101st Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers

April 22, 2012, 1:23PMANS Nuclear Cafe

The Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers enters its second century this week.  If you missed it, the 100th Carnival was published last week at Atomic Power Review which is maintained by Will Davis.  It includes messages of congratulations from the American Nuclear Society and the Nuclear Energy Institute. This recognition shows that social media is here to stay as a communication tool in the nuclear energy industry.

What is the Carnival?

The Carnival is the collective voice of blogs with legendary names which emerge each week to tell the story of nuclear energy.

If you want to hear the voice of the nuclear renaissance, the Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs is where to find it.

Past editions have been hosted at Yes Vermont Yankee, Atomic Power Review, ANS Nuclear Cafe, Idaho Samizdat, NEI Nuclear Notes, Next Big Future, and CoolHandNuke, as well as several other popular nuclear energy blogs.

The publication of the Carnival each week is part of a commitment by the leading pro-nuclear bloggers in North America that we will speak with a collective voice on the issue of the value of nuclear energy.

While we each have our own points of view, we agree that the promise of peaceful uses of the atom remains viable in our own time and for the future.

If you have a pro-nuclear energy blog, and would like to host an edition of the carnival, please contact Brian Wang at Next Big Future to get on the rotation.

This is a great collaborative effort that deserves your support. Please post a Tweet, a Facebook entry, or a link on your Web site or blog to support the carnival.

This week's Carnival

Vermont Yankee - Meredith Angwin

On Tuesday, April 24, Meredith Angwin and Richard Schmidt (nuclear engineer, local resident, and occasional guest blogger at Yes Vermont Yankee)  will debate two anti-nuclear activists on a radio show at Northampton Massachusetts.

If you live in the area, you can attend the show, which will be broadcast live from a local restaurant.  If you do not live in the area, you can call in questions.  The show will not be streamed on the web, but will be podcast later.

Hiroshimasyndrome - Leslie Corice

This week's blog post of 4/20 is titled "F. Daiichi unit #2 robot inspection - one answer and two new questions", which argues the F. Daiichi unit#2 hydrogen explosion idea has been all but put to rest.

It asks two overlapping questions about unit #2 cooling. Basically, if there are no perceptible leaks inside the PCV and Drywell, then where is all the water going and how is it getting to the turbine building basement?

Next Big Future - Brian Wang

The Turkish government recently signed a $20 billion project with Russia to build nuclear power facilities in Akkuyu, Turkey. Now the Turkish government has set its sights on constructing a nuclear plant in Sinop, Turkey.

The Financial Times recently reported that China is the primary contender for this contract due to its ability to secure financing without requiring guarantees from the Turkish government. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited China last week, confirming reports of the deal when Energy Minister Tanir Yildiz held talks with Chinese authorities. At these meetings, Chinese Energy authority Liu Tienan pledged full financial guarantees for the $20 billion project.

This is a review of estimates for a nuclear energy century.  It reports 1000 reactors for 2030 would be the high-2030 scenario from the World Nuclear Association (WNA) - Nuclear Century. The WNA lists nuclear generation targets by country.

Idaho Samizdat - Dan Yurman

Once again it is time to spit on your hands, rub them together, and raise the black flag of contention to respond to deliberate attempts at creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

It will take upwards of three decades to decommission Fukushima. There are many engineering challenges ahead.  However, feat mongering is not useful as part of the dialog about the future nuclear energy in Japan or anywhere else.

In California Friends of the Earth is using Gundersen's report to create fear of the SONGS plant by questioning the design basis of the steam generators. That's propaganda. It isn't engineering fact.

ANS Nuclear Cafe - Paul Bowersox

Suzy Hobbs Baker introduces the Nuclear Literacy Project, a new website and outreach initiative geared toward reaching young, non-technical audiences with information about nuclear energy.  The new website is just the beginning... which you can check out at http://www.nuclearliteracy.org/  There are many ways to support Nuclear Literacy.

Dan Yurman covers the breaking story of a partnership between Westinghouse and Ameren Missouri to develop and build Small Modular Reactors at Ameren's Callaway site -- and other recent entrants in the race to win $452 million in cost-shared funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for SMR licensing and technical support.

Atomic Insights - Rod Adams

Electric utility executives, public utility commissions and energy industry pundits all seem to agree that the ability to extract useful quantities of gas from deep, tight shale gas reservoirs has opened up a 100 year supply of cheap natural gas. Many have publicly stated that abundant supplies of low-priced gas makes nuclear energy irrelevant and hopelessly uncompetitive.

ExxonMobil, one of the most widely respected multinational petroleum companies in the world is betting in the other direction. They are investing heavily in the capability to produce and distribute natural gas. They are not investing tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in natural gas related capital assets because they think gas will remain cheap.

ExxonMobil often places contrarian bets and rewards stockholders because they successfully buy cheap assets when no one else wants them and sells massive quantities of high margin products when everyone else is buying

Atomic Power Review - Will Davis

Will Davis at Atomic Power Review continues on his mission to give nuclear energy its history back by introducing an unusual (to the nuclear energy world) series of historical prose.

Previously announced at APR were four recurring, new historical features; the actual launch occurs now with the first installment covering Sylvania-Corning Nuclear Corporation's Western Sales Office.  Through many original documents both from Sylcor and from the late Jim Vadeboncoeur, Will Davis tells the inside story of the early days of commercial nuclear energy.

Thorium MSR - Rick Maltese

This is a book about LFTR the forgotten and hopefully revived Thorium molten salt reactor is an excellent read.  This book tells the story of the slightly radioactive element thorium, a much-touted alternative fuel for nuclear power plants.

Expanding on his Wired cover story, the author explains that the element was actually used as a nuclear fuel in an experimental reactor built and run by American scientists at Oak Ridge in the late 1960s.

Martin focuses on the work of Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer, now head of Flibe Energy, who urges U.S. utilities that are preparing to replace some 30 older reactors to build a new kind of reactor-a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor, which proponents consider to be more efficient and safe than existing plants.

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