There is no doubt that there will be some effort to fight against any new nuclear power plants here in the US. There are people nearing retirement age whose entire adult lives have been spent in the professional battle to slow the development of nuclear fission based power plants. There was an article published in…
USAToday has the reputation of producing lightweight content for an audience that is generally just interested in keeping up with the headlines, often while traveling. I was pleasantly surprised a couple of days ago to find a well researched story titled Tech could reduce coal facilities’ emissions about the potential and the challenges facing a…
Unistar Nuclear has plans to build the first of a series of nuclear power plants about 50 miles south of my home in Annapolis at a place called Calvert Cliffs. Right now, there are two 850 MWe PWR units originally supplied by Combustion Engineering operating at that site. Throughout its history, Calvert Cliffs has been…
Dan Yurman over at Idaho Samizdat: Nuke Notes has published a detailed update on the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor project out of South Africa. The disappointing news is that the projected cost of the plants is quite a bit higher now than it was when I first started following this development in the mid 1990s….
The price increases experienced in the uranium market during the past 7 years has resulted in predictable behavior – exploration and mining operations are increasing. The clear signal sent by the market is that uranium is a desirable product, one that the customers need and that the suppliers can provide profitably. In a December 26,…
One of the myths that is carefully taught to power plant engineers during their required course in engineering economics is that there is a mathematical method for computing the cost of a power from a power plant. Using that methodical approach, a big part of the equation – which I never committed to memory –…
If you Google “toshiba personal reactor” you will find hundreds of recent blog posts. Here is one example from dvorak.org/blog titled Toshiba’s Personal-Sized Nuclear Reactor. I have had several readers send me links asking what I thought about the design and wondering whether or not the system is real. I have taken some time this…
A couple of weeks ago, I got involved in a long conversation on a rather obscure web site when I found that there was some discussion about my repeated questioning of Amory Lovins’s academic background. My post about joining the conversation is titled When is ad hominem information relevant to an energy discussion?. Some of…
In a December 19, 2007 column in the Washington Post titled A Nuclear Renaissance Ignored Max Shultz of the Manhattan Institute makes the case that the Democratic Party has moved away from the reflexive anti-nuclear position that it held in the 1980s as an official part of its party platform. He cites several examples of…
Ted Rockwell has been there and done that when it comes to nuclear power plant design and construction. He was a key member of the team that built the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the first solely commercial nuclear electric generating station in the world. On December 18, 1957, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station started supplying…
On December 18, 2007, I celebrated the 50th anniversary of commercial nuclear power by spending about an hour with Dr. Theodore (Ted) Rockwell. Ted was a key member of the Shippingport design, construction and operation team that included the Naval Reactors branch of the Atomic Energy Commission, Duquesne Light Company and Westinghouse Electric Company. You…
I read a comment yesterday that provided another data point on the need for American leaders to take a hard look at the way they view the rest of the world. The below comment appeared in a Spiegel Online International (an English language web site out of Germany) article titled Atomic Aid from Russia: Iran…