(CHARLOTTE, N.C. – December 4, 2012) – The Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W) (NYSE: BWC) is pleased to announce that the production-standard control room prototype for its B&W mPower™ small modular reactor (SMR) is now operational. This engineering simulator is a key milestone in the B&W mPower development program. The B&W mPower control room prototype,…
How many times have you heard politicians tell you that the only reason a nation with abundant oil and gas might want to enrich uranium is to build nuclear weapons. The United States has always been one of the top two or three oil and gas producers in the world, but we also have scientists…
Widespread power outages stimulate me to intense bouts of thinking about building resilient power systems, both when they happen to me and when they happen to someone else. During the summer of 2012, during one of the hottest weeks of the year, we lost power for a little more than a week as a result…
Last night I participated in a well-attended meeting of the Virginia chapter of the American Nuclear Society. It was great to be surrounded by a bunch of nukes who were interested in learning about technical developments and in discussing the current local and national political situation from an energy perspective. Before dinner, I had the…
John Horgan, a science writer who lives just a few miles north of the Indian Point Nuclear Power station, has published a pointed commentary in Scientific American titled No Nukes + No Fracking = More Coal? Indian Point Debate Highlights Green Quandary. As a converted former opponent of the Indian Point facility, Horgan has done…
As much as I like reading Bill Tucker’s generally pronuclear articles, I recognize that he sometimes gets the details wrong. In a recent American Spectator article titled Nuclear’s Dilemma: Few Jobs, Just Energy, Bill overlooked some important details about nuclear energy’s ability to generate good jobs in comparison to its competitors in wind, solar, coal,…
On July 23, 2012, busy schedules aligned and I had the chance to talk with Richard Martin, the author of SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future and Kirk Sorensen, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Flibe Energy, a start-up company formed to “develop small modular reactors based on liquid-fluoride thorium reactor…
One of the persistent myths left over from the first Atomic Age is that nuclear reactors can only be used to produce electricity in massive, central station power plants. That application is only one of many ways to use the heat from fissioning uranium, plutonium or thorium. In the US, fully 1/3 of the 100…
I first met Cal Abel during a flurry of correspondence associated with actions he recommended after the Fukushima event. Cal, a former submarine Engineer Officer and current PhD candidate at Georgia Tech, had produced some rapid response papers with useful ideas for the people responding to the events. One idea in particular that Cal produced…
The topic of this podcast is the status of the design certification application for the Westinghouse AP1000, the system that has been chosen for about half of all of the new nuclear power plant projects that are currently planned in the United States. Last week, the Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a…
Lisa Stiles and Rod Adams met for a chat about recent nuclear industry meetings including the American Nuclear Society annual meeting that Lisa attended in San Diego in early June and the Platts – DOE Small Modular Reactor meetings that Rod attended in Washington, DC in late June. After signing off with Lisa, Rod asked…
Rod Adams got together with Margaret Harding, Dan Yurman, Meredith Angwin, and Charles Barton for a round up of recent atomic industry and technology developments. Topics discussed included new enrichment facilities, enrichment technology, public meetings about new nuclear power plants, and small reactor plant developments. Meredith Angwin is a physical chemist with long experience in…