I’ve been complaining about the lack of nuclear energy advertising for a long time. If you visit here regularly, you’ve seen the commercials from Bruce Power. You might even remember the Funkytown themed commercial from Areva. I think this commercial from Westinghouse is in the same league. Please let me know if you see it…
President Obama has announced that he will be giving a speech on Tuesday, June 25, 2013 at Georgetown University that will describe his administration’s plan to address climate change. Here is the video version of the announcement: Nuclear energy is conspicuously missing from both the sound track and the visual imagery. It is hard to…
Nuclear energy in the United States and Europe is far more expensive that it should be. There is plenty of blame to spread; nuclear professionals have to accept some of the responsibility. If you want to do something about the high cost of nuclear energy, it might be best to start with taking the actions…
I did not understand the enthusiasm with which some of my nuclear energy colleagues greeted the selection and appointment of Ernest Moniz as the new Secretary of Energy. He is a natural gas advocate who professes undue conservatism about the potential value of nuclear energy. Read and compare the MIT reports produced under his direction,…
There is no doubt that the Russian natural gas supply industry is a major interest group that expects to be a big winner in Germany’s Energiewende (energy transformation). The only news here is the concise clarity with which this Deutsche Bank analyst cheers his nation’s growing dependence on a supplier with a questionable record in…
Joe Romm, the lead thinker at Climate Progress, has once again exposed the fact that he is not terribly serious about fighting climate change. In fact, he is so casual about the effort that he wants everyone to dismiss nuclear energy out of hand as being too expensive to matter, without even thinking about trying…
Dr. James Conca has published another important post about the aftermath of Fukushima and the efforts of the people opposed to the use of nuclear energy to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about imaginary health effects of low dose radiation. The article is titled Fukushima 2.25 — The Humanitarian Crisis; it is a “must read”…
I had an experience this weekend that reinforced my growing understanding that pronuclear advocates have been distracted by the wrong target. Instead of focusing our fire against the people — both outside and inside the industry — who have successfully driven up the cost of nuclear energy to a point at which it is unable…
Correction: (Posted at 6:43 on 6/16/2013) I made a boneheaded error in the below computation and dropped an important prefix in my units. That error resulted in my final number being off by a factor of 1000; I wrote 0.001 mrem when it should have been 0.001 rem. I apologize for the math error. I…
If Robert Stone’s primary purpose in creating Pandora’s Promise was to generate discussion about nuclear energy, it appears that he has succeeded. If his underlying purpose was to generate heated and uncomfortable reactions from people who have invested their entire career identity into being a go-to person for a negative comment about nuclear energy for…
Robert Stone’s Pandora’s Promise has been capturing attention and encouraging people to challenge their personal beliefs and tribal assumptions. Stone’s documentary is a classic “journey of discovery” tale featuring five people who changed their minds about nuclear energy from opposition to support. It takes viewers along the path of knowledge discovery followed by Gwyneth Cravens,…
One of the least understood features of nuclear power plants is that they consume materials that might otherwise end up in nuclear weapons. Of course, activists that battle the use of nuclear energy generally try to turn that feature into a fault. They have convinced more than a few people that without nuclear power plants,…