There has been a flurry of commentary on the web and on Atomic Insights as a result of a recent Financial Times interview of Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, that ran under the headline of GE Chief: Nuclear ‘hard to justify’. The article provides an informative insight into the motive for Immelt’s dismissal of…
On the evening of July 29, 2012, Suzy Hobbs-Baker, Director of the Nuclear Literacy Project and founder of PopAtomic Studios, Dan Yurman, who blogs at Idaho Samizdat and writes for Fuel Cycle Week and the ANS Nuclear Cafe, Margaret Harding, an independent nuclear energy consultant who blogs at 4 Factor Consulting, and Cal Abel, a…
The European Energy Review (free subscription required) recently published an interview with Arne Mogren, Director of the Power Programme of the European Climate Foundation (ECF) titled Everyone agrees on where we need to be in 2050, but not on how to get there. The ECF is billed as one of the more influential climate lobby…
A good friend sent me a link to an article by Brian Dockstader titled The Coal Industry Wants You In The Dark that does a reasonably good job of deconstructing the messages in the following 30 second television ad, which was paid for by a coal industry lobby group called “American Coalition for Clean Coal…
Intelligence Squared US, an Oxford style debate program modeled after a London program of the same name, recently chose to discuss the following motion – No Fracking Way: The Natural Gas Boom is Doing More Harm Than Good. Here is a link to the archived video of the debate. It was fascinating for an energy…
Meredith Angwin, who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee, published a book review post titled Superfuel: A Book I Wanted to Love. The book is a tribute to thorium and the people that Richard Martin refers to as “thorium-heads”. The villains in the book are the people that Martin calls “nuclearati” – otherwise known as the…
North Dakota recently passed Alaska as the second leading oil producing state in the United States. It boasts one of the lowest unemployment totals in the nation, a fact that is driven by the state’s small population and very large job of building the infrastructure required to extract oil from the Bakken shale formation. That…
Natural gas prices are volatile. Their price pattern can generate large fortunes. The volatile pattern can also generate painful bankruptcies for those on the wrong side of the bet. People who bet on those prices need to recognize the risk. Most people assume that power generators who are planning to meet demand in the next…
According to this Wall Street Journal interview with Charlie Drevna, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Obama Administration has been waging war on fossil fuels. Mr. Drevna also claims that the US could double its oil and natural gas production in just ten years. M. King Hubbert would beg to differ with that prediction. I…
For the next three days (May 21-23, 2012), the Nuclear Energy Institute is hosting the annual nuclear industry conference and nuclear supplier expo called The Nuclear Energy Assembly. The meeting, normally held in Washington, DC, will be at the Westin in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over the past several years, Charlotte has become a significant hub…
This evening I had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Arjun Makhijani, the President and Senior Engineer at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) of Takoma Park, MD. The conversation is available at Atomic Show #183 – Arjun Makhijani Explains Carbon Free, Nuclear Free Strategy Dr. Makhijani is the author of Carbon Free,…
John Rowe is the recently retired CEO of Exelon, an electric power generation and natural gas delivery company with the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the United States. Exelon just completed a merger with Constellation Energy, bringing the total number of nuclear reactors in its fleet to 22 (17 from Exelon and 5…