It’s Friday and the Mood Is Miscellaneous

Or maybe pusillanimous.

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Gizmodo takes a quick look at 1979: the Year We Wussed Out of Nuclear:

The timing of the movie coming out tying in with Three Mile Island may have been lucky for the producers, who suddenly had a huge blockbuster hit on their hands, but it was less lucky for boosters of safe nuclear energy. Since that meltdown, the production of nuclear power plants has gone down significantly despite the fact that there were no deaths or even recorded cases of cancer caused by Three Mile Island—the amount of radiation that the people near the plant were exposed to is said to be similar to that of getting an X-ray.

Too short to really make an argument, the post seems to want to blame The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island equally for the hibernation in building new nuclear plants. We’d likely stress the movie less – movie alarmism usually has a brief half-life – and Chernobyl and the No Nukes movement (that also spawned a movie, in 1980) that arose from TMI. But see what you think.

Jack Lemmon. The perfect actor to go sweaty and twitchy when the dial sticks.

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Speaking of No Nukes and its sponsor, Musicians United for Safe Energy, one of its participants, John Hall of the band Orleans, is now serving a second term as a Democratic Representative from New York’s 19th congressional district. So has Rep. Hall changed his mind about nuclear energy?

Nope.

We should use greater investment in wind, solar, and hydropower, particularly low-head hydropower, to replace the need to rely on polluting forms of energy like old, coal burning plants and nuclear power facilities.

Well, points for consistency, anyway.

Rep. John Hall at a town hall meeting. We were hoping to find a recent picture of him with his guitar, but no love. Hopefully, he still plays.

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Our friends at NA-YGN (that’s North American Young Generation in Nuclear – they have their annual conference in conjunction with NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly) have a group blog called Clean Energy Insight up and running. Similar to Nuclear Notes, but with a bit less stress on politics (blame our Washington headquarters for that) and a bit more on local initiatives, we cannot find anything to gripe about it – well, maybe the writers could add a little more of their knowledge about nuclear energy to help explicate news stories. Nicely done, complete with estimates of how long it will take you to read their posts.

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Offered without comment:

A musical based on the nuclear industry is to be staged this weekend by children from Russia's Sarov region. As part of the NucKids International Children's Kestival [sic?], youngsters from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany as well as Russia will convene in Moscow, where part of their entertainment will comprise songs that dispel myths about radiation and nuclear energy.

Not the group. We just wanted cute Russian kids.