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The school newspaper for Virginia Tech, the Collegiate Times, released a story on the NRC’s recent education grant to Virginia Tech to start a nuclear engineering program. The article is great and the news is wonderful for the university and for the future of the nuclear industry in the United States. What caught our eye here at Clean Energy Insight was the graphic that was placed in the print edition of the newspaper article. (See below)
Eric Danner and myself from Clean Energy Insight were compelled to write a letter-to-the-editor of the Collegiate Times in order to follow up on the article and let the students of Virginia Tech know that atomic bombs aren’t business-as-usual for the nuclear industry, much less a university nuclear engineering degree program.
Nuclear Engineering Graphic Bombs
Last week, the CT released an article covering the recent grant from the NRC for a nuclear engineering program at Virginia Tech. The students at Virginia Tech are some of the best and brightest in the country, and well deserving of this challenging educational opportunity.
However, at least one person made the mistake of placing a picture of a mushroom cloud in the background of a “Virginia Tech’s Nuclear Energy History” timeline. Although this is probably more of a minor oversight by someone at the CT, it does raise a larger issue that is prevalent in today’s society.
The relationship between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are all too often confused, mostly because of a lack of education on the subject. It seems that in today’s world it is becoming easier to demonize something that isn’t understood, instead of attempting to understand it.
No one at Virginia Tech will be taught how to engineer nuclear weapons. A nuclear engineering program is focused on an energy technology that creates clean, safe, and reliable energy.
Just as a bottle of petroleum jelly cannot explode while sitting in your bathroom cabinet, a nuclear power reactor cannot possibly explode like a nuclear bomb. Although the two technologies share the same name, they are very different. Simply, fuel for nuclear power is enriched 25-30 times less than that of weapons-grade material.
Although this new nuclear engineering program is wonderful news for the University, unfortunate inaccuracies like this can cause severe damage to the future of clean baseload energy in the United States.
Nuclear power currently accounts for 74% of clean energy production in the United States and helps the country avoid almost 700 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year. The second and third closest clean energy competitors are hydro and wind energy with 200 and 27 million metric tons of CO2 avoided, respectively.
Nuclear power is also the most reliable clean energy that we have available today. It produces clean energy 100% of the time, compared to wind (30%), hydro (27%), and solar energy (19%).
Not only is nuclear power clean and reliable, it is safe. According to the Dept. of Labor, the US nuclear power industry has a workplace accident rate lower than that of the US education and communication industries, which includes the entire faculty and staff of Virginia Tech and the CT.
Hokies, please take this opportunity to learn more about nuclear power and support the new nuclear engineering program at Virginia Tech.
J Carrington Dillon
Alumnus, Civil Engineering & EconomicsEric Danner
Alumnus, Aerospace Engineering
It’s not just the enrichment that makes it not a nuclear bomb. You can make weapons-grade uranium into a a reactor that can’t detonate. The geometry and materials play a large part in that equation, as well.
I would have to argue that the graphic is an “attention-grabber” that makes readers want to read an article that would otherwise be pretty boring, unless of course you are into nuclear science. It catches the eye of the reader and entices them to keep reading. The graphic may have enhanced readership of that article?
That is correct, David. However, letters to the editor require 400 word limits, and we were speaking to an audience that isn’t necessarily technically minded. We will be doing a Wednesday Fact Series Blog on the myth that “Nuclear Reactors Can Blow Up Like Atomic Bombs” soon. Maybe this calls for it to be expedited.
Thanks for the comment,
Carrington Dillon
Lisa,
Even if the intention of the Collegiate Times was to grab the reader’s attention, I would have to say that it was in bad taste at the least.
I would be willing to bet that if someone read the article without any nuclear experience, they would come away from the article remembering the picture and not the contents of the article.
So, if the picture increased the readership of the article, I would guess that it did nothing but increase the number of people that associate atomic bombs with nuclear engineering.
Carrington
It’s really too bad that nuclear power and nuclear weapons share the word “nuclear”. If we could only go back and change “nuclear power plants” to “fission power plants”. I would be curious if people today would still associate “fission plants” with nuclear bombs. In addition, I think McGuire Fission Station sounds just as good as McGuire Nuclear Station.