On November 21, 2913, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman interviewed Kumi Naidoo, the Executive Director of Greenpeace, in a segment titled Greenpeace: In Opposing Oil Drilling, Detained “Arctic 30” Are Standing Up for Planet’s 7 Billion. (There is a full transcript of the interview at the link provided.) The above embedded video above includes the interview…
By Ed Pheil I mentioned at the Thorium Energy Conference 2013 that accelerator driven systems (ADS) were likely to hurt the nuclear industry more than help it with the following discussion. The ADS proponents are justifying their participation, including with thorium, on the basis of two concepts that cater to the anti-nuclear crowd. A) ADS…
The best chance for humans to avert the worst risks of both accessible fossil fuel depletion and global climate change is for people who generally agree on those risks to begin working together to improve our ability to use nuclear energy. That will mean that both nuclear energy advocates and antinuclear environmentalists must recognize that…
Fissures related to nuclear energy are developing in the monolithic movement known as Environmentalism. The Breakthrough Institute has published a good introduction to the schism titled The Great Green Meltdown: How Economic Arguments Against Nuclear Highlight Environmentalist Delusions. Though this is a simplification, it is generally accurate to describe two sides of the movement that…
The video embedded above illustrates the kind of advertising that the natural gas industry, nuclear energy’s primary competitor, routinely uses to inform the public that it provides a valuable, reliable service. I hope you enjoy the reminder about the importance of communications and the irony of recognizing that the electric power utility company featured in…
As part of the discussions stimulated by their airing of Pandora’s Promise, CNN hosted a debate between Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute and Dale Bryk of the Natural Resources Defense Council. That debate included some commentary that I thought was worth promoting to the front page. A commenter named Fred, a tech who has…
Lenka Kollar is a fascinating nuclear energy educator with an inherited entrepreneurial spirit. She recently decided to move forward from her job as a nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory to form a consulting company and start a blog titled Nuclear Undone. I had the pleasure of meeting her face-to-face — after several months of…
President Obama should task John Richardson with a mission similar to the one that President Dwight Eisenhower gave Hyman G. Rickover. Richardson is the current leader of Naval Reactors (NR), the organization that Rickover built. If directed, NR could begin a new assignment to show others how to manufacture complete nuclear fission power systems starting…
I was disappointed by the speeches given during the plenary session of the 2013 American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting. There is no value in trying to say that more gently. The advertised theme of the still on-going conference is a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the human discovery of fission. That is the almost…
The above clip is titled Nuclear power for the future. It describes the industry leading example of the construction project at Plant Vogtle in northeastern Georgia and it includes some opining on America’s energy future by Greg Jaczko the former Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The video correctly points to the fact that…
In the above clip titled Is nuclear power good for our planet Andrew Birch, the co-founder and CEO of Sungevity says that the main reason that he does not like nuclear energy is that it “costs too much”. However, he reveals the shallow nature of his energy production understanding and his financially driven bias by…
In the above video clip, Robert Stone explains that the cost of nuclear power plants can come down if we start building and applying the techniques of manufacturing and mass production that have helped reduce the cost of wind turbines, solar panels and iPhones. He points out that we have been operating nuclear power plants…