On Sunday, February 21, I gathered a group of well experienced nuclear professionals to talk about the impact of President Obama’s February 16, 2010 speech announcing loan guarantees for Southern Company to build two additional units at its Vogtle Nuclear Station. Margaret Harding, Kelly Taylor, John Wheeler from This Week in Nuclear, Dan Yurman from…
On January 21, 2010, I caught up with Forrest Rudin and TJ Trapp of Hyperion Power Generation. Forrest is Hyperion’s Chief of Staff; TJ is the Vice President of Engineering. They were on the road meeting with various stakeholders to explain more about their product. They took the time out of their schedule to provide…
The United Arab Emirates has recently selected a consortium that includes Korea Electric Power Corp., Westinghouse Electric, Hyundai Engineering and Construction, Samsung C&T Corp and Doosan Heavy Industries to supply it with 5.6 gigawatts of electrical power capacity. The order includes four APR-1400 nuclear reactor power plants and all associated secondary equipment. I made contact…
On December 4, 2009, I spoke with Dr. Madeline Feltus, the Department of Energy technical program manager assigned the responsibility of coordinating the efforts of a team of scientists and engineers working on the refinement and testing of TRISO fuel particles for high temperature gas cooled reactors. During the interview, Dr. Feltus mentioned a few…
Sometimes, games really do change while few people are watching. That is what happened yesterday when Babcock and Wilcox announced their mPowerTM modular nuclear power plant. The big difference is not the basic technology – after all, the mPower reactor is a pressurized water reactor using the same kind of coolant, the same kind of…
One of the great things about working in a city like Washington is the occasional opportunity to attend fascinating gatherings of forward thinking people. Yesterday I was able to take a few hours off in the middle of the day to attend a lunchtime talk sponsored jointly by The Heritage Foundation and Third Way titled…
On Sunday, February 10, I got together with four of my favorite nuclear industry correspondents for a chat about the current state of affairs in the electric power industry. You can listen to the show at The Atomic Show #081 – Five friendly atomic geeks. The guests on the show included: John Wheeler – host…
If you Google “toshiba personal reactor” you will find hundreds of recent blog posts. Here is one example from dvorak.org/blog titled Toshiba’s Personal-Sized Nuclear Reactor. I have had several readers send me links asking what I thought about the design and wondering whether or not the system is real. I have taken some time this…