Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) trace their heritage to William Proxmire, a senator famous for his “Golden Fleece” awards for wasteful government spending. Yesterday, the organization held a press conference to announce that they had decided to award a Golden Fleece to the US Department of Energy SMR (small modular reactor) program. The press release…
Meredith Angwin has been fighting to save Vermont from itself for several years. She has been publishing a blog at Yes Vermont Yankee, teaching adult education classes about energy, attending public meetings, giving interviews, and participating in debates about energy policy since about 2008. (She’ll let me know if I got the date wrong.) She…
Fission, FAST! My creative juices were inspired this morning by an article titled Climate is not a mass movement. The piece comes from Randy Olson, the filmmaker turned scientist who is most famous among my pro-nuclear communication friends as the author of Don’t Be Such a Scientist. Aside: I wonder how many of the people…
On Sunday, February 24, I gathered a group of fission fans to talk about a number of nuclear energy related topics. We discussed Romance of Radium and how perceptions about radiation have been molded over the 76 years since it was produced. Then, people had learned enough about the benefits of using power emitted from…
I found this highly entertaining – is there a central script writing service for local TV stations that functions like the UPI or the AP? There is a reason why I gather my news on the web and not from talking heads. Hat tip to the people populating the No Agenda group on Google +
One of the most frequently used arguments against using nuclear energy is “the waste issue.” When people ask me, “what do you do with the waste”, my standard answer is “recycle it.” The truly curious then ask for more information. A few days ago, Nuclear Street shared a video produced by Argonne National Laboratory that…
I’ve been spending the past hour or so reading an excellent paper written by a US Naval aviator titled Twenty-First Century Snake Oil: Why the United States Should Reject Biofuels as Part of a Rational National Energy Security Strategy. (Note: The link for the original paper is broken, but CAPT Kiefer has published another version…
On Sunday, February 17, 2013, a group of five nuclear energy professionals gathered to share their thoughts about the current state of the atomic energy business. Participants included: Margaret Harding (@M2harding), 4 Factor Consulting Meredith Angwin (@yes_VY), Yes Vermont Yankee Andrea Jennetta (@NuclearBuzz), Fuel Cycle Week and I Dig Uranium Cal Abel (@cal_abel), PhD candidate…
I’ve been engaging in a discussion with several commenters who strongly disagree with my assertion that atomic fission is the ONLY technology that has the technical potential to beat hydrocarbon combustion in the market. It can provide cheaper, cleaner and more reliable heat that can be converted into useful power in almost exactly the same…
During President Obama’s February 12, 2013 State of the Union address, he spoke for six and a half minutes about the importance of energy to the American economy and the importance of being a world leading supplier of clean energy technology. As a proud contributor at an American clean energy company that is developing a…
The leaders of Virginia Uranium need to talk with the leaders of the North Carolina Granite Corporation. VA Uranium is seeking to obtain permission to mine its granite formation while NC Granite is the current operator of a granite quarry that has been in continuous operation since 1889. If you will forgive the obvious pun,…
Ondi Timoner, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker in her own right, recently interviewed the directors of four documentaries that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. All of the interviews are worth watching, but I was especially taken with her chat with Robert Stone about Pandora’s Promise. That segment starts at minute 27:11. You should…