The established nuclear energy industry has taken a wait-and-see approach to the idea of developing and deploying smaller, simpler fission power stations that can take advantage of the economy of series production. The industry’s trade organization, the Nuclear Energy Institute, has expressed cautious optimism and has engaged in a moderate effort to identify regulatory obstacles…
A few days ago, Dan Yurman at Neutron Bytes published a blog post that is now titled Flash: NuScale executive says firm may build SMRs at Idaho lab. It was a follow-up to an earlier post in which Dan speculated about the Idaho National Lab’s potential as a good site for a new nuclear power…
On Sunday, January 23, 1957, a large American audience gathered around their television sets to watch the weekly episode of Disneyland, a popular show created and hosted by Walt Disney in return for an investment from ABC that he used to build Disneyland. On that evening, the audience was treated to a compressed course in…
Owen Paterson, who served as the UK’s environment secretary until a cabinet realignment during the summer of 2014, is planning to begin advocating a dramatic course change for his country’s energy policy. Instead of the wind-heavy plan that was developed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) in order to attempt to implement…
During a recent discussion on James Conca’s article titled Are California’s Carbon Goals Kaput?, Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear accused Conca of trying to revise history. Gunter’s comment includes a lengthy interpretation of the events surrounding the closure of San Onofre from the point of view of a man who has been a professional antinuclear…
Hugh MacDiarmid, the Chairman of the Board for Terrestrial Energy, Inc., gave a talk to the Economic Club of Canada on September 24, 2014. That talk included a brief description of TEI’s integral molten salt reactor technology, but most of the talk was visionary in nature and aimed at exciting his Canadian audience about the…
It’s time to stop talking about the material removed from commercial reactors as “nuclear waste” and to stop looking at the inventory as a burden on future generations. That labeling and that characterization of the material is a costly legacy imposed on us by people who do not like abundant, emission free nuclear energy and…
The BBC made a visit to a German lignite (brown coal) mine. I’d like the people who favor the EnergieWende to explain how they can like this energy source better than nuclear power.
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station never threatened public health and safety. Unit 2 could have been started as soon as its scheduled outage was completed in February of 2012. Unit 3 could have been restarted by mid-March 2012. The total cost of the repairs, including purchased replacement power, should have been less than $50…
Jim Conca has published a couple of recent posts on Forbes.com about the premature closure of nuclear power plants in the United States. One titled Are California’s Carbon Goals Kaput? focuses on some of the environmental aspects of the San Onofre debacle; the other, titled Closing Vermont Nuclear Bad Business for Everyone focuses on the…
No Agenda, staring Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak bills itself as “The Best Podcast in the Universe.” It is the best, most entertaining, most thought-provoking, and most professionally-produced podcast I listen to, so I cannot argue with the frequently repeated claim. On Episode 656, recorded and released on September 28, Curry and Dvorak chatted…
James Conca recently published a commentary on Forbes titled Closing Vermont Nuclear Bad Business For Everyone. A major thrust of Conca’s initial post was highlighting the rapidly rising prices of electricity in New England that are being driven by an increasing reliance on natural gas as reliable power generators like the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant…