(Thanks to Eric McErlain at NEI Nuclear Notes for the initial link to the story.) On Wednesday, April 26, 2006, the NewsHour program on PBS produced a short segment marking the 20 year anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. The segment is typically “balanced” by showing pictures of children with the claim that they have to…
We have reached the point where a response to the time worn question “What about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl?” can be answered with “They were both problems that happened MORE than 20 years ago.” Of course, there is room for discussion about the events and they should not be dismissed or forgotten, but the…
At 0123 local Ukrainian time on 26 April 1986, an alarm sounded at the Chernobyl nuclear power station marking the beginning of an accident that has had a lasting effect on the world. Today is the 20th anniversary of that event. Shane and Rod review the accident, the aftermath, and the lessons learned about the…
The depth and breadth of the information resources on the World Wide Web continue to amaze me. It has been more than 20 years since I sent my first email, and almost a dozen years since I posted my first web page, and I have been narrowly focused on energy issues (especially nuclear energy) for…
Shane and Rod take a trip into atomic fission history as they discuss the events and people leading up to the initial discovery that uranium nuclei could be broken, releasing vast quantities of energy. In just a few short years, a small number of physicists and chemists, mostly European and working with tiny research budgets,…
Texas has a major problem and TXU – one of the largest electricity generating companies in the state – has an investment plan designed to help fix the problem. The difficulty is that the solution may raise some serious questions in the minds of people that live and work in the state. Here is the…
Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, the President of India wants his government to back a plan to increase its nuclear power generating capacity from 2700 MW to 50,000 MW by the year 2030. He also called for an increased focus on the use of thorium since India owns about 30% of the world’s know supplies of…
The Salt Lake Tribune published a very interesting article on April 18, 2006 titled Coal energy plants face lost sales if they ignore technology advances. I discovered the article by accident; I have a daily Google search that looks for “new nuclear power plants” and all of those words were in the story. When I…
People that write headlines continue to give journalism a bad name. Of course, their jobs are different – journalists really do feel a professional obligation to provide balanced stories that attempt to inform their readers; headline writers want to attract people to a story so that they will read it. One profession needs space to…
Patrick Moore’s Sunday 16 April opinion piece in the Washington Post is generating quite a buzz online. The Post has picked nuclear energy as its debate topic of the week with lots of responses. If you dig deep into the discussion, you will find that I put in a couple of cents worth of comments….
This morning I found a couple of interesting – if ill-informed – posts by Dave Roberts on Gristmill, a blog hosted by Grist Magazine, which is a environmentally focused publication whose views I often share. His entry titled Nuclear: no alternatives? aims to make the case that nuclear power should be our last option; that…
Bloomberg.com’s Reed V. Landberg wrote an article titled Blair’s Decision on U.K. Nuclear Power May Cost Popularity that was published on April 14, 2006. The article discusses how polls that were conducted in Britain in October and November of 2005 indicate that nuclear power is not a “popular” choice when compared to investments in renewable…