Moving Forward & The State

Since there is now one major focus for our blogs, I thought I'd come up with a bank of future blog posts topics. Due to class constraints I won't get to all of them, however I may continue to blog even after the semester is over. Some of them were recommended by my instructor and some I've come across elsewhere - more may be added as time goes on:

-Problems with the industry (financing, politics)
-What can we do to give you all job security?
-How does the industry need to adapt?
-TMI: destroyed the nuclear power industry. What can we do to adapt today, that changes the story for the next 40 years (your careers)?
-How does power industry stay afloat and grow in a world obsessed with wind, solar, hydro?
- Power vs. Medical (100,000$ unhelpful proton accelerator treatment)
- Improving the outlook for the next 40 years.
-What do the time management, finance, professionalism principles tell us we should do?
-Who were some notable contributors to the field
-Antimatter and what you aren't being told
-Competition for fusion cornerstone

I'll address the state of the industry first, for this post. Overall, the nuclear industry has seen both better and worse days. The studying of nuclear materials has helped man come up with the tools for understanding and predicting nuclear systems. This has made it marginally more acceptable in the eyes of the public. Pictures of accidents and weapons testing trials remain fresh in the minds of many. This, coupled with the expensive startup costs, causes backlash from society whenever nuclear engineering projects are to make progress.

From a global standpoint, we are seeing countries abide by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (mostly) and seek for new means of clean energy. Bill Gates, and TerraPower (a company in which he has co-founded), are hopeful that the new generation IV reactor systems will begin to multiply. Their simple fuel cycles and resistance against proliferation, as well as the integration of improvements made upon past errors, contribute to the viability of using nuclear fuel for power.

National Laboratories in the US, and other facilities elsewhere like ORION in the UK and ITER in France, are on the forefront of new nuclear, laser, and weapons technology. Existing plants have been licensed for decades and some are being re-licensed for another go-round. Time will be spent, for sure, in the next few decades on ensuring the longevity and safety of the systems we've created, as well as optimizing them for future generations.

References
http://terrapower.com/publications#conceptual-design-of-a-500-mwe-traveling-wave-demonstration-reactor-plant