A new dawn for nuclear energy?; Statistics in Julia symposium

Nuclear energy in the climate transition

The revolutions that have taken place in solar, wind and in energy storage are simply remarkable. But getting to zero emissions remains a daunting prospect, particularly through the problem of intermittency. Nuclear energy is very appealing — but there are two problems: safety and economic viability. On the global landscape, France is the only country where nuclear energy is important in overall energy generation.

My column in the Business Standard on 4 September was A new dawn for nuclear energy? where I show recent developments in small reactors where there is a fair chance of a big jump in safety and a big jump in cost efficiency. Present projections suggest that small modular reactors (SMR) will generate energy at about twice the cost of renewables, with no intermittency problem. One can envision an Indian factory with a small 50MW reactor tucked away in a corner. We are not there yet, but these are important developments and should impact on our thinking for the next few years.

Statistics in Julia symposium

Julia is a modern computer programming language. We have been building statistics capabilities for Julia [github page]. These developments are of interest in the data science and statistics worlds, as Julia is a modern and clean programming language, with remarkable performance characteristics.

Juliacon is the annual Julia conference. In Juliacon 2022 we organised the Statistics symposium. These videos have been released.