New
Technology
and New
Resources
By Eugene Grecheck, American Nuclear
Society.
Eugene Grecheck
Eugene S. Grecheck is a seasoned
executive with 40 years of experience in
commercial nuclear power generation,
including operations,
engineering,
licensing,
training, security
and emergency
planning, new plant
development, and
nuclear safety review.
Grecheck’s
career spanned
over 38 years
with Dominion
Resources, where
he held positions
including nuclear
station manager, site
vice president at two
different stations,
and vice president over nuclear services
and nuclear engineering.
He received a bachelor’s degree in
physics and a master’s degree in nuclear
engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. He earned an MBA from
Virginia Commonwealth University
and an MBA Upgrade from Syracuse
University.
He currently serves on the Mechanical/
Nuclear Engineering Advisory Board for
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and was
a representative for the United States on
the Gen IV International Forum.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri,
Editor of Nuclear Plant Journal, at
the American Nuclear Society Winter
Meeting in Washington, D.C. on
November 9, 2015.
1.
What initiatives related to the climate
conference of parties (COP) 21 has been
taken by ANS?
The American Nuclear Society
(ANS) has been very active with several
international scientific societies and we
were instrumental in the formation of
the grassroots organization, Nuclear for
Climate (N4C). Nuclear for Climate is an
initiative of various international groups
that hold the common belief that nuclear is
part of the solution to climate change. On
the flip side, the existing framework prior
to COP21 came from the Kyoto Protocol
as revised by the Bonn Agreement, and
it actually prohibited nuclear from being
used as a climate negation strategy.
The Bonn Agree-
ment also stated that
nations cannot take
credit for using nu-
clear. To clarify, you
can use nuclear if you
want, but you cannot
take credit for apply-
ing nuclear as a car-
bon dioxide emissions
strategy, nor can you
finance nuclear proj-
ects in less developed
countries as a way of
mitigating their emis-
sions. There was
a situation stating
that our goal is to
de-carbonize power
production, yet you can’t use the only
technology that really accomplishes this.
Our point as part of Nuclear for Climate,
has been that goals are being set that are
destined to fail, unless we do something
about the exclusion of nuclear. Together,
the groups that are part of N4C have been
doing more and more social media work
over the last several months. There has
been a lot of very good material posted to
Twitter and on various Facebook pages,
including the ANS social media pages.
So much so, that when I was in Vienna at
the IAEA general conference in Septem-
ber 2015, the young people who are part
of Nuclear for Climate, told me about all
of the social media they were planning
on doing. They said press releases don’t
get the attention they once did, and that
you need to be visible in social media by
posting on Facebook and Twitter, and us-
ing the hashtag #nuclearforclimate. I had
opened a Twitter account a long time ago
but never used it. I actually tweeted the
speech that U.S. DOE Secretary Moniz
had just given in support of nuclear as part
of climate change strategy. Amazingly,
within 24 hours, I was astounded by the
number of people who had retweeted my
post. Then NEI picked it up and put it on
their webpage.
The message is that you cannot
achieve climate goals without including
nuclear. And there’s a subsidiary piece to
that, which I think is even more important.
There are almost 2 billion people in
the world today who have no access to
electricity at all. When we hear about
what needs to be done to control carbon
dioxide, there’s an underlying assumption
that usually implies using less energy.
That’s kind of an implicit assumption
that we have to eradicate. We’re going to
close coal plants and do all these things,
but somehow, in the final analysis, we all
just need to be more efficient and more
effective. I think for those of us in the
developed world, that is easy to say. But,
if you have no access to electricity at all,
I think it’s immoral for us to say we’re
going to do this, and we’re never going to
allow you to have electricity.
If developing nations are going to
have electricity, then what is going to be
the way they can do that? It is naïve to
say that we are going to provide access
to electricity for 2 billion people on the
back of intermittent energy sources. It’s
just not going to happen . We have a
very strong story to tell. I was really
encouraged at the White House Summit
on Nuclear Energy in November 2015
when I heard policy makers essentially
repeating back the same talking points
that we’ve been using for several months,
which is that there’s a huge population
out there that needs electricity. They
need access to energy. They need access
to clean energy. And if you really are
serious about that, the way to do that
involves nuclear energy.
2.
Is nuclear research getting a boost
from the venture capitalists?
What we’re seeing now is a
fascinating proliferation of individuals,
36
NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, January-February 2016
