At 2:12 pm on December 30, 2013, a Burlington Northern (BNSF) train pulling more than 100 tanker cars full of of crude oil extracted from the Bakken formation in North Dakota collided with another BNSF train carrying grain outside of Casselton, ND. Apparently, one of the trains derailed before the collision, but there have been…
Bill Loveless from Platts Energy Week recently interviewed Mark Little, GE’s chief technology officer, about the company’s interests in the oil and gas extraction sector. Loveless and Little discussed GE’s planned investments into an Oklahoma-based research center that will be the first GE technology development laboratory that is focused on a single business sector. Mark…
On December 27, 2013, Matt Wald published a piece in the New York Times titled New Energy Struggles on Its Way to Markets that points to the predictable consequences of having too many energy options chasing too few customers. When there is excess supply compared to demand, prices tend to fall rather dramatically. Falling prices…
A friend just passed me a link to an article on Clean Technica by Zachary Shahan titled Why Are So Many Redditors Obsessed With Uncompetitive Nuclear Energy?. Shahan bemoans the fact that nuclear supporters on Reddit seem to outnumber solar and wind supporter and believes that contrasts with the real world as demonstrated by the…
Cape Wind is the leading offshore wind energy project in the United States. In 2001, more than 12 years ago, Jim Gordon, the project founder, started the process of promoting his vision of a building a 430 MWe (peak capacity) field of 130 massive (rotor diameter – 110 m, hub height – 80 m, nacelle…
Finns are pragmatic people who love their country, but also recognize its geographic limitations. “Finland is a very cold and dark country. Electricity is very important to us. We are a kind of island in Europe, we have take care of ourselves. No one will help us if we run out of power.” Way back…
Reuters is running a series titled Breakout: Inside China’s Military Buildout. Installment number 6 is titled The U.S. government lab behind Beijing’s nuclear power push. The title is misleading; it is not about China’s world-leading, multibillion-dollar program. That program includes 29 large commercial nuclear plants currently under construction. Instead, the article focuses on a $350…
Every once in a while, I like to get a feel for who is reading Atomic Insights – or, to be more technically correct, whose browser lands on one of the pages. So far this year, the geographic plot looks pretty good. However, there are a couple of white areas and just a few days…
On December 12, 2013, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of NuScale as the winner of the second round of funding under the Department of Energy Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). That announcement, which had been due since sometime in September, must have been quite welcome to a lot of really talented and…
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) has reevaluated data that it contributed to a 15 nation pooled study of low dose radiation cancer risks published in 2005. The determination was that the data was incorrect, needed further evaluation and should be removed from the cohort used for the 15 nation study. When that action is…
On December 11, 2013, Henry Sokolski, the Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC), hosted a event titled Avoiding Future Irans: A New Course for US Nonproliferation Policy. The papers offered as background material before the event started, the prepared remarks from Sokolski’s invited speakers, and the post meeting engagements I had with…
Dr. Edward J. Calabrese is a professor of toxicology in the department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published more than 750 scholarly papers and 10 books. Here is a blurb from his bio page at the university. Over the past 20 years Professor Calabrese has redirected his research…