ANS Nuclear Cafe

The court will decide Yucca Mountain's future, not the president

For the latest updates on nuclear power stations in Japan, please see the Fukushima tab on the top menu of this page.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted 4-0 to renew the operating license for the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station near Brattleboro, Vt., for an additional 20 years. [NRC web page on Vermont Yankee license renewal]

The time has come for the U.S. to recycle its spent nuclear fuel

Leigh Keever is a professor of sociology at Chattahoochee Technical College, in Marietta, Georgia. Last year, she invited PopAtomic Studios to participate in the service learning program, which has evolved into an ongoing effort to learn about energy issues from a sociological perspective.

In my previous post for the ANS Nuclear Cafe, I described what I had learned from debating nuclear opponents.

Hello, my name is Auguste Priori, and I'm here to conduct a census. How many elephants are there in this room?

The 42 Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs is now up at Next Big Future.

Delays seen for new reactor projects in the Czech Republic and Romania

Rather

Dan Rather Reports will be airing a segment on next generation nuclear energy on Tuesday evening, March 1. Dan Rather Reports appears on HDNet (please check with your local television provider for viewing information).

Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) published a report written by Doug Koplow, titled Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable Without Subsidies, which generated a good deal of discussion and encouraged some observers to parrot the conclusions without reading the document very carefully.

Energy density matters ~ graphic courtesy of Pop Atomic Studios

The 41st Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs is up at CoolHandNuke. The carnival is a weekly round-up of the best blog posts from  the leading nuclear bloggers in the United States.

The hard-copy March edition of Nuclear News will soon be in the hands of American Nuclear Society members. That edition will also be available electronically to members. The edition contains the 13th Annual Reference Issue, which includes a 34-page special section on the World List of Nuclear Power Plants. The special section includes:

American Nuclear Society president-elect Eric Loewen on February 17 visited the City College of New York (CCNY). Loewen presented a talk during the noon hour on "Nuclear Reactor Physics at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl" to an audience of about 40 engineering faculty members and students. Most students were from CCNY's mechanical or chemical engineering programs and have taken, or are currently taking, at least one of the college's nuclear engineering concentration courses:

The Mississippi Section of the American Nuclear Society is offering two $1000 college scholarships to Mississippi high school graduates or college undergraduates. Scholarship winners are chosen from state-wide applications.

President Obama has declared "a bold but achievable goal of generating 80 percent of America's electricity from clean sources by 2035." How we are to get there is not spelled out, so there is room for speculation about just what the administration has in mind.

IndyCar is the premier open wheel racing series in the United States. IndyCar features street races, road races, and oval track races around the country, including the world famous Indianapolis 500. "Indy cars" are technologically quite sophisticated, as they are built only for racing. One particular Indy car this season will be sporting a clean, new nuclear-themed look, courtesy of the Entergy, the second largest owner and operator of nuclear power plants in the United States.

The Obama administration, and the Department of Energy, recently released their fiscal year 2012 budget request for nuclear related programs. The budget request is pretty favorable to nuclear, given the current pressure in Washington to cut spending.

The Chicago local section of the American Nuclear Society launched  activities for National Engineers Week a day early on Saturday, February 19, by presenting a student engineering workshop. The event was hosted by the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (MSI), the largest science museum in the western hemisphere. The workshop was part of a series in which high school science achievers learn about different science disciplines and career paths. The workshop included 26 high school students from across Chicago, an MSI education coordinator, and two adult MSI volunteers.

I was not born a geek, but by the time I was a 10-year-old buying books at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, my path was set. Some considered this as an unfortunate background, so I had to learn the hard way how to handle myself in debates  and how to answer aggressive questions. Below, I share what I have learned in defending my position, in the hope that it will help others.