Atomic Show Number 61 – Interview with Dr. Allison MacFarlane, Atomic Agnostic

Last night I had an interesting chat with Dr. Allison MacFarlane. She is an Associate Professor of Environment Science and Policy at George Mason University and a research associate of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University. She also co-authored Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the…

Senator Domenici introduces an excellent discussion in Energy Bill debates

It is summertime in Washington and the leaders of the Senate are engaging in a seemingly annual exercise of creating a new energy bill. Yesterday, there was apparently an interesting skirmish between the two senators from New Mexico, who are both members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Until control of the Senate passed…

Staffing the nuclear renaissance

There was a useful article published in the Jun 10, 2007 issue of the St. Pete Times titled Who will staff the nuclear renaissance?. The subtitle of the story should be very encouraging to those hard working young people who have been studying nuclear technology during the past dozen or so years. Nuclear power’s unlikely…

Nevada Solar One starts up

Nevada Solar One, a 64 MWe capacity solar thermal energy plant, started up yesterday – Wednesday June 6, 2007. The plant cost its developers $250 million and it is projected to produce 124 million kilowatt-hours per year. The plant covers approximately 400 acres with mirrored troughs that concentrate the heat from the desert sun (the…

Another view of the Westinghouse sale to China

I ran across another commentary on the sale of Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors to China at humanevents.com in the form of an article by Timothy P. Carney titled Administration Poised to Subsidize China’s Nuclear Industry. (Amusingly enough, the banner for Human Events.com includes a subtitle “Leading the conservative movement since 1944”. I know that includes the…

Does nuclear power split environmentalists?

A couple of days ago, Marc Fisher, who operates a blog titled Raw Fisher at the Washington Post, published a commentary titled Mixed greens: How nuclear power splits environmentalists. This post has attracted a significant string of well-reasoned (and a few goofy) comments. I encourage you to visit, read the thread and contribute if you…

Encyclopedia of Earth – Small Power Reactors

Sometimes I forget just how many people have recognized that there is a potential market for smaller nuclear power plants. A friend of mine sent me a link recently to an excellent summary of the publicly available information about a myriad of projects from more than a dozen different countries. You can find the article…

China may export the technology learned by building modern reactors

I have some trouble explaining my reluctance to do business with China. Perhaps it is just stubbornness or my inability to move on from my long established Cold War mentality, but I simply do not trust the dictatorial Communist Party government that still runs the place. Sure, they may be more interested in making money…

NNadir visits Atomic HQ

One of the most interesting observers that I have found about nuclear energy is a diarist on The Daily Kos who uses the pen name of NNadir. He is a very progressively minded chemist who calls himself an Eleanor Roosevelt liberal. He believes that prosperity for all is a good goal, that humans have a…

Czech reactor at Temelin shifting fuel suppliers from Westinghouse to TVEL

One of the profit centers in the nuclear business is in supplying manufactured fuel elements. Though fuel costs are a much smaller portion of the overall costs of generating power in a nuclear plant than they are in a fossil fuel plant, there is still a significant amount of money involved. Though full economic information…