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

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

Designers and developers of nuclear power systems that are substantially different from conventional light water reactors face a conundrum. They are required to provide sufficient information to regulators to allow them to confidently predict how the designs will behave under a comprehensive set of postulated operational and accident conditions. Proving their design is safe is a time-consuming, question ...read more

Rendering of Last Energy’s 20 MWe installations (Last Energy) Last Energy is an innovative new company governed by a philosophy of avoiding the invention of anything that has not been done before. They have created a business that is laser focused on building, owning and operating small (20 MWe), modular pressurized water reactors and selling the electricity they produce under long term power ...read more

Dr. Sama Bilbao y Leon, the Director General of the World Nuclear Association Dr. Sama Bilbao y Leon, the Director General of the World Nuclear Association, visited the Atomic Show to provide an international perspective on the revival in interest in nuclear energy deployment. As the head of the organization that represents the global nuclear industry, provides education about all matters ...read more

NRC Advanced Reactor Licensing Vision A panel of five experts and an experienced moderator addressed the progress being made in creating effective processes to license advanced and non-LWR (light water reactors) at an ANS Winter 2022 panel session titled “Licensing the Future: How the NRC is Approaching Advanced Reactors.” Four out of five of the panelists were cautiously positive and ...read more

ANS Winter 2022 Presentation slide template Some like to describe the movement towards smaller, simpler, more sophisticated nuclear energy systems as mere hype. But serious, committed, normally reserved scientists, engineers and investors are becoming more and more convinced that real progress is underway based on solid learning from prior experience. Before the end of this decade, there will ...read more

The nuclear energy policy landscape in the US has changed significantly during the past 5 years. Once seen as an issue with enormous differences between the political parties, it has become one of the few topics on which both parties can have a civil discussion and agree on many key provisions in supportive legislation. Matt Crozat: NEI, Executive Director for Strategy and Policy Matt Crozat ...read more

Modeled waste volumes for selected reactor designs (From “Nuclear Waste from Small Modular Reactors”) Dr. Lindsay Krall is a geochemist currently working on projects characterizing the behavior of radioactive isotopes that will eventually be stored in a deep geologic repository being designed in Sweden for construction within the next decade. During a three year post doctoral period ...read more

OPG and Microsoft link up with Clean Energy Credits (CECs) On September 26, 2022, Microsoft Canada and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) announced an important agreement for clean energy credits (CECs). The most significant part of the deal was the fact that OPG would supply the credits from its nuclear and hydro-electric plants. Microsoft will procure the credits on an hour by hour basis to match ...read more

Dr. Chris Keefer is one of the busiest and most successful nuclear energy advocates working today. He is a Canadian emergency room doctor, the founder of Doctors for Nuclear Energy , the founder and host of the Decouple podcast, the founder of Decouple Media , and the founder and President of Canadians for Nuclear Energy (C4NE) . And to think, just a few years ago, Chris was a free thinking progressive ...read m...