Sabine Roeser, a philosopher, provided a thought-provoking talk at TEDx Delft on the importance of including emotions in debates about risky technologies. Though my initial response to the early part of her talk was defensive, I kept on watching and ended up concluding that I agreed with the vast majority of her message. Though it…
Yesterday I wrote about the need to rationally compare the physical risks associated with producing energy by burning natural gas against the similar risks of producing energy by fissioning uranium in a nuclear power plant. However, even when decision makers includes some reasonable estimates for those kinds of risks, they are still often choosing to…
It is way past time to begin the long process of helping people understand how to rationally weigh the risks versus benefits of available power or fuel systems. For far too many years, promoters of immensely profitable products like natural gas have been loudly and frequently telling society about its benefits while glossing over the…
Suzy Hobbs Baker at Pop Atomic Studios shared a link to an excellent thought piece titled Science and the Greens that is posted on Skepteco: An Ecopragmatist examines the environmental movement. Near the end of the piece, however, there is a section that needed some feedback. Many analysts who warn against the dangers of rapidly…
Widespread power outages stimulate me to intense bouts of thinking about building resilient power systems, both when they happen to me and when they happen to someone else. During the summer of 2012, during one of the hottest weeks of the year, we lost power for a little more than a week as a result…
Many, if not most, of my nuclear energy colleagues believe that our biggest hurdle is overcoming public fears. They believe that the main reason nuclear energy is not more popular is that the public is misinformed by the media. What they do not understand is that selling energy is perhaps the world’s largest and most…
CORRECTED COPY and CORRECTED HEADLINE From Salon.com Possible explosion at Con Ed power plant UPDATE: John Miksad, Con Ed’s Sr. V.P. of Electic Operations, has confirmed to NY1 that the explosion occurred at one of the company’s substations, knocking out power for 230,000 to 250,000 residents in parts of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. There were…
A recent European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) blog post about nuclear energy “subsidies” includes a statement revealing a common misunderstanding about energy system economics. There is also a puzzling contradiction in Foratom’s blog. First it claims, “today nuclear energy is competitive in the internal energy market without requiring public financial support.” Later in the same…
It was a surprise to many of my pro nuclear friends, but Dominion’s recent announcement that it had decided to close its Kewaunee nuclear power plant was the almost inevitable result of current market and political conditions. The conditions bring back many memories of the mid 1990s, which were a rather dark time in my…
John Horgan, a science writer who lives just a few miles north of the Indian Point Nuclear Power station, has published a pointed commentary in Scientific American titled No Nukes + No Fracking = More Coal? Indian Point Debate Highlights Green Quandary. As a converted former opponent of the Indian Point facility, Horgan has done…
A commenter on my last smoking gun report claimed that it did not provide direct evidence of antinuclear activity by the beneficiaries – in that case, the people selling LNG tankers to a market that is growing because of the forced shutdown of operable nuclear power plants in Japan and Germany. Today I ran across…
It’s been a while since my last ‘smoking gun’ report so it might be worth a brief reminder of what that categorization means. For Atomic Insights, the tag ‘smoking gun’ means a story that includes evidence of fossil fuel related interests working to oppose nuclear energy development, usually at a specific project. Some of the…