Energy conference draws crowd in Lynchburg

Comment: Pro-Nuke Bunch will mine Southside and all of Virginia! Nuke power is too expensive and with the French involved, most of the profits will go back to France and the Canadian uranium mining companies will take most of their money back to Canada! No to Uranium mining! The NRC represents corporations so do not depend on them to report the real conditions of uranium milling or nuke plants! Oh, by the way, write to the senator and explain to him Nuke Plants are not CO2 free, he needs to study the problems of uranium mining!

By Ray Reed
Published: July 27, 2009

More than 300 people turned out in Lynchburg today to hear Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-6th District, tell why he doesn’t support the cap-and-trade energy bill that passed the House of Representatives about a month ago.

“The bill sets us on a track that I find not very compelling,“ Goodlatte said at the energy conference he sponsors once a year in the Sixth district.

The cap-and-trade bill now is pending in the U.S. Senate, and Goodlatte said the House-passed version would increase energy costs without lowering global temperatures very much.

Goodlatte said the best energy scenario is nuclear power — a line that won applause from the crowd at Central Virginia Community College. Nuclear technol-ogy is improving and it generates power without releasing carbon emissions, Goodlatte said.

Another speaker at the conference was Kristine Svinicki, a director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Svinicki said she expects new nuclear plant worldwide to increase electricity production by 10 percent.

In the U.S., Svinicki said the Department of Energy has forecast 10 new reactors will be built in the next couple of decades. Svinicki said one signal that nuclear power may be making a comeback in the U.S. came last week when Areva and Northrop Grumman shipbuilding broke ground on a plant to make nu-clear-power equipment in Newport News.

http://www2.newsadvance.com/lna/news/local/article/energy_conference_draws_crowd_in_lynchburg/18017/

Goodlatte explains opposition to energy bill

http://www2.newsadvance.com/lna/news/local/article/goodlatte_explains_opposition_to_energy_bill/18019/ By Ray Reed
Published: July 27, 2009

More than 300 people turned out in Lynchburg today to hear Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-6th District, tell why he doesn’t support the cap-and-trade energy bill that passed the House of Representatives about a month ago.

“The bill sets us on a track that I find not very compelling,“ Goodlatte said at the energy conference he sponsors once a year in the Sixth district.

The cap-and-trade bill now is pending in the U.S. Senate, and Goodlatte said the House-passed version would increase energy costs without lowering global temperatures very much.

Goodlatte said the best energy scenario is nuclear power — a line that won applause from the crowd at Central Virginia Community College. Nuclear technology is improving and it generates power without releasing carbon emissions, Goodlatte said.

Another speaker at the conference was Kristine Svinicki, a director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Svinicki said she expects new nuclear plant worldwide to increase electricity production by 10 percent.

In the U.S., Svinicki said the Department of Energy has forecast 10 new reactors will be built in the next couple of decades. Svinicki said one signal that nuclear power may be making a comeback in the U.S. came last week when Areva and Northrop Grumman shipbuilding broke ground on a plant to make nuclear-power equipment in Newport News.

Virginia Tech, company aim for safer nuclear energy

Chernobyl disaster:The nuclear reactor after the disaster. Reactor 4 (image center). Turbine building (image lower left). Reactor 3 (center right)


Comment: article does not mention the problems of waste, uranium mining problems, CO2 during Nuke Process, Nuke Accidents, $10-20 billion costs, higher electric cost - just a few things the article did not include !!!!!

The university and ADNA Corp. want to improve efficiency and cut down on waste.
By Greg Esposito
381-1675

Virginia Tech is teaming with a company with Southwest Virginia ties on a project that could have far-reaching consequences in the field of nuclear energy.

The university and the Los Alamos, N.M.-based ADNA Corp. are expected to announce a memorandum of understanding today to construct a pilot facility to test technology to produce safer, less-costly and more-efficient nuclear energy.

The new design combines technology old and new -- but all proven to work -- including molten salt reactors tested in the 1960s and projects by ADNA founder and Roanoke native Charles Bowman that integrated accelerator technology into nuclear reactors in the 1990s.

"The components exist," Tech physics professor Bruce Vogelaar said. "What needs to happen is the integration of the systems and the demonstration that things work as anticipated. It's not a question of whether the technology, in principle, will work. The question is, 'Does it work as well as we anticipate?' "

If it does, the result will be nuclear power plants that produce more energy with less waste and don't result in the separation of plutonium from uranium during the process. Plutonium is a nuclear power byproduct that can be used to produce weapons. The production of it through the process of creating nuclear energy has been a point of contention in nuclear proliferation monitoring for years.

After a long career in nuclear science, Bowman retired in 1997 and founded ADNA -- short for Accelerator Driven Neutron Applications. A 1956 graduate of Tech who got his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1961, he splits his time between Los Alamos and Franklin County, where his family farm and some ADNA facilities are located.

The work between Tech and ADNA is the next step in research the company did with Duke and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It will involve soliciting federal grants, and Vogelaar said he is optimistic that stimulus money for energy innovation could be a source of funding. Tech is contributing $225,000 in seed money.

Bowman began working with Vogelaar about three years ago. The Tech professor was a collaborator on a couple of experiments involving ADNA and Duke that measured neutron production from graphite. But the memorandum of understanding is the first official collaboration between Bowman and his alma mater.

There are several sites in Virginia, New Mexico, Tennessee and Nevada that qualify as candidates for the location of the pilot plant, Vogelaar said.

Bowman said the design phase of the demonstration facility could take about two years and the entire project about seven years.

"Virginia Tech is an excellent partner in this because this technology has moved to, pretty much, to an engineering phase," Bowman said. "So what we have to do is bring engineering to bear on the design of the demonstration facility. ... The science at this point is more in the area of refinement."

http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/203552