On November 21, 2005, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) (with all five members in attendance) held a series of meetings to discuss issues associated with new nuclear power plants. There were three invited groups – utilities that had expressed intentions to file a combined Construction and Operating License (COL) application, vendors and financial…
On Wednesday, November 15, 2005, I had the opportunity to talk with Kelly Taylor, a member of the North American Young Generation in Nuclear. Kelly has been working in the nuclear power industry since her high school graduation. Nineteen years ago, when she first entered the industry, it was a rare career choice for a…
Here are some gems found using Google Book Search. I will let you judge for yourself how you feel about the sentiments expressed in the quotes. “It is not possible to characterize en masse the various “No Nukes,” but there appear to be three major recurring themes in energy discussion. The first is a general…
I am learning to play with a new tool – Google Book Search Beta. Though I have some concerns about Google’s treatment of authors and their copyrights, I am excited by the prospects of being able to do serious research from my home office. Until today, I did not realize just how many obscure, but…
The PBMR project continues to make steady progress. In the past week, two important contracts have been signed. One, with the German firm SGL Carbon is for graphite core internals, and one with SNC-Lavalin Murray and Roberts (SLMR), a joint venture company of Canada’s SNC-Lavalin and South African Murray & Roberts covers phase one of…
A small group of investors made a bet last year that the spread between the cost of natural gas fired electricity and the cost of electricity from coal and nuclear power plants would increase. They recently cashed in on the bet, netting a profit of almost $5 BILLION on a $900 million dollar investment. The…
Clay Sell, the Deputy Secretary of Energy, spoke on 21 November 2005 to the US – Japan Nuclear Energy Conference being held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The speech mentioned a number of the topics that I have been writing about in recent months, including the nuclear incentives in the Energy Policy Act, the renewed…
In an article titled Britain is ready to go nuclear published in the The Times on 21 November 2005, Philip Webster is reporting that Britain will start the process of planning and building new nuclear power stations. The most often cited primary motivator for this decision is the fact that many scientific advisors have determined…
I stumbled across a Brookings Institution Policy Brief titled The Political Economy of Nuclear Energy in the United States that is dated September 2004. Oh what a difference a year can make. After reading the briefing closely, I took the advice offered at the bottom of the last page of the brief and composed a…
Asif Parvez has written an opinion piece for The Financial Express (Bangladesh) titled Nuclear power plant, a visible option for starved Bangladesh. It is worth the inevitable struggle to get past translation issues to read this article in order to expand understanding and to see an important issue from the perspective of an energy starved,…
Christopher Adams and Jean Eaglesham published a story in The Financial Times on Sunday 20 November 2005 about the debates that are going on in the UK cabinet about new nuclear power stations. The article, titled Looming Cabinet split over nuclear power discusses the sceptical, but possibly open-minded views of Margaret Beckett, the UK Environment…
Tim Gray of the New York Times published an article in the Sunday, 20 November 2005, Times titled “Can Nuclear Power Become Just Another Business?”. (The NY Times is a subscription site, though this article is available for free for 14 days with a simple registration.) The general premise of the article is that investors…