The Science council for Global Initiatives

Van Snyder spent 53 years as a mathematician and software engineer at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, starting Bastille Day 1967. Before that, he’d earned a BS in Computer Science and an MS in Applied Mathematics and System Engineering. The first half of his career involved developing mathematical software components used in JPL, especially orbit determination, trajectory planning, instrument design, and data analysis. When the applied mathematics group was dissolved, he spent four years doing data analysis for the TOPEX and NSCAT satellites.

Then for twenty years, he developed mathematical models—and software to implement them—to do data analysis for the Microwave Limb Sounder on the NASA Earth Observing System Aura Satellite. Van retired on Halloween, 2020. He spent seventeen years as an adjunct associate professor of Computer Science.

He is a member of US and ISO committees to maintain the standard for the Fortran computer programming language, and a member of IFIP Working Group 2.5 on Numerical Software. Van has been interested in energy, and especially nuclear power, for decades, but that "education" only began in earnest twenty years ago when he found outstanding nuclear mentors (among them some founding advisors of SCGI).

Van published a book in March 2024 entitled Where Will We Get Our Energy? It's a comprehensive end-to-end life-cycle system-engineering analysis of the entire energy landscape. Everything is quantified, with no vague hand waving, containing some 350 bibliographic citations.

By Van Snyder

I received a "Nuclear News Bulletin" from nuclearmatters.com, in which they celebrated the re-opening of Three Mile Island and Palisades.

In response, I sent them this note:

Thanks for advocating for nuclear power, but….

A critical part of the nuclear power system is spent fuel processing. Spent fuel isn't nuclear waste. It's valuable 5%-used fuel. The unused-fuel part needs custody for 300,000 years. It's daft to pretend it can be hidden that long. The pyramids were plundered before 500 years! A far better idea is to turn it into electricity and fission products. Fission products are produced at the rate of about one tonne (1,000 kg) per GWe-year. 9.26% of fission products -- caesium and strontium -- need custody for 300 years. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. A 1,700 GWe all-electric all-nuclear American economy would produce less than 160 tonnes of caesium and strontium per year -- about the weight of one dime per American household -- which wouldn't quite fill nine cement-mixer trucks. We can handle that quite easily -- much more easily than trying to hide 34,000 tonnes of valuable 5%-used fuel every year.