In my continuing efforts to produce a narrative about the way that the public was taught to be afraid of ionizing radiation, no matter how low the dose, I came across an interesting write up in the Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report for 1958. Here is some important temporal context. The Foundation Board of Trustees asked…
Every week, a loosely aligned group of writers and thought leaders pick their favorite recently produced piece about nuclear energy. One member of the group volunteers to put together a single highlights article that we call the Carnival of Nuclear Blogs and publishes that article on their own blog. Sometimes it seems like a little…
Malcolm Grimston, a senior research fellow at Imperial College in the UK, gave a fascinating talk to the Canadian Nuclear Association’s February 2016 meeting. His message includes powerful suggestions for people who are excited about the prospects of using nuclear energy to solve some of humanity’s most wicked problems. It’s also a critical message for…
I feel better about the prospects for new nuclear technology development today (April 21) than I have for several years, based on the four conferences in four different U.S. cities I’ve attended over the past several weeks. My travel calendar has included Washington, D.C., for the Nuclear Industry Summit / Nuclear Security Summit, New York…
The Nuclear Innovation Alliance, UC Berkeley and Third Way are partnering with universities, national labs, think tanks, the Department of Energy and corporations including Southern Co., Google, Transatomic, Terrestrial Energy, and TerraPower to offer the first Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp August 1-12 at the University of California, Berkeley. Twenty-five students (graduate students or undergraduates who will…
On Saturday, April 30, Leonard Hyman & William Tilles published an opinion column on Oilprice.com headlined Lets (sic) Stop Pretending Nuclear Power Is Commercially Viable. Aside: Leonard Hyman is an accomplished electricity industry analyst and historian. I have a dog-eared copy of his 1983 work titled America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present and Future on my…
On April 3, 2016, Mark Lynas met with David MacKay, the author of Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, to give him the Breakthrough Institute’s 2016 Paradigm Award. After the brief ceremony, the two influential British thinkers chatted about David’s career, his love of arithmetic, his concerns about humanity and his famous book. Perhaps the…