Ronald Cooke, author of Oil, Jihad and Destiny has published an article on Energy Pulse titled The 2006 Economic Forecast: Oil Remains a Wildcard that should be required reading for government policy making officials. If you are involved in any government economics policy or if you are a strategic planner for a business, or if…
Many people that have heard me talk about the energy density of uranium have had the opportunity to see my “three shooters” demonstration. For those of you who are totally lost, here is the background. If you compute the volume of uranium needed for a pound of the material you can compare it almost exactly…
During the period from 1980-1988, a large and comprehensive study was conducted to determine the risks of occupational exposure to low levels of radiation. A summary of the study’s final report, which was completed in 1991 but not widely released, has been published under the title of Nuclear shipyard worker study (1980–1988): a large cohort…
I learned as an English major that writers are careful about selecting the words that they use. Whenever I speak about reusing the materials left over from the first pass through a nuclear reactor, I use the word “recycle”, but many people seem to like the word “reprocessing” instead. I am not sure why they…
There has been a lot of interesting news about atomic energy this past week, a fact that you might have missed if Atomic Insights is a major source of your news. I apologize – sometimes life interferes with blogging. One of the things that has taken up more time than it should have has been…
After the Chernobyl accident, Italy passed a referendum to halt new nuclear power plant construction and to shut down their existing plants. As a result of that decision and the fact that Italy has little coal, it now generates 75% of its internally generated electricity from oil or natural gas. This dependence has given Italy…
In the February 8, 2006 issue of Newsweek magazine, there is a story titled Another Nuclear Dawn in which the author, Fred Guterl repeats an often used, but erroneously thought out statement. He said “Environmentalists, who used to be the natural enemies of nuclear power, are now busy beating their drums over climate change.” It…
The Bush administration has often pointed to Iran’s oil and gas resources as prima facie evidence that their nuclear power ambitions must be related to weapons. After all, the expressed logic goes, why would a country that is well endowed with oil and gas want nuclear power stations. (Of course, that argument is bunk, especially…
It looks like the Wall Street Journal is realizing that offering some of its excellent content for free might help to draw in new readers. I was very encouraged yesterday to find that one of its articles turned up in one of my Google news alert summaries. I was especially pleased by the topic of…
This posting needs a little context. I occasionally get into conversations with people that wonder why I am so passionate about atomic energy. Explanations of that sort often require some background information. I composed this letter as part of a conversation with a journalist whose views are completely divergent, but who is willing to listen…
On 3 July 2006, I published a post titled “Nuclear referendum in the market”. The topic of the post was the announcement from BNFL that they had decided to put its Westinghouse division up for sale. Since the division focuses almost exclusively on nuclear technology, the gist of my post was that watching the progress…
The International Herald Tribune is reporting on a new wrinkle to the energy supply situation in European Russia in an article titled Report: Prosecutors call blasts on Russian pipelines sabotage. Two natural gas pipelines running through southern Russia into Georgia and then into Armenia were damaged by explosions that occurred early Sunday 22 January 2006….