Smoking Gun: ExxonMobil admits plan to take advantage of Fukushima to market gas
As an undergraduate, I was trained to read between the lines and to interpret the words on the page in context with the author’s background and intent. With that in…
A good friend sent me a link to an interesting diary on Daily Kos titled “Clean Coal”‘s Dirty Hands?. That diary entry used an article written by Peter Montague, titled INSIGHTS: Carbon Sequestration that provides some very interesting documentation of grants provided by The Joyce Foundation to a number of mainstream environmental organizations.
The essential thrust of the article was that carbon sequestration was an untested and potentially risky endeavor that was being supported by a surprising coalition of groups that shared some of the same funding sources. I personally think that Mr. Montague was a little off in his analysis – in my opinion carbon sequestration will never be implemented on a major scale – but he has done a great job in contributing valuable information to an important discussion.
I recommend that you go visit “Clean Coal”‘s Dirty Hands? and participate. It should be an interesting source of opinions and information about how fossil fuel interests use their extensive financial resources and those of long established foundations with huge investment portfolios.
For example, the article talks about the activities of The Joyce Foundation. I did a little poking around and found out that Joyce was originally endowed with a $100 million bequest from a lumber industry heiress in 1972. It now controls an unrestricted portfolio of nearly $900 million. After giving away about $40-50 million each year, they have still grown that endowment by about $35 million per year for the last few years. It can do a lot of very good charitable work and still enable some nefarious and sneaky anti-nuclear activities to protect its interests and those of its donors and leaders.
PS – I had to grin about the magic of Google Adsense when I posted this comment. The link that showed up was titled Energy From Coal. It leads to an interestingly titled organization called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices. Its main point is that coal is essential, affordable and increasing clean. Note: I did not put a hyperlink in this postscript – go ahead and click on the ad link. That is more advantageous to Atomic Insights.
Rod Adams is Managing Partner of Nucleation Capital, a venture fund that invests in advanced nuclear, which provides affordable access to this clean energy sector to pronuclear and impact investors. Rod, a former submarine Engineer Officer and founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., which was one of the earliest advanced nuclear ventures, is an atomic energy expert with small nuclear plant operating and design experience. He has engaged in technical, strategic, political, historic and financial analysis of the nuclear industry, its technology, regulation, and policies for several decades through Atomic Insights, both as its primary blogger and as host of The Atomic Show Podcast. Please click here to subscribe to the Atomic Show RSS feed. To join Rod's pronuclear network and receive his occasional newsletter, click here.
Dick Armey is a former US Congressman (Republican) who now serves as the chairman of FreedomWorks, a conservative, issues-based organization founded in 1984 that includes “full time staff in ten states and over 800,000 grassroots volunteers nationwide.” (quote from the organization’s “About Us” page). The tag line for the group’s web site is “Lower taxes,…
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…
It’s been a while since my last ‘smoking gun’ report so it might be worth a brief reminder of what that categorization means. For Atomic Insights, the tag ‘smoking gun’ means a story that includes evidence of fossil fuel related interests working to oppose nuclear energy development, usually at a specific project. Some of the…
An article titled “US sweetens pot to study siting for spent nuke fuel storage” was published in the January 26, 2023 edition of the Washington Post. The article included a paragraph that credited “environmentalists” as being the main source of opposition to construction of consolidated interim spent fuel (CISF) storage facilities that are either licensed…
On December 8, 1953 President Eisenhower announced to the UN that the US knew how to harness atomic energy to produce useful power. He stated that the US was willing to widely share that knowledge. He described an especially intriguing possibility of using atomic energy to bring power to the “power-starved areas of the world.”…
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…