The Energy Bulletin has published a post titled “Energy resources and our future” – remarks by Admiral Hyman Rickover delivered in 1957. The talk was for delivery at a banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association St. Paul, Minnesota. According to Energy Bulletin contributor Rick Lakin, it was pulled from…
On this day (December 2) in 1942, Enrico Fermi and his team demonstrated that they knew how to configure a pile of graphite and uranium in such a way as to produce a controlled chain reaction.
According to a recent UPI interview titled Analysis: Reid to change U.S. energy plan, Harry Reid, the senior senator from Nevada who will soon be the Senate Majority Leader, has a strong desire to reduce American oil consumption. He is particularly concerned about the implications of importing more than 65% of the 21 million barrels…
One of my goals with this blog is to help people to understand that the energy debates are not just a discussion about technology – it is also a very important financial “game”. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to tell which “team” many of the participants in the energy are on – there are a…
Rod Adams and Shane Brown discuss the properties of polonium. They move on to the hazards of mining and transporting coal. Polonium talk is all over the news media because of the recent poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent living in the UK. The tale is one suitable for a John Le…
Chinese President Hu Jintao has completed his visit to Pakistan without inking the large nuclear power plant deal that some people expected, but there was little indication during the visit that already existing Chinese-Pakistani nuclear cooperation will slow down. In fact, there are many reasons to expect that the atomic business arrangements will grow substantially…
In the competitive energy market in the United States, coal is often a market share winner. With “modern” mining techniques, massive existing transportation infrastructure, and more than 600 electrical power plants the can use the fuel, coal is often seen as a cheap and available alternative to high priced natural gas or oil, unreliable alternatives…
The Washington Post published an article on November 25, 2006 titled Energy Firms Come to Terms With Climate Change. According to the authors of the article, more and more American energy industry leaders are accepting the notion that emissions of climate changing gases like carbon dioxide are going to be regulated. Even companies like Exxon-Mobile…
Monsters and Critics published an article on November 25, 2006 titled Draft nuclear report fails to convince. I am not surprised. There are plenty of critics of nuclear power that have invested too much of their careers in opposition to the technology – the chance of them changing their mind is essentially nil. It does…
On November 24, 2006, Wade Allison, Professor of Physics at Oxford University, gave a talk about the extreme caution with which radiation exposure is treated. According to an article titled Public needs better understanding of nuclear safety, Professor Allison said: Current environmental regulations that attempt to keep variations in radiation exposure to a fraction of…
George Stanford talks about sodium cooled fast reactors George Stanford earned his PhD in experimental nuclear physics from Yale University and then spent his professional career doing nuclear reactor safety research at the Argonne National Laboratory. One of his special interest was the sodium cooled fast reactor program. He worked on the Experimental Breeder Reactor…
Several months ago, I interviewed Ruth Sponsler, an amateur mineral collector. Ruth also runs a blog titled We Support Lee, which is named for a proposed new nuclear power station in Ruth’s home state of North Carolina, located in the southeast section of the United States. Ruth recently wrote a rather detailed post titled The…