Sourcing Nuclear
Like life itself, this blog is mainly about energy. Whether it pertains to our diets, our metabolism at the cellular level, or the grand-scale generation and supply systems that make our modern world possible, life on earth is all about energy. If we want to continue to make progress and thrive, we will need to keep expanding our options for energy, hopefully with the greatest achievable efficiency as our constant objective.
One of the better solutions available at the societal level is nuclear power, which produces relatively clean electricity and heat at competitive costs, but which has remained politically orphaned in the wake of Soviet-encouraged anti-nuclear fear-mongering about the technology. The U.S. political system responded to public fears by implementing strict government oversight. But that response has made nuclear power-plant construction prohibitive in terms of construction costs. Federal oversight has ground the industry to a halt.
The challenges for American nuclear power don’t end there, as Robert Bryce’s podcast guest Matt Wald explains. When the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor states agreed to draw down their nuclear arsenals, we agreed to buy the reprocessed byproducts of dismantled arms to cover the costs and incentivize post-Cold-War harmony. Our own domestic nuclear fuel production decreased as a result, costing us industry experience and know-how.
The audio version of the interview is here:
The video is below.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine over a year ago earned American enmity, and we have been looking for ways to stop buying nuclear fuel from such a hostile source as the Russian Federation. This has met with little success so far. The Russian dictatorship is also apt to use energy as a weapon against us, as we witnessed in the natural gas crisis in Western Europe last winter.
Matt Wald was a reporter for the New York Times for many years. He has since become a public relations writer for the American Nuclear Society. He learned his way around the industry as a reporter, and now uses that expertise to explain how it all works. As they discuss in the podcast, the political challenges of “decarbonizing” the economy are formidable, but there are quite a few options available to help us get there, even if this blog maintains a more skeptical view of them.
Julie Ioffe reported today that Prigozhin has landed in Belarus and is taking up residence in a 3-star hotel, the chief feature of which is that the windows don’t open. She points out, however, that all hotels have roofs…
This just in: a group of bears is called a "sleuth".
https://www.witn.com/2023/06/26/sleuth-bears-spotted-along-highway-64/
Etymology: Old Norse, for trail or track (from etymonline.com)
I thought you might like to know, Jack.