On June 15, 2011, the professional staff at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission provided a brief to the commission. It was the second of three planned status updates on the Task Force Review of NRC Processes and Regulations Following Events in Japan. The briefing started with a report by Bill Borchardt the NRC’s Executive Director…
Two articles that appear in the New York Times on June 15, 2011 should help to make it more clear to more thinking people – Russia, the world’s largest natural gas exporter, stands to gain the most money by an illogical, politically driven shift away from nuclear energy. It baffles me why there is so…
Circumstances sometimes create some rather strange alliances. This week, despite being a proud liberal who proudly supports public education, comes from a family of union school teachers, appreciates the value of being covered by a single payer medical plan and voted for President Obama, I find myself cheering for a group of representatives who are…
The Energy Collective, is an aggregation site that provides a wide variety of views about energy. It is often a place with high quality discussions, but it can also be a site where article placement decisions completely baffle me. Yesterday, I visited The Energy Collective and found out that the best, most visible spot on…
I realize that my topic selection during the past couple of days might have given the mistaken impression that NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko’s action to derail the Yucca Mountain project is the main reason that I think that the man is a hazard to the prosperity of my grandchildren. People who have been reading Atomic…
I received an email from Tom Popik, the founder of the Foundation for Resilient Societies a few days ago. The email was addressed to a selection of people who blog favorably about nuclear energy. For some odd reason, Tom thought that we might be interested in supporting the petition for rulemaking that his organization has…
Dr. Gregory Jaczko has successfully elevated the office of Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission into a position of far higher visibility than the often obscure office has received in a very long time – at least since it was an office called the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and inhabited by David…
The US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology has released a report of its findings on the politically motivated budgetary maneuvers that NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko employed to starve his own staff of the funds required to complete their legally mandated review of the DOE Yucca Mountain repository application. He took that…
During a recent discussion on a email list frequented by pro-nuclear activists, we were discussing possible advertising messages that we would like to see from nuclear companies or nuclear industry groups. There is no way that any other fuel or power source can compete with uranium or thorium fission on anything close to a level…
Platts Energy Week recently aired a short segment discussing a topic that I was dimly aware of, but had not taken the time to pursue. According to Platts, natural gas market analysts are discussing the overall impact of the expiration of something called “held by production leases”. Platts’s explanation piqued my interest, but the presenter’s…
On May 10, 2011, the Friends of the Earth, a group that has professionally opposed nuclear energy since the late 1960s, issued a press release that challenged the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s refusal to extend the public comment period for the AP1000. Here is a quote from the press release describing how the group organized…
On March 16, five days after the Fukushima Daiichi reactors were shutdown in the wake of a large earthquake that was followed by a tsunami, Gregory Jaczko, the Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, announced that he was recommending that all Americans within fifty miles of the nuclear power station evacuate the area. That…