – 49 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061214_041.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #041 Here!

It is possible to almost completely eliminate a number of different pathogens from food by treating that food with exposure to electron or gamma radiation. The process is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for a number of meats, fruits, vegetables and spices. It is used to treat food destined for consumption by NASA astronauts, to sanitize nearly all spices sold in grocery stores, and to treat food sold under a number of different brands.

After reading a number of articles about another outbreak of E.Coli in the US, Shane and I decided that it was time to talk about irradiation and to share what we know about the process. You can also find out more by visiting the following links.

• Food Irradiation: A Safe Measure
• Food Irradiation: The treatment of foods with ionizing radiation
• Labeling and cost of irradiated foods
• Salad Doubts: Science News Online 16 Dec 2006
• Irradiation May be the Answer to E. coli Outbreaks
• Irradiated foods highlighted during week of protest

(MP3 – 15.7 MB – 46 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061205_040.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #040 Here!

Thorium is a heavy metal that is not directly useful as a nuclear reactor fuel. In certain kinds of reactors, however, it can provide high quality heat for a very long time.

Kirk Sorensen became intrigued with thorium fueled reactors after reading about the Light Water Breeder on Atomic Insights. (Disclosure – Rod Adams is the primary author of the articles on Atomic Insights.) He now blogs at Energy from Thorium. Kirk has provided an incredible resource for the world by gathering a number of papers from Oak Ridge and other national laboratories that discuss the technical details of a number of different thorium reactor concepts.

As someone once said, there is a word for interesting people that are one important step removed from crazy – that word is passion. Kirk has a passion for thorium and sees it as a way to overcome many arguments against the use of nuclear power.

Warning – this conversation gets into enough technical detail to excite hard core geeks, but we try to go back and explain our thoughts in more accessible English.

(MP3 – 16.1MB – 47 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061128_039.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #039 Here!

Polonium talk is all over the news media because of the recent poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent living in the UK. The tale is one suitable for a John Le Carre novel with allegations of a state sponsored assassination, a suggestion of self-administered death for the purpose of discrediting a former employer and stories about a mysterious meeting at a sushi bar.

Shane and I, however, focused on the unique properties of polonium-210, the rare, dangerous, but useful isotope used as the murder weapon. For example, did you know that there was a substance whose energy density (milliwatts/milligram) is nearly 200,000 times larger than lithium-ion in a chemical battery?

After chatting about a single isotope for about 20 minutes, we moved on to a discussion about the hazards of coal mining and transportation with an emphasis on the way that the industry avoids even seemingly simple safety and environmental precautions.

As an industry (US numbers only) that extracts and moves more than a billion tons of useful material every year (and causes the movement of several times that of less useful material) with a total annual revenue of only about 50 billion dollars, the available margins in the industry are pretty tight. It is difficult for the industry to make a profit, so the industry operators do things like refuse to cover their fuel storage areas and transport rail cars and resist requirements to install pollution control measures.

They also use explosives to blast off the entire top of a mountain and shove the residues off into local valleys and streams because it is cheaper than a more careful extraction method. Some smaller, non-union operators even skirt dust control measures designed to reduce the risk of black lung disease, a condition that is leading to increases in that disease’s death rate after years of decline.

Here are some links providing more details about the topics covered:

Daintiest Dynamo

Nuclide Safety Data Sheet; Polonium-210

Learn a bit more about mountain top removal (MTR)

Black Lung Disease

(MP3 – 14.3MB – 42 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061121_38.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #038 Here!

George Stanford earned his PhD in experimental nuclear physics from Yale University and then spent his professional career doing nuclear reactor safety research at the Argonne National Laboratory. One of his special interest was the sodium cooled fast reactor program. He worked on the Experimental Breeder Reactor II which was the technical prototype for a future reactor proposal known as the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR)

George and I talked about various fuel cycles, their perceived advantages and disadvantages, and some of the politics associated with the IFR. We talked a bit about the passive safety experiments conducted on the EBR II, pyroprocessing of fast reactor fuel, and the uranium use efficiency possible with fast reactor fuel recycling.

We also spoke a bit about the 10 MWe Toshiba 4S sodium cooled reactor, which has been proposed as an alternative electrical power generator for remote areas. The first proposed location for this reactor is Galena Alaska, a small village on the Yukon River that currently depends completely on diesel fuel and kerosene for its energy supplies.

Here are a few related links that might be useful in helping to better understand our discussion.

• Argonne National Laboratory – State of the Laboratory 1992
• Argonne National Laboratory – State of the Laboratory 1993
• Argonne National Laboratory – State of the Laboratory 1994
• DOE’s Nuclear Energy Research Programs Threaten National Security

Ruth recently wrote a rather detailed post titled The Ziggy Switkowski Report: Is Nuclear in Australia’s Futureabout the various sides of the nuclear debate in Australia. Not only did she discuss the soon to be released Report, but she also pointed readers to a new anti-nuclear web site titled energyscience.org.au.

She included a discussion about the efforts of the fossil fuel industry and its political supporters to try to blunt any optimism about the prospects that Australia’s entry into nuclear power would bring increased prosperity. According to many in that industry, efforts that encourage nuclear power or try to make the fossil fuel industry pay for its damage to the environment would be harmful for Australian businesses.

(MP3 – 15.6MB – 45 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061107_37.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #037 Here!

Shane and I chatted about recent announcements by Morocco, Algeria, UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia that they have been talking with the International Atomic Energy Agency about developing nuclear power programs. All of the countries have indicated that they are interested in using nuclear power in cogeneration plants that produce useful products like fresh water in addition to electricity.

One of the key factors to consider is that oil producing countries currently have large reserves of cash, a key ingredient for a successful nuclear power plant development project. In addition, as energy producers, these countries have a base of people that understand the geopolitical importance of the industry, the importance of working carefully around high energy systems, and the impact that the energy industry can have on prosperity.

We talked about desalting plants, production of uranium from sea water, creating fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen, and history of nuclear programs in the Middle Eastern area.

Here are a few links containing information that might enhance your understanding of the show.

ORNL Review – Chapter 5: Balancing Act

Iran’s quest for power has deep roots

(MP3 – 19.8MB – 56 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061102_36.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #036 Here!

On November 2, 2006, I chatted with Professor Rodney Ewing of the University of Michigan. Dr. Ewing has been studying methods for disposal of used nuclear materials for more than 25 years.

He made a recent speech to the Geological Society of America in which he framed the choice of proceeding with nuclear power as follows:

“Plutonium versus carbon—which would you rather have as your problem? I don’t have the answer, but the points I’m raising are ones I think people need to be considering.”

Prof. Ewing’s other main issue is that he thinks that the scale of nuclear power development necessary to make a significant contribution to alleviating greenhouse gas production is rather awe inspiring.

According to his calculations, there would need to be as many as 3,500 new nuclear power plants built between now and 2050. Though he acknowledges that nuclear power developments have a role to play, he is concerned about the monetary and intellectual resources that would be required for this huge expansion. Of course, the prospect of such a large number of new nuclear plants sounds pretty terrific to me!

This show is even longer than our normal show; Dr. Ewing provides some excellent and patient explanations for his points of view, while I think he might even have learned something from mine. I hope you enjoy the show.

(MP3 – 8.4MB – 24 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061102_35.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #035 Here!

On November 2, 2006, Rod Adams talked with Dr. Regis Matzie, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Westinghouse. Dr. Matzie has been a key participant in the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor and several other advanced nuclear power system development projects.

Dr. Matzie has been in the commercial nuclear power industry for about 31 years, following a five year stint in the nuclear navy and five more years as a graduate student at Stanford University. He has a breadth of nuclear and technology experience and is excited about the future prospects for the industry.

(MP3 – 17.3MB – 50 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061024_34.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #034 Here!

Shane and I have had a few busy days in our day jobs, so this show is a zero prep show with a variety of topics including long term storage of used nuclear fuel, the design and operation of Fermi’s CP-1, Steorn’s claim of “free energy”, Warren Buffett’s investments in nuclear power, the “broken window” theory, and an interesting nuclear point of view from a college newspaper. We hope you do not get frustrated in following our chat, but that is the way that conversations go at times.

Here are some links that you might find useful if any of the topics whets your interest.

• Steorn’s “free energy” claim
• Village voice article that discusses graffiti and “broken windows”
• Warren Buffett versus Amory Lovins on nuclear power
• N-waste storage plan grows dim in Skull Valley
• Ashley Yeager’s article titled “Nuclear Power on the Rise”

At the request of several listeners and blog readers, Shane and I decided to focus this podcast on the graphite and heavy metal “pebbles” that form the basic fuel element for a number of currently proposed reactor types.

We talk a bit about the inventor of the pebble bed concept – Rudolf Schulten – and about the success of the demonstration and testing reactor built using his fuel elements – the German AVR. We spend a good deal of time talking about the follow-on to the AVR- the Thorium High Temperature Reactor (THTR) and about the circumstances that led to its early demise.

Then we move on to more contemporary versions – the South African PBMR, the Chinese HTR and the planned follow-ons to that prototype and the Adams Engine^TM. If you want to see some good information on all kinds of high temperature gas reactors, check out Professor Andrew Kadak’s presentation at http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/Presentation/HTGR.pdf

Hope you enjoy the show. For those that were kind enough to suggest the topic, we hope that we answered your questions in our own geeky way.

Sorry we got a bit long winded, we plan to cut back down to about 40 minutes – unless, of course, we get really excited about another topic.

(MP3 – 17.9MB – 52 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061010_32.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #032 Here!

Ruth Sponsler is an amateur mineral collector, a resident of the beautiful mountains of North Carolina and an active supporter of the use of nuclear energy. She blogs at We Support Lee.

Shane and I invited her onto the show to talk about her unusual hobby and find out how she goes about finding minerals, particularly those that contain uranium and thorium.

In addition to talking about mineral collecting, we spoke about local (to North Carolina) nuclear politics, European role models for energy production, and a bit of nuclear family history – Ruth’s mother knew people like Enrico Fermi and Leo Szliard.

We also discussed high mileage automobiles – Ruth drives a hybrid Prius while I have been driving a VW Jetta TDI (Turbo Diesel Injected) since 2001. Shane mentioned something about VW’s diesel production for the US – here is a link that provides a bit more detail VW and TDI for the future

The show concludes with a special guest appearance by some of Ruth’s minerals.

Following the show, you will hear a short promo for Hobo Radio, part of The Podcast Network line up of independently produced podcasts. I think I recognized the tune being whistled in the background as “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin. Of course, the snippets are too short to violate any copyright laws!

We hope you enjoyed this episode, especially hearing a new voice with a different perspective on nuclear matters. We plan to bring you more of those kinds of interviews – in fact, if you are interested or know someone that we should talk to, please do not hesitate to make a comment or suggestion.

(MP3 – 15.5MB – 45 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20061003_31.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #031 Here!

Uranium is a relatively common metal. The quantity that is readily available for human use is far larger than the quantity that would be required to fuel a vastly larger base of nuclear reactors than the one that is in operation today. The Uranium Information Center has published an excellent briefing paper titled Supply of Uranium that was last updated in June 2006.

That information paper directly contradicts the adamant antinuclear activists who try to make the case that the world’s supply of uranium is comparable to the world’s supply of fossil fuel. They are often trying to convince people that there is no use in expending significant resources in developing new nuclear power plants. According to their way of thinking, nuclear fission power is simply replacing one non renewable resource for another.

The reality is that there is a huge difference in potential energy available. Uranium prospecting has only just begun; there is a vast quantity of already mined uranium that is currently considered to be a waste product and there is an even larger potential resource base in the world’s supply of thorium.

Shane and I talk about these topics and others during Atomic Show #031.

During the show we made a couple of comments that deserve additional attention.

1. The chemicals most frequently used for In Situ Leaching (ISL) in the US are oxygen and carbon dioxide. That’s right, the acidic chemical that Shane mentioned during the show is essentially soda water with a pH of about 6.8-7.5.

2. Approximately 85% of the uranium mined in the US uses the ISL process.

For a variety of reasons, a large portion of the nuclear people that I know tend towards being conservative Republicans who believe that “Environmentalists” share much of the blame for the difficulties that their favorite technology has had in the marketplace and in public perception.

I challenge that belief and ask them to reason a little more deeply. Though there are some vocal opponents to nuclear power that are liberal Democrats, there are also many who are conservative Republicans. Though there are people that claim to be Environmentalists that oppose nuclear energy developments, there are also some very prominent people in the environmental movement that favor nuclear energy – and there always have been. James Lovelock and Patrick Moore are only the most recent. In the 1950s, some very prominent and powerful Democrats – including Al Gore Sr, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and John F. Kennedy – were big nuclear power supporters.

On numerous occasions, I have also asked people to ask themselves a few tough, logically based questions.

1) Which party has supporters that like the status quo more than radical change?
2) Why would someone who is really concerned about clean air and water, uncluttered landscapes, and global climate change actively oppose a technology clean enough and compact enough to run inside sealed submarines?
3) Which party should favor large projects that employ thousands of people, many of whom are union members?

Then I ask them to tell me again why they believe that the Republicans are on their side and the environmental movement is not.

One particular prominent Democrat that gets misunderstood by many nukes is Al Gore, Jr. For many years, he has been identified with the environmental movement. Through his writing, (Earth in the Balance – 1992 and An Inconvenient Truth – 2006) film making and speaking he has made a consistent plea for people to take better care of the Earth and its natural resources, including its people.

In his climate change wake up messages, he occasionally mentions nuclear power and expresses doubt that it can solve the problems that he sees, but his statements are never what I would consider to be antinuclear. As I understand and interpret his words, he is simply expressing his view of the industry and its ability to get things done based on prior history. Here is an example statement from a recent speech:(Note: you can find more of the context of the speech and a discussion about it at Al Gore’s Speech)

While I am not opposed to nuclear power and expect to see some modest increased use of nuclear reactors, I doubt that they will play a significant role in most countries as a new source of electricity.

Read that sentence carefully and remember that there are hundreds of countries in the world, only a handful of which are seriously considering massive new nuclear power projects. Remember also that the nuclear industry, for all its operational successes, has not been very successful in getting new plants financed, politically approved and constructed.

One of the reasons why I believe that Al Gore is telling the truth when he says he does not oppose nuclear power is that I remember reading about how much his father favored the technology. Senator Al Gore, Sr. was a member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and once proposed legislation to allow the Atomic Energy Commission to build a number of nuclear power plants to feed its own facilities as a way to encourage the development of a commercial nuclear power industry. He saw the technology as one way for public power to help improve people’s lives. As a Senator from Tennessee he was also influential in getting approvals for the Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power projects.

Most people who admire their parents gain much of their insight and attitudes from them. It would seem a long stretch to believe that Al Gore, a man who chose the same profession as his father, would decide that he was wrong about such an important issue.

In case you are wondering, I am a registered Republican, but I have not voted for that party in national elections for at least a dozen years.

Shane and I start off the show by congratulating the voters in Sweden for their recent election of a new government. The leaders of the parties that seem likely to form the new coalition government have declared that they will not shut down any of Sweden’s currently operating 10 nuclear reactors during the next four years despite a 1980 referendum putting 2010 as the end of the nuclear age in Sweden.

Alliance coalition ends Prime Minister Goran Persson’s rule By Lennart Simonsson

The rest of the conversation – with the exception of a few stray ramblings by each of us – remained focused on my impressions of a talk given on 18 September 2006 by Skip Bowman, the President of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). The talk was given to a group consisting of US military members, defense contractors and other people interested in actions that can be taken to alleviate America’s oil addiction.

The talk was part of a series of “energy conversations” hosted by the Office of Force Transformation and the Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. The series has already include talks by a diverse group of thought leaders that includes Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, Matt Simmons, Jeremy Rifkin, and Suzanne Hunt. Each have shared very different perspectives and possible solutions to the energy supply challenges. You can find out more about the series and even download many of the presentations at the following link:

Energy: A Conversation About Our National Addiction. An Inter-Agency Learning Opportunity

Admiral Frank L. (Skip) Bowman’s presentation slides, referred to on the show, can be found under the heading of “Presentation” at the following link:

Energy Forum #6
Admiral Frank L. “Skip” Bowman,
President and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute
Nuclear Energy 2006: Status and Outlook

(MP3 – 15.2MB – 51 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060912_029.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #029 Here!

Space exploration is critically dependent on energy sources that are long lasting and can operate in a vacuum. Nuclear power fits the bill, but there have always been objections that limited its applications.

Objections notwithstanding there have also been a number of missions where the only real solution was to use a nuclear power source of one form or another. During episode 29 of The Atomic Show, Shane and I talk about nuclear batteries – also known as radioisotope thermal generators (RTG), nuclear fission electrical power sources, and nuclear thermal rockets. We mention the NERVA program for rocket motor development that resulted in a number of tests during the 1960s.

You can find out more details regarding the topics covered at the following links: (Warning: The first three links are not independent sources – Rod Adams wrote all of the articles during an earlier life phase. Please forgive the self promotion.)

AEI April 1995, Nuclear Batteries

AEI September 1996 – Focus on nuclear batteries

AEI September 1995 – Focus on nuclear rockets

The following sources are independent.

NASA Fact Sheet – Spacecraft Power for Cassini

Nuclear Thermal Rockets: Design Concepts and Issues

(MP3 – 17.7MB – 51 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060905_028.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #028 Here!

The new reactors designs that will be built in the US (and perhaps in countries like the UK, Japan, and China) are refined versions of the first and second generation plants that are now operating. There has been a great deal of effort put into reducing the number of components, the reliance on electrically powered safety systems, and in providing means of cooling that rely on physical principles like natural circulation instead of pumps.

One benefit of these new designs is to provide more time for operators to take action in unusual situations another is to reduce the cost of licensing, construction and operation.

Here are links to some of the sources that Shane and I used while we were preparing for the show and during our discussion.

Regis Matzie’s AP-1000 presentation to Tulane University – September 26, 2003

NRC Backgrounder on new plant designs

America’s renaissance in nuclear power: Next-generation nuclear reactors strive for radical simplicity

NRC ESBWR design certification status page

We hope that you enjoy the show. New plants design experts – please help us correct any technical errors that you hear.

(MP3 – 16.7MB – 49 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060830_027.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #027 Here!

Shane and I were inspired by an article titled “Nuclear to the rescue” by Paul Driessen who also wrote “Eco-Imperialism: Green Power • Black Death.”.

I had posted a comment about the article for my Atomic Insights blog at Inspiring way to start the day and I was still excited enough with renewed enthusiasm for the concept of using nuclear power to alleviate human suffering that we talked for nearly an hour.

During the hour, we also mentioned solar powered cookers, the Sturgis (scroll down a bit in the article to find a picture of the ship) and the NS Savannah

The concept of using nuclear energy to provide power to remote areas is not new to me; I presented a paper titled Nuclear Power for Remote Areas almost exactly ten years ago. The anniversary of hurricane Katrina and the onset of another hurricane season have reminded me, a normally spoiled American who can sometimes take power for granted, just how uncomfortable it is to live without reliable electricity.

I am grateful to Mr. Driessen for reminding me of one of the reasons that I never gave up on Adams Atomic Engines, even when others tried to convince me that the world did not want what we had to offer.

(MP3 – 16.2MB – 47 min)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060823_026.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #026 Here!

Shane and I get our groove back and engage in a geeky discussion on topics ranging from helium to coal and somehow manage to include such topics as aviation safety, nuclear engineering career paths, computing the cost of common products like a liter of water, assumptions underlying the MIT study titled the Future of Nuclear Energy, the geology that results in helium contamination of natural gas, a new business model for building nuclear power plants, Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and a singing act that included a cello and a helium bottle.

We are obviously biased, but think that this show is one of our better efforts. We hope you agree. Feedback is always welcome.

Here are some links to articles and topics that we discussed during the show:

Lighter than Air

Russia’s Energy Strategy

The Future of Nuclear Power

The Nuclear Option

The Amarillo Globe News, a local paper with a well organized web site, is telling this story for the world to see. Though many of us in the podcasting a blogging world recognize the power of the internet and call it a new media, we do not have a monopoly on bits and electrons. There are many people in traditional media that also get the fact that there is a new way to share information with the world.

I think it is very interesting that a small paper – reported max circulation of less than 63,000 in a moderately sized town like Amarillo, Texas – which had a population of about 174,000 people as of the last census in 2000 – is taking advantage of its local access to report on a major story that is being overlooked in many larger newspapers. Soon, there will be major papers and journalists that get interested in the story, but they will find themselves scooped by the Globe News which has already been able to begin telling the story to the whole world.

We definitely live in a new era.

View from Australia: Uranium policy shift is roiling Australians by Raymond Bonner International Herald Tribune

For a view from the anti-nuclear establishment, you might want to read PM’s nuclear dreaming: enriching Australia? by Jim Green in the Green-Left Weekly

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060808_025.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #025 Here!

The big news since Shane and I last talked is the announcement by a Texan named George Chapman of the formation of Amarillo Power and its plans to build two Advanced Boiling Water Reactors (ABWR) near Amarillo Texas. Shane questions the location based on his frequent drives through the area. Water might be an issue, but there are probably solutions that are not readily visible. Customer location is also a question. However, the indications are that Mr. Chapman is a serious, experienced businessman with a plan. He once worked for Bechtel and helped to build the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station as a welder in his younger days.

I also talk quite a bit about the discussions going on at the American Nuclear Society Utility Working Conference at Amelia Island. Lots of positive talk about new nuclear plant construction and the amount of work – translate that as jobs – that will need to be done in order to rebuild the infrastructure for manufacturing reactors and their components.

Here are some links to the stories we mention in the show about the Amarillo Power ABWR project.

Nuclear power plant sought (1 August)

Editorial: Nuclear plant in our future (6 August)

Nuclear facility years away (2 August)

Nuke plants get incentives (5 August)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060727_024.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #024 Here!

It was one of those weeks when Shane and I could simply not match our schedules for a talk. Just so none of you would miss your Atomic Show fix, I have obtained permission to post an interview of me conducted by Paige and Gretchen of Mommycast. I had been corresponding with them about my desire to share a little bit of information with moms everywhere about atomic energy.

These ladies “get it” and understand just how important it is for people to listen, learn and think about energy and alternatives to oil.

This story is not actually “news” in that it is dated 13 July 2006 and talks about something that has been going on for six weeks at the time that the story appeared. However, it should cause a certain level of concern for those people that live and work in those areas where fossil fuel exploration is common. There are certainly still a lot of unknown hazards associated with the operation.

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060723_023.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #023 Here!

Shane and I start with a lengthy and informative discussion about saturation diving, a technique that allows humans to operate in deep water for weeks at a time. This technique is often a part of off-shore oil drilling and production and is one of the many reasons that there are high costs associated with that method of oil production.

We talked about the geopolitics of energy and the reasonable notion that energy producers and energy consumers have different views about energy security. We try to help each other figure out why security of demand is so important and why major oil companies often assume prices well below current prices in the models that they use to determine their investment strategies. In other words, they are logically reluctant to add capacity too quickly or to add capacity that has too high of a marginal cost.

There was not really much in this show directly related to atomic energy, but all energy topics have some interrelations so we hope you enjoy it anyway.

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060712_022.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #022 Here!

During episode number 22, Shane and I begin with a rant about people like George Monbiot, the author of a recent article titled Sure, nuclear power is safer than in the past – but we still don’t need it. Our big beef is that he accepts a fossil fuel industry supported notion that it is somehow going to be possible to capture and bury CO2 from their facilities. At the same time he states that it would be a mistake to believe that it is possible to safely store nuclear fuel by-products.

We make reference to some ideas from an article about waste titled The Energy Challenge and the special edition of The Atomic Show when I interviewed Mary Mycio, the author of Wormwood Forest.

Hope you enjoy the passion; we got a little excited during this show. Shane even used the term “BS”. Wow!

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060711_021.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #021 Here!

Atomic Show number 21 is a special episode. I was honored by the opportunity to interview Mary Mycio, the author of Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl. Mary is a unique person with an interesting career path; she earned her undergraduate degree in biology, became a lawyer and then left the law to pursue a career as a journalist and writer. In 1986, after the Chernobyl accident, she developed what she calls in the preface to her book “an atomic fire – a determination to find out the truth about Chernobyl.”

The book is a fascinating journey of discovery and provides a unique view of the area that the Ukrainians call The Zone of Alienation.

Please have a listen and learn why Mary believes that it is time to rethink opposition to nuclear power.

(Note: During the interview, Mary recommended the following book – Nuclear Fear: A History of Images by Spencer R. Weart)

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060703_020.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #020 Here!

I hope some of you missed us last week. If not, we must be doing something that needs improvement. Just in case you noticed that we did not post a new show last week, we simply were not able to match up our schedules. I had a series of meetings about Adams Atomic Engines and those interfered with production of the show. The good news is . . . (blacked out by censors waving NDA’s.)

Anyway, back to this week’s show. Shane and I start off by sharing some of our thoughts about engineering educations versus liberal arts. We then talk a bit about the large Japanese engineering firms – Toshiba, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi – that are all developing ways to enter the US market for new nuclear power plants.

We talk about NRG Energy’s announced plans for new reactors at the South Texas project site and about the fact that those new nuclear facilities only represent about 25% of NRG Energy’s new building plans.

We then digress a bit into some commentary about how new air emissions standards in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach might help to encourage the use of atomic engines for large commercial ships. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback. Enjoy!

With all due humility, I think I fielded them pretty well. Please check out the show and let Cam and us know what you thought.

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060620_019.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #019 Here!

This week Shane and I talked about recent nuclear developments in Canada, about the Ontario energy plan, and about technical choices and opportunities in the nuclear energy business in Canada.

We discuss the potential use of CANDU technology for tar sands oil production and the potential use of SLOWPOKE reactors for district heating systems.

During the show we promised a link to the recent Living on Earth segment on new nuclear power plants. You can find it under the title of Living on Earth: New Nukes for North America.

We welcome your comments. As a matter of fact, the topic for this show was a direct result of a request by one of our listeners following last week’s show about nuclear power in Europe.

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060613_018.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #018 Here!

Last week a technical glitch caused the loss of an entire show when GarageBand decided to hang just as we were finishing our chat. It caused some rather heated expletives but there was no recovery possible since I never bothered to hit “Save” during the course of the conversation. Lesson relearned.

This week, Shane and I decided that it was a good week to talk about the current situation in Europe with regard to nuclear power. Throughout the dark period in American nuclear plant construction, there has been a common tendency by some in the industry to look over the Atlantic and think that things are better there, but that really has not been true for the past 15 years or so.

Even in the vaunted French nuclear power system the newest plant started construction in 1992 and took about six years to become connected to the grid. There has been some focused opposition to nuclear power’s expansion and a few countries even have plans to begin shutting down their existing plants. Most of those plans are progressing more slowly than initially planned, partially due to resistance from energy intensive industries.

Here are some links to articles that formed part of the background for our conversation:

• Nuclear stations may stay on line to bridge the gap
• Nuclear power a contentious issue
• Russia defends its record on gas supply reliability
• The Gazprom nation

[audio:http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_atomic_20060530_017.mp3]

Listen to Atomic Show #017 Here!

Shane and I decided to try to stick our American noses into Australia’s growing conversation about whether or not to enter into the nuclear power business as more than just a supplier of 25% of the world’s yellowcake uranium, the raw material that is refined and manufactured into fuel elements for nuclear power plants.

We discuss the fact that Australia has about 41% of the world’s proven uranium reserves within its borders, the fact that the country has not yet built any nuclear power stations (it does have some well respected research reactor facilities) and the fact that the nuclear power industry faces some competition for markets by the coal industry.

We mention the following information sources – here are the links so that you can get to the original material yourself and verify if we know what we are talking about. Please be a critical thinker when learning about this controversial topic.

Nuclear Energy Prospects in Australia

Let’s talk about nuclear power and other energy sources

Sharing the vision for a nuclear future