Month: April 2009

I can almost hear Another One Bites The Dust, the ubiquitous Queen song played at so many American high school sporting events. According to Professor Barry Brook’s Brave New Climate, James Hansen and Tom Blees have influenced another long time anti-nuclear activist to take another look at nuclear power, especially in light of the climate…

Bill Conlon writes Knowledge and Thoroughness: Musings on Energy, Technology, Music and Politics. Bill has a degree in Nuclear Engineering and is a licensed Professional Engineer (Mechanical) in California. About 8 months ago, I discovered Bill’s blog because it included a post about his mentor, John Tully, who was a former Chief Mechanical Engineer for…

Nuclear power is often dismissed as “just another way to boil water” as if that is not an industrially important activity. The problem with people who try to turn that statement into a condemnation is that boiling water is historically the most lucrative and important physical process that enables modern human society. It was, in…

On Earth Day 2009, Jon Wellinghoff, the newly appointed chairman of the U. S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission declared that “baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism.” He went on to compare power plants to computers, further exposing the limits of his technical knowledge “People talk about, ‘Oh, we need baseload.’ It’s like people…

The Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital blogged about Phil Radford, the 33 year old activist who has taken over the reins at Greenpeace USA. Not suprisingly, Mr. Radford affirmed his opposition to clean coal, asserted that renewables could do the job of supplying all needed electricity – with a little transitional help from natural gas…

David Walters, who blogs at Daily Kos and Left Atomics joined me for a discussion about the benefits that a revived nuclear power industry could bring to the working class and to aid in economic development in states like North and South Carolina. Part of the inspiration for the show was an interview with Chris…

As part of my rambling effort to catch up with events and commentary about nuclear power, I found an article about “new” whistleblower accusations of a massive cover up following TMI. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the Steven Wing studies that claim that the health records of people who lived near the facility…

Yesterday, the Vermont Legislature warmly received a non-nuclear energy salesperson and allowed her to continue her traditional tactic of emotionally telling negative stories about the competition. I know, that is a purposely provocative way to describe the event, but that is certainly one way of looking at a situation where wind and solar entrepreneurs named…

I came across an article a publication called Energy Washington Week about small reactors that troubled me a bit. Unfortunately, I cannot link to that article because the source is a subscription only publication. Tthe article gave me the impression that the NRC is not terribly interested in licensing small reactors because its funding came…