https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRGGoGENuus

David Schumacher is a filmmaker who was inspired to learn more about nuclear energy at a Wired-sponsored event in 2011. That event took place soon after the Fukushima event captured widespread media attention.

During the Wired gathering, he heard Bill Gates talk about his investments in TerraPower and his excitement in being involved in the development of a technology that could help to address climate change, energy supplies, and economic inequalities. Given what he had heard in the media, he realized there was a significant disconnect between perception and reality.

He began an intensive self study effort to find out more. He read, spoke with experts and traveled to places where there was development activity underway.

By early 2015, David had learned enough about nuclear energy to realize that there was a story to tell that was not being told. He had met some "really smart" people who were convinced that there were improvements to be made in the technology that would go a long way in addressing many of the challenges that had slowed development.

He and his long time cameraman decided, over a coffee after a project completion, that it was time to begin working to tell that story.

The New Fire Movie is the product of that collaboration.

Though this is Dave's first feature length documentary movie as the director, he has deep and broad experience in video production work and story telling. As he explains during our interview, the story of young, bright, energetic people doing really hard things goes way beyond typically dry debates and technical presentations.

It is a human story that should motivate, inspire and excite.

The world premier of The New Fire Movie is just two weeks away. It will be showing at 7:30 pm on Saturday, October 14 at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, IN.  Go to The Heartland Film Festival web site to order tickets.

Have a listen to find out more.

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Dr. George Gonzales is an energy-focused political scientist and professor at the University of Miami. He has written a number of books about the relationships between energy, the environment, international relations, and political decision making. His upcoming work is titled Energy and the Modern State; it is scheduled to be published in 2018.

On this podcast, George and I discuss the way that the United States continues to use its ability to influence and dominate the world's oil markets to maintain its position as a global superpower. Part of the underlying strategy includes focused efforts to discourage the use of energy sources like plutonium that are capable of supplying enough additional energy to the world markets to reduce the importance and value of petroleum, natural gas and coal.

I hope you enjoy the discussion, even if it is lengthy, sometimes passionate, and a bit contentious.

ClearPath Foundation has established a new niche; it is an unabashedly conservative organization that believes that clean energy is an important issue. It is taking aggressive action to seize the initiative. It asserts that the definition of “clean” energy should not be left in the hands of people who do not like material prosperity and prefer to emphasize limits to growth over technology developments that enable more people to live with access to abundant power.

Here is a brief philosophy summary from their home page.

At ClearPath we stand against bureaucracy, crony capitalism, and big government. We believe that time-tested conservative principles can create energy security, boost our economy, and reduce pollution. We can do this together.

ClearPath provides a more detailed listing of their six guiding principles, along with a brief explanation of each one.

Jay Faison, the founder of ClearPath, introduced his organization to the nuclear industry by participating in a Global Climate Change panel at the annual Nuclear Energy Assembly.

Earlier this week, ClearPath Action, an affiliated SuperPac launched in February 2016, issued two related memos that directly challenged the League of Conservation Voters and its limited definition of clean energy. According to the LCV, nuclear energy counts as “dirty energy”; strong support for its expansion can help a candidate land on the LCV’s Dirty Dozen list.

On Tuesday, I had a chance to chat with Rich Powell, the Managing Director for Policy and Strategy at the ClearPath Foundation. We discussed Jay Faison’s background and vision, the goals that his foundation has established, Powell’s role in helping to establish the policy and strategy to achieve those goals and the current actions that the organization and its affiliates are pursuing.

Forgive my vanity, but I think that this conversation was particularly valuable. Your opinions, as always, are welcome.

I self-identify as a classic liberal who believes in good government, public education, worker protections, equality of opportunity that includes efforts to overcome historical inequalities, environmental protection, social security programs and strong international security. I’m even a fan of socialized medicine; I believe it would be hypocritical for a guy who has had free government-provided health care since age 17 to think otherwise.

However, I’ve lived and worked productively with numerous people that are more conservative in their politics and philosophies. I don’t think that differences in approach inevitably lead to deadlock.

My sincere hope is that liberals and conservatives from both major parties in the US will see that providing clean, cheap, sustainable energy that is abundant enough to share widely with everyone is a goal that is ripe for both political cooperation and non-partisan competition to see who can do the most to enable success.

David Brower had a profound influence on the Environmental Movement and its gradual transition from groups of outdoors enthusiasts and conservationists who focused on protecting public lands and establishing national parks to a powerful political movement with major influences on a variety of important industrial, economic and international policy arenas.

The Movement has had a huge impact on the world’s energy industry and helped to pick winners and losers among the various fuel and non fuel alternatives to powering our society. Though that influence, the Movement has indelibly altered the flows of vast sums of money between consumers and producers on an international scale over a period of at least 40 years.

David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement, by Tom Turner, tells the story of how a shy Berkeley boy who started off being fearful of heights grew up to be an accomplished mountain climber, captivating public speaker and leader of two of the most influential environmental organizations in the world. He was the first executive director of the Sierra Club, serving from 1956-1969 and growing the organization’s membership by ten fold from about 7,000 to 77,000 and the founder of Friends of the Earth, starting from a membership of zero and peaking at over 39,000 during his tenure.

He was also asked to resign from both organizations by boards of directors that felt he was a bit of a loose cannon who undertook his own projects without paying careful attention to budgetary impacts or listening to the restraining decisions of the board.

Brower’s own interpretation of his major contribution to the Environmental Movement was as its publicist. He was a creative and inspiring writer and had a knack for organizing projects to produce books and documentaries that stimulated people to take action to join organizations and to get involved in their activities. He was the creative force behind the Sierra Club’s Exhibit Format (never call them coffee table) books full of incredible photos that made people want to join the Club, visit and/or protect the places depicted.

Brower was also one of the first of the environmentalists to begin questioning the value of atomic energy, even though his initial response to the dawning of the Atomic Age was relief. He was in the Tenth Mountain Division, which was preparing to pivot from winning the battle in Europe to invading Japan in order to finally end World War II. He and his fellow servicemen believed that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened Japan’s decision to surrender, making the invasion unnecessary.

Sometime in the mid 1960s, however, Brower began to believe that the risks from radiation to human genetic material along with the risk of terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities or diversion of nuclear materials from power programs to weapons programs outweighed any benefits that the new technology would provide to society. He began to speak out on the topic and to try to move the Sierra Club to an official position of opposing nuclear energy development.

Along with his propensity to spend outside of budgetary limits, the nuclear energy issue was one of the factors that led to his dismissal by the Sierra Club board. In 1969, the majority position on the board was still that atomic energy was better than damming rivers to fill scenic valleys with water that could fall through turbines to produce electricity.

His opposition to nuclear energy was well known before he left the Sierra Club and founded Friends of the Earth (FOE). As Turner acknowledged, FOE’s early success was greatly assisted by a major contribution from Robert O. Anderson, the CEO of the Atlantic Richfield Company,

Some people who are not well versed in human history believe that fossil fuels are inherently evil, costly and harmful to human health. They ignore the side of the accounting ledger that documents the incredibly beneficial effects concentrated fuels have provided to overall human freedom, happiness, self actualization and reduction of dependence on nature.

Those benefits, however, have not been universally or equitably shared.

Kathleen Hartnett-White, one of the co-authors of Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy, is fully aware of the beneficial effects of hydrocarbon extraction and use as a fuel to empower major portions of the human population. She joined me on July 6th for a spirited discussion about the importance of abundant energy that can be converted to reliable, focused power.

We talked about the ways that concentrated energy sources have given people some of the comforts, nutritional options, free time and freedom of movement that used to be only available to the very thin slice of the population that owned or controlled both beasts of burden and large numbers of other human beings.

Hartnett-White described the way that the shale revolution in both natural gas and oil has changed the world’s available energy balance and altered people’s assumptions about the future availability of conventional fuel supplies. We disagreed a little in our view of the sustainability of that revolution and its need for substantially higher prices to keep it viable.

We talked about the way that some people believe that the risks from climate change are so dramatic that they require human society to depower and devolve back into a less free, less mobile, less comfortable and less prosperous mode of living.

As a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Fueling Freedom Project is unabashedly aimed at changing the public conversation about energy from one that seeks to keep fossil fuels away from people into one that seeks to continue intelligent use of concentrated fuel resources as a way to improve the human condition.

Hartnett-White noted that the way most climate change activists treat nuclear energy provides evidence that their primary motivation is to depower the people rather than to reduce CO2 production. As she noted, if reducing risks from an atmospheric build up of CO2 was their primary concern, they would rethink their stubborn opposition to nuclear energy. Instead, they promote unreliable and uncontrollable sources of power like the wind and the sun even while fully recognizing that those sources are incapable of providing the same quantity and quality of power that people purchase today.

It’s nearly impossible to find an advocate of a 100% renewable energy supply system that does not begin the conversation by stating that their goals cannot be reached without a drastic reduction in power consumption. Mark Jacobson’s oft touted “solutions project” prescriptions rest on the assumption that we already use about 40% more energy than we should use in 2050. Here’s links to two example states in the US, Virginia (42%) and Florida (43%). Even more egregiously, the Solutions Project expects the same kinds of reduction in energy consumption in countries like India (43%) where enormous swaths of the population don’t use any commercial quantities of fuel or power.

Jacobson’s team at the

Rachel Pritzker and Ben Heard, two skilled communicators that have recognized the immense gift to humanity represented by the tightly packed power inside uranium and thorium nuclei, joined me in a terrific discussion about effectively communicating the awesome story of nuclear energy.

It should be apparent by now that the US nuclear industry is facing a situation difficult enough to qualify as a crisis. We must seize the attention grabbing opportunity that briefly accompanies such a situation.

Despite a couple of decades of outstanding plant performance, the number of units that have been declared to be uneconomic is growing. Plants are being shutdown and replaced by a plants burning natural gas with occasional support from wind or solar when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

Nuclear professionals, traditionally a group of people that is still strongly influenced by the presence of a large contingent of people from the Silent Service, have not successfully made the case that their product is difficult to replace. They have not effectively provided an optimistic vision for the future, instead spending most of their time in public on the defensive.

Rachel and Ben both recently returned from attending the Nuclear Energy Assembly in Miami. Ben attended the Clean Energy Ministerial in San Francisco and shared some important thoughts about the contrasts between the two events. He also shared some reflections on the differences in the audiences that attended the two events.

The gulf between those two events was more than just the three thousand miles of geographic distance.

I hope that a few people who are in New Orleans this week for the ANS Annual Meeting have a chance to download this episode. Perhaps they can make use of the discussion to stimulate some conversations of their own.

Towards the end of the episode, we mentioned Mothers for Nuclear and the March for Environmental Hope that they are organizing. Please take the time to learn more about the organization and try to plan at least some participation in the March.

The US nuclear industry has decided that it’s time to take aggressive action to improve its operational efficiency. Leaders have looked hard at the competitive landscape. They’ve clearly recognized that while they produce a valuable, desirable commodity, their production costs are not competitive.

Many of them aren’t willing to give up their markets and valuable assets without a fight. In the fall of 2015, they decided to focus on eliminating wasteful efforts and begin prioritizing efficiency alongside their traditionally strong core competencies of safety and reliability.

Note: The CO2 emission-free nature of atomic fission is an inherent attribute that comes with the technology choice. So is the elimination of other noxious air and water pollutants. End Note.

On April 22, I spoke with two senior executives from the Nuclear Energy Institute about their efficiency program. My guests were Maria Korsnick, the Chief Operating Officer, and Tony Pietrangelo, senior Vice-President and Chief Nuclear Officer.

No one is more knowledgable about the high priority initiative, which has been named, “Delivering the Nuclear Promise.” It’s an industry-wide effort that is scheduled to last for three years with expected effects that will live for many productive years.

In preparation for the discussion I had read the strategic plan issued in February. I also sampled the program’s early products, which are being delivered the form of “Efficiency Bulletins.”

Here is how Ms. Korsnick began our discussion.

I’ll start with the name, Delivering the Nuclear Promise. Why did we name it that and what does it mean? We stepped back and looked at the value proposition for nuclear. We said nuclear was always intended to be very safe, it was always intended to be very reliable and, if you can remember way back when, it was going to be “too cheap to meter.”

So our challenge is that we’ve delivered on the promise of being very safe, we have a very strong safety record. We delivered on the reliability. Last year, as a US fleet we were at about 92% from a reliability perspective. We took a hard look at the cost side and said, not so much.

The idea of delivering the nuclear promise was essentially that we would continue our focus on safety and continue our focus on reliability but really sharpen our pencils from an efficiency perspective and better understand how we can do a better job on the efficiency side.

It’s a cost as well as revenue piece. We want to be as efficient as we can at running the plants and also make sure that the product we’re producing, that carbon free product, is valued in the market place.

It would be difficult for anyone who has ever worked in the commercial nuclear industry, looked at a typical plant organizational chart, or observed the way that the plant is administered and guarded to fail to notice that there are many inefficiencies that can be addressed.

The industry has a long tradition of complying with requirements; which may be part of its Nuclear Navy roots. Unfortunately, the commercial users of the technology and operating modes invented and refined by ADM Rickover haven’t always applied the “questioning attitude” that his program also demanded of all participants.

Now that they’ve realized that cost is an object and that excessive costs can destroy valuable plants almost as easily as improperly operating them, leaders have decided it’s a good time to ask “Why are we doing things this way...

On the evening of April 10, 2016, I met with two good friends and fellow nuclear energy bloggers for a wide ranging discussion about nuclear energy. We talked about the following topics:

* Nuclear energy’s role in the future of energy supplies

* Impact of the Nuclear Security Summits initiated by President Obama

* Demonization campaign being waged against the use of refined uranium (aka highly enriched uranium or HEU)

* Murky future of the US’s plutonium disposition program in light of the DOE’s FY2017 budget that cancels the Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility

* Growing risk that California may experience a repeat of the 2000-2001 energy crisis this coming summer

* Compensating various sources of electrical power

* Destabilizing effects of the extension of the renewable energy PTC/ITC subsidies – which take $5 billion/year from taxpayers and give it to selected power source developers

My guests included:

Meredith Angwin, who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee and the Northwest Clean Energy blog

Steve Aplin, who blogs at Canadian Energy Issues

I hope you enjoy the show.

Note 1: During our discussion about the compensation received by various electric power sources, Meredith mentioned several figures from an article that she wrote for Nuclear Engineering International. Here is a link to those figures. http://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurepay-for-performance-and-the-us-grid-4800656/featurepay-for-performance-and-the-us-grid-4800656-3.html.

The article titled ‘Pay for Performance’ and the US grid is an important source of information about this complex, but impactful situation. Meredith is becoming my “go-to” expert on the convoluted grid supply rules.

Note 2: We talked about the little understood change to the wind energy Production Tax Credit that was initiated in the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. That act included a provision that allowed wind energy developers to opt for a 30% of project cost investment tax credit (ITC) in lieu of the $23/MW-hr Production Tax Credit. Because of the time value of money, nearly every project developer recognized that it was a more lucrative option because all of the subsidies were delivered less than a year after project completion instead of being spread over a ten year period.

The option also shifts performance risk from the developer to the government. There is a reporting requirement that only lasts for 5 years and has few teeth. In other words, it is entirely plausible for some of the projects to fail to generate the promised amount of power and for the developer or the project owner to simply give up. There is a low probability that anyone will be tasked with the effort required to obtain a refund of the ITC, which might be a substantial sum of money for a large project.

The option to take the ITC in lieu of the PTC was included in the renewable tax credit extension wedged into the Omnibus appropriation bill passed at the end of the congressional session just before the Christmas holiday.

When the ARRA first invented the option to tax an investment tax credit, renewable energy lobbyists successfully made the case that investment tax credits have no value if the developer has no taxes to offset and if even banks that one provided a market for transferring the ITC – at a favorable cost – also had no...

It’s not often that the Atomic Show has the chance to be a source of breaking news, but this show includes a timely report from Ben Heard in Adelaide, South Australia. Just an hour before our show began, the South Australia Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission issued the tentative findings from the investigative effort begun in March 2015.

Ben wasn’t available when the show first started due to fielding inquiries from interested media outlets, but he was able to join us about 8 minutes into the program. He provided a clear synopsis of the reports findings in several key areas. After we talked about the report and the next steps, Ben had to depart to continue his work answering inquiries.

This show was also special because it included the return of Lisa Stiles, a former regular on the Atomic Show. Lisa has been out of the nuclear advocacy limelight for several years while serving a deep cover assignment for an undisclosed employer. We’re happy to be able to learn from her deep and wide experience as both a nuclear professional and as a skilled communicator about nuclear science and technology.

In addition to talking about the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission report, we talked about the following topics>

* The overblown reactions in New York to what amounts to a trivial quantity of tritium detected in on-site monitoring wells at Indian Point nuclear power station

* Save Diablo Canyon and the work of Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP). (It was great to have a guest from California who could provide a local perspective.)

* Public outreach needs

* The way that the DOE FY2017 Nuclear Energy budget proves that the Department was just blowing smoke with its verbal support of advanced nuclear reactor development

The guests for this show included:

Andrew Benson, who blogs at Atoms For California and tweets from @atoms4CA

Les Corrice, who blogs at Hiroshima Syndrome and maintains the Fukushima Accident Updates

Lisa Stiles, recently returned from an undisclosed location

Ben Heard, the director of Think Climate Consulting and the publisher of DecarboniseSA

On February 10-11, 2016, the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council (USNIC) sponsored the 3rd annual Advanced Reactor Technical Summit. Oak Ridge National Laboratory provided the venue for the event.

Though he wasn’t the first speaker, I’d like to begin my reports from the event with Jeffery Merrifield’s stage setting talk. Merrifield is a man with a long resume in nuclear energy that includes an Atomic Show interview for show #167. He was a two-term commissioner on the NRC, serving from 1998-2007. He is the chairman of the USNIC Advanced Reactor Task Force.

This speech shares Merrifield’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of his current employer, the Pillsbury Law Firm. He provided permission to publish his talk, both as written and in a recorded audio file as delivered, with associated Q&A.

Remarks of Jeffrey S. Merrifield Third Annual Advanced Reactor Summit February 10, 2016

I would like to join David Blee in welcoming you to the Nuclear Infrastructure Council?s 3rd Annual Advanced Reactor Summit. As the Chair of the NIC Advanced Reactor Task Force, it is my pleasure to provide the kickoff industry remarks on Advanced Reactors.

With the exception of President Dwight David Eisenhower’?s Atoms for Peace speech in 1953, ?Hallmark Moments? in the nuclear industry tend too often to focus on the darker moments in the history of nuclear power. Like the proverbial Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, the hyper-focus on TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima and the unfortunate, but understandable concern about the shutdown of units like Vermont Yankee, the nuclear industry?s own rhetoric and self-doubt contribute to public questioning about this technology and cast this industry in negative way. Unfortunately, this attitude tends to obscure what is truly an exemplary hallmark of achievement.

I think it is quite appropriate that we have our conference here at Oak Ridge, which is one of the world?s premier facilities in developing Advanced Reactor technologies. To put it in its simplest form, scientists from around the world, spurred by the events of World War II, worked at this and it sister facilities to take mere radioactive dirt and harness it to create vast amounts of energy. Through the subsequent development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy in the 1950?s at Oak Ridge and its sister facilities, the American people today benefit from clean, safe nuclear power that provides 70% of the U.S. carbon free generation and 35% of the world?s carbon free power. This is an achievement worthy of boastful pride.

Today, the vast majority of individuals in the United States support nuclear power and they are increasingly aware of its significance in fighting global climate change. While many anti-nuclear activists are slowly converting to a begrudging acceptance of nuclear power, or are slowly dying off, there is a growing and enthusiastic group of individuals under the age of 40 who embrace technology, who are not stuck in the past, and who are excited about the promise of Advanced Nuclear Reactors.

Two Thousand Sixteen will be noted for a number of very positive events in the renewal of nuclear power development in the United States.

* ? First, later this year, in this very state, Watts Bar II will begin adding power to our nation?s electric grid becoming the first nuclear power plant to do so since its sister unit, Watts Bar I, began operations in 1996.

* ? Second, on Friday, January 15, 2016, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of two companies, X-energy and Southern Company with TerraPower,