The Science Council for Global Initiatives (SCGI) is an international NGO dedicated to uplifting the standards of living of people of all nations while repairing our damaged environment.

by Tom Blees

The United States is indisputably a world leader in many technologies. Yet the country’s leadership role in nuclear power has been in steady decline for many years. Spurred on by the specter of climate change and the insatiable and rapidly growing demand for energy in developing countries, a variety of advanced nuclear power concepts are being developed around the world, nowhere more so than in the USA. Yet transforming those exciting ideas into actual deployable products is a nearly impossible challenge here.

The consequences of losing a global leadership role in the nuclear power arena implies a lot more than a loss of prestige. Nuclear technology is spreading to many countries that are not members of the “nuclear club” of nations with nuclear weapons technology, so the international oversight of nuclear materials has never been more important. By abandoning our leadership in nuclear power technology, America is losing its influence in forging non-proliferation policies at the international level that should be allowing the spread of nuclear power to be accomplished safely.

by Hannah Ritchie

Our World in Data presents the empirical evidence on global development in entries dedicated to specific topics.
This blog post draws on data and research discussed in our entry on Energy Production and Changing Energy Sources.

 Energy production and consumption is a fundamental component to economic development, poverty alleviation, improvements in living standards, and ultimately health outcomes. We show this link between energy production and prosperity here, where we see a distinct relationship between energy use and gross domestic product per capita.
The unintentional consequences of energy production can, however, also result in negative health outcomes. The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process: this includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts. We have recently explored this trade-off with respect to development and air pollution.

Read the entire article at Our World in Data

 

Well, the good news is twofold:

1) GE finally is applying for a commercial license for the PRISM. I suspect they've been goaded on by the imminent construction start of Korea's fast reactor that will be ready to start building by 2020. Whatever the reason, it looks like we'll get one or two metal-fueled fast reactors built in the first half of the next decade. (I don't take the recent no-nuclear pronouncement by the current ROK president too seriously, as the timeline for such changes exceeds administration lifetimes, and there's just too much planning done for ROK reactors—both domestic and for export—to throw that all away. We've seen these hiccups before [Sweden and France]. I suppose GE might be happy and hoping that such a presidential pronouncement might delay the start of ROK's fast reactor build, giving GE more time to get their commercial license in order to get the jump on them.)

2) Yoon's design work on the commercial-scale pyroprocessing facility at Argonne encompasses recycling both metal fuel and oxide fuel to metal. That facility will be ready to build before the fast reactors are built to use its output (though Russian and Indian fast reactors could use it before that if they want to).

  1. Burden of Proof
  2. After Trump's Withdrawal from Paris, Nukes Are More Crucial Than Ever
  3. The Global Nuclear Landscape Is Changing And America Better Get On Board
  4. The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends
  5. Letter to Gov. Rick Perry
  6. We Hold These Truths to be Self Evident