Nuclear Engineering Interview Questions and Answers
Question - 11 : - Are There Any Vendors Who Declined To Be Involved In The Development Of The Principles?
Answer - 11 : -
No. All of the current and aspiring vendors exporting nuclear power plants at the time the Principles initiative began agreed to participate in the drafting process.
Question - 12 : - What Was The Process For Drafting The Principles?
Answer - 12 : -
Carnegie began this process by convening the leading international experts on various aspects of nuclear power plant exportation as well as key exporting vendors of nuclear power plants. Drafting took place at a series of meetings occurring every 3-4 months.
These meetings brought together Carnegie staff, the participating vendor companies, and a group of international experts on the subjects addressed in each of the Principles, as well as antitrust/competition law counsel. The meetings, which were held over a three-year period, involved discussion of the substance of Principles as well as the crafting of consensus on the text of the Principles themselves.
Question - 13 : - Isn’t This An Industry Code Of Conduct? Why Did The Vendors Choose To Name The Document The “principles Of Conduct?”
Answer - 13 : -
The Principles are a truly global initiative developed by experts and vendor companies from three continents. When deciding on the title, participants had to take into account how the Principles text—including the title—might translate into other languages. Participants decided to call this voluntary initiative the “Principles of Conduct” rather than a “code”—the term often employed in such voluntary corporate social responsibility initiatives—because when “code” was translated into some other languages, it acquired an overly legalistic meaning that might have created confusion regarding whether this was a state-based, legally mandated or voluntary initiative.
Question - 14 : - What Other Industries Have Adopted Similar Codes Of Conduct?
Answer - 14 : -
The process that produced the Principles of Conduct, as well as the Principles themselves, reflects a recent trend in the management of global challenges. Leading national and transnational industries [business sectors], such as the oil and gas, apparel and pharmaceutical industries, have come to recognize that their reputations as socially responsible actors are key to their long-term business success. Some industries with similar codes of conduct include:
- Manufacturing (The Fair Labor Association, Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production)
- Extractive (Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, International Council on Mining and Metals)
- Financial (Equator Principles, UN Principles for Responsible Investment)
- Electronics (Electronic Industry Code of Conduct)
Question - 15 : - Do We Really Need Nuclear In Order To Deal With Global Warming?
Answer - 15 : -
Preventing dangerous warming of the planet due to human emissions of greenhouse gases will require that we cut our emissions by 80 percent over the next 40 years at the same time that global energy demand is expected to double or triple. Doing so will require that we produce vast amounts of zero carbon energy. At present, the only way we know how to do that is with nuclear energy.
Question - 16 : - Isn’t The Real Problem That We Simply Consume Too Much Energy?
Answer - 16 : -
Most people on the planet actually need to consume more energy, not less. Energy consumption is highly correlated with better health outcomes, longer life spans, and higher living standards. High-energy societies have liberated billions of us from lives of hard agricultural labor. More than a billion people around the world still do not have access to electricity at all. Ensuring that there is abundant energy to power the planet over the coming century promises to unleash the creative potential of billions more. But the basic math of global development and global warming is unforgiving. If we are going to meet the needs of a growing global population while keeping global warming in check, we will need technologies that can produce enormous amounts of energy without emitting carbon.
Question - 17 : - Isn’t That Why We Need To Control Population Growth?
Answer - 17 : -
Providing universal access to abundant, cheap clean energy is one of the best population growth strategies we have. Consuming more energy allows people to live wealthier, healthier, and longer lives, which translates into lower population growth. As people become wealthier and more economically secure, they have fewer children. This is why leading advocates for human development and environmental sustainability, like Bill Gates and Jeffrey Sachs,4 strongly support the development and deployment of nuclear energy.
Question - 18 : - Even If We Produce Energy With Minimal Pollution, Won’t More Energy Use Incur A Greater, More Devastating Environmental Impact?
Answer - 18 : -
Cheap clean energy allows us to reduce our impact on the environment. With it, we can grow more food on less land and leave more wilderness for nature. We can reprocess wastewater and desalinate seawater, rather than depleting aquifers and draining majestic rivers. We can also recycle fiber and pulp rather than cutting down ancient forests. A world with abundant clean energy allows us to protect natural resources and leave more of our ecological inheritance undisturbed.
Question - 19 : - Can’t We Become More Energy Efficient Instead Of Using More Energy?
Answer - 19 : -
We are vastly more energy efficient than we were just a few decades ago, much less a few centuries ago. Yet, even as we’ve become more efficient, we’ve also continued to use more energy. That’s because energy efficiency makes energy cheaper, and the result is that we find more ways to use it. Just a few years ago, nobody had heard of the cloud, and two decades ago nobody had heard of the Internet. Today, more of us than ever are able fly around the world. We fill our homes with 50-inch televisions and all manner of networked devices. We transform billboards and skyscrapers into gigantic LED video screens. Efficiency is good and we should strive for more, but it won’t eliminate the need to develop enormous quantities of cheap and zero carbon energy to meet the demands of the growing global economy.
Question - 20 : - Can’t We Solve Global Warming With Renewables?
Answer - 20 : -
We’ve made a lot of progress with renewables, but they are still costly, intermittent, and difficult to scale. Without utility scale energy storage technologies, which remain unviable, you simply can’t run a modern society on wind and solar alone. Some places, like Germany and Denmark, have achieved higher levels of wind and solar, but they have done so through heavy, historically unprecedented deployment subsidies, that can’t be sustained. Furthermore, these societies remain overwhelmingly dependent upon fossil energy: Germany got 70 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels in 201212 versus 5 percent from solar and 7 percent from wind.