In the past week, retirement has been a big topic on my mind. I served as a sideboy and flag passer for a colleague, I dig some digging into the cost of a flag officer retirement, and I attended a surprise retirement party for a man who had worked for the DC Metro system since…
Apparently there really is a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that applies to all major federal decisions with the potential to “significantly affect the quality of the human environment”. In accordance with that law, the Bureau of Land Management has placed a freeze on approving applications for large scale installations of solar energy plants on…
I’ve got a hot tip for you. According to an article in Seattlepi.com titled What’s next for Gates? Anything he can dream up, Gates is taking an active interest in a nuclear power project. He has been talking about all kinds of ideas with Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. According to…
I have been watching a lot of Washington DC area buses recently. For a variety of reasons, the ones that are painted in green jungle motifs or displaying large signs indicating “This Bus Running On Clean Natural Gas” fascinate me. Today I noticed a bus that had an even more obvious advertisement for methane –…
S. David Freeman, one of the most damaging energy policy makers of the 20th century is trying to make a comeback. For those of you who are not energy geeks, S. David Freeman served on the predecessor to the FERC under President Kennedy and worked on energy policies for both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon….
On Tuesday, June 17, 2008, I had an opportunity to take a few hours off from my day job to attend a CASEnergy Coalition sponsored press conference announcing the release of a new white paper titled Job Creation In the Nuclear Renaissance (4.8 MB PDF). If you are interested in just the Executive Summary from…
Workforce development, small reactors, 2008 ANS Annual Meeting, job opportunities, industry involvement in ANS, Zion Nuclear Power Plant John Wheeler, Kelly Taylor and I talked about workforce development and John’s impressions from the American Nuclear Society Annual meeting, recently held in Anaheim, California. With regard to workforce development we chatted about the opportunities that the…
You learn something new every day. One of my Google Alerts brought me a letter-to-the-editor from David Hollein, who indicated that he was once the “Westinghouse senior engineer assigned for all the Commonwealth Edison Company nuclear reactor sites”. His letter, published on June 15, 2008 by the Daily Herald (Suburban Chicago’s Information Source) and titled…
David Bradish at NEI Nuclear Notes has produced an insightful series of blogs about Amory Lovins and His Nuclear Illusion. The posts enter into a rather detailed analysis of some of the assumptions, deceptions, fuzzy mathematics and ill-founded conclusions reached by my least favorite energy prognosticator. There is something close to lying about a two…
Several of you have asked me for a copy of the little song I asked Geoff Smith to create for me as a new way of introducing people to the idea of an atomic alternative to fossil fuels. Here it is. Feel free to share it widely and let people know where to find it….
On the June 10, 2008 episode of the Daily Source Code, Atomic Rod (that’s me) payed a visit to rant about the fact that we have been conditioned to consider nuclear waste as an unsolvable problem while we have also been conditioned to simply accept and deal with the deadly waste products that spew out…
Switzerland has one of the cleanest electrical power systems in the world. It produces and consumes about 58 billion kilowatt-hours per year. Its five nuclear reactors (four power stations, one has two reactors) supply about 22 billion kilowatt-hours (38%), nearby French nuclear plants supply about 7-8%, and its extensive network of hydroelectric dams produce nearly…