Five Interesting Things I Heard About: Nuclear Energy

I’m back with another installment in my new series, “Five Interesting Things I Heard About: [blank].” In the first installment, I relayed ~five interesting comments that University of Wisconsin – Madison mechanical engineering professor Sandy Klein made about solar energy. Klein, also the director of the Solar Energy Lab at UW, was a guest lecturer in a course I’m enrolled in this semester, the topic of which is energy resources … go figure.

(Image of U.S. government in public domain)

We have had quite a few distinguished and fascinating guest speakers actually during the class, each of whom addressed various types of energy, along with aspects of energy science, resource availability and current and future requirements. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to rattle off five interesting things from each of them. But, I did want to at least get to one speaker: Paul Wilson, a nuclear engineer at UW – Madison who works on both technical and policy issues related to nuclear energy. Wilson spoke a few weeks ago about nuclear fuel cycles, reactor technology and nuclear waste polices among other topics.

While he made many interesting points, here are five that stuck out to me:

Five Interesting Things I Heard About: Solar Energy

One of the great things about living in a university town like Madison, Wis. is that there is a never-ending supply of interesting talks to attend and scholars willing to give those talks. While the talks are rarely dull and I do my best to pay attention, I’ve found that much of the material presented often escapes me soon afterward. You know, you get to worrying about work or school or what’s on your grocery list (daily life, in other words) and you forget the interesting stem cell development, the surprising statistic about corn ethanol production, or the fascinating hypothesis about mantle hotspot dynamics that you just heard. It’s not easy retaining so much information, even when it is interesting, surprising and fascinating stuff.

(Image credit: (c) pixor, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In the spirit of trying to preserve some of this awesome info that might otherwise be lost, I thought I’d mix things up with the blog here and introduce a new series of posts entitled “Five Interesting Things I Heard About: [blank].” This is a largely self-motivated exercise of course, but I hope I manage to keep it interesting for you, the reader, as well.

The first installment comes from a guest lecture by Sandy Klein, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Solar Energy Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, as part of a course about energy resources. Klein spoke about the basics of energy use in the U.S., including solar, where solar technology is now and where it’s headed: