If the nuclear field is anything to go by (and it isn’t) then the national jobs picture really should be looking up!
After the spate of Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowships, Princeton’s Nuclear Futures Lab has a postdoc on offer. The lab is run by FoW Alex Glaser. If you have a technical PhD this is a wonderful opportunity. You get the chance to have an excellent boss in Alex, be associated with the prestigious International Panel on Fissile Materials and get to work along side the wonderful people in the Program on Science and Global Security.
And you’re right across the street from Hoagie Haven!
I wonder why any Princeton postdoc would consider working on nuclear power.
Nuclear power is not magic.
It, too, runs on fuel. Which is limited.
At present, fossil fuels provide 87 percent of the world’s total energy while nuclear power plants provide just 4.8 percent. (All nuclear power plants currently generate electricity, accounting for about 15 percent of world electricity generation, while fossil fuels produce almost 67 percent of the electricity.)
The best estimates put the amount of uranium that can be mined economically (what geologists call the reserves) at about 5.5 million metric tons, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, today’s nuclear power plants use 70,000 metric tons a year of uranium. At this rate of use, the uranium that could be mined economically would last about 80 years.
Suppose it were possible to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear power. Suppose that we could use nuclear energy to make liquid and gas fuels to power vehicles, and could do this quickly using conventional nuclear power plants.
We would have to build enough plants to increase energy production by 17.4 times, which means using 1.2 million tons of uranium ore each year. At that rate of use, the reserves of uranium would be used up in less than five years.
Nuclear power is a non-solution, especially considering its poor safety and waste record and potential security problems.
Let’s stop dreaming and get behind renewables.
Renewables can’t be the base load source of electricity. Need a non-fossil base load, and nuclear is it. There may be a time that renewables could be moved thousands of miles to compensate for calm days, say in Europe, to compensate for lack of wind energy, but we are not there and the cost parameters may make it prohibitive for decades.
fsb and nick: Great! A teapot version of the entire nuclear power debate.