Carnival of Nuclear Energy 216

1. Forbes – Are EPA’s Carbon Rules Really About Nuclear?

Although it’s been difficult for the President to advocate for nuclear power within his own party, President Obama’s promise of a world with fewer nuclear weapons but more nuclear energy is finally getting a push with EPA’s new carbon rules.

2. NewsOK – There is an explanation for what anti-C clothing is and what it can do and can not do.

3. Canadian Energy Issues – Zero-carbon electricity, electric transit, clean cities, in ten years: an easily achievable plan for Ontario

Steve Aplin of Canadian Energy Issues presents a modest ten-year plan to completely de-carbonize Ontario electricity. He suggests that given what we know about CO2 and climate change, and given our constitutional autonomy in electric power generation, this is an inescapable moral imperative.

4. Yes Vermont Yankee – Tritium in Retrospect. Tritium: An example of Unreasoning ALARA

Radiation safety follows the rule of keeping dosages in accordance with ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) requirements. In this post, Meredith Angwin reviews the Great Vermont Yankee Tritium Scare. Vermont Yankee had to remediate (by extensive groundwater pumping) a tritium leak. The total amount of tritium in that leak was less than one day’s legal emissions of tritium from a typical Canadian plant. An example of unreasonable ALARA.

5. Hiroshima Syndrome’s Fukushima FUD – Fukushima Fabrications: Paul Gunter on RT

Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear is clearly bigoted with respect to nuclear energy, elaborates for effect, embellishes for impact, and fabricates as-needed to promote his unabashed antinuclear agenda. His interview with Abby Martin of RT America reeks of fabrications intended to promote fear, uncertainty and doubt, and resorts to garden-variety conspiracy theory allegations.

6. ANS Nuclear Cafe – Caught in the Leadership Paradox: Insight from Admiral Rickover by Paul E. Cantonwine

Scandals at the U.S. Veterans Administration and at General Motors represent the worst aspects of bureaucracy, and a failure to effectively deal with the Leadership Paradox. How the “Father of the U.S. Nuclear Navy,” and perhaps most effective bureaucrat in U.S. history, successfully navigated the Leadership Paradox

7. ANS Nuclear Cafe – Communicating Nuclear Energy Forward by Lenka Kollar

What will it take to move nuclear energy forward? A conversation about effective communication – from the Focus on Communications Workshop at the 2014 American Nuclear Society Annual Meeting

8. Nextbigfuture – EMC2 Bussard Fusion’s Dr Park Spoke about the status of the project

An attendee to Dr Park’s talk provided a summary at Talk Polywell.

1) Dr. Park is interested in trying to form the potential well as the next step in the research program.

2) There was a discussion between Dr. Park and Prof. Forest about MHD (magneto hydro dynamics) and the lack of axial symmetry. Dr. Park’s conclusion was that it’s very difficult to address high-beta with a PIC code, but high beta is necessary to explain the improved confinement of fast electrons. 3-D MHD codes have been tried on the Polywell but the results don’t agree with the PIC results. More MHD work by collaborators would be nice.

3) Dr. Park would also like to map out the magnetic field, but it will be difficult to do in a pulsed experiment. The discharges are short, and they are quite dynamic due to the gun formation (he showed a video of the visible emission from the two blobs of plasma from each gun as they collided in the center and wiggled around). He said they’ve only take 50 shots, because they have to ‘reload’ the gun each time they fire.

4) In the future, he’d like to have a longer plasma sustainment time than the guns can provide, and then implement Thomson scattering diagnostic to measure the density and temperature more accurately.

5)There is evidently a sweet spot at 2.7 kG [kiloGauss?]; lowering the magnetic field to 1.6 kG doesn’t produce as good results, even though that means beta is higher. They don’t really know why this is true.

6) DoE funding is unlikely in the future, Dr. Park thinks China or possibly Korea may be interested though.

7) the confinement time is theorized to scale as the 3/2 [half cube] power of the energy of the electrons, so it would be easier to confine very hot electrons than cold ones.

8) Expect more publications in the future.
He promised to send the slides from his talk.

9. Forbes – Atomic Man Gets Closure at Nuclear Weapons Site

Atomic Man’s laboratory is finally getting cleaned-up and dismantled 38 years after an explosion that covered a radworker named Harold McCluskey with a massive dose of radiation. He survived to become known as the Atomic Man and the lab was dubbed the McCluskey Room. It surprised everyone that he did not die from any radiation-induced health effect, but from congestive heart failure as a result of a long-standing coronary artery disease at the age of 75.

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