Dan Yurman (left) American Nuclear Society, and NRC Chairmain Gregory Jaczko (right) at a webinar session for nuclear bloggers held Oct 3. Over 60 people heard the 90 minute live session. (Photo credit: NRC)
I came to the session with over five pages of questions. Questions which were not answered in the 90 minute session will be answer over time on the NRC blog.
Under the ground rules that Laura Scheele, ANS, set with the NRC, as the moderator I had the discretion to ask the questions in any order I felt prudent and to ask follow-up questions. Over a third of the questions were follow-up.
Jaczko was pleasant, conversational, and well prepared for the session. He invested a lot of time in the event both before it and with a 90 minute live, unscripted session. The result "exceeded all expectations," said lead NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner.
The webinar was a collaborative effort of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the American Nuclear Society. Laura Scheele, Manager of Policy & Communication, led the effort for ANS.
Bigger than a breadbox
For our first of a kind event, at least as far as the NRC is concerned, we had a small mob scene behind the microphones. Those in the room included;
• Eliot Brenner, the NRC Chief of Public Affairs,
• Two aides to Jaczko including his chief of staff,
• An NRC IT guy to run the webinar software
• Two people from NRC running the video and sound recording equipment for the video and podcasts that will be posted on the NRC website, one of the them also took a series of candid photos (see above).
• Fritz Schneider, Clark Communications
• Laura Scheele, American Nuclear Society
Post Webinar News media & blog coverage
Something you may not know about me . . . I worked in talk radio in New York in the 60s when I was in college and in news in radio in the 70s in Denver.
It was a bit of a blast from the past to be back in front of a microphone in a live session. I enjoyed every minute. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
I have some additional thoughts on the future of video webinars over at CoolHandNuke.
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3 comments:
I can't tell everyone who did not listen in what a fine job Dan did with this. The questions were clear, the flow of the whole session was smooth (and now I know that's because Dan has some background in this) and the result was that we got to hear some important things. Dan - you really are an asset to us in more ways than even I'd suspected after having met you. Thank you and thanks to the ANS and the NRC too for this. I nominate you for the next one!
A question I did not have success asking which I would like to have asked of Chairman Gregory Jaczko is:
Q - If your safety culture is such as to raise the cost of US nuclear to a level where it is no longer built (and historically less safe fossil fuel power plants are built in their place) does your highly vaunted NRC safety culture really promote safety?
One way perhaps to better promote safety is to encourage the construction of nuclear power plants that are built with intrinsically safer nuclear technology (i.e. molten salt reactors that cannot suffer a core meltdown). Nuclear technology which has fewer serious safety vulnerabilities is superior to an intrinsically less safe technology that you are more comfortable reviewing (Light Water Reactors).
I am not sure that the toughest and most probing questions that could have been asked by nuclear bloggers was in fact asked in the recently completed webinar.
Robert, the questions you, and others, asked during the webinar will be addressed by the NRC on its blog.
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