Quote of the Day

Dan Kammen of the World Bank and UC Berkeley (and who taught me ER100 at Cal) has a nice, quick piece up in The Atlantic today on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). His analysis indicates that SMRs present multiple advantages that overcome some or many of the challenges typically presented by nuclear power, but that any forward momentum of a "nuclear renaissance" may have been irreparably slowed by the incident in Fukushima.

At this point the nuclear industry faces a range of issues; resilience of backup systems; waste management; cost; and public trust. While SMRs offer potentially attractive approaches to a number of design issues, many of the most pressing issues facing the nuclear industry today are not technological.