(On a personal note–today has been a very good day for me. My dad is having open-heart surgery and I’ve been so concerned for him, and just received word that his surgery was successful and he is doing well.)

So I’m very happy about that. But I did get some disappointing news today. I was part of a proposal team, led by the University of Tennessee and including Oak Ridge National Lab, to look at fluoride/chloride reactors for burning up nuclear waste. The proposal was made to the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.

Well, out of 3500 proposals they picked 70 to go to the next level, and we weren’t one of them.

3500 proposals is a LOT of proposals to look at, and I don’t envy the proposers the task that they had. Nevertheless, I think the work we were proposing to do was very good work and targets a real national need. But I’ve also been involved with proposals for long enough to realize that sometimes there are other reasons than “technical merit” that proposals aren’t chosen.

I’ll see if I can post sections of the proposal here on the blog, if anyone’s interested…