Reed College is perhaps best known among technologists as the place where Steve Jobs learned about calligraphy – among a number of other useful topics. It is also the only liberal arts college that owns a research reactor that is operated primarily by undergraduates. I hope you enjoyed Will and Norm’s visit to the Reed…
Updated (May 9, 2012 05:47 am) This now includes information from Southern California Edison and the California Independent System Operator explaining why they had published an “estimated return to service date” for San Onofre. Original post starts here. Stories that underly other stories can be fascinating topics for discussion. Yesterday morning, a friend sent me…
With a hat tip to Ben Heard at Decarbonize SA, I thought it might inspire you to see two videos side by side. These videos were created in geographic locations that are about as far apart as you can get and still be on Earth. As far as I can tell, neither creative team knew…
In the power system marketing wars, both nuclear fission and natural gas are currently labeled as “low carbon” sources of electricity. Even though nuclear fission reactors can be clean enough to run inside sealed submarines, the forces who oppose nuclear energy insist that there is enough CO2 produced in the fuel cycle and in the…
John Rowe is the recently retired CEO of Exelon, an electric power generation and natural gas delivery company with the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the United States. Exelon just completed a merger with Constellation Energy, bringing the total number of nuclear reactors in its fleet to 22 (17 from Exelon and 5…
If you think your fuel bill is high, imagine what it must be for companies with fleets of heavily leveraged 737s, 747s, A300s, A330s, A380s or 777s.
Though many of you appreciate the long form blogging on Atomic Insights, there are just too many different topics worth mentioning today to try to put together a reasonably coherent post. If you want to engage and see just how many different issues have captured my attention today, I suggest that you watch the Twitter…
I’ve been following a couple of conversations about a recent story that has been floating around the web from an antinuclear Chicken Little named Robert Alvarez. According to Alvarez, a man who seems to believe that it is physically possible for dense, corrosion-resistant, solid material to instantaneously vaporize, the spend fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi…
There was a scene in the ABC documentary titled I Can Convince You About … Climate” that featured Bjorn Lomborg, the self proclaimed “Skeptical Environmentalist”. Lomborg acknowledges that human activity is causing the climate to change due to changing atmospheric chemistry, but he thinks that the proposed solutions are either too expensive, not effective, or…
During the Australian Broadcasting Company documentary titled I Can Change Your Mind About … Climate there is a scene where Anthony Leiserowitz (via Skype video) shares some of what he has learned during his research about climate change attitudes with Nick Minchin and Anna Rose, the show’s protagonists. Here is how the producers of “I…
Jason Mraz, a Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter, published a thought piece on the Huffington Post titled Global Warming Is No Longer a Future Problem, It’s a Now Event that inspired me to go and find some of his music. He is the kind of observer of the human condition worth reading and listening to. As…