Collegiate Times

Last week, the CT released an article covering the recent grant from the NRC for a nuclear engineering program at Virginia Tech. The students at Tech are some of the best and brightest in the country, and well deserving of this challenging educational opportunity.

However, at least one person made the mistake of placing a picture of a mushroom cloud in the background of a "Virginia Tech's Nuclear Energy History" timeline. Although this is probably more of a minor oversight by someone at the CT, it does raise a larger issue that is prevalent in today's society.

The relationship between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are all too often confused, mostly because of a lack of education on the subject. It seems that in today's world it is becoming easier to demonize something that isn't understood, instead of attempting to understand it.

No one at Tech will be taught how to engineer nuclear weapons. A nuclear engineering program is focused on an energy technology that creates clean, safe and reliable energy.

Just as a bottle of petroleum jelly cannot explode while sitting in your bathroom cabinet, a nuclear power reactor cannot possibly explode like a nuclear bomb. Although the two technologies share the same name, they are very different. Put simply, fuel for nuclear power is enriched 25-30 times less than that of weapons-grade material.

Although this new nuclear engineering program is wonderful news for the university, unfortunate inaccuracies like this can cause severe damage to the future of clean baseload energy in the United States.

Nuclear power currently accounts for 74 percent of clean energy production in the U.S. and helps the country avoid almost 700 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year. The second and third closest clean energy competitors are hydro and wind energy with 200 and 27 million metric tons of CO2 avoided, respectively.

Nuclear power is also the most reliable clean energy that we have available today. It produces clean energy 100 percent of the time, compared to wind (30 percent), hydro (27 percent) and solar energy (19 percent).

Not only is nuclear power clean and reliable, it is safe. According to the Department of Labor, the U.S. nuclear power industry has a workplace accident rate lower than that of the U.S. education and communication industries, which includes the entire faculty and staff of Tech and the CT.

Hokies, please take this opportunity to learn more about nuclear power and support the new nuclear engineering program at Tech.

Eric Danner, alumnus, aerospace engineering, Charlotte, N.C.
J. Carrington Dillon, alumnus, civil engineering & economics, Charlotte, N.C.