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

Watercolor illustration of a Russian nuclear research complex by the author. As my posts here are admittedly few and far between these days, my most-recent was about the HBO drama Chernobyl , a fictionalized account of the real disaster at the Ukrainian Chernobyl nuclear power station in the 1980s. Now, I am compelled to write about a recent, real, incident the contemporary Russian Federation seems to have had with...

A scene from the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl . I, apparently along with many others the world over, keenly watched the five dramatic episodes of HBO’s recent miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster. Perhaps more than many viewers who simply turned to it after the end of Game of Thrones or while searching for something interesting to watch on a rainy night, I however had a long-brewing and vested interest. Nuclear...

Planes, even cars, once were viewed as having an atomic future. Drawing by the author in pen and ink with marker. I allowed this blog to, in essence, go dark because I was very busy with other things. Right now, I am both a graduate student in the Writing MFA program at the Savannah College of Art...

1956 concept of a Soviet nuclear generating station. First of all, a very big apology for being away from this blog and neglecting it for so very long. My primary duties as a sports and outdoors journalist have required a great deal of travel and doing the scope and quality of research I ideally hope to provide for this blog has not been very pragmatic while on the road, much less so when rock climbing and such. But...

Drawing of the Red Hook grain elevator ruins. Pen and marker sketch by the author. Well. I've not posted in this blog for quite some time. It has not been intentional, but I've been aware of my absence and it's been with some valid reason. I have for one been occupied with other journalistic work but also when I began this blog, as its name suggests, its primary purpose was to educate those within the...

A very brief history lesson: During the Cold War, with the emphasis on nuclear weapons the USA and USSR both felt to be necessary to secure their nations, the USA constructed a vast network of national labs for the manufacture of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons components and the research required to produce those components. Those labs make up the backbone of the national labs of the US Department of Energy. At the...

To build a reactor facility of nearly any size, you'll need to move some dirt. Drawing of a digger-crawler by the author; pen-and-ink and marker. First off, I apologize that it has taken me so very long to get back to this blog. It's been a very busy time for me as a journalist the past few months, to say nothing of the holidays, as well. This multi-part series of entries on building new reactors, new nuclear...

It takes heavy equipment to build something as large, vast, and complex as a new nuclear power station. Drawing by the author, in ink and markers. Given that I am a journalist with a background in architecture, and given my work on nuclear power, one of the most-fascinating things for me is learning how new nuclear plants are designed and built. This focus is also crucial to understanding nuclear power in the United...

Downtown Belgrade, Serbia. Ink and marker drawing by the author. � If you follow energy politics in Eastern Europe, which I do since my main job is as a journalist covering this region and at that, this specific topic, you'll have great cause for concern right now. For quite some time, Serbia and other nations (but especially Serbia) had placed their bets on the South Stream Pipeline, a massive natural gas transfer...

If you follow the nuclear industry, you've probably already seen the news: Lockheed-Martin's fabled Skunk Works division—yes, the same folks who under Kelly Johnson brought us the U-2 and SR-71 spy-planes and much, much more over the decades—has announced a consummate design for a compact fusion reactor. They have made various press releases about this novel technology throughout 2013 but the most...

Pencil and marker sketch of the extant, operational, Plant Vogtle Units 1 & 2 by the author. On February 2, 2010, President Obama announced $8.3 billion in federal loans via the Department of Energy to the Southern Company and its daughter corporation, Georgia Power, for the construction of two new nuclear power reactors and their associated facilities at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Georgia. This was the first...

Peaceful applications of nuclear technologies have evolved over the course of the twentieth century in a manner that no other industry in the history of mankind has, with a trajectory that started with the atomic bombs used to end World War Two and the latent background that nuclear was a novel, unique, and fully modern area of technology able to literally change our lives in profound ways. It was a field of technology...

When I began writing this blog I had three core goals in mind: 1) To educate our industry about its history with an especial focus on the unique and varied developments in nuclear technologies for power-generation, military, and medical applications. 2) To educate our industry about the sociocultural position of nuclear power and technology in society and what needs to be done to win more people over to the merits...

Command and Control—Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser New York City: The Penguin Press, 2013 For a rather long work of non-fiction I tore through this book pretty quickly, mostly because it reads like a thriller and leaves the reader turning pages as promptly as if in the thick of an engrossing novel. That's a great credit to the author, a savvy and...

Sketch for a seaside nuclear power plant in Wales. I didn't have time to draw the MOX facility for this article, alas, so this will have to do, though as everyone reading probably realizes it's a very different creature altogether. � Slate , a very-popular and well-regarded daily news site ran an article today by journalist Josh Voorhees regarding the DOE MOX facility under construction at the Savannah River...

A few blog entries ago, I wrote about reasons why Ukraine—in light of the current political turmoil there—might consider investing further in nuclear power. Russia, once Ukraine's greatest partner in natural gas and oil trade, now has become nothing short of its enemy as Crimea (formerly a part of Ukraine) has been annexed into Russia as a territory of the Russian Federation. Ukraine's winters can...

The French neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée is known today as much for his unbuilt projects as those he actually saw built and completed. Boullée worked at a time when science and engineering were quickly changing how mankind saw the world and when architecture was looking not only to traditional, classical, influences but towards outward expressions of math and science as part of its...

China street scene; pencil and marker drawing by the author. The People's Republic of China currently has twenty power reactors in operation at a total of six nuclear power plant locations, which only contributes to the national power grids around a meager 2% of all normal power output. That is a small amount in contrast to leading nuclear nations, but one that is only going to grow—and at that, grow greatly...

Most everyone knows about Russia's recent annexation of Crimea back into Russian territory from Ukraine and the related strife in much of eastern Ukraine now where Russian-leaning citizens have advocated for these regions to also be annexed into Russia, though such probably will not happen. Europe and the United States wait nervously to see if Russia will use the military forces it has assembled in Crimea to in any...

(Please visit the site to view this video) Interview from 1984 by Diane Sawyer with Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, from 60 Minutes . Admiral Rickover probably did more for both the American nuclear industry and the American military establishment in terms of the promotion of key, innovative, nuclear technologies in the early Cold War years than any other single person in history. Certainly, his legacy is vast—as...

Just a quick but very honest "thank you" to the NRC for having its documents organized so well, making ADAM work as a database of its nature ought to work, and in general making it easy for me to find historical information I'm seeking—even stuff going back to the AEC's early days. I know many people in the industry have their complaints about the NRC, but look: I've dealt with several other...

Chinatown, San Francisco. Painting in gouache and airbrush by the author. I began my college career in San Francisco, California and marveled not only at the cultural diversity of this city and its very American, very pioneering history, but also at its quite compact geographical size. I lived right on the western cusp of Chinatown, yet I could easily get on the Muni or BART trains and be anywhere from Berkeley...

The space shuttle awaiting launch: the shuttle depended on conventional rocket technologies, but future manner spacecraft may rely on nuclear-enabled rockets for their extra-atmospheric portions of their journey. Drawing by the author. I don't know if the rest of you have been following the exciting work related to the Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion Stage project down at Marshall Space Flight Center or not, but NASA...

The entire article is only available in the print edition, but my article on nuclear power as an option for sustainable energy in Croatia is the lead article in the new issue of SEE: A Fortnight in Review , one of Eastern Europe's leading business/finance trade journals: http://see-magazine.eu/teasers/the-nuclear-option-why-nuclear-is-making-a-big-come-back-why-it-may-yet-in-croatia/ I'm very glad they ran...

My drawing of Chicago based on the sketches of architect Bertrand Goldberg and containing some of his architecture. What city can claim the most nuclear-related history in all of the USA? There are ample contenders, but the award if there were one I feel would have to go to Chicago. Consider the following: —The Dresden Generating Station , the first fully private, long-term, nuclear generating plant in...