Nice to see a description from Idaho Samizdat’s Dan Yurman of the blogger event last week. Here’s a snippet:

While the mainstream news media panel was dissecting their coverage of the nuclear energy industry, a group of 45 people met Tuesday Nov 17 to discuss how social media is making an impact.  One of the themes of the evening round table discussion is how nuclear bloggers are taking myths out of the debate. 

…Areva is the only major nuclear energy firm in the U.S. that has paid any attention to social media in terms of people outside the firm who develop independent content.

The blogger meeting was organized by Rod Adams, Atomic Insights; Dave Bradish, NEI; John Wheeler, ThisWeekInNuclear, and Dan Yurman, Idaho Samizdat.  Corporate support for the conference room and refreshments was provided by Areva and CoolHandNuke.

There’s a lot more detail in the full post… go read the whole thing!

John Wheeler of This Week in Nuclear, in his an excellent post up on The Energy Collective, pointed us to a recent study from the Nature Conservancy on the “Land Use Intensity” of nuclear energy versus other forms of energy.  The study, “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency,” looks at the impact of various energy-generation methods on natural habitats (measured in square kilometers per terawatt-hour) and comes to the conclusion that aside from increasing efficiency, nuclear power has the smallest land-use footprint of all forms of energy generation – including green technologies like wind, geothermal, and solar!

As you can see from the chart, it only takes 2.4 square kilometers of land to produce one terawatt-hour of energy in a nuclear reactor – just one-third of the impact of the next most efficient form of generation, geothermal, and just one-sixth the impact of solar thermal power.

Why is this important?  As climate change becomes a reality, preserving natural habitats – the Nature Conservancy’s mission – will become more and more crucial.  The energy we generate in the future needs to not only have a low-impact with regards to carbon emissions and pollutants, but also be efficient in terms of land use.  Just as “suburban sprawl” can gobble up natural and wilderness habitats that had previously supported diverse ecosystems, so too can “energy sprawl.”

The Nature Conservancy is concerned that as our energy appetite increases and we become more and more concerned about carbon emissions, we’ll go to methods of power generation that require the destruction of natural habitats for things like farming corn or soy for biofuels.  Nuclear power, they say, has the least amount of land-use impact of all forms of power generation.  Nothing can substitute for more efficiency, obviously. It’s clear from the study that efficiency gains (including, we might add, smart grid technology) would result in net decreases in land use.  But if we’re going to build more power plants, nuclear power will use the least amount of land.

This, combined with the NEI study we previously highlighted showing that nuclear energy is just as carbon-efficient as solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and wind power, makes it even clearer: the world’s green energy future must involve nuclear power.  Safe, reliable, clean, CO2-free nuclear power must be a crucial component of any carbon-reduction plan.

We missed this last week because of the excitement of the Ohio announcement, but we wanted to make sure we highlighted a panel discussion of nuclear bloggers at the American Nuclear Society meeting in Atlanta that happened last week. Several of our colleagues in the nuclear energy blogging community participated: Rod Adams (Atomic Insights), John Wheeler (This Week in Nuclear), Kirk Sorensen (Energy from Thorium), and Dan Yurman (Idaho Samizdat).

From Dan Yurman’s write-up on the panel discussion at The Energy Collective, an excellent summary of how nuclear energy bloggers are changing the nuclear energy news landscape:

There are not many serious bloggers in the U.S. who cover the nuclear industry on a full time basis. There are perhaps fewer than a dozen who do blog frequently about the topic. The difference for this group is a commitment to consistent high quality content and in-depth analysis despite not being part of the nuclear trade press. That doesn’t mean we’re not capable of heavy lifting when it comes to explaining the key issues of the nuclear industry. . . .

What has happened with nuclear energy and the new media is that substantive news and analysis, often with industry thought and opinion leaders, is now available online without having to come up with the equivalent of several months of car payments. This means that some of the news and the “so what” analysis is now reaching an audience composed of mostly of the general public. What’s interesting is that according to Google Analytics, most of the same utilities and EPC firms are also reading the blogs.

The rest of the write-up includes some very interesting thoughts on the differences between nuclear energy bloggers and the future of nuclear energy blogging… but we couldn’t pass up a favorable mention of this blog by John Wheeler:

Wheeler noted that Areva’s recent forays into outreach to bloggers may cause other large nuclear firms to take a look at their efforts toward public transparency. According to Wheeler, these firms may decide they don’t need to talk to bloggers and are perfectly satisfied with how they are interacting with the public.

We’re glad our efforts in reaching out to the blogging community are being recognized, and we’re especially glad to be part of the nuclear energy blogging community. You can read the rest of Dan Yurman’s write-up on the panel here.