In my recent article on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Tsar Bomba test, I relied very heavily on Russian sources that were digitized by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. For whatever reason, Rosatom has been dedicating an impressive amount of resources to Soviet nuclear history, radically transforming what is easily available to scholars outside of Russia. The extraordinarily useful series of (curated, redacted) archival documents, Atomniy Projekt SSSR (Atomic Project of the Soviet Union), for example, went nearly overnight from being something only existed in full in a handful of libraries in the United States (I was proud to make sure that the Niels Bohr Library at the American Institute of Physics has a complete set), to being easily accessible through the Rosatom Digital Library.

But I’m not here to talk about the stuff that’s useful to scholars. I’m here to talk about their section on “Atomic Fun” from the Soviet atomic bomb project. This is a collection of, as they put it, “funny stories.”

modeling nuclear detonations based on size, location, etc

The revolutionary discovery of nuclear fission in December 1938 helped launch the Atomic Age, bringing with it a unique need for secrecy regarding the scientific and technical underpinnings of nuclear weapons. This secrecy evolved into a special category of proscribed information, dubbed "Restricted Data," which is still in place today. Historian Alex Wellerstein spent over 10 years researching various aspects of nuclear secrecy, and his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press), was released earlier this month.

Wellerstein is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, where his research centers on the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear history. (Fun fact: he served as a historical consultant on the short-lived TV series Manhattan.) A self-described "dedicated archive rat," Wellerstein maintains several homemade databases to keep track of all the digitized files he has accumulated over the years from official, private, and personal archives. The bits that don't find their way into academic papers typically end up as items on his blog, Restricted Data, where he also maintains the NUKEMAP, an interactive tool that enables users to model the impact of various types of nuclear weapons on the geographical location of their choice.

• http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
• https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

The scope of Wellerstein's thought-provoking book spans the scientific origins of the atomic bomb in the late 1930s all the way through the early 21st century. Each chapter chronicles a key shift in how the US approach to nuclear secrecy gradually evolved over the ensuing decades—and how it still shapes our thinking about nuclear weapons and secrecy today. //

Ars Technica: While researching your book, did you learn anything that really surprised you?

Alex Wellerstein: One was the fact that in the US we still have this parallel separate system for nuclear weapons secrets that is different from any other kind of secrecy. "Restricted Data" was a specially created category for nuclear weapons in 1946 because they really just were not sure what to do with this new concept. So we still have a very 1940s-style system. There's a lot of reasons one could imagine for saying, "Maybe we don't need to treat nuclear weapons as a totally parallel system from everything else in the world. Maybe that's not the best way—maybe we're in some ways inflating the value of this information by doing that."

There is an alternative argument, which is that secrets don't control nuclear weapons very well. It seems obvious to most people, and certainly did to me when I started this, that knowledge is power. Nuclear weapons are sort of infinite power, so their knowledge should be infinitely important, right? But the counterargument—and Oppenheimer was one of the first to really put this out there in a strong policy-framed way—is that secrecy is about control of a certain type of information, what philosophers might call "explicit information," stuff you can write down. You can restrict tons of knowledge just by not letting your experts go to another country and show them how to do stuff.

But that is only a small percentage of what it takes to actually make a weapon, specifically a nuclear weapon. As a result, it might not be the thing you want to focus on to control these weapons. You might want to focus on controlling the processes to make the fuel because that turns out to be the necessary thing. I can draw for you a beautiful sketch of how to make a thermonuclear weapon, but it's not going to help if you don't have the fuel—and you don't because we restrict that.

You could get rid of all of the secrecy tomorrow and the world would not measurably become more dangerous, because it’s other things that are actually keeping these weapons from spreading. To me, it's still a pretty radical idea because it not only goes against our intuitions about the bomb, but it also goes against what we tell ourselves about the way in which technology functions. It's not the equation that gives you the technology; it's the overall socio-political, human system that causes it to exist in the first place.

LtWiggledworth Ars Praetorian
AUG 26, 2021 8:56 PM

goodolejackburton wrote:
All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

Its one thing to get the scientific understanding to start a reactor, but the Germans were years behind in building the huge industrial base necessary for the bomb. The Manhattan Project should really be understood just as much as an effort to bootstrap an entire industrial sector, as a scientific project. K-25 was the largest building in the world , and used 1% of all the electricity in the US, and that was only one part of the overall effort.

For decades, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been home to an unusual artifact from World War II: a small cube of solid uranium metal, measuring about two inches on each side and weighing just under 2.5 kilograms. Lab lore holds that the cube was confiscated from Nazi Germany's failed nuclear reactor experiments in the 1940s, but that has never been experimentally verified.

PNNL scientists are developing new nuclear forensic techniques that should help them confirm the the pedigree of this cube—and others like it—once and for all. Those methods could also eventually be used to track illicit trafficking of nuclear material. PNNL's Jon Schwantes and graduate student Brittany Robertson presented some of their initial findings this week at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (a hybrid virtual/in-person event).

University of Maryland physicist Timothy Koeth is among the outsider collaborators in this ongoing research. He has spent over seven years tracking down these rare artifacts of Nazi Germany's nuclear research program, after receiving one as a gift. As of 2019, he and a UMD colleague, Miriam Herbert, had tracked down 10 cubes in the US: one at the Smithsonian, another at Harvard University, a handful in private collections—and of course, the PNNL cube.

What makes these cubes so special is their historical significance. As we reported previously:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/physicists-hunt-uranium-cubes-to-shed-light-on-germanys-failed-nuclear-reactor/

Underpinning the Manhattan Project in the US was the fear that German scientists under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime would beat the Allies to a nuclear bomb. The Germans had a two-year head-start, but according to Koeth, "fierce competition over finite resources, bitter interpersonal rivalries, and ineffectual scientific management" resulted in significant delays in their progress toward achieving a sustained nuclear reaction. German nuclear scientists were separated into three isolated groups based in Berlin (B), Gottow (G), and Leipzig (L).

Renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg headed up the Berlin group, and as the Allied forces advanced in the winter of 1944, Heisenberg moved his team to a cave under a castle in a small town called Haigerloch—now the site of the Atomkeller Museum. That's where the group built the B-VIII reactor. It resembled an "ominous chandelier," per Koeth, because it was composed of 664 uranium cubes strung together with aircraft cable and then submerged in a tank of heavy water shielded by graphite to prevent radiation exposure.

As the German scientists were racing against time, Manhattan Project lead Lieutenant General Leslie Groves kicked off a covert mission dubbed "Alsos," with the express purpose of gathering information and materials related to Germany's scientific research. When the Allied forces closed in at last, Heisenberg took apart the B-VIII experiment and buried the uranium cubes in a field, ferreting away key documentation in a latrine. (Pity Samuel Goudsmit, the poor physicist who had to dig those out.) Heisenberg himself escaped by bicycle, carrying a few cubes in a backpack.

As Heisenberg himself acknowledged, the German scientists' final experiment failed because the amount of uranium in the cubes was insufficient to trigger a sustained nuclear reaction. But Heisenberg was confident [was he certain?] that "a slight increase in its size would have been sufficient to start off the process of energy production." A model described in a 2009 paper bears that out, showing that the group would only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes to get the design to work. If it had, our world might look very different today.

The Alsos team purportedly brought the cubes confiscated from Berlin to the United States for use in the uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge. However, Koeth learned that, by April 1945, the US didn't need additional feedstock material. And there is no official record of any cubes entering the country, so most of them have never been accounted for. Ditto for the 400 or so uranium cubes that had been in use by the Gottow group, led by Kurt Diebner.

FHRs have the potential to safely and reliably generate large quantities of power at lower cost than any other nuclear reactor class. The United States has attempted to develop non-light-water-cooled reactors since the 1950s. None have succeeded on a sustained basis in the commercial market despite long-term, substantial government funding. Light-water-cooled reactors (LWRs) are a reliable, mature reactor technology with an established cost and performance basis. Even LWRs, however, supply only ~20% of US electricity and only ~8% of total US energy. The most significant issue inhibiting the growth of nuclear energy in the United States is the high cost of available LWR reactor options (compared to the current cost of natural gas) combined with an output temperature considerably lower than that needed to support many industrial process heat uses.

As multiple advanced reactor vendors enter the licensing process to build first-of-a-kind demonstration projects, the Nuclear Innovation Alliance (NIA)—a nonprofit “think-and-do tank” that supports the nuclear power industry—has said issues with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) current user fee cost-recovery model could slow innovation.

In a report released on May 19, the NIA identified how the NRC’s fee model can inhibit advanced nuclear innovation, compared the current model to structures used in other industries and countries, and recommended changes to improve the system. Importantly, the group says reliance on applicant fees limits the ability of the NRC to hire and train staff ahead of expected applications, reducing regulatory efficiency.

Smaller Firms with Less Resources
“We’re at an inflection point with the nuclear industry in the U.S., as well as nuclear regulation,” Alex Gilbert, project manager with NIA, said during an online panel session held to roll out the report. “We’re really moving away from the large, conventional light-water reactors that dominated our initial 40, 50 years of the nuclear industry in the U.S. We’re looking at advanced reactor technologies. We’re looking at new advanced light-water technologies—other non-light-water technologies, and we have a regulatory framework that we’re currently in the process of transforming to adapt to these new technologies.”

According to Gilbert, nuclear reactor development has historically been dominated by a handful of large, multinational corporations. For them, the cost of regulatory fees may not have been a significant financial barrier. But today, many smaller, less-established companies are working to develop new designs, and money is sometimes scarce.

“When we’re looking at the industry that we’re trying to develop, we’re trying to look towards a very vibrant, very competitive future. And so, we need to think about how our regulatory system is impacting new entrants,” Gilbert said. //

Gilbert explained that there are basically two elements to the NRC’s current fee structure. The first is 10 CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) Part 170 fees. These are hourly fees that are charged to applicants when they’re getting a specific item or regulatory engagement of value.

“The easiest way to think about that—and the thing that we focused on—is if you’re trying to get a license at the NRC to build and operate a nuclear facility, that’s something that there’s a discrete value and you’re charged hourly fees. Those hourly fees are actually just under $300 per hour, so that can add up pretty quickly,” said Gilbert.

The second element of the current fee structure is 10 CFR Part 171 fees. These are annual fees paid by existing licensees. These fees actually provide the majority of the funding for the NRC. Although these fees are obviously very important, Gilbert said NIA focused on the Part 170 fees because the group was most interested in understanding how fees affect innovation.

Notably, the report says the NRC’s budget has declined by more than 30% since the mid-2010s due to plant retirements and reduced application activity. This has been accompanied by a 25% reduction in NRC staff. While the existing fleet may be shrinking, indicating a lesser need for NRC staff, the growing pipeline of advanced reactors and the potential obligation for NRC design reviews would signal more staff may be required.

“What we’re concerned about with that kind of efficiency question is getting the right resources for the right project at the right time,” Gilbert said. //

The NIA reviewed fee structures for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to better understand how they were funded. Gilbert felt the FAA and FDA were particularly noteworthy. “These are really interesting regulatory agencies, because they’re very similar to the NRC in that they’re regulating innovative activities,” he said.

In the case of the FAA, even though most of the agency is funded by user fees, those user fees are collected exclusively from economic activities, such as ticket sales. “They’re not charging fees for their review of what’s called a type certification, which is similar to what the NRC does for a reactor license. So, you’re not having that disincentive to innovation,” said Gilbert.

The FDA operates a little bit differently. “They’ve had to actually substantially grow their overall budget over time,” Gilbert explained. “In implementing user fees there, it was really effective when combined with public investment by being able to balance both public and private interests in the funding of the agency. And that’s one of the reasons, among several others, that FDA is considered to have a relatively efficient and effective regulatory review system.”

Meanwhile, the EPA, which regulates many of the nuclear power industry’s competitors, such as coal, gas, and biomass power plants, only requires a small portion of its costs to be covered by fees. “They’re really minor compared to nuclear license fees,” said Gilbert. “So, the way that this fee system has worked out across the federal agency is actually disincentivizing the nuclear industry and kind of raising a roadblock that our competitors are not facing.” //

In its report, the NIA recommended a number of changes to the NRC fee structure, which it felt would spur innovation. For example, it proposed excluding or substantially reducing fees for new license applicants. The report says: “Multiple aspects of U.S. nuclear regulation bring benefits to the public and entities rather than just the applicant. Reduced fees, especially for new designs and innovative technologies, can reflect these broad benefits. Increasing the fraction of the NRC’s budget that is funded from general revenues can incentivize more innovation, improve regulatory efficiency, and ensure the American regulatory environment remains competitive.” Alternatively, NIA said if licensing fees could not be completely replaced, then excluding fees for items such as pre-application, topical reports, and environmental reviews could still bring substantial benefits. //

Peter Hastings, vice president of Regulatory Affairs and Quality with Kairos Power, agreed. “I think some amount of fee could be an effective barrier to that kind of frivolity. She used the term ‘skin in the game,’ and that certainly makes sense—to not necessarily reduce the hourly fee to nothing, but perhaps put in some sort of cost-share that would reduce the overall cost but still require the applicant to demonstrate that they’re serious, even if it’s only through a financial obligation,” he said.

“Any time that you put a cost on something, like a carbon tax, you discourage it,” said Gilbert. “In the case of these hourly fees, you’re essentially charging for innovation. And so, if we’re trying to build a new generation of safer, more economic reactors that can really help restore American competitiveness, we’re kind of creating a regulatory barrier right now to that innovation.”

In ‘Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,’ former Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Hagedorn provides a captivating account George Koval, who was born in Iowa and died a Soviet hero.

Malcolm Nance, the onetime National Security Agency cryptographer and current Brookings Scholar, once observed, “nothing in the world happens by coincidence.”

But when it came to George Koval, the Soviet sleeper spy carefully embedded into the Manhattan Project who, with his all-American background and scientific training, revealed key American nuclear secrets to his Moscow patrons, the U.S. national security establishment seemed all too willing to overlook as mere coincidences the unlikely concatenation of events leading to Koval’s betrayal.

A new generation of clean energy is on the horizon

Oklo is a clean energy company that has focused on developing a product and service that people want to buy. In 2020, they made history by submitting, and having had the NRC accept, their combined license application for their Aurora powerhouse design.

Over the last couple of years, Oklo has also made notable strides on multiple fronts. They were approved to use a specific site on the Idaho National Laboratory campus to build their first unit. The arrangement includes the grant of a long term site use permit. An environmental assessment is already underway. //

Oklo is developing a “First of a kind” (FOAK) advanced energy system, which typically involves unusual costs and risks that can scare away investors. Yet, Oklo’s simple, safe and small reactor passively cools itself with a design that has already been well proven. They’ve based their modern implementation on the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-2), that ran for 30 years, providing a wealth of performance data that has helped the NRC regulator get comfortable with the design’s technical capabilities.

Thus, while some might think that Oklo’s first-ever 4th Gen application to the NRC might never be approved, the NRC accepted the application even though it was radically shorter than prior applications submitted for Gen III plants. Under the requirements of the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA) the review process is expected to take three years, rather than four to complete. This means that Oklo should have an approved certification in the first half of 2023. //

Doug Coombes says

December 14, 2021 at 7:33 PM

“Oklo further recognized that the INL was storing waste from the EBR-II project and knew that this waste would be well suited to be the fuel for their reactor. They have secured an agreement with the INL to supply this waste and approval from the DOE to use it as fuel in their reactor.”

If it can be bred into fissile fuel like U-238 or Th-232 can or is already fissile like U-235, Pu-239 or other fissile TRUs, is it really waste?

There is a huge amount of fuel currently being stored as “waste” in the US, just waiting for reactors to be built that will burn it. Ed Pheil from Elysium estimates there is enough spent nuclear fuel to power their MCSFRs for 300 hundred years at current demand if they replaced ALL current US energy generation. It would be enough for over 1,000 years if it just replaced current US nuclear power generation.

That’s before we even look at the 470,000 tons of depleted uranium now being stored as “waste” in the US as uranium hexafluoride that can also be bred into fissile plutonium or added directly to the fuel cycle of some fast reactors now being developed.

The quicker we certify and start building these new designs the better.

Engineer-Poet says

December 15, 2021 at 1:34 PM

If it can be bred into fissile fuel like U-238 or Th-232 can or is already fissile like U-235, Pu-239 or other fissile TRUs, is it really waste?

Rhetorical question, I know, but if it was too depleted to be used any further in the EBR-II then it counted as “waste” for that purpose.

During routine maintenance, Electricite de France (OTCPK:ECIFF) ("EDF") found pipe defects on the safety injection systems for two nuclear facilities; both are shut down awaiting repair.

Two additional reactors, using the same technology, will be shut down briefly later this month for inspection. //

With yet another source of energy offline, European natural gas for January delivery continues its relentless march higher; prices now reaching $44 / mmbtu, Europeans will pay 900% more for natural gas in January 2022 than January 2021.

In the US, where natural gas prices have risen almost 50% year over year, consumers are paying less than $4 / mmbtu. //

French month ahead electricity prices for January have risen to ~$620 / mwh on the back of the EDF news, compared to average power prices in the US at ~$100 / mwh.

A recent conversation about the dangers of false claims of expertise stimulated me to revise and republish a nearly 11 year-old post.

It provides documented proof that Jimmy Carter was not a “nuclear engineer” and never served on a nuclear submarine. He left the Navy in October 1953, about 15 months before Jan 17, 1955, the day the the world’s first nuclear submarine went to sea. //

Here is a quote from the first debate between President Ford and Governor Jimmy Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign as transcribed in the Sep 24, 1976 issue of the New York Times:

Q: Governor Carter, I’d like to turn to what we used to call the energy crisis. Yesterday a British Government commission on air pollution, but one headed by a nuclear physicist, recommended that any further expansion of nuclear energy be delayed in Britain as long as possible. Now this is a subject that is quite controversial among our own people and there seems to be a clear difference between you and the President on the use of nuclear power plants, which you say you would use as a last priority. Why, sir, are they unsafe?

‘Capabilities of Atomic Power’

CARTER: Well among my other experiences in the past, I’ve been a nuclear engineer, and did graduate work in this field. I think I know the capabilities and limitations of atomic power. //

Since you remember enough about the 1950s/early 1960s to have been traumatized by “duck and cover” drills, you are old enough to personally recall the public’s interest in the energy crisis that was precipitated by the October 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. Do you recall how interested some people were in stimulating investments in more nuclear power as a means of reducing America’s vulnerability to another attempt to use oil as a weapon?

My interpretation of the history is that Carter’s friends in the upper elites of the hydrocarbon economy took advantage of his political ambition and his tenuous connection to nuclear energy to help put him into position to sabotage “the plutonium economy.” He might have had other goals and priorities, but once his purpose had been served, he lost enough support to make him a single term president.

Do you happen to recall that the title of Carter’s campaign book was “Why not the best?” and that he explained that choice of title in homage to the influence that Admiral Rickover had on his performance in life? //

Yes, Carter had an affinity for the coal industry. When Carter was running for President, roughly 40% of US coal production was from companies that were oil company subsidiaries. Here is a supporting quote from an Oct 3, 1976 NY Times article titled “Breaking Up Big Oil.”

Right now oil companies control between 26 percent and 40 percent of coal production (the lower figure comes from the Haskell committee, the higher from the United Mine Workers). Seven of the 15 largest coal companies are subsidiaries of oil companies. As Big Oil’s coal ownership climbed, so did coal prices: 300 percent. There was probably a connection. The nuclear‐energy industry is also being swallowed by the oil industry, which owned about 30 percent of our uranium reserves 10 years ago and today holds between 50 and 55 percent. As for shale and geothermal lands, virtually all of those leased to date have gone to oil companies.

Note: Like many commenters on the energy industry, the author of the NY Times piece did not understand that uranium was (and remains) only a small portion (5-20% depending on how it’s counted) of the nuclear energy business. //

In my opinion, it is the height of vanity for someone with a general engineering degree and service on diesel power submarines who did not even finish nuclear power school — which is the first baby step in a lengthy process of developing nuclear energy expertise in the US Navy program — to assert that he “knew nuclear engineering.”

When Carter made his policy decisions, he was asserting that he understood more about nuclear engineering and safety than thousands of nuclear scientists and engineers who had, by then, spent a couple of decades adding professional experience to their formal education on the topic while Carter, who left the Navy in Oct 1953 and never again focused on nuclear physics or engineering, raised and processed peanuts, made a fortune, and served as the governor of Georgia.

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Officials have announced that Kemmerer, population 2,600, will be the site of a plant featuring a liquid sodium-cooled reactor //

The high heat-transfer properties of sodium will allow the Natrium plant to be air-cooled. That will enable the plant to be quickly shut down in case of an emergency, and the absence of emergency generators and pumps will save on costs, Levesque said.

Others are skeptical about the benefits of sodium compared with water for cooling as in conventional nuclear plants.

“The use of liquid sodium has many problems. It’s a very volatile material that can catch fire if it’s exposed to air or water,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists science advocacy non-profit.

The “Clean Energy Performance Program” is not needed to meet climate goals, and might actually undermine them.

Consider Waxman-Markey. That’s the name of the “cap and trade” climate legislation that passed the House but failed in the Senate in 2010. It had a climate goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020. Instead, the U.S. reduced its emissions by 22 percent.

Had cap and trade legislation passed in the Senate, emissions would have declined less than 22 percent, because Waxman-Markey so heavily subsidized coal and other fossil fuels. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, “the Environmental Protection Agency projects that even if the emissions limits go into effect, the U.S. would use more carbon-dioxide-heavy coal in 2020 than it did in 2005.”

The same thing would likely have been true for the Clean Energy Performance Program, which lock in natural gas. Consider France. According to the Commision de Regulation de L’Energie, €29 billion (US$33) billion was used to purchase wind and solar electricity in mainland France between 2009 and 2018. But the money spent on renewables did not lead to cleaner electricity. In fact, the carbon-intensity of French electricity increased.

After years of subsidies for solar and wind, France’s 2017 emissions of 68g/CO2 per kWh was higher than any year between 2012 and 2016. The reason? Record-breaking wind and solar production did not make up for falling nuclear energy output and higher natural gas consumption. And now, the high cost of renewable electricity is showing up in French household electricity bills. //

What threatens the continued operation of nuclear power plants, and nuclear energy in general, is the continued subsidization of renewables, which the Clean Energy Performance Program would have put on steroids. Under the program, utilities would have received $18 for each megawatt-hour of zero-emissions energy it produces between 2023 to 2030, on top of the existing $25 per megawatt-hour subsidy for wind energy.

Under such a scenario, notes energy analyst Robert Bryce, a wind energy company "could earn $43 per megawatt-hour per year for each new megawatt-hour of wind energy it sells. That’s a staggering sum given that the wholesale price of electricity in New York last year was $33 per megawatt-hour. In Texas, the wholesale price of juice was $22 per MWh.” //

A better approach would be for Congress to seek nuclear-focused legislation to expand nuclear from its current 19% of U.S. electricity to 50% by 2050. It should take as a model the British government’s announcement yesterday that it would put nuclear energy at the center of its climate plans. Global energy shortages triggered by the lack of wind in Europe have led nations to realize that any efforts to decarbonize electricity grids without creating blackouts must center nuclear power, not weather-dependent solar and wind.

Nuclear is still one of the most controversial sources of energy on the planet, but it does have some key upsides, especially in the global push to tackle emissions.
The European Union stands completely divided on the issue of nuclear power as Scotland hosts the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow.
China is betting big on a nuclear future, aiming to bring over 150 new reactors online over the next 15 years. //

Other studies show that nuclear energy may not be the answer to climate change mitigation at all. A paper published in the journal Energy Policy August of this year argues that installed nuclear power capacity is simply too small now -- and still shrinking -- and will be too hard to scale up to have any kind of viable post-energy transition future, thanks to “technical obstacles and limited resources.” //

Beijing plans to bring 150 new nuclear reactors online over the next 15 years, which amounts to more nuclear capacity that the entire world has constructed in the last 35 years. “The effort could cost as much as $440 billion; as early as the middle of this decade, the country will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest generator of nuclear power,” writes Bloomberg.

This is an especially important development for China, given the size of the nation’s carbon footprint -- the biggest in the world. It’s also a development that only China could accomplish. “It would be the kind of wholesale energy transformation that Western democracies — with budget constraints, political will and public opinion to consider — can only dream of,” Bloomberg characterizes the plan. In fact, China may just be the only country in the world that can come up with the significant resources necessary to scale up nuclear so much so fast that it will put an end to the opinion that a nuclear renaissance will be “too little, too late.”

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Alex Epstein, founder of Center for Industrial Progress, joins Federalist Western Correspondent Tristan Justice to make “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” discuss the Biden administration’s out-of-touch climate goals, and explain why nuclear energy, which is often overlooked, could actually help solve American energy problems.

“We have restricted coal and natural gas in particular, as well as oil, so much on the promise that green energy would replace them and that has not happened. So when there’s an increased demand for energy, we need fossil fuels but you don’t have as many because they’re being restricted in terms of their production and transport,” Epstein said.

Epstein said the panic surrounding climate change and energy is “total distortion.”

“It’s really instructive that almost all the people talking about climate catastrophe in the future do not recognize the climate renaissance of the present,” Epstein said. “So I mentioned that if I would trust at all the solar and wind people if they acknowledge that solar and wind are a failure now, but they have some great argument about the future, but they claim their success now which means they’re definitely gonna be wrong about the future. Exact same thing with climate. If you acknowledge that we have the most livable climate ever, thanks to fossil fuels and what I call climate mastery, then I’ll listen to you if you say there’s a problem in the future, but if you portray today as unprecedented climate danger, then you are a total liar or just unbelievably ignorant.” //

Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was created in 1975, there have been ZERO nuclear plants that have gone through the entire regulatory process (plants built after that were approved before NRC was established).

Australia’s plan to build the submarines with U.S. and British help faces big hurdles. Supporters say they can be overcome. Critics say they may be too much.

NASA has previously discussed how nuclear propulsion technology could allow the agency to send humans to Mars more quickly than by using traditional chemical rockets.

"Nuclear electric propulsion systems use propellants much more efficiently than chemical rockets but provide a low amount of thrust," NASA has said. "Nuclear electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft for extended periods and can propel a Mars mission for a fraction of the propellant of high-thrust systems."

There are multiple types of nuclear propulsion that could be used in space technology. With nuclear electric propulsion, thermal energy from a nuclear reactor is turned into electric energy that powers whatever type of electrical thruster or propulsion tech that a spacecraft uses. With nuclear thermal propulsion, reactors heat up propellants like hydrogen and then the gas from that reaction is ejected, creating thrust. This can create a lot more thrust than electric propulsion systems.

National leaders around the world are announcing big plans to return to nuclear energy now that the cost of natural gas, coal, and petroleum are spiking, and weather-dependent renewables are failing to deliver.

“The number one objective is to have innovative small-scale nuclear reactors in France by 2030 along with better waste management,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.

Macron had previously promised to reduce nuclear from 75 to 50 percent of its power, noted Financial Times. “But the mood has now changed,” the paper writes today. “Macron said on Tuesday he would begin investing in new nuclear projects ‘very quickly.’”

Japan is set to fire up its nuclear power plants as it looks to expand its renewable energy offering amid a push to slash its emissions, its new industry minister has said today.

The efforts are a bid to cut 46 per cent of its carbon output from 2013 levels by 2030, while the country has also pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050.

“I would like to promote the maximum adoption of renewable energy, thorough energy conservation and the restart of nuclear power plants with the highest priority on safety,” newly appointed economy, trade and industry minister, Koichi Hagiuda, told his first news conference.

It comes amid a cabinet shuffle in Japan, as its government makes way for new prime minister Fumio Kishida.