03-01 Some Basics
In 1987, my wife and I were planning a tour of the Soviet Union in advance of an international conference in Helsinki. And to my surprise, many of the tours had been cancelled for fear of airborne radiation associated with the explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine the year before.Stories of…
03-02 Fuel or Weapons
It was a professor at “Teachers College” that said our job was to help students “know what they don’t know”. And this is the importance of this chapter. Do we ever fully know the extent to which uranium ends up as fuel for nuclear reactors or as material for nuclear weapons.I remember when it was…
03-03 Replacing Fossil Fuels
If all the developed nations of the world followed the lead of Sweden and France in using nuclear power to produce electrical energy, then nuclear energy would replace fossil fuels.But it will not happen. The political decisions made by these two nations to go nuclear were not based on a concern for carbon dioxide emissions…
03-04 The Future
Most of what government’s deal with is unplanned. So, we should not assume that even industry can plan its future. And this applies in spades to nuclear energy. It would be my thinking that our energy future is so complex that we cannot study the future of nuclear unless we are also studying the future…