Tuesday i went to my first day of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Fuel Cycle Information Exchange (FCIX). As you can see, EVERYTHING is an acronym here. The conference is attended by a bunch of NRC people, industry representatives, DOE people, basically anyone involved with the nuclear industry at all. I am clearly the youngest and least informed person there, but it is really interesting. Or parts of it is anyways. Each day as a "theme" and the first day focused on "Lessons Learned", so a bunch of people gave presentations about their experiences building and licensing the first nuclear facilities the US has seen in 20 years and the problems they had. Wednesday was about Safety Culture and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards and proliferation concerns. I attended the morning, but left early because the WISE people had a meeting at DOE with people in the Solar program
there and I thought that would be more interesting. And it was. We heard from a guy who focused on PV, from the Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy Directorate. Then we heard from a guy about Concentrated Solar. Both of them were VERY optimistic about their technologies and talked about the current installations and where they thought solar would go, or had the potential to go. The most interesting thing I learned was that they just published a report about dry cooling for concentrated solar and that there will probably not be another tower built in the US with wet cooling. Then we got a tour of the
solar installations they have on the roof. They have a big installation that generates about 500 kWh a day, which is only about 1% of the buildings energy use, but it's something I guess. Then they had a demonstration project that was 1 kW installations of Concentrated PV, CdTe, CIGS, and Thin film cells (just 4 different kinds of new solar technology). It was interesting to see the different sizes of them, it gave a really good impression of the relative efficiencies. Then I went for a bike ride this afternoon, which was short and traffic-y, but felt really good. I wanted to
work tonight, but I sat down and just finished checking my email 15 minutes ago and it's already quarter to 10, so maybe I'll try to do a little. Tomorrow is the most exciting day of the FCIX conference, it's all about reprocessing, so I'm excited for that. I'll let you know how it goes later, but I thought I'd post know since I know you are all waiting with baited breathe. :)
Tuesday i went to my first day of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Fuel Cycle Information Exchange (FCIX). As you can see, EVERYTHING is an acronym here. The conference is attended by a bunch of NRC people, industry representatives, DOE people, basically anyone involved with the nuclear industry at all. I am clearly the youngest and least informed person there, but it is really interesting. Or parts of it is anyways. Each day as a "theme" and the first day focused on "Lessons Learned", so a bunch of people gave presentations about their experiences building and licensing the first nuclear facilities the US has seen in 20 years and the problems they had. Wednesday was about Safety Culture and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards and proliferation concerns. I attended the morning, but left early because the WISE people had a meeting at DOE with people in the Solar program 
there and I thought that would be more interesting. And it was. We heard from a guy who focused on PV, from the Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy Directorate. Then we heard from a guy about Concentrated Solar. Both of them were VERY optimistic about their technologies and talked about the current installations and where they thought solar would go, or had the potential to go. The most interesting thing I learned was that they just published a report about dry cooling for concentrated solar and that there will probably not be another tower built in the US with wet cooling. Then we got a tour of the
solar installations they have on the roof. They have a big installation that generates about 500 kWh a day, which is only about 1% of the buildings energy use, but it's something I guess. Then they had a demonstration project that was 1 kW installations of Concentrated PV, CdTe, CIGS, and Thin film cells (just 4 different kinds of new solar technology). It was interesting to see the different sizes of them, it gave a really good impression of the relative efficiencies. Then I went for a bike ride this afternoon, which was short and traffic-y, but felt really good. I wanted to 
work tonight, but I sat down and just finished checking my email 15 minutes ago and it's already quarter to 10, so maybe I'll try to do a little. Tomorrow is the most exciting day of the FCIX conference, it's all about reprocessing, so I'm excited for that. I'll let you know how it goes later, but I thought I'd post know since I know you are all waiting with baited breathe. :) 
1 comment:
I may be the only one waiting with baited breath. But I love hearing about your day. THANKS.
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