First and foremost, I am personally incompetent. I can’t get anything done, I’ve lost what project management capability I ever had, and in short, in attempting to understand the nuclear industry’s institutional culture, I’ve internalized it. That has spilled over into my life in general, and over the time that I’ve been a pro-nuclear activist, I have increasingly promised more and more things, failed to deliver on time or with the promised capabilities, and quietly abandoned it all once it was clear that the conditions that would have made those things desirable were gone. Even worse, since I’m politically tone-deaf and clearly do not fit in here, when I open my mouth, people are more likely to go in the direction opposite the one I advocate. I am not an asset here.

Second, the whole sector is circling the drain. There is no capability present to do what we need to do. Therefore, even if I were doing more good than harm by advocating the program of action regarding advocacy which I have repeatedly advocated, there would be no way to actually do any of it. And, since I’m a very poor politician, in advocating this program of action, I’ve come off as criticizing the pro-nuclear community, and alienated the people I needed to reach. So I’ve lost any influence I ever had, which was probably never much. I could go back to blogging, but I’ve long ago figured out that this fixed format doesn’t work well for people who are under attack from a Gish Gallop - there’s no way for people who are new to the issue to access the information topically. I could expand on that point, and others, but nobody would listen, so why bother?

So I’ll go somewhere else and do something else. What, I don’t know. This site will stay up until August, then disappear. If anyone wants the domain so that it doesn’t get taken over by Russian spammers, email me.

Update 5/29 6:10 PM: The “Pages” section on the right side of the sidebar got very long, very fast. It’s been taken down. Please use the updates page and the search function available at the top of the right sidebar to find what you’re looking for. Apologies for the delay and thank you for visiting.

Update 5/29 4:36 PM: Apologies to those who saw strange text on the right column for about two hours around 2:30-4:30 PM Central. We were testing some code that might have allowed the “Pages” section to display only the pages that were immediately below (in terms of the page tree that you currently see) the page currently being viewed. It didn’t work. Next time, we’ll do it during off-hours so that it’s less disruptive.

Update 5/29 2:17 PM: Another bug in WordPress has popped up: apparently, if there are two pages in different parts of the tree with the same slug, it finds the title of the first one and applies it to the second one. This affects the action page Support the Direct Use of Plutonium In CANDUs (DUPIC) Process and the poll page Weekly Nuclear Poll: Dec. 1-7, 2006. Sorry about that; we didn’t do it.

We’ve uploaded more pages over the last couple of days; the site is almost reconfigured. One of those pages is the new Weekly Nuclear Poll; please check it out. Thank you for visiting.

Update 5/19 10:20 PM: We’ve uploaded some more pages and implemented the redirect detailed below. The blog/news page is now a part of the main site, with a (hopefully) seamless redirect. Please comment if there are problems.

Update 5/19 12:45 PM: Apologies to those who saw either a 404 or a default WordPress page for about an hour around 11 AM Central. We were upgrading to the new version of WordPress, and moving some content around. As you can see, the blog is now on this page. We’ll set up a redirect later today.

Update 5/13 2:04 PM: While we’re working on the software that will make it possible to do what we’ve promised, please check out:
1. The Nuclear is Our Future weblog/news page, and
2. The Nuclear is Our Future forums.
Again, our apologies. We know you don’t come here to read work in progress notices and we’ll be back as soon as we can.

Update 11/17 11:17 AM: Apologies for the broken links on the About page. WordPress is choking on a fairly large amount of text (the pending pages page) and won’t display it; it also doesn’t allow you to create a new blog at another location (as it says it doesn’t), which we didn’t think was going to be a problem but is going to prevent us from putting up the Updates and Known Issues pages (ironic, isn’t it?)…clearly, WordPress isn’t going to work and we’ll have to find something else.
Obviously, we underestimated the amount of time it would take to copy and paste our static content into WordPress, underestimated our need for additional sequential-entry data structures, and overestimated WordPress’s ability to function as advertised.
This is going to take a while. Sorry.

As you can see, the normal content isn’t here; we’re converting from static HTML to WordPress.

We apologize for this downtime and we should be back up tomorrow.

Update 8/27 7:45 PM: This seems like a better template (i.e., it displays what is given to it) than the high-contrast one we were using for a couple of days. The header photo (the Clinton nuclear power plant in Illinois) should be replaced with something that doesn’t look like an endorsement of a company’s business practices, but the overall “floating-rounded-rectangle” layout seems to work well; what do you think? Should this look be maintained when we switch to Movable Type (it would be used for everything–the (threaded) forums, main site, blog, etc.)?

Update 8/26 2:45 PM: Posts (except one; which one it is we don’t know; we’re tracking it down) and comments up to April 10th have been successfully imported into our new WordPress installation. What’s left:
1. Comments: those who have been here before know we had a huge spam attack in mid-November 2007; fortunately, the import script timed out before any spam comments were imported, but unfortunately it also stopped before any comments were imported that were submitted after April 10th. Those will be copied and pasted once I figure out how they’re saved in the database.
2. Sidebar links, scripts, etc.: those will also be coming, but being content-complete is higher on the list.
3. Template: those who have been here before know that the site did not look like this. Rewriting the old template in the WordPress templating language will take so much time that it’s not likely to happen (and given that it’s not our template anyway, it might be illegal). The current plan is to use WordPress as a step toward Movable Type, so the current look is temporary. Honest.
4. Once we’re content-complete, said content will be transferred to a Movable Type installation, which we hope will work.
5. If MT doesn’t work, we’ll try Drupal.
6. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to write a CMS.

Sorry about this page not being here; we’re converting the old Blogger site to WordPress and then to either Movable Type, Drupal, or a hand-coded system. Meanwhile, we’ve reverted to niof.blogspot.com (temporarily–please don’t change any bookmarks or links) while we set up the new software over here and get the import/export bugs ironed out.

We should be up in a couple of days. Thanks for your patience.

It’s kinda flawed.

1. All uncontrolled reactions are not explosions. A reaction can be uncontrolled merely because a person or mechanism is not in charge of it–there were 16 natural nuclear reactors in an African uranium deposit, and they formed in a very similar configuration to this postulated accident. How did they stop? The energy released heated the water and eventually boiled it–and without the water, there’s no reaction. After it shut down, it cooled off, letting the water back in; this process was repeated for millions of years until it simply ran out of fuel. No explosions were involved–it didn’t even disrupt the ore.
2. There will never be a homogeneous mixture. Ceramic does not dissolve in water, there’s no way to get enough water into the fuel assemblies even if it did, and expecting every single one of those 21,000 tubes to open up, let the water in, and not let any of it out afterward is ridiculous.
3. This isn’t gasoline. A critical configuration in one area does not create a critical configuration in another nearby area.

Sounds a bit like the Brookhaven Report, which was written in 1957 with no access to computers, and said that if the core of a nuclear reactor were pulverized and deposited equally into the lungs of 10,000 people, they would die. Well, yes–but what’s your point? The amount of water in a filled bathtub could drown 40,000 people. Blaming nuclear power for things it didn’t, doesn’t, and can’t do doesn’t save lives. It cynically manipulates tragedy for political purposes.

This happened recently, and doesn’t have anything to do with what we know about uranium’s radiotoxicity today. It doesn’t prove any conspiracy theories and doesn’t make uranium magically increase its radioactivity when aerosolized.

For the record.

And they sat on them.

Until Thursday, May 31.

The Manhattan Project scientists had a plutonium bomb design ready in 1944 and had to wait for a specialized weapons-production reactor to be completed in order to actually build it. If they had known the plutonium was going to be available before 1945, they could have started work on the implosion mechanism–the most difficult part–and had it ready by mid-1943.

I’m sure the families of every person killed on both sides in 1944 and 1945 will say, “Thanks, guys.”

More from We Support Lee.

But what if they weren’t?

That boils down to an extremely conservative attitude. It is formally known as the Precautionary Principle: don’t do anything unless all the possible problems to future generations are known and solved. Since humans aren’t infalliable and can’t predict everything, don’t do anything–even if you know the problems you’ll cause are less severe than what you’re currently experiencing.

How can you know that it’s a net gain if you can’t know everything that will happen in the future? Easy. Today’s problems, if unsolved, will continue unabated into the future, indefinitely. Thus, whatever problem is eliminated, whatever net gain is made, will be projected into the future from this day forward.
I’m all for precaution–eliminating, reducing, and optimizing risks; establishing a coherent system by taking problems that will always be there and letting them work against each other. Given two two-by-fours, I’ll lean them against each other instead of trying to balance them on their ends and complaining that doing so requires perfection and is inherently unstable, and mere humans cannot be trusted with two-by-fours as a result. However, I am not in favor of swinging in trees.

The Precautionary Principle has nothing to do with precaution. It is simply a reactionary philosophy that has been with humanity since our first consciousness, and is keeping humans who have the bad luck to be born in the Third World barefoot and sick when solutions are well-known and available.

Give me the real left wing. Not the left wing of Amory Lovins, but the left wing of FDR. Give every person everywhere an American standard of living, and watch their environmental impact go down as they rely less on nature for their needs. Telling a man who is up to his waist in a rice paddy in Bangladesh that he needs to use less energy is not the answer. A radical overhaul of the poverty lifestyle forced upon him by reactionaries is the answer, and doing so is our moral obligation.

One thing is certain: if the American nuclear industry doesn’t immediately forget any illusions that it is special and start acting like an industry, they’ll stagnate just like they have over the past 35 years.
The nuclear industry outside of Russia is the only industry in the world to respond to a great opportunity for growth by screaming “SLOW DOWN!” Well, guess what. You’re never going to have everything you need to be perfect, and your suppliers that you so often complain about move at the normal speed for private industry–meaning a complete turnaround in two years is not unheard of–instead of yours. Don’t worry about them. Get the orders, start innovating, and the workers will come as soon as there are jobs for them.

Remember: if not for Chernobyl–meaning, if they had banned the RBMK in 1950 like we did, and if the Soviet military hadn’t tried to build power plants out of their bomb factories–the Russian nuclear industry would have a perfect safety record. They do have much better financial and management performance. There are lessons to be learned from the Russians; they’re getting these orders for a reason.
And if you don’t get going, the Russians are going to come over here, get the VVER-1000 certified by the NRC, and build a fleet. Do you really want that?

Link.

I disagree with the Society of Energy Professionals, however, and fully expect that McKinsey will rate AECL’s Canadian nuclear technology near the bottom. The current designs remove the CANDU’s traditional commercial advantages and are competitive only if there is a requirement to consume American-style reactors’ waste–which Canada doesn’t have. They could build a fleet down here, but in places without a lot of LWR waste, they might as well just build fast breeders.

Link.

Count me skeptical. I don’t see anything here that satisfies the third point, but perhaps George Bush knows by now that any proposal of his will be rejected simply because it came from him (which is wrong, even though I don’t agree with him on much), and is trying to set up an international conference where Obama or Hillary will present something nearly identical to what he would have.
Let’s just hope that successor doesn’t drop the ball.

Link.