Proceedings of the 2. MIT international conference on the next generation of nuclear power technology. Final report

The goal of the conference was to try to attract a variety of points of view from well-informed people to debate issues concerning nuclear power. Hopefully from that process a better understanding of what one should be doing will emerge. In organizing the conference lessons learned from the previous one were applied. A continuous effort was made to see to it that the arguments for the alternatives to nuclear power were given abundant time for presentation. This is ultimately because nuclear power is going to have to compete with all of the energy technologies. Thus, in discussing energy strategy all of the alternatives must be considered in a reasonable fashion. The structure the conference used has seven sessions. The first six led up to the final session which was concerned with what the future nuclear power strategy should be. Each session focused upon a question concerning the future. None of these questions has a unique correct answer. Rather, topics are addressed where reasonable people can disagree. In order to state some of the important arguments for each session`s question, the combination of a keynote paper followed by a respondent was used. The respondent`s paper is not necessarily included to be a rebuttal to the keynote; but rather, it was recognized that two people will look at a complex question with different shadings. Through those two papers the intention was to get out the most important arguments affecting the question for the session. The purpose of the papers was to set the stage for about an hour of discussion. The real product of this conference was that discussion