The link should only cover the word “highway” Thanks for fixing that

Looking forward to the FAQ and more articles!

David Phillips

The idea of spreading the word to the younger generation is right on target. While Jack will be giving his presentation at the local Rotary Club this week, it would be good if he could put together a presentation for high school students who are being fed mis-information from many of their left-leaning teachers.

Sorry for the continuous link in my post. I missed the close link evidently.

I would love to see your rework. You have a great design now. Take the time to do it well and we will all be thankful.

Also, I think you should change the titles of one page in particular to something more positive – ‘Coal Creates Bigger Environmental Disasters than Nuclear’ to “Coal, the real environmental disaster” (as Jason Correia on facebook said).

Thanks.

I think the site has a good depth backing up the statements. But a summary, like a FAQ, of basic physics and economics would be helpful. I would do these in the “fear priority” that is, the most common fears answered first.

1. Dangerous – Nuclear Energy has proven safer than any industry in history. While there are still occasionally a small errors these are more like having a flat tire on a car than having the gas tank blow up. Fix the tire keep going. In fact, now Nuclear power plants replace the tires before they go flat. Highways kill about 34,000 people a year. Nuclear power plants have killed less than a 1,000 in 60 years. (I am pulling the last number from memory since I am running out of time before heading to work).

2. Radiation – Inside the reactor is very high and dangerous, but we know how to protect ourselves from this and we do it so well that standing outside the reactor, even inside the building has less radiation than you get just sitting in your chair at home.

3. Cost, To build a nuclear power plant is expensive. About the same cost as building 250 miles of highway. Nuclear plants can last between 40 to 80 years so this is a long term investment. Highways only last between 10 to 20 years. Both need maintenance.

4. Waste – Reduce, reuse, recycle. While the number of “tons” of waste is often quoted and the long term danger of the waste. Simple comparisons would be helpful. Is is more likely I will die from eating food contaminated by bacteria or by radiation from nuclear waste. What are the numbers?

These kind of FAQ will greatly help. I am also not an expert in these areas, I only know what I have been able to research using web tools, but by using multiple sources and doing the math on some claims. I am comfortable that Atomic Power is the “Silver Bullet” to our energy needs.

Obviously competing for the Nuclear Energy keyword would be great, but there is a very real obstacle with that; it is highly competitive. There are tens of thousands of web pages vying for that keyword and it takes time and a high Pagerank to achieve a top-notch position with Google.

Now, you mentioned clear and concise information as being critical. Do you find this site too detailed or too in-depth?

Thanks for the thoughts and we home you come back again. Best of luck in your pursuit of Nuclear Engineering.

I don’t know what you can take from this, though. More often than not the teacher doesn’t know a huge amount on the subject, so the students often can get away with Googling answers and rewriting the first few links in their own words. If you really want to reach out to students studying nuclear energy for a school project, then you’re probably going to need a page that is high in the list of Google search items for ‘Nuclear energy’ with easy and concise facts and analysis of energy. Although I understood everything on this site and most others (e.g. BraveNewClimate) at the time I was doing the project on Nuclear energy I wanted to get the information as quickly as possible, hence I did not want to read perhaps a dozen pages on the subject to base the report on. If I found a source that had an answer hidden within a dozen pages, I would skip it and find something that narrows it down. Make sure everything is clear and concise. Or you could add a “too long; didn’t read” section to teach report that basically summarizes everything in a couple of sentences.

Also it’s probably a good idea to emphasize that the website is independent of the Nuclear energy industry, I usually don’t use sources that are not independent.

Thanks.