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    Here is another pithy clip from Ted Rockwell’s testimony to the Senate Republican Conference on June 22, 2009. He provides some solid engineering reasons why he agrees that modular reactors provide an interesting alternative to large ones. He is specifically addressing the B&M mPowerâ„¢ in response to a question from Senator Lamar Alexander, but the…

  • Health Effects of Low Level Radiation – Presentation to APGES Roundtable

    The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan (APEGS) hosted an event on May 1, 2009 titled Round Table on the Future of Nuclear Energy. Pieter Van Vliet, P.Eng. provided a presentation on Low Dose Radiation that included a brief on the history of radiation protection, the Linear, No Threshold (LNT) assumption, the documented…

  • Excellent Explanation of Why America Needs New Nuclear Power Plants and Why The First New Ones in More Than 30 Years Need a Boost

    Yesterday, President Obama visited a technical training center in Lanham, MD to announce the Department of Energy’s decision to guarantee a loan of $8.3 Billion to Southern Company to build two new Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactor power plants at its Vogtle site in Georgia. If one visited that site today, it would appear that the…

  • Lovins failed gospel

    Yesterday, I posted a link to a new anti-nuclear diatribe by Amory Lovins, a man that has been preaching the gospel of “negawatts” for more than a quarter of a century. According to his dogma, the only energy supply we need is conservation; and, implicitly, a little less of all of the sources of energy…

  • Do We Need a Smart Grid, A Strong Grid, Or Less Grid?

    One of the reasons that I am a strong advocate of smaller nuclear energy plants is that I resist the notion of the inevitability of greater interconnectedness and dependence. I like systems that have firewalls, circuit breakers, and air gaps to ensure that a failure in one location can be isolated. I do not like…