As we come close to the holiday season, several listeners have very generously asked what they can do to show their appreciation for The Atomic Show. I am actually quite humbled by those requests. Since March of 2006, a loosely connected team of people has been working with available time to provide you with the…
Raser Technologies has recently started up a geothermal power plant in Utah that produces 10 MWe using a collection of identical, 200 kwe binary cycle units manufactured by UTC Power. It takes 50 of those units to produce the combined output, but by using these small, off the shelf machines, Raser was able to put…
I received several comments from people who had perused yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Apparently they saw the abbreviated paper version of the article titled Reading Up on Nuclear Energy. It was nice to hear from so many people and kind of nice to see my name in print. ( I am the guilty owner of…
British Energy has been having some unscheduled maintenance difficulties in recent months. Combined with scheduled maintenance that cannot be deferred, the issues have caused the portion of UK energy provided by nuclear power to drop – temporarily – to approximately 10%. Since North Sea gas production is falling, natural gas prices in the UK remain…
Dan Yurman who writes for Idaho Samizdat, Fuel Cycle Week and The Energy Collective shared a link with me to a very interesting hour long discussion on the topic of Nuclear Power and Decarbonization. Dan’s fellow panel members included E. Ashton Poole, Managing Director Global Power and Utility Group, Morgan Stanley and Jerry Paul, CEO,…
Luke Weston at Physical Insights has produced a valuable and detailed post about the Australian coal industry’s research and marketing efforts in the field of carbon capture and sequestration. Go read it – perhaps twice – before getting excited about the prospects for “clean coal”.
The University of Nevada News has posted a brief article about a new project to develop ways to use molten salts to recycle used nuclear fuel. Mano Misra, Director of the Center for Materials Research and a professor in the Department of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering said the following about the project: “This will be…
The NY Times Green Inc. blog recently asked readers to provide some suggestions for an image makeover for nuclear power. I did not like the published responses very much so I submitted my own: Dear Editor: In 1991, I took a cruise with my wife and noticed just how much smoke was pouring out of…
Wisconsin is one of the states in the US that has a law on its books that is a virtual moratorium on new nuclear power plants. Its law is similar to the one in California that states that the public service commission cannot approve a new nuclear plant until the federal government has built and…
On numerous occasions, I have heard speeches or read commentary by leaders in the US electric utility industry that have made the case that utilities need to partner or merge in order to have the financial heft to develop a new nuclear plant. The line of logic is something like this – official estimated cost…
Kelly Taylor and Rod Adams chat about President-elect Obama’s nuclear energy policies, the Areva-Northrop Grumman joint venture, and Warren Buffett’s purchase of Constellation Energy. Kelly Taylor and I got together for a Sunday evening chat to discuss President-elect Obama’s nuclear energy policies and their implications for the nuclear industry’s growth and development. We also talked…
Though it has been a few days since a full new post here, I have not been slacking off. Instead, I have been spending some quality time engaging in some interesting, possibly rewarding and sometimes frustrating discussions in the expanding universe of nuclear related discussions. I even managed to spend some time in real, face…