Science Show

Phillip Finck says it's been a momentous couple of months in the US. New nuclear power plants have been announced. New panels will look at the options for spent nuclear fuel. The aim is to develop reactors that produce very little or even no waste.

Transcript

Phillip Finck: It's always very interesting to discuss this topic after my European colleagues because I've certainly learned a lot from their approach and especially what you just said about using a very strong science-based approach to reduce uncertainty and increase public confidence is really the way we as engineers want to run our programs. So there's big lessons to be learned.

But this is really a good time for the US to talk about what's happening in the nuclear world. Things have been rather momentous in the past few months and no later than, I think it was even Monday or Tuesday morning, President Obama announced that the administration is going to support by long guarantees the construction of two new nuclear power plants in Georgia, I believe. This is the first time in 30 years that the US is going to build new plants, and it's a very momentous event for us.

But in the past year many things have happened which have really changed our outlook on how we run our science and our programs. At the same time the administration announced that they are going to create a blue ribbon panel to look at the various options that exist to deal with spent nuclear fuel, and at the end I guess make recommendations what the best options would be for our country. And to support that we have had running for several years a pretty intense set of science and engineering programs for us to understand what the best solutions would be to deal with waste in a short, medium and long term.

We have been talking in the US for several years...it starts to feel forever but it's probably two or three years...about a nuclear renaissance, and all these things are starting to combine to make us look at a much more innovative set of programs to not only deal with energy production but also deal with the waste, to produce a long-term system that will produce less waste, hopefully will be more economical, certainly will be safer. One important part of doing that work, which I personally I enjoy a lot of course but is really the fundamental of what we have to do, is to associate with the best science possible, and at the end a very strong science basis for what you do is one way we're going to convince ourselves and the public that this is the right thing to do.

Robyn Williams: Phillip Finck is associate laboratory director for nuclear programs at the Idaho National Laboratory in the USA, changing policy triggered by new technology, and of course the climate concerns.

Guests

Phillip Finck
Associate laboratory director for nuclear programs Idaho National Laboratory USA
https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1555&mode=2&featurestory=DA_86066

Presenter

Robyn Williams

Producer

David Fisher

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