Nuclear Issues

An interview with Karim Sadjadpour, Senior Associate of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on the Iran-Saudi rift.

Last week, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel affirmed the goal of eliminating highly enriched uranium (HEU) from civilian use, while recommending step-wise conversion of high performance research reactors using weapon-grade uranium fuel and that the White House coordinate a 50-year national roadmap for neutron-based research. (Full disclosure:  I sat on that committee, and oversaw the NNSA reactor conversion program from 2006-9; this post, however, represents my views, not necessarily those of the committee or NNSA.)

As Japan’s nuclear energy crisis continues to unfold at the Fukushima Daiichi power station, the news media have struggled to sort through confusing, and often conflicting, information about damage to the crippled plant and its threat to public safety. The challenges of covering this situation were discussed in the seminar “In the Shadow of the Japan Crisis: The Seesaw Coverage of Nuclear Power,” the last in a three-part Clean Energy and the Media series cosponsored by Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and the Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy.