Weinberg’s enthusiasm for nuclear’s humanitarian potential was infectious, and spread to John F. Kennedy, who visited Oak Ridge National Lab with his wife, Jackie, and Senator Al Gore Sr., just months before being elected president.

Weinberg was more than a great nuclear engineer; he was also a dedicated activist. He championed President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative with urgency in the fifties. He fought for safer nuclear in the sixties. And he warned of climate change in the seventies.

In 1979, Weinberg’s fears were realized when one of the reactors at Three Mile Island lost its coolant and partially melted. Weinberg thought there was something wrong with light water reactor designs, and his view was influential even among nuclear’s antagonists. “The Chernobyl [sic] [Three Mile Island] accident was caused by design failure not operator error,” said Ralph Nader.

Nuclear never recovered from the accident. Its share of global electricity has declined seven points since its peak in 1996. French nuclear giant Areva failed in 2015 and Japanese-American nuclear giant Westinghouse, owned by Toshiba, failed earlier this year. //

Meanwhile, the crisis facing nuclear is quickening. Asia was supposed to lead the nuclear renaissance. Now, Japan isn’t restarting its nuclear, Taiwan and South Korea are following Germany, Switzerland and France are phasing out nuclear, and all while Vietnam opted for coal rather than nuclear.

There’s no secret why. Just watch the trailer for “Pandora,” the big budget disaster movie that took South Korea by storm last fall. Greenpeace — an organization with an annual budget of $350 million— coordinated protests afterwards, which helped elect a new president who is seeking to reduce nuclear’s share of electricity from 30 to 20 percent by 2030. //

Nader crusaded across the United States training local activists on how to kill nuclear plants, or at least delay their construction. Nader was deliberately inflammatory. “A nuclear plant could wipe out Cleveland, and the survivors would envy the dead.” //

The Sierra Club joined Nader’s crusade. “Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation... and add to the cost of the industry...” the new executive director [Michael McCloskey] said in a secret, internal memo.

They all advocated burning coal and fossil fuels instead. Nader said, “We do not need nuclear power...We have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we’re owning up to...the tar sands...oil out of shale...methane in coal beds...” Sierra Club consultant Amory Lovins said, “Coal can fill the real gaps in our fuel economy with only a temporary and modest (less than twofold at peak) expansion of mining.”

You might wonder: maybe people back then didn’t know coal was bad for health and the climate? In fact, it was such commonplace knowledge that the New York Times reported on its front page that coal’s death toll would rise to 56,000 if coal instead of nuclear plants were built. The Sierra Club pushed for coal anyway and even forced utilities to convert nuclear plants into coal plants in Haven, Wisconsin. //

After being fired in 1972, Weinberg campaigned to save nuclear power. Along with Roger Revelle, Weinberg was one of the first American scientists to draw attention to threat posed by climate change and, also along with Revelle, urged that nuclear instead of coal plants be built. “I went from office to office in Washington, curves of the carbon dioxide buildup in hand, Weinberg wrote. I reminded them that nuclear energy was on the verge of dying. Something must be done. I almost screamed.”

The people who today claim to care about climate change ignored Weinberg’s warnings. “California Governor Jerry Brown said, ‘I want the Department of Water Resources to build a coal plant.’ So we embarked on the planning of a coal plant... a dreadful prospect.” //

In the 50s and 60s, people knew nuclear power wasn’t like a bomb. It was only later that the two were deliberated mixed together such as by the organizers of the “No Nukes” concerts, putting on stage a soldier exposed to nuclear weapons testing along with a pregnant mother from near Three Mile Island. //

Anti-nuclear leaders knew what they were doing and, toward the end of their lives, were honest. “If you’re trying to get people aroused about what is going on, you use the most emotional issue you can find,” one wrote.

And when nuclear plant construction couldn’t be stopped, it could be delayed, sending costs soaring — along with the number of federal regulations. In the end, 150 percent more nuclear plants were canceled than built.

“Unless changes are made to restore public confidence,” Weinberg warned, “the Nuclear Age will come to a halt as the present reactors run their course…” //

Ralph Nader admitted to PBS News that he didn’t want to solve the waste problem ”because it'll just prolong the industry, and expand the second generation of nuclear plants subsidized by the taxpayer.”

If safety and waste were the main concerns of nuclear opponents, why would they oppose reactors that address them? To answer that question, we have to go back to 1953. In his Atoms for Peace speech President Eisenhower declared the US would work with the UN to give away nuclear energy for a very specific humanistic reason: “to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.

”Over the next decade, a growing number of people began to realize that nuclear energy is limitless and humankind would thus never again be at risk of running out of energy, fertilizer, fresh water, or food. This good news came at a time of widespread fears — many of them racist, as seen here on this 1960 Time magazine cover — of overpopulation.

But something strange happened. The people who claimed to be concerned about resource scarcity from overpopulation opposed nuclear precisely because it put an end to scarcity. “If a doubling of the state’s population in the next 20 years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth, [California’s] scenic character will be destroyed,” warned David Brower of the Sierra Club.

Their primary fear wasn’t accidents, waste or weapons — it was people. “In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” said Paul Ehrlich. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean and abundant energy because of what we would do with it,” said Lovins.

“I didn’t really worry about the accidents because there are too many people anyway…I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine,” confessed the Sierra Club member who led the campaign to kill Diablo Canyon. //

Some say that what is really scary about nuclear accidents is that they can affect the public, but if that’s the case, then why then hasn’t anyone heard about the Teton dam collapse three years before Three Mile Island, which killed 11 people and caused $2 billion in damage? Or of the Banqiao dam, which killed 171 thousand people?

The data are clear. Nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity. The most dangerous nuclear plant is the one that doesn’t get built. When nuclear plants aren’t built, or are shut down, fossil fuels are burned, and people die. //

What is it that makes nuclear cheap or expensive? The French and US nuclear construction data offer a natural experiment. The French managed to keep the construction costs of their nuclear plants relatively steady while US costs shot upwards. Why?

According to NRC Commissioner Ivan Selin, “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.” //

Debates over reactor design, size, and construction method are irrelevant so long as demand for nuclear remains low and declining. The innovation nuclear needs must be something more radical than anything that’s been proposed to day. What’s required is atomic humanism.

What is atomic humanism? I would like to offer three first principles that are meant as the beginning, not the end of the discussion of what atomic humanism should be.

First, nuclear is special. Only nuclear can lift all humans out of poverty while saving the natural environment. Nothing else — not coal, not solar, not geo-engineering — can do that.

How does the special child, who is bullied for her specialness, survive? By pretending she’s ordinary. As good as — but no better than! — coal, natural gas or renewables.

Like other atomic humanists of his time, Weinberg knew nuclear was special. But he could not fully appreciate how special nuclear was given the low levels of deployment of solar and wind.

Now that these two technologies have been scaled up, we can see that nuclear’s specialness is due due an easy-to-understand physical reason: the energy density of the fuel.

Consider that the share of electricity the world gets from clean sources of energy over the last 10 years declined by the equivalent of 21 Bruce nuclear power plants, which powers Toronto, which produces about the same amount of electricity as 900 Topaz solar farms.

Bruce power sits on 9 square kilometers and Topaz sits on 25 square kilometers, so it would take 1,075 square kilometers, or twice the size of Toronto, to generate the same amount of energy with solar as with nuclear.

The environmental impacts are enormous. When they built another solar farm, Ivanpah, dozens of threatened desert tortoises, which can live to be 80 years old, were killed.

The energy density of the fuel determines its environmental impact. With higher energy densities, fewer natural resources are used, requiring less mining, materials, waste, pollution and land.

And it's increasingly obvious that only nuclear can significantly and rapidly mitigate climate change. This fact has done more to change minds on nuclear in recent years than anything else.

"If we're going to tackle global warming, nuclear is the only way you can create massive amounts of power,” said the formerly anti-nuclear Sting.

"It’s like half the people who were saying ‘No nukes!’ are now realizing nuclear is the best way to go for energy for the future. I think it’s natural to reexamine your beliefs as you age up,” said Robert Downey Jr. //

Fundamentally, it’s not what makes nuclear safe, it’s who makes it safe. Every accident report says the same thing. Human factors and human-machine interaction matter most. Culture, training and discipline makes nuclear safe.

And resilience. Look at what the amazing people of nuclear did. In response to Three Mile Island, they responded resiliently and brilliantly, running the very same plants better, and raising their efficiency from 55 to over 90 percent. In what other industry is operator performance over 98 percent?

Originally published in May 1967

“By the year 2030 the electric power requirement will be 10 times the present capacity. Because of the expected decline in fossil-fuel resources, and in the absence of any other large source of energy at reasonable cost, fission power would be counted on to supply about 85 percent of this need. To fill such a demand with fission plants of the present type, however, would call for quantities of uranium ore that would soon deplete reserves. Thus, the fission age would be over almost before it began. These facts make plain how heavily the ‘fission age’ (perhaps to be followed someday by a ‘fusion age’) can depend on success in developing power plants with breeder reactors that will make the most of the available resources.”

—Scientific American, May 1967. ///

Very "scientific" and very untrue.

Reserves are measured by the market price. The higher the price the greater the reserves that can be unlocked. The cost of fuel is a minor ingredient in the cost of nuclear energy.

Equinor among latest round of investors in MIT spin-off that aims to help show 'net energy gain' nuclear fusion by 2025

Scientists at the Department of Energy Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have their eyes on the prize: the Transformational Challenge Reactor, or TCR, a microreactor built using 3D printing and other new approaches that will be up and running by 2023. But their

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- With billions of workers at home and factories idle, early April saw daily carbon emissions fall 17% compared to 2019 averages, according to a study by a team of international scientists published this month. That’s great. Unfortunately, it only takes us back to 2006 levels, and

October 8, 2018, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the operation of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) using uranium-233 as a fuel. U-233 does not occur naturally; it is formed when thorium absorbs a neutron undergoes a double beta decay to form U-233. U-233 is a superior nuclear fuel, producing enough neutrons through its fission (whether by a fast or thermal neutron) to allow sufficient conversion of thorium to U-233 to replace its consumption. That makes it very unique and very valuable.

Alvin Weinberg and the other researchers on the Molten-Salt Reactor Program (MSRP) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recognized this property of U-233 and sought to demonstrate its actual use in a real nuclear reactor. The MSRE was designed for this purpose. When the MSRE was first brought to criticality in June 1965, this was a great accomplishment, but the MSRP researchers had something more in mind. Therefore, after a few years of operation, they removed the initial uranium inventory from the reactor by fluorination and replaced it with uranium-233.

To commemorate this accomplishment, they invited Dr. Glenn Seaborg to ORNL to be the one to first take the MSRE to a significant power level on uranium-233 fuel. Seaborg’s participation was significant on several levels. At that time, Seaborg was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) which had funded the development of the MSRE. But even more importantly, it was Seaborg who had a led of team of chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, to discover uranium-233 in the early days of the Manhattan Project. Seaborg was the first person to grasp the potential of thorium as an energy source when he received information about the performance of uranium-233 in the ORNL Graphite Reactor in late 1944.

While electricity availability doesn’t guarantee wealth, its absence almost always means poverty.

Juice takes viewers to Beirut, Reykjavik, Kolkata, San Juan, Manhattan, and Boulder to tell the human story of electricity and to explain why power equals power.

The defining inequality in the world today is the disparity between the electricity rich and the electricity poor. In fact, there are more than 3 billion people on the planet today who are using less electricity than what’s used by an average American refrigerator.

Electricity is the world’s most important and fastest-growing form of energy. To illuminate its importance, the Juice team traveled 60,000 miles to gather 40 on-camera interviews with people from seven countries on five continents. Juice shows how electricity explains everything from women’s rights and climate change to Bitcoin mining and indoor marijuana production. The punchline of the film is simple: darkness kills human potential. Electricity nourishes it.

Juice explains who has electricity, who’s getting it, and how developing countries all over the world are working to bring their people out of the dark and into the light.

If Russia can control half of the US nuclear fuel market, it will be problematic for national security and the economy. //

The Trump administration's recent Nuclear Fuel Working Group report provides a sobering view of the national security threat posed by Russia's aggressive global strategy to dominate the nuclear power and fuel industry to extend its geopolitical influence. The report warns of Russia's efforts to increase its market share of the U.S. nuclear fuel industry and the threat that its below-market prices pose to the survival of the U.S. nuclear fuel sector. If this is left unchecked, the U.S. may find itself dependent on Russia for its nuclear fuel.

Russia's steps to boost its nuclear fuel market share are taking place at a perilous time. The market for nuclear fuel in the United States has weakened considerably in the past decade and the country's production facilities are in danger of being driven out of business. The global industry has been hit with a one-two punch of decreased demand and increased supply; Japan and Germany have greatly reduced their nuclear power generation, and Russia's state-owned nuclear enterprise has expanded production and marketing without regard to profit in a bid to obtain a dominant market share here and around the world. //

Allowing Russia's nuclear import caps to expire would provide only minimal benefit to the struggling U.S. power industry and come at a great cost to future U.S. security. Congress should renew the Domenici Amendment and the Department of Commerce should conclude negotiations with Russia, to continue the caps and ensure that Russia never can dominate this energy market.

The world’s first floating nuclear power plant has been fully commissioned to begin operation in

The CryoHub project will use extra wind and solar electricity to freeze air to cryogenic temperatures, where it becomes liquid and in the process shrinks by 700 times in volume. The liquid air is stored in insulated low-pressure tanks similar to ones used for liquid nitrogen and natural gas.

When the grid needs electricity, the subzero liquid is pumped into an evaporator where it expands back into a gas that can spin a turbine for electricity. As it expands, the liquid also sucks heat from surrounding air. “So you can basically provide free cooling for food storage,” says Judith Evans, a professor of air-conditioning and refrigeration engineering at London South Bank University who is coordinating the CryoHub project. //

The U.K. is already a leader in liquefied air energy storage (LAES) technology. London-based Highview Power put the first-ever LAES system online last summer. The 5-MW demonstration plant near Manchester is designed to power 5,000 homes for about 3 hours.

There are 53 nuclear reactors currently under construction around the world. Only two are in the United States, once the world’s leader in nuclear energy development. And those two reactors represent expansions of a preexisting two-reactor facility, Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Ga.

New program aims to have two prototype reactors running within 7 years

The US Department of Energy has launched an <a href="https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-department-energy-launches-230-million-advanced-reactor-demonstration-program" target="_blank">advanced reactor development programme</a> with initial funding of $160m and the aim of building two reactors that can be operational within five to seven years.

The DOE said the programme, known as the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP), is designed to help domestic private industry demonstrate advanced nuclear reactors in the US.

For the fiscal year 2020 budget, Congress appropriated $230m to start a new demonstration program for advanced reactors. Through cost-shared partnerships with industry, the new programme will provide $160m for initial funding. //

Energy secretary Dan Brouillette said the next generation of nuclear energy is critical to US energy security and environmental stewardship. He said the US must pursue technological innovation and advanced nuclear RD&D investments to strengthen leadership in the next generation of nuclear technologies.”

In addition to the two reactors, the programme will make use of the National Reactor Innovation Centre (NRIC) to test and assess advanced reactor technologies.

Building a Uranium Reserve: The First Step in Preserving the U.S. Nuclear Fuel Cycle //

The U.S. nuclear industry is coming off its best year ever. Electricity production from nuclear plants hit at an all-time high in 2019 as we led the world in generating more than 809 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is enough to power more than 66 million homes.

Yet, despite operating the largest fleet of reactors in the world at the highest level in the industry, our ability to produce domestic nuclear fuel is on the verge of a collapse.

Our uranium miners are eager for work, the nation’s only uranium conversion plant is idle due to poor market conditions, and our inability to compete with foreign state-owned enterprises (most notably from China and Russia) is not only threatening our energy security but weakening our ability to influence the peaceful uses of nuclear around the world.

This is not an easy problem to fix, but the United States has a plan.

Restoring America’s Competitive Nuclear Energy Advantage

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa will soon start developing a plan for a new 2,500 megawatt (MW) nuclear power plant, the energy ministry told lawmakers on Thursday.

Africa’s most industrialised economy, which operates the continent’s only nuclear power plant near Cape Town, said last year that it was considering adding more nuclear capacity in the long term, after abandoning in 2018 a massive nuclear expansion championed by former president Jacob Zuma.

The atomic bomb and meltdowns like Fukushima have made nuclear power synonymous with global disaster. But what if we’ve got nuclear power wrong? An audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival, PANDORA’S PROMISE asks whether the one technology we fear most could save our planet from a climate catastrophe while providing the energy needed to lift billions of people in the developing world out of poverty. In his controversial new film, Stone tells the intensely personal stories of environmentalists and energy experts who have undergone a radical conversion from being fiercely anti to strongly pro-nuclear energy, risking their careers and reputations in the process. Stone exposes this controversy within the environmental movement head-on with stories of defection by heavyweights including Stewart Brand, Richard Rhodes, Gwyneth Cravens, Mark Lynas and Michael Shellenberger. Undaunted and fearlessly independent, PANDORA’S PROMISE is a landmark work that is forever changing the conversation about the myths and science behind this deeply emotional and polarizing issue.

America is in the midst of an energy revolution. Over the last decade, the United States has slashed net petroleum imports, dramatically increased shale gas production, scaled up wind and solar power, and cut the growth in electricity consumption to nearly zero through widespread efficiency measures. Emerging advanced energy technologies provide a rich set of options to address our energy challenges, but their largescale deployment requires continued improvements in cost and performance. Technology is helping to drive this revolution, enabled by years to decades of research and development (R&D) that underpin these advances in the energy system. //

The 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR) examines the status of the science and technology that are the foundation of our energy system, together with the research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) opportunities to advance them. It focuses primarily on technologies with commercialization potential in the midterm and beyond. It frames various trade-offs that all energy technologies must balance across such dimensions as cost, security and reliability of supply, diversity, environmental impacts, land use, and materials use. Additionally, it provides data and analysis on RDD&D pathways to assist decision makers as they set priorities, within budget constraints, to develop more secure, affordable, and sustainable energy services.

Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind farms are less polluting than fossil fuels.

But a new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.

“Planet of the Humans was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore told Reuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.”

The film shows both abandoned industrial wind and solar farms and new ones being built — but after cutting down forests. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at was a solar dead zone,” says filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, staring at a former solar farm in California. “I learned that the solar panels don’t last.”

Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. “We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,” says a well-coiffed environmental leader. “Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,” says a scientist.

In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy. There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.

But the apocalyptic rhetoric detracts little from the heart of the documentary, which exposes the complicity of climate activists including Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Sierra Club’s Executive Director, in promoting pollution-intensive biomass energies, as well as natural gas. //

Solar panels require sixteen times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste. “You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place,” said one expert, “instead of just playing pretend. We’re basically just being fed a lie.”

The man noted that Koch Industries provide many of the materials used to build solar panels and industrial solar farms. “The funny part is that when you criticize solar plants like this you are accused of working for the Koch brothers,” he laughs. “That’s the idiocy. This relies on the most toxic industrial processes we’ve ever created.”

What drives people who believe they want to save the environment into destroying it? The filmmaker hints that the desire for “sustainability” is really a desire for a kind of immortality. “What differentiates people is that we know we’ll die someday,” says a sociologist. “We enveloped ourselves in belief systems and worldviews.” //

The good news, the man says, is that “once you come to terms with death, anything is possible.”

One can scan monthly summaries of outage data at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, either directly on its website or in Table B.1 of its downloadable monthly report, Electric Power Monthly. This source lists outages exceeding 50,000 customers for more than one hour as well as utility network events that may have not resulted in outages. It is based, in turn, on the results of Form OE-417 - Electric Emergency Incident and Disturbance Report, which regulated entities submit to the U.S. Department of Energy. Annual summaries can be downloaded from the Department of Energy. One can view also view quantities of reported real-time customers without power at PowerOutage.us, and can gain insight through S&C Electric’s annual report Entitled 2020 State of Commercial & Industrial Power Reliability Report, which summarizes responses from large commercial and industrial firms about their experiences.

What's the significance of this information? Power outages commonly occur, and thus require appropriate planning as a condition of operation. Is this a new finding? No .... Industry experts have pointed this out all along, and backup power systems have been around nearly as long as electrical grids. What's interesting is that this condition hasn't improved in recent years.

The S&C Report summarizes outage experiences of 255 companies averaging $4 billion in annual revenues (by our rough calculation, nearly 5 percent of the US Gross Domestic Product). It concludes:

1 Reliability has not improved over the last three years. In 2019, 21 percent of companies experienced outages monthly.
1 Power disruptions and their associated expenses have significant impact on commercial and industrial companies, leading to a growing need to install alternative reliability solutions.
1 Companies are willing to pay premiums for guaranteed power.

We invite you to review the document, noting that S&C Electric provides equipment and services primarily to the electrical transmission industry and likely self-funded the report. Nevertheless, each of the findings bears on the backup power community:

1 At ASCO, we remind people that outages should continue to be viewed as an expected operating condition, and S&C's first conclusion supports this thought.
1 When power outages do occur, the costs of disruption and recovery are substantial. If the numbers are even half as high as reported, outages of all types are expensive. Consequently, backup power systems provide real value. Nevertheless, the S&C Report addresses commercial and industrial users ... consider also mitigating outages at mission-critical facilities such as large data centers that make modern economic activity possible ... or the present demand for life-saving services at medical facilities that rely on power. Disruptions in power flow can and does have monumental impacts.
1 The willingness of companies to pay more for reliable power and their willingness to invest in alternatives again speaks to the importance of maintaining power availability. Backup power systems do this.

The UAE has announced that the first reactor of its under-construction Barakah nuclear power plant is scheduled to come online within “a few months”.