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…
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…
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