One of the best things about nuclear energy is that the fuel is cheap and densely concentrated. That characteristic enables facilities to be hardened against external events, and has the potential to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear energy facilities to infrastructure damage that happens outside of the facility. The low cost fuel also enables a…
CORRECTED COPY and CORRECTED HEADLINE From Salon.com Possible explosion at Con Ed power plant UPDATE: John Miksad, Con Ed’s Sr. V.P. of Electic Operations, has confirmed to NY1 that the explosion occurred at one of the company’s substations, knocking out power for 230,000 to 250,000 residents in parts of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. There were…
Part of my persona and my “brand” is a hairy upper lip. In the past 31 years, I have only been clean shaven for a few days in Movember 2009. The occasion for that loss of mustache event was an opportunity to bring attention to men’s health issues by helping the Movember campaign to raise…
A recent European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) blog post about nuclear energy “subsidies” includes a statement revealing a common misunderstanding about energy system economics. There is also a puzzling contradiction in Foratom’s blog. First it claims, “today nuclear energy is competitive in the internal energy market without requiring public financial support.” Later in the same…
It was a surprise to many of my pro nuclear friends, but Dominion’s recent announcement that it had decided to close its Kewaunee nuclear power plant was the almost inevitable result of current market and political conditions. The conditions bring back many memories of the mid 1990s, which were a rather dark time in my…
The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) has published a blog titled Nuclear Decommissioning Costs Amount to €66 Billion in UK alone that is a direct response to a post on Foratom titled To subsidise or not to subsidise: that is the question. There seems to be a conflict brewing over energy-related actions that is worth…
Last night I participated in a well-attended meeting of the Virginia chapter of the American Nuclear Society. It was great to be surrounded by a bunch of nukes who were interested in learning about technical developments and in discussing the current local and national political situation from an energy perspective. Before dinner, I had the…
John Horgan, a science writer who lives just a few miles north of the Indian Point Nuclear Power station, has published a pointed commentary in Scientific American titled No Nukes + No Fracking = More Coal? Indian Point Debate Highlights Green Quandary. As a converted former opponent of the Indian Point facility, Horgan has done…
The temperature in the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent fuel pool never exceeded 90 degrees C and the level in the pool never fell below the top of the used fuel that was stored there. The Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the people who supported his testimony to Congress on the afternoon…
Tepco has recently released measurements that provide convincing evidence that virtually all of the corium in Fukushima Daiichi unit #1 remains safely stored inside an intact reactor pressure vessel. Despite all claims to the contrary, no substantial quantities of that material have melted through the pressure vessel to fall onto the concrete floor of the…
During the past week or so, I have been spending quite a bit of time following a discussion about nuclear energy between Theo Simon and George Monbiot. It is a deeply philosophical engagement between two literate and concerned people who view nuclear energy through different lenses and have, so far, reached different conclusions about its…
Though I have a deep and abiding respect for the vast majority of the people I have met who work in the nuclear energy industry, it is time for me to risk losing a few friends with some brutal honesty. Decision making has become unbalanced in the “conservative” direction to a point of a dangerous…