Nuclear Street - Nuclear Power Plant News, Jobs, and Careers

James Krellenstein is a physicist, consultant and nuclear energy historian. He is currently employed as a senior advisor to Global Health Strategies. He started up their decarbonization practice with an emphasis on nuclear energy along with renewables. He was the lead author on GEH’s report on ways to reduce global dependence on Russia for necessary supplies of enriched uranium. He had the ...read more

I’ll start with a disclosure. I’m still long on NuScale in my personal portfolio and have no intention of changing that position in the near future. I believe that the company has a good product and excellent potential for growth. The image above with Jose Reyes and me is from a visit I paid to the NuScale test loop in October 2014. Yesterday (Nov 8, 2023), an expected shoe dropped ...read more

Stefano Buono is a physicist and the successful founder of Advanced Accelerator Applications, a multibillion dollar company that pioneered the use of several therapeutic medical isotopes. After making several people very rich, including himself, he sold the medical isotope business and returned to his early 1990s field of study – nuclear fission reactors using molten lead as a coolant. About two ...read more

By Valerie Gardner Cross-posted from Nucleation Capital June, July and August of 2023 were the three hottest months the Earth has ever seen by such a large margin, it left climate scientists agog. Climate disasters are abounding apace, with the U.S. hit by 23 large-scale disasters, a record-breaking year already . In Pakistan, extreme rainfall and flooding affected 33 million people, killing more ...read more

Commissioners on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are worried. They see a pending avalanche of license applications for new reactors, fuel production facilities, uranium mines, transportation containers, and waste repositories with an insufficiently sized and trained licensing workforce. They seem to be increasingly aware of their role in enabling a clean energy transition and they want to avoid being ...read more

Craig Piercy, the Executive Director and CEO of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), sat down with Chair Chris Hanson of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to talk about the NRC’s role in nuclear energy development and the way that the agency is responding to growing demands for its services to the American public. This post focuses on the first five minutes of the interview. Piercy ...read more

Zeno Power makes cost-effective radioisotope power systems (RPS) for some of the most challenging environments in the solar system. Its systems use a proprietary package that allows a wider variety of isotopes to perform functions previously reserved for Pu-238, a rare isotope that is slowly produced at great expense. What is the value of RPS? RPS’s produce power and/or heat by usefully ...read more

Mary Jo Rogers is a trained clinical psychologist who developed her interest workforce safety cultures and leadership in the nuclear power sector while consulting and working for ComEd (later Exelon). At the time she began her work, ComEd was a perennially under-performing utility with new leaders that were committed to turning it into the best nuclear plant operator in the United States. That leadership ...read more

Each year since 1998, POWER Magazine has hosted a conference titled Experience Power that brings together utilities, suppliers, customers and energy leaders to discuss trends in the electric power sector. The event is currently organized as three colocated conferences, one focusing on electric power insights, one on distributed power and one on hydrogen. The 2023 edition of the event was held ...read more

One good reason to attend industry conferences is to be able carefully listen to the thoughts of industry leaders, especially during unscripted panel discussions. When the executives are among colleagues and aren’t delivering prepared, vetted speeches with polished slides, it’s possible to glean valuable information that can help form the basis for future actions. As a member of a decision-making ...read more

The theme at the annual American Nuclear Society Utility Working Conference (#ANSUWC) was resiliency, a term that applies equally well to the equipment and the people that make up the U.S. nuclear industry. Resiliency is similar to the materials engineering term of toughness; it’s the ability to withstand pressure and blows and to spring back into shape without permanent damage. Using a ...read more

Plutonium-239 (Pu-239) is a nuclear fuel source that should play an important role in a sustainable, rapidly growing nuclear power enterprise. It is a natural byproduct that is created inside every fission reactor using uranium fuel. It is fissile with characteristics that are similar to U-235, the fissile material that provides most of today’s nuclear power. During the 1960s and into the ...read more

AR Summit Panel: Government Efforts to Enable Nuclear Technologies From left to right: Jeff Merrifield US NIC, Julie Kozeracki DOE LPO, Christina Walrond DOE Office of Technology Demonstrations Non-attendees might dismiss it a just another nuclear industry conference full of talk signifying nothing, but the 2023 edition of the Advanced Reactor Summit (AR Summit) – hosted by the US Nuclear Industry ...read more

In the past few years, there has been a strong revival of interest in using nuclear fission energy to power space travel and planetary exploration. There have also been new developments in radioisotope thermal generators that will make them more widely available with greater energy density. Though there has been interest in using nuclear energy in space since the earliest days of the Atomic Age, financial ...read mor...

Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. He writes about energy, economies and the way that energy sources have influenced modern societies and economies. One of his first books was Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (2013) which is very briefly described as follows: Looking beyond the usual culprits, “Lifeblood” finds a deeper and more ...read more

Alyssa Hayes is a leader in the pro-nuclear movement. She is a PhD candidate in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee and she has been interested in policy making and politics since interning with her local representative when she was 14 years old. She was involved in the successful efforts to save four nuclear power stations (Clinton, Quad Cities, Byron and Dresden) in Illinois and ...read more

Mark Nelson has been traveling the world in an effort to help create a sustainable pronuclear movement. His focus includes both saving existing plants and encouraging the construction of new reactor in areas that have operating reactors, those that have shut down their nuclear plants and in countries that have never operated nuclear plants. We spoke in depth about the German nuclear exit, the ...read more

Westinghouse, one of the world’s first nuclear power plant vendors, recently announced a new small modular reactor (SMR) design called the AP300. It is described as a simplified version of the AP1000, four of which are currently operating in China and two of which are in the final stages of operational testing in Georgia, United States. Six additional AP1000s are under construction. In a ...read more

On Apr 28, the much anticipated film, Nuclear Now, will premier in selected theaters in New York, Sedona and Los Angeles. It will remain available in those venues for a week. On May 1, 2023, the film will be shown at 350 theaters across the US and Canada. The film is co-written by Oliver Stone and Joshua Goldstein. Here is a blurb about the film. Nuclear Now takes viewers on an educational ...read more

Dr. Leonard Rodberg spent most of his adult life being opposed to nuclear energy. A half a dozen years ago, he abruptly changed his mind. Ever since, he has been a strong and vocal advocate for the increased use of nuclear energy. On Atomic Show #304 Len and I discuss his education, career, his changing attitudes towards nuclear energy and the important role that nuclear will play in enabling a transition ...read mor...

Vogtle 3 fabricated shield building panel lift Courtesy Southern Company Projects that last as long as building nuclear reactors in the U.S. are analogous to extreme endurance competitions in which overall progress is the sum of all stages of the race. There is no magic reset button that allows recovery of time lost early in the race, even though the specific events that resulted in the lost time ...read more

President Biden signs Inflation Reduction Act Image source: Jennifer Granholm, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) should make an important contribution towards mitigating future inflationary periods. It accomplishes this beneficial goal by providing important support for facilities that increase US clean electricity production. The key sections of the Inflation ...read more

Image from campaign against CISF An article titled “US sweetens pot to study siting for spent nuke fuel storage” was published in the January 26, 2023 edition of the Washington Post. The article included a paragraph that credited “environmentalists” as being the main source of opposition to construction of consolidated interim spent fuel (CISF) storage facilities that are ...read more

Petroleum – a term includes oil, gas and derivatives – wells have been going dry for more than 150 years. Until the late 2000s, the solution to that problem of resource depletion has been to find a new place to drill. We now have the alternative of drilling deeper and using hydraulic fracturing techniques to reach previously known but inaccessible formations. Though there is still ...read more

The American Nuclear Society posted an article entitled How a nuclear victory at COP27 started with a teen and a text reporting on the wonderful story of Ia Aanstoot. This is the 17-year old Swedish highschool student who effectively saved the day for nuclear at COP27 by alerting a WhatsApp chat group with the right people in it, that the final language being used by the COP27 negotiating team for ...read more