We Are Atom News

Hello everyone!

We (as in plural, not the royal We) are very glad to introduce Atom News to our readers for what we hope will be a thrilling experience. As this is the first time we post here, let’s introduce ourselves a bit and explain what we are and why we decided to start this adventure!

We are a little group of people bound by the same interest: energy issues in general and nuclear energy in particular. Let’s be clear from the start: we believe in it… Some of us work in the field, some others merely dabble in the topic out of sheer personal interest, but all of us are convinced that it is the energy of the future.

Sadly, this was not a popular belief for some time. As incredible as it may seem, atom energy is one of the few scientific fields where things were more advanced forty years ago than they are today. Its golden age - namely from the 1950’s to the 1980’s - was a hotbed for innovation where bold reactor designs with epithets like “fast” or “breeder” started appearing. But this was not to last. Chernobyl’s accident, and the more discreet Three Miles Island, were nails in a coffin that stifled the entire field for decades in the West. Fear and loathing ensued, fanned by politicians, lobbies and bureaucrats…

Ideas were shelved, knowledge was filed in dusty cabinets, and experts grew old and retired. Funniest thing, but as talks of “fourth-gen reactors” start to crop up today, most people seem to ignore that these are no brand-new designs but forty-year-old ones that we talk about.

Fast forward to our days. As the world’s thirst for energy keeps on mounting and the search for green and decarbonated energy grows more and more frantic, some people conveniently remembered there were alternatives to burning fossil fuel to produce energy. Nuclear fission boils water far more efficiently than exothermic redox.

But there’s the rub. Forty years of disaffection by most Western countries have left a few scars. Knowledge and know-how took time to be rediscovered. Experts needed to be re-trained/trained again. Technical diagrams had to be dug out of cobwebby bookshelves. If the will to move forward is there again, key industry players are picking the pace on sometimes… wobbly legs. The competition is all the fiercer that the hype is real and only a few actors will get to secure both the funds and the markets to spend them on.

And that’s where we come in. In our opinion, transparency is key to help regain the public’s trust, which has been eroded by years of neglect and sometimes misinformation – or outright disinformation. Moreover, being honest with our flaws fosters a sane atmosphere, where mistakes are owned, rather than hidden. People need to be properly informed on the industry beyond ideological bias and pseudo experts.

This is why we launched this platform: we pledge to provide a nonpartisan take on the industry, so that our readers may better understand what nuclear energy is and decrypt the dynamics of our field.

We are Atom News. We believe in atom energy. We believe it has the capacity to solve the world’s energy crisis. And we believe the topic is serious enough to warrant the utmost honesty from those who work in it.

Welcome to our world! Stay tuned here and on X for more in the near future!