English majors are notorious for reading between the lines and coming up with character motivation theories that are not supported by the text on the page. That is one reason I thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate education – it was fun to try to find the underlying story while most of my engineer friends were crying…
In the Sunday, February 15, 2009 edition of TimesOnline (London), James Lovelock leads off a column supportive of nuclear power with a hypothetical story line. His hypothesis, nearly as interesting and potentially as conception altering as his famous Gaia theory, is that creative writers missed an opportunity for a believable thriller by failing to explore…
Peter Applebome has been writing about the controversy surrounding the Indian Point Nuclear Plant relicensing effort for several years. In the Saturday, February 14, 2009 , issue of the New York Times, in the Our Towns section, you can find his most recent piece titled Indian Point And a License To Disagree. After reading that…
One of the clubs used to batter atomic power advocates is the old story of indigenous people exploitation during the uranium mining boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The way the story is told, the uranium extracted from Navajo tribal land came at great cost to the health and welfare of the miners and their…
I have spent the last few hours reading some interesting, sometimes detailed articles about nuclear power in India, Texas, Vermont and South Carolina. I also re-read a thought provoking article about how the neo-cons “killed” nuclear power. Though the author of that article used the word “killed”, I think she would agree that it is…
While reading a report titled Strategic Research Agenda published by a European organization called the Sustainable Nuclear Energy Technology Platform, I found a graph that I plan to use in many online debates. At the risk of incurring a take down notice, I will publish that graph here for ready reference.
Reuters is reporting that Stephan Kohler, the managing director of Dena, the German government energy agency, recently spoke at a trade fair in Europe in favor of a continued push to build new coal and gas fired power plants as a way to ensure that Germany remains an industrial power. “New build of fossil fuels-based…
On February 3, 2009, I attended a public meeting regarding the future construction of North Anna Unit 3. Several of the people who attended that meeting gathered via Skype last night to share notes. I will add some more notes to this post later today, but now it is time to get ready for my…
On Thursday February 5, 2009, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! moderated a brief debate about nuclear power between Harvey Wasserman and Patrick Moore. The forcing function for holding the debate on that date was the fact that the Senate has included an additional authorization for $50 billion in loan guarantees for clean energy as part…
Back in 1980, politicians in Sweden offered the country’s voters a referendum on nuclear power that offered three options for implementing a gradual phase out of the technology, but no options on the ballot called for maintaining or expanding use. After nearly thirty years in which only two smallish plants at Barseback were shut down,…
Social media sites like Facebook and LiveJournal have added several new words to our American lexicon; one that I want to explore today is “unfriend”. In the Facebook vocabulary, that is a term that means quietly striking someone off of your computerized list of “friends”. Those are the people that you care enough about to…
I have to learn better prep skills – my video camera battery ran dry before the entertainment really started at last night’s public meeting regarding the environmental impact statement and construction and operating license application for Dominion Resource’s North Anna Unit 3. After leaving my Arlington, VA office just after 5, it took me a…