Since Entergy announced that it would close Vermont Yankee, I have been thinking about advice for nuclear plants going forward. I mean, they haven't asked me for my advice, but what the heck. I have lots of opinions, and 20-20 hindsight.
When Leonard Nimoy wrote his first autobiography, it was titled I Am Not Spock. Nimoy had mixed feelings about the title, but it did entice people to read the book.
Prisoner's Dilemma is a famous example of game theory. You can look at this example in quite a few ways. I especially think of this game when I am thinking about Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) and advanced and non-traditional reactor development.
City people sometimes move to a farming community and then are somewhat shocked that the beautiful fields are actually not just for looking at and painting. A farmer's fields are a sort of factory. The fields produce stuff. They take inputs of raw materials, such as seeds, fertilizer, water, pesticides, and so forth. With these inputs, they produce food. Some farms are organic, and they use non-chemical fertilizer and more "natural" methods of pest control, but the goal is the same. A farmer's fields are supposed to produce food. That's the goal of farming.
A few days ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a public meeting to discuss its yearly assessment of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The assessment results were excellent (all green).
I have been thinking lately about "framing the discourse" on nuclear energy. Framing is the way that people use words and concepts to present their points of view in an understandable and appealing way to other people. I think that pro-nuclear people are often bad at this. We figure that "the truth will set you free," and then we don't spend very much time on how to frame the truth.
Refueling optimism
Note: The NRC public meeting on San Onofre steam generator issues has now adjourned. The webcast will soon be available in archived form at http://video.nrc.gov/. The twitter feed featuring participation by groups on all sides of the issue can be viewed HERE (tweets will eventually expire).
A few days ago, the Connecticut Section of the American Nuclear Society invited Howard Shaffer and me to give a talk on "Pro-Nuclear Activism." Well, it is true, we have been very actively pro-nuclear in Vermont. So, armed with our recent experiences, our presentation was an effort to convey "lessons-learned," or perhaps "best-practices" of pro-nuclear activism.
A recent public meeting held by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) turned out to be a horrific way for a nuclear supporter to spend an evening. The NRC held the meeting to report its annual review of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant's performance. The plant received the highest safety ratings, but that was not the focus of the May 23 meeting in Brattleboro, Vt.-to put it mildly.
View from Vermont