Cheese or Nukes?

The French are building a new plant at Flamanville on the Normandy coast at a site with two currently operating reactors. The Areva-designed EPR is also being built at the Olkiluito site in Finland and potentially in the US, though the planned new  unit at  Calvert Cliffs has stumbled due to a provision in the US Atomic Energy Act prohibiting foreign ownership or control of a power plant licensee. Here's an EDF promotional post card of the Flamanville 3 plant under construction:

Although France produces nearly 75% of its electricity from nuclear power, President Hollande has proposed reducing that proportion to 50% by 2025. Hollande calls for closing the older Fessenheim units, while continuing the construction of Flamanville 3.  There are some signs of protest, like this playful card that my daughter spotted in a souvenir shop at Mont Saint Michel during our visit  in 2011:

You can see the play on words - so what will it be? La tome de Savoie or l'atome de Normandie?
Cheese or nukes?

Atomic Towns

Here are classic "linen" post cards of the 1950's extolling three towns' atomic connections. The first is Oak Ridge, Tennessee, "Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb," as the back of the card reminds us. Oak Ridge was the "secret city" as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb and remains one of the national labs.

Paducah was the site of a new uranium enrichment plant built for the Atomic Energy Commission that began operation in 1952. The plant was originally operated for the AEC by Union Carbide and eventually was operated by the United States Enrichment Corporation, though the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), eventual successor to the AEC, owns it. The Paducah plant's life has been extended another year.

The Portsmouth Uranium Enrichment Plant is actually in Piketon, Ohio, near Portsmouth. It operated originally from 1952 until the mid-1960s to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons and then turned to processing for commercial fuel for nuclear power plants. It ceased operation in 2001.

Artistic Protest

These are two cards supporting anti-nuclear causes using the work of Austrian artist-architect-environmentalist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. I first came across Hundertwasser when I was a student in Vienna in 1974, the year of a major retrospective of his work at the Albertina Museum. His philosophy can probably be summed up in this quote: "Paradise is there, but we destroy it."

The first card shows a poster donated by Hundertwasser to Ralph Nader's Critical Mass Energy Project in Washington in 1980.

The poster itself is based on a silkscreen created by Hundertwasser about a decade earlier: Irinaland over the Balkans with Bulgarian actress Irina Maleeva as the subject. Hundertwasser visited Washington in 1980 and in his honor Mayor Marion Barry, Jr., proclaimed  "Hundertwasser Day" which was marked by planting of the first 12 of 100 trees in Judiciary Square.

The poster was also used in other anti-nuclear campaigns, with sales proceeds going to the citizen action groups. The version below was for the benefit of the Initiative östereichische Atomkraftwerkgegner (Initiative of Austrian Opponents of Atomic Power Plants):

The post card's legend translates as "Atomic Final Solution - No, No, No, No."

Hundertwasser died in 2000 at age 72 while on the Queen Elizabeth 2.

Atomic Jobs - Binders of Men!

Well, maybe the Romney allusion is a stretch, but I did find amusing this 1950's era post card for DeVry Technical Institute in Chicago picturing its training labs to prepare its students for careers using, among other things, "nuclear instrumentation." 

The legend on the back says it all: DeVry is "one of the best-known, best-equipped training organizations of its kind in the nation for preparing and helping men get started in Television-Radio- Electronics." I guess they never heard of Women in Nuclear.

One of the students apparently sent the card to his sweetie.

The other card is a small trading card (about 1 x 2 1/2 inches) issued in the 1960s by a British soft drink company in a series on "Adventurous Lives" -- of men, that is. This one features an "atomic worker":

I'm sure he was ready for a lubbly Jubbly  after a hard day at the glovebox!

Ontario's Bruce Power Units return to service

Two units at the Bruce Power Station in Ontario, Canada, have recently returned to service after a 17 year hiatus. At the time of lay-up in the mid 1990s Ontario Hydro, then the operating company, was facing the consequences of a poor performance and reliability. A number of U.S. advisors and managers, many of whom had helped U.S. plants break out of a similar malaise, were brought in for the recovery. 

In 1997 when I was an Associate General Counsel at the US NRC, I was contacted by Ontario Hydro and subsequently was offered a position as a legal advisor. It was a hard decision whether to take the offer and move to Toronto, and I jokingly said to my wife that I would make the decision based on the outcome of a Toronto Blue Jays - Baltimore Orioles baseball game that I was watching at about the point I had to make a decision. The Orioles won 3-2 in the 9th inning.  I stayed in Maryland for another 15 years with the US NRC.

Indian Point: Optimism and Anxiety

It's like deja vu all over again, as Yogi said.  A New York governor named Cuomo opposes the licensing of a reactor in his own state. Some 25 years ago it was Mario and Shoreham. Now it's Andrew and Indian Point.  NRC hearings on the application for renewal of Units 2 and 3 recently began.

I've picked diverse pieces of memorabilia: one that reflects the optimism of the early years of atomic power; the others reflect the anxiety bred by calls to shut down the plant due to its proximity to New York City and supposed attractiveness as a target for terrorists.

The Con Edison brochure from c. 1960 illustrates the benefits of electricity generated from the proposed Indian Point Unit 1 to New York City. There's a certain irony in the proximity of the plant to the city in the cover illustration, given later opposition to the plant based on that fact.  Unit 1 itself was shut down by the mid-1970s because it did not have an Emergency Core Cooling System required of all plants as a result of an AEC rulemaking.  In response to a Union of Concerned Scientists petition, the NRC held a special proceeding in the early 1980s on the risk of operation of Units 2 and 3 in light of the population density near the site.

The terrorist attacks in September 2001 in New York and Washington recharged arguments against the plant as illustrated in these advocacy post cards calling the plant a nuclear weapon. Each is intended to be sent to some public official -- or in one case his wife.  The back of one card is addressed to Mrs. Diaz, the wife of then NRC Chairman Nils Diaz, who served as Commissioner from 1996 to 2003 and then as Chairman until mid 2006.

Fessenheim - Hollande's Campaign Promise

The administration of President Francois Hollande has confirmed plans to reduce France's dependence on nuclear energy to 50% in 2025 from the current level of 75%. This policy includes closing France's older nuclear power plant in Fessenheim, located in Alsace close to the borders with Germany and Switzerland, by the end of 2016. The first unit of the two 880 MWe pressurized water reactors entered commercial operation in 1977, followed several months later by the second unit in early 1978.  A review by the French nuclear regulator ASN in 2011 approved its suitability to operate for a further ten years subject to the completion of several safety measures. 

Davis-Besse Station - Near Misses

I picked up this card at Toledo Edison's (then the licensee) visitor center while assisting an NRC Incident Investigation Team in June 1985 sent to evaluate a loss of feedwater incident at the plant, one of the most significant events at an operating plant since the Three Mile Island accident. The Davis Besse plant is also infamous for other significant operating events: a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve in 1977 that was a precursor to the TMI-2 accident and the 2002 discovery of a pineapple sized hole in the reactor vessel head. Discovery of the latter incident also led to criminal charges being levied against the operator First Energy Corp. and several plant employees related to withholding evidence and making false statements to the NRC related to the vessel head corrosion problem.

The Nautilus crosses the North Pole

The first nuclear submarine - the USS Nautilus - pictured in one of the Defenders of America trading cards issued by the National Biscuit Company in the late 1950s (and put in boxes of Shredded Wheat!). I worked for Vice Admiral Kenneth M. Carr, one of the crew of the Nautilus on its transpolar expedition, when he was a Commissioner and Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1986-1991. Hear Adm. Carr describe the journey on a radio broadcast from BBC World.

Yankee Rowe - one of the earliest plants

The plant, part of the Yankee Atomic Electric Co. consortium, was built near Rowe, MA, and was the first operating plant in New England. It operated from 1961 - 1992. The plant was decommissioned and the site restored, although the spent fuel remains in a storage facility at the site due to the stalemate over a waste disposal solution in the US. See what the site looks like today at http://www.yankeerowe.com

Postcards go nuclear!

Along the way of a 34 year career at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, I picked up some postcards and other ephemera on nuclear energy -- for, against and otherwise.  I started trawling eBay and other sites in earnest a few years ago for items to add to a growing collection. The items reflect the optimism, the opposition, and the ambivalence of our relation to nuclear energy.  The collection came with me to Paris when I moved here 6 months ago to take a new position with the OECD.  It's time to share!