Month: May 2010

Meredith Angwin at Yes Vermont Yankee posted this three year old classic on her site today. Just remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

As a “served engineer” on a nuclear powered submarine, I learned a long time ago that things go wrong, even with the very best technology. The recognition of inevitable “problems” should not deter technical development and should not make people afraid to develop new products and services, but it should add a healthy dose of…

Graham Jesmer of RenewableEnergyWorld.com interviewed Amory Lovins at Solar 2010 about the prospects for the renewable energy business in general and solar in particular. Lovins could not resist the opportunity to make his usual pronouncements about the superior value of distributed, but unreliable power sources like wind and solar and repeat his frequent lie about…

I often suspect that the raison d’etre for the nuclear weapons non-proliferation community is to add barriers that restrict the beneficial use of nuclear energy. Many prominent spokespeople from that community can be counted on to make proclamations of worry for any innovation in the fuel cycle that improves performance, lowers costs, or reuses material….

A friend who has heard me discuss my theories about the relationships between mainstream Environmental groups and fossil fuel extraction and marketing companies sent me a link to an article titled Polluted by profit: Johann Hari on the real Climategate. He included a rather amusing subject line on the email “Red meat for Rod” and…

Platts published an article dated May 24, 2010 describing a request by the Obama Administration to include an additional $10 billion in loan guarantee authority for nuclear and renewable energy programs as part of the supplemental appropriation bill that is normally used for military war related expenditures and disaster relief programs. The loan guarantee authority,…

There is an informative article in the business section of the San Diego Tribune’s online publication titled Renewables need helping hand from gas. The article describes how combined cycle gas turbine plants work, with gas turbine exhausts feeding steam plant bottoming systems. It talks about air cooled condensers and about the use of peakers to…

On May 25, 2010, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Army Corps of Engineers held a joint public meeting/hearing to present their initial recommendation and solicit public comments following their release of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement on a proposed Calvert Cliffs Unit 3. The EIS project has been underway for two full years; I…

A friend shared a link to an EBay auction for a vintage advertisement from General Electric describing its efforts to help the world move past its dependence on burning coal. This ad appeared in 1972, just a couple of years before Ralph Nader successfully gathered a large group of organizations that had been individually fighting…

Senator Lamar Alexander is one of the more energy literate members of the United States Senate. He was recently quoted in a Knoxnews.com article titled Alexander calls Mass. offshore wind farm ‘a taxpayer rip-off’ as saying the following about the Jim Gordon led project to build a 130 turbine, 468 MWe (max output) wind farm…

The Pacific Northwest is an area of the country where the electrical power supply has some common attributes with the power supply system serving the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway). There is a large installed base of hydroelectric power, a small amount of nuclear power, and some variable fossil power. As is the case in…