Get to Know Nuclear

The May 2013 edition of the technical journal Nuclear Technology (NT) is available electronically and in hard copy for American Nuclear Society member subscribers and others.

It's that end-of-semester time of year, and that means it's time to showcase this year's Texas Atomic Film Festival!  Each year engineering students at UT-Austin communicate some rather difficult and technical nuclear concepts - and blow off some steam in a time of term papers and final exams - via the wondrous medium of the silver screen.

A group of IBM researchers have created the world's smallest movie - starring 130 atoms (well, the oxygen atoms of carbon monoxide molecules).  An atomic-scale must-see!

The American Nuclear Society's Center for Nuclear Science and Technology Information and the ANS Outreach Department will sponsor a full-day teacher workshop on Saturday, June 15, in Atlanta, Georgia. The workshop-Detecting Radiation in Our Radioactive World-is for science educators, including elementary, biology, chemistry, earth science, physics, physical science, life science, environmental, and general science teachers. The workshop will be held the day before the beginning of the ANS Annual Meeting in Atlanta.

The May 2013 edition of the research journal Nuclear Science and Engineering is available both electronically and in hard copy for American Nuclear Society member subscribers and others.

With Unit 6 returning from a planned maintenance outage earlier this week, all 8 reactors at the world's largest nuclear electrical generating station are now online, generating emission-free electricity from the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario, Canada ("Full Power at the Bruce").

NASA scientist Dr. Pushker Kharecha and Dr. James Hansen (the leading climate scientist in the US) recently authored a study which conservatively estimates nuclear power has saved 1.8 million lives, which otherwise would have been lost due to fossil fuel pollution and associated causes, since 1971.

The April issue of Nuclear News magazine is available in hard copy and electronically (click 'ANS Members' or 'Subscribers' in left column for full issue). This issue features a special section "Outage Management" with these feature articles:

The 151st Carnival of Nuclear Energy is at Next Big Future. Click here to access the latest edition of the Carnival.

Charles Chase and his team at Lockheed Martin's "Skunk Works" made quite a splash recently by announcing that they are attempting to develop a truck-trailer-sized 100-MW fusion reactor-to be ready for operation in just a few years!

It's high time to make plans to attend the American Nuclear Society's 2013 Annual Meeting, held this year in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 16-20 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta.

The March/April 2013 edition of the technical journal Fusion Science and Technology (FST) is available electronically and in hard copy for American Nuclear Society member subscribers and others.

While Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania was the first full-scale nuclear plant to be designed and built to provide commercial electric power, the Vallecitos Atomic Electric Power Plant in California was actually the first privately-financed nuclear power plant to provide meaningful amounts of electricity for public use.

Following the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident on March 28, 1979, it seemed to many as if a slowing nuclear energy industry in the United States had been dealt a death blow. It had not, but the public's confidence was shaken, and this blow to public opinion built upon a decade's worth of intensive, focused anti-nuclear effort on the part of a number of large well-funded special interest groups.

"The best science online" according to someone who really ought to know: Henry Reich, creator of MinutePhysics.

The American Nuclear Society is soliciting names of qualified members who are interested in becoming the editor of the ANS journal Nuclear Technology (NT). Dr. Nicholas Tsoulfanidis, Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, has served as editor of NT since June 1997. During his term, Professor Tsoulfanidis has done an outstanding job. He has raised NT's reputation for technical excellence and has kept up a full schedule of publishing monthly issues.

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 earthquake and 40-foot-high tsunami waves hit Fukushima, Japan. The impact on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was a call-to-action for members of the American Nuclear Society.

Don Miley, tour guide at Idaho National Laboratory, takes viewers of this video on a trip to the Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-I). In 1951, the first electricity from nuclear power was generated at EBR-I-using a reactor that actually bred more fuel than it consumed, using an all-plutonium core.

Taxpayers for Common Sense on February 27 issued a press release targeting the Department of Energy for "wasting more than half a billion dollars" on its small modular reactor (SMR) development cost-sharing program. Leaving aside the historically essential role of government investment in developing, advancing, and bringing to market innovative energy technologies-and the fact that early government investments in nuclear energy technology now pay back enormous dividends to all Americans in billions of dollars' worth of affordable and emission-free electricity generation every year-many of the advantages of advanced SMR energy technologies were overlooked or misconstrued in the group's press release and policy brief.