Matt Wald at the New York Times published an article titled Nuclear Opponents Invoke Solyndra that alerted me to a new tactic by the forces arrayed against the beneficial use of nuclear energy in the battle against hydrocarbon addiction and climate change. The new meme is a smear on nuclear energy by falsely attempting to…
Sami Mäkeläinen and I agree that the world’s economy is barreling forward on a course that will result in a great deal of pain and suffering as we collide with the limitations on the available supply of hydrocarbons paired with the negative environmental effects of continuing to increase the rate at which they are consumed….
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just published an open letter to President Obama that offers opinions on how to solve various pressing problems. I’d like to riff on that letter and suggest that we should be pursuing ways to use one problem to solve another one. According to the BAS, there is a…
From XKCD: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Hat tip to Dr. Brian Mays, one of the more prolific contributors to the Atomic Insights comment threads.
This morning I found an article titled Builders pessimistic about new nuclear plants published in the Tampa Bay Times, one of my former hometown newspapers. (As a retired naval officer, I have about a dozen former hometowns.) The author built his case about pessimism for new nuclear plant construction on the words of a single…
I ran across an end of the year post about energy worth sharing Counting Down Top 12 Energy Facts of 2012: 3, 2 & 1. It appears on a blog titled John Hanger’s Facts of the Day. Mr. Hanger claims to be “an expert on energy, environment, green economy, competitive electric markets, and utility regulation…
Dieter Helm’s The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong–and How to Fix It has the potential to be an influential energy policy book, not just for the UK but for the rest of Europe and the United States. Helm has been making the rounds to promote the book and recently gave a concise…
My post about fighting climate skeptics in the nuclear community has attracted some rather passionate discussion. I encourage you all to visit that post and read through the comments to learn a little more about several different points of view. This discussion is not about picking a side in a bipolar battle, but about making…
Bob Hargraves, the author of Thorium: Energy Cheaper than Coal, recently traveled to Shanghai to present a 30 minute talk summarizing the main points of discussion that he covered in his book. The occasion of the trip was Thorium Energy Conference 2012. Bob is a professor with a good facility for numbers and a talent…
Now this is the kind of messaging I keep trying to tell my colleagues that the nuclear industry should be unashamedly sharing. I could not care less if it happens to offend some dirt burners. As the ad shows, when nuclear energy production increases, energy production from competitive fuel sources decreases. It is as simple…
An article titled Fukushima inspires safety features for Georgia nuclear reactors is a recent addition to CNN’s Powering the Planet series. It is packed full of misinformation about nuclear energy along with subtle and not so subtle promotion of natural gas, one of nuclear energy’s strongest competitors. The most important misinformation in the article is…
Occasionally I run into people who are opposed to nuclear who tell me that they fight it because we do not need the power. They forget that about 35-50% of the electricity in the United States comes from burning as much as 1.1 billion tons of coal per year. It is important to me that…