I had an experience this weekend that reinforced my growing understanding that pronuclear advocates have been distracted by the wrong target. Instead of focusing our fire against the people — both outside and inside the industry — who have successfully driven up the cost of nuclear energy to a point at which it is unable […]
Energy density
Atomic Show #202 – Atomic Earth Day 2013
Many nuclear professionals have been attracted to the technology because of its inherently light footprint when compared to all other alternative power sources. It uses less land, less metal, less concrete, and a tiny volume of fuel when compared to producing a similar quantity of energy from other sources of reliable power, especially when the […]
Dieter Helm – Nuclear saga cannot go on (Leaders must push to a happy ending)
Dieter Helm has generously shared an April 2013 article written for Prospect Magazine titled Stumbling towards crisis. In that article Helm points to US energy decision making as a good example that serves as a contrast to UK energy policy making. He sees chosen path in the UK as almost guaranteeing a crisis. In his […]
Switch II Fission, the Sequel
Last night I drove to Lexington, VA where the sustainability program was hosting a screening of Switch (to a smarter future). There was a decent crowd; perhaps 100 or more students, faculty and townspeople. It is an impressive documentary, with inside views of facilities that people rarely see. It also does a good job of […]
Nuclear energy fights climate change and energy poverty at same time
The Washington Post Wonkblog recently published an article with the following headline Can the world fight climate change and energy poverty at the same time? There is a straightforward answer to that question that involves some hard work and some paradigm busting, but at least it is a path that offers a good chance of […]
Atomic Show #198 – Women are empowered by reliable energy
A few days ago, Steve Aplin wrote an inspiring post on Canadian Energy Issues titled The electric grid: the greatest invention of all time expanded after women won the vote. That post described how important electricity was to the effort to free women from household chores so that they could choose to pursue more interesting […]
Cure climate crisis by shifting to Fission, Fast!
Randy Olson’s post about the contribution of a short, alliterative slogan to the mass attraction of the No Nukes movement inspired my recent post about using Fission Fast! to inspire effective action to improve our climate situation. Olson has responded to that proposal with his own idea in a post titled Curb Carbon or Fission […]
Hard reality – biofuels are a loser, despite all the hope and hype
I’ve been spending the past hour or so reading an excellent paper written by a US Naval aviator titled Twenty-First Century Snake Oil: Why the United States Should Reject Biofuels as Part of a Rational National Energy Security Strategy. (Note: The link for the original paper is broken, but CAPT Kiefer has published another version […]
SOTU – Clean energy focus, but “nuclear” treated as the other ‘N’ word that cannot be spoken
During President Obama’s February 12, 2013 State of the Union address, he spoke for six and a half minutes about the importance of energy to the American economy and the importance of being a world leading supplier of clean energy technology. As a proud contributor at an American clean energy company that is developing a […]
Do the math – Secure fissile materials inside reactor cores
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just published an open letter to President Obama that offers opinions on how to solve various pressing problems. I’d like to riff on that letter and suggest that we should be pursuing ways to use one problem to solve another one. According to the BAS, there is a […]
Friday funny – Logarithmic Scales are for Quitters Without Enough Paper
From XKCD: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Hat tip to Dr. Brian Mays, one of the more prolific contributors to the Atomic Insights comment threads.
