Vicky Eckenrode of the Morris News Service published an interesting article titled Fuel costs eat at electric utilities. I found a published on November 18, 2005 on the web site of the Gwinnett Daily Post. After a detailed discussion of the basis for several recent fuel adjustment requests by both Georgia Power and by Savannah…
On November 15, 2005, at the ANS Winter Meeting, Jacques Besnainou, Senior Executive Vice President, Reprocessing and Recycling, AREVA, spoke about fuel reprocessing, which is now properly being referred to as fuel recycling. In contrast to other talks and papers on the subject, Mr. Besnainou did not focus on a comparison in cost between fresh…
On Tuesday November 15, 2005, at the ANS Winter Meeting, Thomas Houghton, Senior Project Manager, New Plant Development, Nuclear Energy Institute talked about various aspects of the physical and industrial infrastructure that will be needed to support new plant development. He began his presentation with a rather startling slide for people that had not been…
On Tuesday, November 15, 2005 at the ANS winter meeting, there was a general session about four aspects of the supporting infrastructure that will need attention in order to successfully reestablish a vibrant nuclear plant construction effort in the United States. As has been repeated in countless articles, it has been more than three decades…
The tag line for the ANS winter meeting was “Talk about Nuclear Differently: A Good Story Untold”. Based on the sessions that I managed to attend, in between coughing fits, I heard a number of themes that were significantly different from those that I had heard at other ANS meeting attended over the years. There…
I spent the majority of the past week at the American Nuclear Society winter meeting held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC. I had every intention of adding new material regularly during the conference, but three issues slowed me down. First of all, I came down with a wicked cold that sapped my…
After listening to some interesting talks yesterday about various methods of producing hydrogen as a means to reduce our dependence on fuels that release CO2 into the atmosphere, I was a bit shaken to come across the following article on BBC news – Water builds the heat in Europe. I guess I knew that water…
On 12 November 2005, Business.Telegraph published a story titled Power transfer for the people about the electrical power supply situation in South Africa. The story does a good job of explaining the economic and developmental reasons why Eskom is developing the PBMR. I have been following this technology project almost since it started in 1993,…
As I told you in my last post, I attended the first ever Young Professionals Congress, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to a Career in Nuclear meeting today. The diverse group of about forty – about half of them women – nuclear professionals and students included people associated with national laboratories, universities, power plants, corporate headquarters, power…
I’m excited – it is time to head out for some live contact with young(er) nuclear professional. I will be covering the first-ever Young Professionals Congress, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to a Career in Nuclear in Washington, D. C. today. Maybe I will even capture some of the “dress for success” session on my iPod.
Eric McErlain at NEI Nuclear Notes pointed me to an interesting discussion that is going on at MetaFilter about nuclear power in response to Judith Lewis’s article in the LA Weekly. You can find the discussion at http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/46540. I was impressed by the civil nature of the discussion and the intelligence of the comments, even…
In a lengthy interview, Gyle Konotopet of Ontario Business Edge uncovers Duncan Hawthorne’s long term goal. Mr. Hawthorne, the CEO of Bruce Power, and son of a Glasgow shipyard electrician wants to be the first to build a new nuclear plant in North America in a several decades. The interview discusses his long history in…