ANS Nuclear Cafe

NS Savannah, Baltimore, May 17, 2014

The weekend of May 17-18, 2014, saw a beehive of activity on board the beautiful nuclear powered ship N.S. Savannah, docked now in Baltimore. The ship was being prepared on May 18  for open public touring-a rare event indeed for this ship that is still a Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed facility-in commemoration of National Maritime Day (which actually is May 22.) To this end, the ship was abuzz with workers from the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) and its ever-present Ship's Master, Erhard Koehler, as well as workers from other organizations and, of course, the N.S. Savannah Association (NSSA), which works with MARAD to preserve and restore the ship.

With the recent shutdown of four reactors and another scheduled closure later this year, there is increasing concern over nuclear plant shutdowns in the United States, and the idea of policy intervention to prevent further closures is gaining political traction.

The 209th Nuclear Energy Blog Carnival: Nuclear Energy In Perspective

Florida governor Rick Scott and his cabinet met on May 13 for the final state-level site selection determination for new AP1000 nuclear reactors planned to be built at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in southern Florida. The hearing was well-attended by opponents and supporters.

It's time for the 208th Carnival of Nuclear Energy, and ANS Nuclear Cafe is proud to host the event!

The second Sunday in May marks the celebration of Mother's Day in the United States and many countries. In honor of this wonderful tradition, the Nuclear Cafe Matinee is quite pleased to showcase interviews with nuclear engineer Julie Ezold, Californium-252 Production Program Manager at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Expanding U.S. nuclear exports a key component of effective nonproliferation policy

I told some friends the other day that I often feel like a time traveler from the Age of Reason who sees questionable behavior and is forced by training to ask, "Why?"

The 207th Carnival of Nuclear Energy has been posted at Next Big Future.  You can click here to access this latest post in a long running tradition among the top English language pro-nuclear bloggers and authors.

Studies by Janette Sherman and Joseph Mangano purporting to link radiation from Fukushima to health effects in the United States have made for alarming headlines in news outlets on occasion, and have come under fire by critics who charge flawed methodology (for example, What Can We Do About Junk Science and Researchers Trumpet Another Flawed Fukushima Study).

In the 1960s, visions for nuclear power were hopeful and plentiful; nuclear plants of all sorts imaginable* were under consideration and under construction in areas both urban and remote, while future plans portrayed an enormous nuclear plant build-out with a complete fuel cycle that included fuel recycling and breeder reactors.

Social exchange theory is a foundational notion in social psychology that posits a rational basis for human relationships. It arose in 1958 based on theoretical foundations in economics, sociology, and psychology. Fundamentally, social exchange theory relies on three propositions [1]:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 1 in 6 people get food poisoning each year in the United States and that 3000 die from foodborne illness. Food irradiation can drastically decrease these numbers by killing harmful bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella in meat and produce. The U.S. government endorses the use of food irradiation, but does not educate the public about its benefits. Food irradiation has not caught on in the United States because consumers fear that radiation will mutate the food. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires a label (pictured below) for any food that has been irradiated.

The 206th Carnival of Nuclear Energy has been posted at The Hiroshima Syndrome.  You can click here to access this latest post in a long running tradition among the top English language pro-nuclear bloggers and authors.

Jacopo Buongiorno of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discusses some of the advantages of a nuclear reactor concept under development in collaboration with industry and other universities: floating off-shore nuclear power plants, constructed entirely in a shipyard, anchored off the coast, linked to the electric grid via undersea cable. Earthquakes and tsunamis would not be a threat, the ocean would be readily available to serve as a heat sink for reactor cooling, emergency evacuation planning would be a lesser consideration...

Note by Rod Adams:  This post has a deep background story. The author, Mike Derivan, was the shift supervisor at the Davis Besse nuclear power plant (DBNPP) on September 24, 1977, when it experienced an event that started out almost exactly like the event at Three Mile Island on March 28, 1979.

The 205th Carnival of Nuclear Energy has been posted at Atomic Power Review.  You can click here to access the latest post in a long running tradition among the top English language pro-nuclear bloggers and authors.

The World Bank reports that fewer than 10 percent of African households have access to the electrical grid.  Some countries such as Kenya and Nigeria are looking to add nuclear energy to their grids, Egypt has plans to implement nuclear energy and South Africa wants to expand its share.  This video from Voice of America News discusses some recent developments in nuclear energy in Africa and pros and cons.

Nuclear barge STURGIS; photo from US Army Corps of Engineers

Last week, we were reminded of a mostly forgotten but ambitious effort spanning the late 1950's and 1960's by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the U.S. Army-to develop a versatile range of small nuclear power plants-when it was announced that CB&I had been awarded a contract to decommission the former Army nuclear power plant barge STURGIS.  While many have recently touted the Russian Akademik Lomonosov as the "first floating nuclear power plant," the expected completion date for that plant in 2016 will put it almost exactly a half century later than the successful STURGIS.

The ANS Nuclear Criticality Safety Division (NCSD) is sponsoring a special session at the upcoming American Nuclear Society Annual Meeting in Reno, Nev., June 15-19. The session is titled "Critical and Subcritical Experiments" and will commence the morning of Wednesday, June 18. This session will contribute to the long history and hundreds of technical papers related to critical-mass experiments that first began at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the 1940s.