On February 16, 2015, an AP article by Ray Henry titled Nuclear plants delayed in China, watched closely by US firms contained a short paragraph that has contributed to a number of sleepless nights. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of other people affected in the same manner who have far more at stake than…
Interest is growing in building right-sized reactors. In the relatively near future, there will be operating demonstration plants in China, Argentina, and Russia proving that the nuclear industry has learned that the one-size fits all model cannot work if the chosen size is in the range of 1,000 MWe. There simply are not enough customers…
Evan is a New Hampshire resident who will be graduating from high school in 2015 and plans to pursue a career in engineering. Few innovations have shaped the world as dramatically as the development of the airplane. In less than a century, mankind went from riding horses to flying non-stop half way around the world….
On Atomic Show #230, I talked with Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Some of the things I told Alex during that show intrigued him enough to ask me to be a guest on his Power Hour show. That show has now been published as Power Hour: Rod Adams on…
One of the well known techniques for minimizing the impact of an important report whose news some people don’t want to hear is to hold it for release until late Friday evening. That way, conventional journalists will not pay much attention until Monday morning and there will be some amount of decay in interest level…
Josh Freed, Third Way‘s clean energy vice president, has published a thoughtful, graphically enticing Brookings Essay titled Back to the Future: Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle Against Climate Change. It focuses on Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie of Transatomic Power, but it also makes it abundantly clear that those two visionary entrepreneurs are examples…
On October 20, IBM announced that it was spinning off its chip division by paying GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion. GlobalFoundaries appears to have won the deal with its geographic position of owning fabrication facilities in New York as well as in Germany and Malaysia. The move didn’t surprise many, as there have been rumors that IBM…
A few days ago, Dan Yurman at Neutron Bytes published a blog post that is now titled Flash: NuScale executive says firm may build SMRs at Idaho lab. It was a follow-up to an earlier post in which Dan speculated about the Idaho National Lab’s potential as a good site for a new nuclear power…
There is a growing roster of innovative organizations populated by people who recognize that nuclear technology is still in its infancy. Terrestrial Energy is one of the most promising of those organization because of its combination of problem solving technology, visionary leadership, and strong focus on meeting commercial needs. Nearly all of the commercial nuclear…
Update: (Posted 08/21/2014 at 7:35) Donn Dears and I have continuing exchanging comments on his blog post about the destruction of nuclear energy. Atomic Insights readers might be intrigued by the way that the experienced, retired GE executive is responding to the “smoking gun” type stories I have shared with him. End Update. I was…
There was a time when the Royal Dutch Shell corporation demonstrated strong interest in nuclear energy. In 1973, it was approached by Gulf Oil Company, the owner of Gulf General Atomics, as a capital partner for an aggressive expansion program. GA had spent the better part of two decades developing an innovative high temperature gas-cooled…
Dear Mr. Crane: According to Exelon’s power struggle, your company is searching for a strategy that will restore the glowing prospects that it faced in the period from 2004-2008. That is the period that an Exelon leader called “the boom years for nuclear.” During that time, Exelon’s stock price reached an all time high of…