I keep hearing people talk about how much new natural gas supply horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has provided to the US energy market. They keep telling me that is the reason that US gas prices have stubbornly remained at levels about 1/6th to 1/3 the levels in Europe, Japan and India. The ads –…
Donald Hoffman is one of the few entrepreneurs in the nuclear industry. His company, Excel Services, has been a profitable professional services provider to the nuclear industry for more than 25 years. Don is a leader who is willing to take calculated risks and also willing to recycle his profits back into his industry. Most…
My friends and family recognize that I am an odd bird. I often wake up in the middle of the night as a result of thinking about things that few others worry about. Tonight was a great example; my eyes failed open at midnight as I thought really hard about how to spread the word…
Dr. Jim Conca recently published an article titled What’s Better? A Carbon Tax or Energy Subsidies? for his column on Forbes.com. I invited him, along with Cal Abel, a nuclear engineering PhD candidate at Georgia Tech with a strong interest in energy economics, for a chat on the Atomic Show. We got a little off…
One of the frequently repeated comments about the way that the ad supported media choses its coverage is that the media tends to focus on “if it bleeds it leads” and on telling dramatic stories. If that was true, why are stories about deadly, dramatic fossil fuel accidents told once and then forgotten while brief…
I’ve spent a fair amount of time during the past few days trying to convince people who promote only certain types of nuclear fission technologies that they are engaging in the wrong battle. They are failing to recognize that all forms of fission take advantage of the incredible energy density found in atomic nuclei to…
As much as I like reading Bill Tucker’s generally pronuclear articles, I recognize that he sometimes gets the details wrong. In a recent American Spectator article titled Nuclear’s Dilemma: Few Jobs, Just Energy, Bill overlooked some important details about nuclear energy’s ability to generate good jobs in comparison to its competitors in wind, solar, coal,…
As promised, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s political action committee (PAC), the Searchlight Leadership Fund, has donated $10,000 to a legal defense fund set up to pay the expenses incurred by Dr. Greg Jaczko while he was serving Reid as the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Of course, there would not be a need…
In December 2009, the editor of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences decided to provide printing services for a small group of people who had a history of pursuing an agenda against the use of nuclear energy. They had translated a book titled Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the…
A recent post on Nuclear Town Hall titled WILLIAM TUCKER: At Last, Some Common Sense on Fukushima generated some passionate reactions by some of my corresponding associates who study radiation health effects. Here is the particular passage from that post that lead to the comments I want to share with you. What does this suggest?…
By Paul T. Dickman Paul Dickman was a career Federal environmental scientist specializing in nuclear waste and nuclear materials management. He served as Chief of Staff to NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein. Part 2 of 2 NRC’s Draft Waste Confidence Decision Update of October 2008 was based on an understanding of that the DOE would…
By Paul T. Dickman Paul Dickman was a career Federal environmental scientist specializing in nuclear waste and nuclear materials management. He served as Chief of Staff to NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein. Part 1 of 2 The 12th paragraph below has been revised to clarify that the 1998 rule was a reaffirmation of a 1990…