By Wade Allison Emeritus Professor of Physics at Keble College, Oxford A canary, alive and singing in the coal mine, gave miners confidence that the air was safe to breathe. But today our problem is not carbon monoxide in a mine but carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. The Industrial Revolution was built on…
There is a pervasive myth claiming that energy is difficult to store. The objective fact is that our creator – or nature if you prefer – figured out how to store massive quantities of useable energy at the very beginning. Aside: Refined electricity storage doesn’t appear to be difficult from a consumer’s point of view. Charging small…
by M. Herschel Specter, former AEC Licensing Manager for Indian Point 3 On November 16, 2015 Jim Malatras, New York State’s Director of Operations, wrote to the Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners arguing that the applications for extending the licenses of the two operating nuclear plants at Indian Point should be denied. His central reasoning was “Indian…
For the majority of human history, people used their own muscles to provide almost all of the work required for survival and development. A thin slice of humanity achieved a moderate amount of personal comfort and leisure because they were able, often through an accident of birth, to control a portion of the daily work…
by Jeremy Whitlock Ah, Nuclear Power, my old friend. Please do come in. Have a seat. Again you’ve been away too long. I feel silly coming here Doc. Now, now, hush. Sooner or later, everyone comes here. Tell me, how are things going? Well that’s just it Doc – on the face of it you…
I’ll admit that I am actively searching for good news about nuclear energy to counter the conventional wisdom that we are losing the market battle to cheap natural gas. I found an interesting take on recent Cabinet appointments in a New York Times editorial titled Two Enlistees in the Climate Wars. Though it appears as…
I found this highly entertaining – is there a central script writing service for local TV stations that functions like the UPI or the AP? There is a reason why I gather my news on the web and not from talking heads. Hat tip to the people populating the No Agenda group on Google +
Please be patient with me on this post – it might take a while before I clearly demonstrate why it belongs on Atomic Insights. First I want to share a couple of entertaining, but informative videos that you’ll probably never see in the commercial media. This is another version of the same song, performed with…
On Friday, Nov. 5, I heard an inspirational talk given by a man who had a big influence on my early career; he was the Brigade Commander who welcomed the class of 1981 to the US Naval Academy on July 6, 1977. Col. Art Athens, USMCR (Ret.) is now the Director of the Stockdale Center…
For the past few months, I have been rereading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Though the book was first published more than 50 years ago, it is remarkably prescient about some of the risks that society can face when too many people forget how to produce items of real value and quality. It is a book…
On May 4, 2011, the Subcommittee on Energy and Power and the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy conducted a hearing titled The Role of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in America’s Energy Future. Watching that hearing and digesting what I heard has resulted in several sleepless nights. I have been struggling with how to share…
The Economist recently published a column titled Climate politics: Flush with cash. So what? that described the results of a recent study by Matthew Nisbet, an researcher at American University in Washington, DC. According to Nisbet, groups classified in the environmental category spent almost $400 million on climate change and energy issues in 2009. The…