Concept for Fort Saint Vrain Today we are highlighting a reactor that was a pioneer of its kind: the Fort Saint Vrain Nuclear Power Plant, located in Platteville, a city in Northern Colorado. Though the plant has since been converted to a natural gas generating station, Fort Saint Vrain was one of the first thorium-powered […]
Eifion Rees wrote an article for the Ecologist and later republished it in the Guardian. The article was called “Don’t believe the spin on thorium being a ‘greener’ nuclear option.” I wrote a rebuttal to the article here.
Last night I was flying back from speaking at TEDxYYC to Alabama and I had a bit of time on my flight, so I watched a program that I had recorded on PBS a few days earlier. It was called “Plan-B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” and it focused mostly on the work of Lester Brown […]
Lately I’ve been looking a lot at spent nuclear fuel, particularly what’s in it and what’s radioactive after a while. I’ve seen graphs of fission product distributions before, but they’re always of fission products by atomic mass, and they’re usually showing the distribution right after the fission event. I wanted to know what was in […]
In nuclear reactor design, we describe the cross-section of different nuclides in a unit called a “barn”. It has units of area. So what does that mean? Well, take a look at this picture. This shows five important nuclides plotted against each other, with their size determined by their “barns”. You can see that one […]
Reprinted with the author’s permission and my admiration and gratitude for a job well done! 12 May 2010 Physicians for Social Responsibility 1875 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 1012 Washington, DC, 20009 psrnatl@psr.org Nuclear Information and Resource Service 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 340, Takoma Park, MD 20912 info@ieer.org Dear Sirs/Madams: Taking encouragement from your (PSR’s) website’s […]
Doug Caruso of the Columbus Dispatch has written a pair of articles that are appearing in today’s issue of the paper. In the article he quotes Dr. Al Juhasz and Dr. George Schmidt of NASA GRC, Dr. Dan Ingersoll of ORNL, Dr. Rich Denning of Ohio State, and me. All of these folks have been […]
“Even if nuclear reactors weren’t top terrorist targets…” Lie. A nuclear reactor is a terrible target. It’s about the hardest target you could even go after, encased in concrete and steel that would crush a plane in seconds. “Even if radioactive waste didn’t remain deadly for 10,000 years…” What are you talking about? Are you […]
Boy, sometimes someone mentions something to a group of people that give a concept a level of credibility no money could buy: 13:28 — “there are some innovations in nuclear…modular, liquid…” 23:10 — “there’s a liquid-type reactor, which seems a little hard…but maybe they say that about us.” Here’s the original link to the TED […]
Steven Kotler: Meltdown or Mother Lode: The New Truth About Nuclear Power Lately we’ve been seeing a lot more discussion about nuclear power on “environmentalist” and other left-leaning sites that have traditionally been opposed to nuclear. I know that part of this has been driven by the interest in building new reactors and reducing CO2 […]