Economics

  • Columnists declare nuclear to be uncompetitive

    On Saturday, April 30, Leonard Hyman & William Tilles published an opinion column on Oilprice.com headlined Lets (sic) Stop Pretending Nuclear Power Is Commercially Viable. Aside: Leonard Hyman is an accomplished electricity industry analyst and historian. I have a dog-eared copy of his 1983 work titled America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present and Future on my…

  • Lightbridge metallic alloy fuel provides upgrade path for LWRs

    Lightbridge, a company that was originally incorporated as Thorium Power, Inc., has achieved significant technology developments after making a strategic turn in 2010 from thorium based fuels to low enriched uranium metal alloy fuels. As funding dried up from the government agencies supporting their thorium work, the company chose to use its assembled nuclear engineering…

  • Addressing remaining concerns about nuclear energy

    In recent years, critical thinkers who have habitually objected to using nuclear energy have conceded that it has a good safety record and that its CO2 and other air pollution emissions are a tiny fraction of produced by the most efficient natural gas power plants. They also recognize that nuclear power plants, unlike power sources…

  • Atomic Show #247 – Jigar Shah, founder SunEdison and Generate Capital

    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…

  • Maybe it’s time for the Department of Justice to investigate restraint of trade by nuclear plant operators

    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…

  • Why would UBS root for Entergy’s Merchant Nukes to Close?

    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…

  • NRC FY2016 budget hearing – Sen Alexander and Sen Feinstein

    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…