For Sunday December 21, 2014, I sent out a standard invite to my list of the usual suspects for an Atomic Show round table. As the responses came in, I realized that random chance had ensured that every one of the people on the call was a grandparent. It seemed kind of appropriate to talk…
Josh Freed, Third Way‘s clean energy vice president, has published a thoughtful, graphically enticing Brookings Essay titled Back to the Future: Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle Against Climate Change. It focuses on Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie of Transatomic Power, but it also makes it abundantly clear that those two visionary entrepreneurs are examples…
Alex Epstein, the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, recently published The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Trained as a philosopher, Alex describes himself as anti-pollution but pro-development. He believes that the standard of value for any development or technology should be its impact for human beings and that the green standard of non-impact…
On December 7, 2014, 60 Minutes, the venerable investigative reporting television show that has been on the air since 1968, aired a segment about Duke Energy’s Dan River coal ash spill, which occurred on February 2, 2014. That large release of coal waste was a big topic in local newspapers and television shows in my…
By Robert Parker President, Australian Nuclear Association Two of the most powerful nations on earth have concluded an agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Included in that agreement is reference to nuclear power being used to limit those emissions. Yet in Australia even discussion of nuclear power is taboo. We continue to frame the control…
On December 2, 2014, Bloomberg published an article titled Oil Investors May Be Running Off a Cliff They Can’t See in the Personal Finance section of their online publication. The article focuses on the risks associated with investing in companies that specialize in developing or financing fossil fuel resources in an era where there is…
On October 20, IBM announced that it was spinning off its chip division by paying GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion. GlobalFoundaries appears to have won the deal with its geographic position of owning fabrication facilities in New York as well as in Germany and Malaysia. The move didn’t surprise many, as there have been rumors that IBM…
On November 6, 2014, immediately after the midterm election results became available, National Review Online published an article by Kevin D. Williamson titled With Energy, More Is More: An Economic Agenda for the New GOP Majority. Long time readers of Atomic Insights will know that I lean way to the left on the political spectrum…
On October 21, 2014, I was invited to be a speaker at the Eastern Washington American Nuclear Society Meeting. That talk was recorded and produced by volunteers at the section. Perhaps as a result of jet lag or nervousness, I neglected to provide proper credit for borrowed slides. Though the words were mine, the slides…
An article in the Berkshire (MA) Eagle News titled New England Clean Energy Council hopes for renewable energy push from candidates appeared in my Google News Alert on “new nuclear power plants” this morning. If you follow that link and begin reading, you might wonder how Google found this article. The story headline and most…
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station never threatened public health and safety. Unit 2 could have been started as soon as its scheduled outage was completed in February of 2012. Unit 3 could have been restarted by mid-March 2012. The total cost of the repairs, including purchased replacement power, should have been less than $50…
Jim Conca has published a couple of recent posts on Forbes.com about the premature closure of nuclear power plants in the United States. One titled Are California’s Carbon Goals Kaput? focuses on some of the environmental aspects of the San Onofre debacle; the other, titled Closing Vermont Nuclear Bad Business for Everyone focuses on the…