The Wall Street Journal has published an interesting commentary on Senator Harry Reid’s personal attack against Commissioner Bill Magwood of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Hat tip to Dan Yurman of Idaho Samizdat, who provide a link to the above video with the following tweet: Dan Yurman @djysrv WSJ video: Sen Harry Reid’s crack up over…
A post titled Bill Magwood, NRC Democrat, Is ‘Treacherous, Miserable Liar’ And ‘First-Class Rat,’ Says Harry Reid offers an illuminating view of political thinking coming from inside the Washington, DC beltway. That way of thinking, in this case, can be traced back to Las Vegas, NV and the mob-influenced power politics that played a role…
It is easier to design and build compact nuclear reactors with uranium that has a higher fraction of U-235. The higher the U-235 content, the easier it is to overcome the effects of impurities in the coolant and cladding and the easier it is to overcome the inevitable effects of fission products that absorb neutrons….
Readers of Atomic Insights know that I have never been a fan of Dr. Greg Jaczko. He is a politician with no background in nuclear energy production either through education or professional experience. His only claim to knowledge of nuclear energy came through his policy jobs on Congressional and Senate staffs, but his employers in…
In keeping with a familiar pattern, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko issued a press release in advance of the the official release of a damaging NRC Inspector General (IG) report about him. In my opinion, for what little it is worth, it is another example of his routine abuse of the power of…
Meredith Angwin, who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee, published a book review post titled Superfuel: A Book I Wanted to Love. The book is a tribute to thorium and the people that Richard Martin refers to as “thorium-heads”. The villains in the book are the people that Martin calls “nuclearati” – otherwise known as the…
A couple of days ago, I happily reported on an article by Mark Lynas indicating that Friends of the Earth (FOE) UK was reconsidering its stance on nuclear energy. Aside Mark’s article reminded readers that FOE is a federation, not a monolithic organization; each country’s chapter can produce its own policies. End Aside. Mark based…
Bud Ryan is a documentary filmmaker who is deeply concerned that the world has forgotten about the fight against nuclear weapons. As part of his effort to remind people that there is still a need for activism in support of disarmament, he produced a film titled The Forgotten Bomb. In it, he interviews a number…
On Sunday January 8, 2012, I chatted with Meredith Angwin who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee and Margaret Harding, a well known independent consultant who specializes in GE Boiling Water Reactors. Our primary topic was the fate of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power station, which has been embroiled in a several year long battle to…
There have been a number of recent articles about the evacuated area that surrounds the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. One in particular that caught my attention was an article published in the Washington Post titled Around the Fukushima plant, a world left behind. The problem is that the contamination levels outside of the gate…
On November 11, 2011, the Institute of Nuclear Plant Operators (INPO) released a report that provides a detailed timeline of events that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in the days and weeks following the Great North East Japan earthquake and series of seven tsunamis. Releasing that report was a rare event; INPO…
On August 13, 2011, I spoke with Ben Heard of Decarbonise SA and Barry Brook of Brave New Climate. These two Australians are both working hard to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in a land where the idea of reducing the consumption of carbon and hydrocarbon fuels trends on the interests of some very powerful…