A news article posted on 5 November 2005 on the website of KTVO TV3 out of Kirksville Missouri reported that the retail price of natural gas in the area had increased from $0.72 to $1.29 per 100 cubic feet between the winter of 2004-05 and now. That is an increase of 85%. Customers have expressed…
For the past 19 years, South Korea has been working to site a facility capable of storing low and intermediate level radioactive waste materials. On 2 November 2005, the South Korean government announced that Gyeongju, an ancient city that once served as the capitall of the Silla Kingdom, had won. The waste products that the…
As the prospects for new nuclear power plant construction improve, the numerous small suppliers of components like heat exchanger tubes, valves, control rods, specialty materials, and fuel components are seeing strong improvements in their order books. One French supplier of nickel alloy tubes, which was laying people off five years ago, has recently received orders…
I have been listening to a number of podcasts for several months. There is an incredible variety of shows out there – one of my favorites is G’Day World, an interview formatted podcast out of Australia hosted by Cameron Reilly. He recently posted an interview with Noam Chomsky. I had heard the name before, but…
There is at least one company that has installed the capability to capture carbon and inject it into a geologic structure on a reasonably large scale. Statoil, a Norwegian oil and gas company that produces about 60% of Norway’s annual petroleum output, installed a carbon separation and compression system in its Sleipner West field in…
In an article published in the New Zealand Herald’s 2 November 2005 on line edition, Senator Ian Campbell (also identified as Australia’s environment minister) stated: “Any politician who stands in the way of providing uranium to the world is committing an outrageous act of environmental vandalism.” As is often the case for a politician, he…
Tim Worstall published an article titled “Nuclear Power and CO2 Emissions” on 1 November 2005. Well worth a read. The topic has been discussed several times before and Tim does an admirable job of trying to be fair to people who baldly assert that nuclear power has measurable emissions of polluting gases that are worse…
Nuclear Engineering International published a story on 2 November 2005 about Progress Energy’s announced plans to apply for two new nuclear power stations. Each station would include two reactors. Progress Energy has not announced its choice of reactor designs, but has indicated that it will limit its choice to one of the three evolutionary designs…
One of my favorite authors is Michael Fumento – he has published a number of excellent books and articles during the past 20 years. However, I think his logic is a bit weak when it comes to his recent article about the use of oil sands as a replacement for other oil supplies. There is…
The Triangle Business Journal is reporting that Progress Energy is preparing a license application for a plant in the Carolinas as well as its previously announced effort to prepare an application for a plant to be located in its Florida service territory.
Many energy supply commentators profess an outdated view of coal as a low cost fuel with rather steady and predicable prices. That description of the coal market, which had been reasonably accurate for more than a decade before about 2002, became obsolete because of a number of factors. China’s rapid growth Lengthy, maintenance related, shut…
BP, the oil gathering, refining and marketing conglomerate formerly known as British Petroleum, is continuing its efforts to convince people that it has moved “beyond petroleum”. In two large, 2/3 of a page advertisements on pages 16 and 17 of the November 7, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek, the company details its efforts to double its…