This morning I published my first post as a contributor to Forbes.com. It’s titled Addressing Economic Challenges Facing Nuclear Power Plants. The post is a quick summary of the DOE GAIN program summit titled Improving the Economics of America’s Nuclear Power Plants held yesterday. The new venue on Forbes will provide an increased reach into…
On May 17, 2016, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing to examine the status of advanced reactor technologies. Hosted by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) the Committee Chairman and Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), the Ranking Member, the committee heard testimony from the five witnesses listed below. Dr. Jacob DeWitt, Co-Founder and CEO…
Over the past week or so, I’ve engaged in a “root cause analysis” project to determine why the US is having so much difficulty implementing a plan to take 34 metric tons of nearly pure plutonium 239 — a fissile isotope with virtually the same energy value as uranium 235 — out of our nuclear…
During the ECO:nomics Conference held in Santa Barbara, CA April 6-8 2016, the Wall Street Journal’s Russell Gold Michael Brune peppered Sierra Club’s Executive Director with direct questions about his organization’s current and potential position vis a vis nuclear energy and climate change. Brune’s dismissive responses insulted the thousands of hard-working people who have been…
by M. Herschel Specter, former AEC Licensing Manager for Indian Point 3 On November 16, 2015 Jim Malatras, New York State’s Director of Operations, wrote to the Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners arguing that the applications for extending the licenses of the two operating nuclear plants at Indian Point should be denied. His central reasoning was “Indian…
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…