In an article in the Kansas City Star titled Atomic power finds new popularity, Gary Rainwater, the CEO of Ameren Corp is quoted as saying that his company is “seriously considering” adding a new nuclear power reactor at the Callaway Nuclear Plant. The article is quite lengthy and expresses some amount of excitement on the…
Baltimore civic leaders may be able to stop worrying about losing the only remaining Fortune 500 company that has its headquarters in the city. According to a recent article in the Baltimore Sun titled Utility merger could include power-sharing deal for CEOs a merged FP&L and Constellation Energy would maintain two headquarters offices, one in…
On Monday, 12 December 2005, I had the opportunity to attend a public meeting held at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) headquarters in Rockville, MD on the subject of pre license application reviews proposed by PBMR (Pty) Ltd. for their Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). The company proposed a series of workshops and white papers…
The Sierra Club of Canada (SCC) has confirmed its continued opposition to nuclear power. (Shocking!) In response to an expected announcement by the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) that Ontario should commit to building new nuclear power plants, Elizabeth May, the Executive Director of SCC has promised that her organization will “raise holy hell”. Those of…
FPL Group has offered to purchase Constellation Energy for $11 billion, a premium of about 10% above its market capitalization as of the day before the offer on December 13, 2005. Today, the first full day of stock trading after the offer was made public, both Constellation and FP&L shares are higher; Constellation’s have increased…
As I dug more deeply into the Annual Energy Outlook 2006 mentioned in yesterday’s entry, I realized that the projection for nuclear capacity increases had a rather strange pattern. According to the report overview, the agency projects that nuclear generating capacity will increase by 9,000 MW by 2019. This includes a gradual addition of 3,000…
The US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency has posted its early release of Annual Energy Outlook 2006. In recognition of major changes in the energy markets since last year there are several significant differences in what the agency calls its base case. World oil production is expected to grow at a slower rate than…
Last Thursday night I had the pleasure of spending the evening with the Michigan chapter of the American Nuclear Society. Despite the cold and snow, there was a good turnout and I had the chance to speak to a number of friendly and interested people during the pre dinner attitude adjustment period. Following the dinner,…
The BBC has collected some photos from the Luton airport fuel depot fire at These images are rather incredible. Take a good look and think about how pleasant it must be to live under that black, billowing smoke. Imagine if the fire was taking place in the coal stacked up next to your local power…
In the December 12, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek magazine, there is a “Special Report” titled Business gets serious about emissions. The article talks about a number of initiatives, actions, technologies, policies, and regulations related to the issue of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the face of almost certain cost increases attributed to global climate change….
One truck driver that services the fuel depot at the Luton Airport, the scene of the explosions and fire reported earlier today told the BBC, in a story titled Massive explosions hit fuel depot that the depot has twenty tanks each containing 3 million gallons of fuel. I want you to think about the implication…
CNET News published a story on 9 December 2005 titled Power could cost more than servers, Google warns. A Google engineer published an article in the September issue of Association for Computing Machinery’s Queue. He warned that power might eventually cost more than the hardware itself, which is quite a concern for an organization with…