Several of the therapists I have visited over the years have told me that I need to stop taking too much responsibility for events that are beyond my control. It’s not always easy advice to follow even for someone who has been aware of similar advice from the Serenity Prayer for the better part of…
Jigar Shah is the founder of SunEdison, a former CEO of the Carbon War Room, and is currently the President of Generate Capital. He is also a member of The Energy Gang on Greentech Media. Jigar and I have been engaged in some lively discussions on Twitter about the future of solar and nuclear energy…
Once again, a full fledged member of “the nuclear industry” has determined that it will shut down an operating nuclear electricity generating station in a market where the available capacity is already tightening. Today, Entergy “regretfully” announced that it would stop operating the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant in Plymouth, MA. According to A Message from Bill…
UBS Investment Bank holds a large portfolio of loans to companies involved in extracting natural gas using the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Because of the healthy fees associated with generating those loans initially, UBS, along with several other large investment banks, supported drilling programs for production that was not justified by the…
During an OPEC meeting in Vienna held in early June 2015, John Watson, the CEO of Chevron, the second largest oil and gas company in the United States, made a comment that deserves more attention and follow up from journalists. The context of the below comment was that Watson was explaining why his company will…
I came across an interesting saga yesterday. My introduction came from a May 14, 2015 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal titled The Greens’ Back Door at the EPA. (Hint: If you don’t have a WSJ subscription, copy and paste the article title into the Google search engine. That should provide you a link…
On March 4, 2015, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development held a hearing about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s FY2016 budget. The video archive is available for review. The only senators from the subcommittee who took part in the hearing were Sen Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Sen Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) with an invited…
I took advantage of circumstances and technology last night to indulge in a TV series marathon consisting of watching the entire season of the 2012 History Channel series titled The Men Who Built America. Though originally aired in 19 episodes, Netflix is showing series as four 80-90 minute segments. One of the most eye-opening things…
On Feb 9, 2015, I had the opportunity to visit the faculty and students at the University of California Berkeley. Prof. Per Peterson invited me out to give a colloquium talk and to see some of the interesting work that his colleagues and students were doing in advanced nuclear technology. One of the primary research…
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…
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…
Owen Paterson, who served as the UK’s environment secretary until a cabinet realignment during the summer of 2014, is planning to begin advocating a dramatic course change for his country’s energy policy. Instead of the wind-heavy plan that was developed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) in order to attempt to implement…