Cheryl Rofer ’63 dishes nuclear energy on blogosphere

For 35 years, Cheryl Rofer ’63 of Santa Fe, N.M., worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. She now is a sought-after consultant on nuclear energy issues and CEO of nucleardiner.com, an online forum for discussing all aspects of nuclear energy.

“A website allows rapid response to the news with little financial investment,” Rofer says. “Many people now get their news from the Internet and depend on sites like Nuclear Diner to provide background.”

A website makes it easy to post a forum regularly on current talked-about topics, Rofer says. “My partners and I want to provide information on nuclear issues, including civilian nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. We also discuss related issues, like national security and radioisotopes in nature, medicine and industry.”

Communicating online is an important tool for her, Rofer says. “The Internet has completely changed our concept of communications. We now can speak to people around the globe and share photos, in real time or by many types of messages – email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and many more. It is wonderful to be able to have this ability, but the volume of communications requires judgment on which ones are reliable and important.”

She says that today’s communications are a good thing, but there is an undercurrent of paranoia and a lack of analysis by some that allow rumors to grow quickly. “People still are learning how to deal with the great volumes of information available,” she says.