21st century nuclear… for beginners

SACOME has put published a glossy portfolio edition of the 6-part series (9 pages in total) was done by me and Ben Heard for the SA Mines & Energy Journal – you may find this useful for family and friends! (some of these individual articles were already published on BNC and DecarboniseSA). Thanks to Megan Andrews and Dayne Eckermann for putting this together.

The aims were to be: (i) easy to understand, (ii) concise but accurate, (iii) attractively presented, and (iv) to tackle the most common objections raised by anti-nuclear folks.

Download the PDF here (5.5 MB) and distribute far and wide.

The content covers generation IV technology, safety, radioactive waste, sustainability and carbon emissions of uranium supplies, small modular reactors, and economic competitiveness compared to other low-carbon energy options. The overarching context is nuclear as a solution to climate change. That’s what Ben and I really care about, after all.

(Note that we offered this series gratis as a community service — we are educators, after all, and to us, dissemination of evidence-based knowledge is its own reward).

One Response

  1. Barry

    Mike Seyfang put me onto your Blog with the comment it will change your world.

    blimey he is right. I spent most of my post grad at Uni SA arguing we didn’t have the right to inflict Nuclear Waste onto the future generations. however now I get why they had Phd Exchange students in Nuclear Physics from Iran I our Tutorials. So I get it now, sack all fossil fuels and focus everything into Nuclear Fission for Base load power generation, the rest is arranging deck chairs on the Titanic ready to sink into an acidified ocean.

    so now we come to how to make the change happen, clearly there are plenty of governments and opposition parties that are apologists for the coal industry, so how do we bust it?

    I had a hypothesis that South Australia should make itself the Nuclear Power industry output / by product storage management centre for the world due to our space and geological stability. we should go further to strive to work on reuse and or reduction of the half lives, if this is even necessary (I have some personal research to do to catch up).

    Anyway thanks for opening my eyes and I’ll start with a chat with those Professors, I have recruited my brother and nephew ( physics teacher and post grad science student respectively) I have also told my 6 year old son he needs to become a Physicist. I’m figuring we have 15 to 20 years max. Otherwise one day in the future another intelligent life form will be looking at Homo Sapien fossils and scratching their had as we do about Dinosaurs and ask…

    “Why did they go extinct?”

    Regards

    Matthew Nolan Branch Manager SA Openlogistix 0427 053 085

    MODERATOR
    Thankyou for you comment Matthew. As Barry is overseas at the moment, I suggest you contact him by email to discuss this and also the founder of DeCarboniseSA Ben Heard (checkout his website too)if you wish to become involved in the efforts to convince others about nuclear power.
    Please note that comments on BNC are now made on the BNC Discussion Forum. I will re-post this comment over there.

    http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=bncblogposts&thread=317

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