Jim Beall (BS-Math, MBA, PE) has been a nuclear engineer for 50 years, beginning as a nuclear engineering officer in the US Navy. Civilian experience includes design, construction, inspection, enforcement, and assessment with a nuclear utility, an architect engineering firm, and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC). Assignments included on-site health physics support, piping design stress analyses, reactor licensing, reactor startup testing (Canadian Point Lepreau heavy water reactor), research reactor inspections, and an assist mission to the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine in Kiev. USNRC positions included reactor site construction senior resident inspector (SRI), reactor operations SRI, inspection team leader, safety analyst, senior enforcement specialist, and reactor policy assistant to three different Presidential-appointed USNRC Commissioners while earning the agency’s Meritorious and Distinguished Service awards.
Duties of those policy-level posts included research into alternative and speculative energy sources, as well as energy forecasts and transmission technologies. Energy sources included coal, oil, hydro, geothermal, tidal, solar, wind, fracking, space-based, heavy water reactors, breeder reactors, fusion, and even anti-matter.
Coauthor of Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) paper, “Ecological Engineering Considerations for ISU’s Worldship Project” and also Elsevier’s “Interstellar Travel: Purpose and Motivations.” Baen Books (baen.com) has published several of his non-fiction articles on a variety of subjects, including:
- “Our Worldship Broke!”
- “Case Studies in Handwavium”
- “From Corvus to Keyhole—Shipyards: Past, Present, and Science Fiction”
- “Radium Girls of Science and Science Fiction”
- “Grid Wars: Innovation, Feuds, Rivalry, and Revenge in the Never-ending Battle to Electrify America and the Planet”
- “Atomic Follies”
- “Warships of Sea and Space – Part 1”
- “Warships of Sea and Space – Part 2”
- “Recycling: From Stars to Starships”
- “Borders: From the First Sumerians to the Last Starfighter”
- “Artificial Intelligence: Myth, Fiction, and Future”
