Fifty years ago, the era of operating molten-salt reactors came to a prolonged conclusion with the shut down of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment. In a personal interview in 2012, Paul Haubenreich had told me the story of the Christmas shutdown of the MSRE. He had described how Milton Shaw, the head of the Atomic Energy […]
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 […]
This is hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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 […]
You’re going to want to bookmark this one for later reference: Why You Can’t Build a Bomb From Spent Fuel Probably one of the best that’s been on Depleted Cranium, and Steve Packard sets the bar pretty high for himself.