The American Nuclear Society's Young Members Group, with the help of ANS's Nuclear Installation Safety Division, is organizing a panel session at the Young Professionals Congress (an embedded topical at the 2011 ANS Winter Meeting) on the history of severe nuclear accidents.

The Young Members Group of the American Nuclear Society is accepting nominations for the two YMG national awards. Each award will be presented at the ANS Winter Conference.

About 35 percent of current nuclear workers will retire in next five years. Where will the next generation come from?

The basic thesis of a post I wrote in January was that the Chernobyl accident was far enough in the past that the younger generation in the nuclear industry did not have the first-hand memories of the experience, and therefore lacked some of the emotional understanding of the event. I suggested that there should be a conscious effort to pass on how Chernobyl and Three Mile Island affected the culture of the industry.

I teach students of engineering. Many of them (although certainly not all) prefer logarithms to literature and algebra to anthropology. No doubt they get a fair share of that in my classes, but I try to include a bit of history whenever I can.

At a session on educational programs during a recent ANS meeting, a fairly new graduate student in nuclear engineering described a nuclear survey course that he had taken at his university. The graduate student had not studied nuclear engineering as an undergrad, and when he said, "I had never really heard of Chernobyl before I took this course," you could almost hear an audible gasp among the more, well, mature members of the audience.

What does it mean to be a nuclear engineer? That question is not as

This year's North American - Young Generation in Nuclear (NA-YGN) continental conference was held in May and was themed "Leading the Change: Go Green." Participants learned that the future of electricity production in the United States would be heavily influenced by the desire to combat global warming. This desire is starting a national debate on how the country should select technologies for new electricity production facilities.

Fall is in the air! The temperatures are cool-the leaves are turning-and (after a childhood filled with repeated disappointment and utter futility) I get to watch my Philadelphia Phillies make their mark on another MLB post-season.

It is sometimes a little hard for me to believe, but I have been involved in nuclear engineering education for more than 16 years. For many of those years, I was a student, climbing my way up to achieve a doctorate in nuclear engineering. Now I am an educator, which in many ways is just a different kind of student.