Yesterday, I wrote a quick post that linked a recently issued UBS report’s negative views about the economic viability of merchant nuclear power plants in the US to UBS’s large portfolio of troubled loans to companies involved in various aspects of the natural gas extraction technique known as “fracing” (alternatively spelled as fracking in many…
UBS Investment Bank holds a large portfolio of loans to companies involved in extracting natural gas using the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Because of the healthy fees associated with generating those loans initially, UBS, along with several other large investment banks, supported drilling programs for production that was not justified by the…
Meredith Angwin, who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee and Northwest Clean Energy, was recently invited to talk with Pat McDonald on her television show called Vote for Vermont: Listening Beyond the Sound Bites. Angwin and McDonald covered a number of topics during the conversation. Meredith explained how we safely store used nuclear fuel, why some…
An important message that has been discussed often by web publications like Hiroshima Syndrome, Yes Vermont Yankee, Canadian Energy Issues, Nuke Power Talk, Neutron Bytes, Atomic Power Review, and ANS Nuclear Cafe has jumped to the mainstream press in the form of a New York Times article by George Johnson titled When Radiation Isn’t the…
Nuclear4Climate posted the below video on their YouTube channel yesterday. It features Kirsty Gogan, the Executive Director and one of three cofounders of the U.K. based civil society group Energy for Humanity. Though there is a small issue with sound quality, I think you’ll agree that Kirsty makes a strong case for nuclear energy as…
Yesterday evening, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) hosted one of several clean power plan listening sessions in Roanoke. I attended the meeting. It was a true listening session; the DEQ representatives did very little talking and a lot of note taking. Each person who signed up to make a comment was given five…
On April 18, 1973, President Richard Nixon gave a special message to the congress of the United States on energy policy. Unlike more recent offerings by presidents regarding energy, that document placed a huge emphasis on making regulatory and legislative changes that would enable the rapid expansion of nuclear power; the ‘N’ word appears in…
For the first time in several months, I gathered a group of nuclear energy experts to chat about recent events and announcements in nuclear energy. Participants in this episode include: Meredith Angwin who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee and Northwest Clean Energy Steve Aplin who blogs at Canadian Energy Issues Les Corrice who blogs at…
by Paul Lorenzini Part II: Rethinking Environmentalism Today’s environmentalism is premised on two fundamental ideologies: first, solutions must “harmonize with nature” and second, nuclear power must be opposed at all costs. In the first part of this discussion I addressed the conflicts raised by constraining environmentalism in this way and how those constraints are working…
Recently an Atomic Insights reader shared a document that inspired a new line of thinking about the chronology of atomic energy development. The inspirational document was a PDF copy of a chapter titled Little Red Schoolhouse from Freeman Dyson‘s memoir, Disturbing the Universe. It was a brief tale about a memorable burst of creativity in…
By Paul Lorenzini Part I. Must we destroy the environment to save it? When Jonathan Franzen wrote a provocative piece in The New Yorker earlier this year, “Climate Capture”, Chris Clarke, an influential environmental blogger in California, described it as having “walked up to a hornet’s nest and hit it with a baseball bat.”[1] Franzen…
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