Another low sleep night. Through a long and unrepeatable browsing path involving the Chris Perillo show and Dave Ryder’s excellent web site, I came across this picture link, which made me remember that I had something to say about transmission lines. The joy of blogging and streams of random thoughts. I recognize that electric power…
One of the most often repeated myths about nuclear power is that no one wants to invest in it. There was a time when that seemed to be true, but that time is long gone. If you review the performance of utility companies during the past three years, the more nuclear exposure that the utility…
Petroleum – that term includes oil, gas and derivatives – wells have been going dry for more than 150 years. Until now, the solution to that problem of resource depletion has been to find a new place to drill. Though there is still a lot of oil left inside the Earth, there is a significant…
My family and I just returned from a terrific coach tour of the UK and Ireland. I liked being a passenger; it gave me the opportunity to see a lot of the country. As people that know me might suspect, I paid a good deal of attention to the energy infrastructure that I could see…
The following post was first created as the response to one more article from a “pro energy” guy who does not understand his competition. The original article can be found at the Energy Pulse web site under the title of Oil Now and Oil Tomorrow. In case you do not want to wade through all…
As frequent readers know, I am a huge fan of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) project that has been under development in South Africa since 1993. Though there have been some hurdles over the years, and the project has had to overcome a significant amount of resistance, the PBMR team – originally from Eskom,…
The Alaska state legislature has approved $500,000 to fund a study of using nuclear power reactors – perhaps the Toshiba 4S described here a couple of days ago – to replace diesel generators as a source of electricity in remote areas. Even though Alaska is a large crude oil producer, the residents of the state…
On May 16-18 2005, the Nuclear Energy Institute hosted its annual Nuclear Energy Assembly. The conference, held at the Fairmont Hotel in northwest Washington DC was titled Nuclear Energy 2005: A Time of Opportunity. There were both optimistic and cautionary speeches given during the conference. Some of the speeches are available for download from our…
There are a number of new nuclear power projects in various stages of implementation and planning. One of the more interesting projects is a plant that produces only about 1% of the power output of a “typical” commercial nuclear power plant. Designed to provide needed electricity for a town with a population of less than…
Yesterday morning during my commute, I listened to the May 31 edition of Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl?issue=20050531) and heard an interesting interview with Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. He made a couple of statements that seemed rather incongruous. On one hand, he described his focused efforts since his election to pass legislation banning uranium mining on…