Freeze Pilgrim debate tonight: Follow on TwitterANS Nuclear CafeApril 25, 2012, 8:00PM|ANS Nuclear CafeThis evening there will be a debate on a nuclear referendum that is on the town ballot in Plymouth, Mass. The referendum calls for a halt to relicensing the Pilgrim nuclear power plant, pending implementation of Fukushima lessons learned.Dave Lochbaum, appearing on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists, will be supporting the referendum. Russell Gocht, appearing on behalf of the American Nuclear Sociey, is a nuclear engineering graduate student at UMass-Lowell and will be opposing the referendum.ANS has arranged live-tweeting of the debate via the ANS twitter feed @ans_org (https://twitter.com/ans_org).This is the second of three nuclear-related public events in Massachusetts this week: Tuesday's radio panel featured Meredith Angwin and Richard Schmidt Tonight's FREEZE debate A forum on Thursday with Dave Lochbaum and others at MIT.The Pilgrim plantPlease keep an eye on the twitter feed and take part in the social media conversations about the debate!WHEN: Wednesday, April 25, 7-9 pmWHAT: Freeze Pilgrim Forum. Plymouth, Mass.http://freezepilgrim.org/news.htmlWHERE: Plymouth South Middle School, Plymouth, Mass.WHO: Russell Gocht, PhD student at UMASS Lowell, will be opposite David Lochbaum, of UCS. Lochbaum is expected to discuss UCS's report on the NRC's post Fukushima actions.WHAT YOU CAN DO: Attend or follow the ANS live twitter feed: @ans_org or https://twitter.com/ans_org___________________________Tags:educationfukushimalessons learnedlicensingnuclear opponentsreactor designsunion of concerned scientists (ucs)Share:LinkedInTwitterFacebook
ORISE reports uptick in nuclear engineering master’s degreesAn increase in the number of master’s degrees awarded in the United States in 2019 pushed the total number of nuclear engineering degrees to its highest level since 2016, according to a study conducted by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) that surveyed 34 U.S. universities with nuclear engineering programs. The report, Nuclear Engineering Enrollments and Degrees Survey, 2019 Data, includes degrees granted between September 1, 2018, and August 31, 2019, as well as enrollments for fall 2019. It was released by ORISE in February.Details: The 316 nuclear engineering master’s degrees awarded in 2019 represented a 21 percent increase over the 2018 total, and a 12 percent increase over the number awarded in 2017. The 194 doctoral degrees awarded in 2019 represented the second-highest level recorded since 1966.Go to Article
Earthquake has impact on Fukushima Daiichi plantThe black star represents the epicenter of the February 13 earthquake. Image: USGSThere has been no off-site impact from the February 13 earthquake that struck off the east coast of Japan near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) reported on February 19. The earthquake, however, has caused a water leakage from two of the site's primary containment vessels (PCVs).A nuclear alert order was issued by the plant about 20 minutes after the earthquake, and the water treatment and transfer facilities were shut down. Inspections after the event revealed no anomalies and the nuclear alert order was rescinded on February 14.The nuclear plant in Fukushima Prefecture in northeastern Japan is now undergoing decommissioning.Go to Article
Exelon Generation’s workforce development and knowledge transfer strategyStudents display items they received at a STEM workshop sponsored by Exelon. Photo: Exelon. The landscape of Exelon Generation’s nuclear business has continued to evolve—even before the complications of a pandemic—but people will always remain the core focus. Our employees and our future employee pipelines are changing almost as fast as technology, which is why the development of the workforce, both present and future, along with the transfer of knowledge across all departments and levels of the organization, must remain adaptable and advance as well.Go to Article
Farming in FukushimaScreenshot of the video from Vice. Vice News has published a video on YouTube that follows two farmers from the Fukushima Prefecture, Noboru Saito and Koji Furuyama. Saito, who grows many different crops on his farm, says that the rice grown in the area is consistently rated as the best. Furuyama specializes in peaches and explains his strategy to deal with the stigma of selling fruit from Fukushima: grow the best peaches in the world.Go to Article
The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima kicks off an online documentary seriesA film titled The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima gets top billing as part of The Short List with Suroosh Alvi, an online documentary series curated by the founder of the media company Vice. The film, which first aired on Vice TV on January 31, follows local hunters who have been enlisted to dispose of radiated wild boars that now roam abandoned streets and buildings in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear accident there.Go to Article
U.K., Japan to research remote D&D, fusion systemsThe LongOps project will develop innovative robotic technologies. Photo: UKAEABritain and Japan have signed a research and technology deployment collaboration to help automate nuclear decommissioning and aspects of fusion energy production. According to the U.K. government, which announced the deal on January 20, the £12 million (about $16.5 million) U.K.–Japanese robotics project, called LongOps, will support the delivery of faster and safer decommissioning at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan and at Sellafield in the United Kingdom, using long-reach robotic arms.The four-year collaboration on new robotics and automation techniques will also be applied to fusion energy research in the two countries.Funded equally by U.K. Research and Innovation, the U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Company, the LongOps project will be led by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA) Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE) facility.Go to Article
John Gilligan: NEUP in support of university nuclear R&DJohn Gilligan has been the director of the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) since its creation in 2009 by the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE). NEUP consolidates DOE-NE’s university support under one program and engages colleges and universities in the United States to conduct research and development in nuclear technology. The two main R&D areas for NEUP funding are fuel cycle projects, which include evolving sustainable technologies that improve energy generation to enhance safety, limit proliferation risk, and reduce waste generation and resource consumption; and reactor projects, which strive to preserve the existing commercial light-water reactors as well as improve emerging advanced designs, such as small modular reactors, liquid-metal-cooled fast reactors, and gas- or liquid-salt-cooled high-temperature reactors.Go to Article
Nuclear Education and COVID-19The COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States on a wide basis in March of this year, and life as we knew it changed. “Social distancing” and “essential workers” entered the jargon and working from home for many became the norm.The number of remote meetings skyrocketed, and various companies have seen that business can be conducted without having employees in the office. For universities, distance learning has been common for a while now, but with COVID it has become essential.Nuclear News asked some nuclear engineering professors about how their programs have been dealing with the pandemic. We posed three questions and asked for responses to any or all of them:How has COVID affected your NE program, and what have you learned from the experience?Has your NE program been able to contribute to your university’s broader COVID response (e.g., through research or volunteer programs)?What opportunities or challenges do you foresee in the next year for your program and your students?The following are responses received by NN.Go to Article
The value of “fluffy” stuffMary Lou Dunzik-GougarYou know the old saying that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach? Well, I say anyone thinking that way should be kept far away from students!In my time at Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, I worked with incredible scientists and engineers doing cutting-edge research. Unfortunately, making progress in research is not always conducive to the education and training of those who haven’t yet gained the necessary expertise. And there is an interesting phenomenon that occurs the more one gains in education and experience: We tend to forget what we were like before, what it was like not to know everything we do now. More than one of my PhD colleagues at the national labs dismissed the education and outreach efforts that I pursued in my spare time: scouts, K-12 classroom visits, teacher workshops, science expos, etc., viewing any focus other than the truly technical as just “fluffy” and a waste of valuable time and effort.Go to Article
U.S. university programs: Lighting the way to a brighter nuclear futureCraig PiercyWe have dedicated this month’s edition of Nuclear News to university programs and their contributions in advancing the field of applied nuclear science and technology and readying the next generation of scientists and engineers.Say what you want about the condition of the U.S. nuclear enterprise today, but there is no denying that our university-based programs in nuclear science and engineering are still the envy of the world. You can see it in the way these programs attract students and faculty from across the globe, and from their formative contributions to technologies, such as the NuScale power module and many of the advanced reactor designs being developed today.Go to Article