3. "Entreprenuke" Bio

I am presently employed as a Mechanical Engineer. For 3.25 years now, I have worked in nuclear power plant design. This was my first full-time job after completing 19 years of formal education. At some point early on during this opening of my career, I developed what some would consider a strange (and certainly nerdy) hobby of reading blogs related to nuclear energy. I had long before that developed a keen interest in reading about energy-related issues in general. A particular favorite nuclear blog of mine is Atomic Insights. I will be adding links to some of my favorite nuclear blogs in the near future.

Aside:I initially plan to remain a degree of anonymity posting here, so I am blogging under the name EntrepreNuke. I have also started twitter and facebook accounts. The twitter account is simple enough, @entreprenuclear, and the Facebook page is too, Facebook.com/entreprenuclear. Feel free to go follow and/or like, respectively. End Aside

For my formal education, I completed both a B.S. and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA. The Masters degrees were completed as a dual degree program, with a focus on product development. Near the completion of the program, I got to be part of a team participating in a competition/challenge involving pitching a product to venture capitalists (my team shared the runner up spot). That experience sparked my pre-existing entrepreneurial spirit. I allowed that spirit to delude me for a time, thinking I could possibly be an entrepreneur directly out of school. With that delusion, I delayed beginning full-time employment for about 6 months after completing my final project for my Masters program.

When my funds were nearly fully depleted, I finally came to grips with needing a real job, and was fortunate to find one.

I never have fully shaken that entrepreneurial spirit. Since I have gained a fair amount of actual experience relating to nuclear power in addition to gleaning additional knowledge from reading blogs and trying to keep up with industry-related developments, this blog seems to be an appropriate endeavor. I have recognized that an entrepreneurial spirit and Peaceful Atomic Energy are far from mutually exclusive (despite a challenging regulatory structure) and that this pair of things (entrepreneurs and nuclear) need to be combined more and more if this world in the future is going to have any hope of having energy availability on the scale needed to prevent many considerably undesirable outcomes.

I think I actually came up with the name more than 18 months ago and have been intending to begin this blog since about that time. With the 100th Nuclear Blog Carnival coming up this weekend, trying to be included in that was the final push I needed to overcome procrastination and get this thing started.

I hope everyone has a wonderful remainder of your weekend.