As I talk with other “nukes” at conferences, on the web and in other social circumstances, I often get into political discussions. I know – you are supposed to avoid politics, religion and sex in social circumstances, but I guess I never really accepted the idea that one should avoid all interesting topics as a…
I missed this little story that was published in Forbes about a month ago – China to build two nuclear power plants in Shandong province – official. The story is only a couple of paragraphs long and it is quite short on details, but here are two that I found fascinating. 1. The plants will…
Dr. Helen Caldicott has been an effective leader in the antinuclear movement for several decades. I disagree strongly with her position on nuclear power, though I do not have quite a strong a disagreement with her stance on nuclear weapons. However, I recognize that she is a formidable woman with a large following and I…
Texas seems to be the destination of choice for major investments in nuclear power plants. I came across a story in the Chicago Tribune titled Nuclear power push revs up; paperwork keeps ‘option open’ about Exelon’s recent announcement that they are looking at about eight different sites in Texas with the idea of building a…
There is an interesting and well reasoned post at We Support Lee: Al Gore’s Speech that is worth a visit. It contains a clear articulation of the plusses and minuses of various energy production methods and tries to understand the politics that often underly some of the statements made about each energy production method. Energy…
The Innovations Report – a web site published in Germany – recently posted an article titled MIT engineers work to improve nuclear power generation that describes two projects by MIT researchers aimed at improving the performance of light water reactors. (That term is used to describe both pressurized and boiling water reactors that use ordinary…
Kommersant (Russia’s Daily Online) published an article titled Russia’s Neighbors Splitting Gas Into Atoms on September 27, 2006. It tells the story of ambitious nuclear power plans in the Ukraine and in Belarus. Both countries see nuclear power as a way to reduce their natural gas consumption and their dependence on Russian suppliers. Last winter,…
The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, is often considered to be the seminal work on free markets. In Wealth, Smith had a lot to say about monopolies and competition. Here is one quote that I like to keep in mind as I try to comprehend John Rowe’s somewhat confusing position on new nuclear power…
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has recently published a report titled Unlearned Lessons from Year-plus Reactor Outages that makes some rather absurd claims. The most glaringly wrong comment from the web site that has been set up to market the report is the following: This event—an outage at a nuclear power plant that lasts…
Impressions of talk by the Nuclear Energy Institute President. Shane and I start off the show by congratulating the voters in Sweden for their recent election of a new government. The leaders of the parties that seem likely to form the new coalition government have declared that they will not shut down any of Sweden’s…
I did not realize that I was missing a controversy until a good friend (thanks Cameron) asked me what I thought about Steorn’s claim to have discovered a way to create “free” energy. I did a quick Google search and found some interesting reports about a small Irish company that claims to have found a…
There is an often discussed plan for China to purchase four large nuclear reactors at a cost of about $2 billion per reactor. This deal has been in the works for quite some time; two years ago on September 12, 2004, People’s Daily Online published a story titled Foreign energy giants bid for China’s nuclear…