Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer
On March 23, 2012, Bill Gates was interviewed as part of the Wall Street Journal ECO:nomics conference.
There is little doubt that he understands the technology and the opportunity. My main question is why he is not investing more in order to drive the technology even faster. After all, he is one of the world’s richest men and could write billion dollar checks if he wanted to. He also has plenty of rich friends who would join him if he provided the example.
Note: Len Koch, whose participation in nuclear energy research started in the 1940s, wrote the below open letter to colleagues who are striving to restore interest in the progress that they made in research and development of the Integral Fast Reactor during the period from 1954-1994 the year that President Clinton and Hazel O’Leary, his [...]
I just received my copy of Plentiful Energy: The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor. The complex history of a simple reactor technology with emphasis on its scientific basis for non-specialists by Charles Till and Yoon Il Chang. There is no doubt that it is going to be a fascinating read, but I had to [...]
Steve Kirsch, an MIT graduate and enough of an entrepreneurial success to have an auditorium at the school that carries his name, has updated his challenge to the faculty at his alma mater in a post on The Huffington Post titled Is MIT Afraid to Debate Nuclear Report?. Steve is quite serious about this challenge [...]
I got notified via a Google Alert on “small nuclear power plants” about a post on a blog that I had not previously visited. The post was titled The Environmentalists Nuclear Debate (2) Mark Lynas. The post provided a link to a very interesting article by Mark Lynas in the New Republic titled How nuclear [...]
Conventional wisdom holds that a breeder reactor produces more fuel than it uses. This idea is fascinating to some, but confusing to a whole group of rational people. It sounds too much like science fiction or Madison Avenue hype. Actually, a breeder reactor is not magic, but it is a marketing exaggeration to state that [...]
AEI would prefer to concentrate its efforts on discussing the incredible technical potential of nuclear energy while leaving the discussion of politics and personality to others. When trying to understand nuclear energy technical decisions, however, it is essential to understand some of the political issues involved. For the last 20 years, there has been an [...]
Soon after the development of the first nuclear reactors, scientists and engineers began to discuss the possibility of a nuclear fuel shortage. As far as these nuclear pioneers knew, there was a rather limited supply of uranium that was concentrated in certain areas of Africa and Eastern Europe. The situation was considered even more critical [...]
At 12:30 am, on August 26, 1977, the operators at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station began lifting the central modules of the experimental breeder reactor core into the blanket section. At 04:38 am, the reactor reached criticality. During the next five years, the core produced more than 10 billion kilowatt-hours of thermal power – equivalent [...]