As a patriotic and competitive American, I am worried about the long term effects of the difference in stimulus investments between my country and China. We spent $3 billion dollars subsidizing the purchase of new automobiles for individual people and are spending an untold amount of money helping other individuals to purchase homes through the…
The Wall Street Journal has published a pithy and quite good summary of the prospects for new nuclear plant construction in the United States written by Rebecca Smith and titled The New Nukes: The next generation of nuclear reactors is on its way, and supporters say they will be safer, cheaper and more efficient than…
Last year, the PBMR company in South Africa began testing TRISO coated fuel particles containing Uranium Dioxide enriched to 9.6% U-235. These 1 millimeter diameter fuel particles are the fundamental building blocks of the high temperature fuel that the company intends to use in their gas cooled modular reactors. The next higher level of assembly…
On September 5, 2009, a group of people gathered in Berlin, Germany to encourage the German government to stick with its plan to phase out the 17 nuclear power plants that current provide about 1/3 of its electricity supply. The organizers claim that the gathering included between 30,000-50,000 people from all across Germany and its…
New Energy and Fuel has published a post titled Another New Small Fission Reactor Joins the Group. It is a perceptive post whose author uses a well proven technique to attract my attention. I recommend reading the piece and the comment thread.
I was dimly aware that Spain had, up until 2008, one of the most generous feed in tariff laws for grid connected solar systems, both photovoltaic and thermal. What I did not know was that Spain, as small and as lightly populated as it is, represented fully 42% of the world market for solar PV…
The New York Times blog Green Inc. which is subtitled Energy, the Environment and the Bottom Line, published a post titled More Delays at Finnish Nuclear Plant that indicates a continuing confusion about the implications of the construction and contract dispute related delays at the Olkiluoto unit 3 European Pressurized Reactor project in Finland. Green…
According to a recent news release and press conference held by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), an organization that has been fighting against nuclear power for several decades, the nuclear renaissance is a fiction that only seems visible inside the Washington, DC Beltway. By their score card, the tally is 6 runs against…