A colleagues who used to work in the oil and gas industry pointed me to an article from the November 2012 issue of the Journal of Petroleum Technology titled Switch: The New Documentary on Energy’s Future. The article describes a video research project undertaken by Scott Tinker, a former oil and gas company geologist who…
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…
Fission, FAST! My creative juices were inspired this morning by an article titled Climate is not a mass movement. The piece comes from Randy Olson, the filmmaker turned scientist who is most famous among my pro-nuclear communication friends as the author of Don’t Be Such a Scientist. Aside: I wonder how many of the people…
On January 18, I joined Carl and Richard, the hosts of Dot Net Rocks, for an hour long conversation about nuclear energy. We spanned a number of topics including current light water reactors, breeder reactors, accidents, safety records, SL-1, NR-1, Mars Rover, pebble beds, IFR, and traveling wave reactors. Please go visit and listen.
Robert Stone calls Pandora’s Promise his most important work because it discusses our biggest collective challenge – how do we supply a growing world population with the reliable power it needs without slowing choking the Earth’s ability to support our civilization and all of its existing infrastructure. He and the people whose conversions he describes…
One of the benefits of being “out there” in the social media world – which includes old fashioned email lists – is the opportunity to meet like minded souls without being limited to people who happen to be in your neighborhood or your physical social circle. I recently saw an exceptional commentary about Pandora’s Promise…
One of the more frequent inquiries I have received during my years operating Atomic Insights is “What happened to the NS (nuclear ship) Savannah?”. I just learned about a recently completed documentary film by Thomas Michael Conner, a former member of the ship’s crew, that is designed to answer that question in detail using sea…
In the 21 months since three the fuel cores in three nuclear reactors melted at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station, there has been a substantial investment made in learning lessons from the event. Nuclear trained people are members of a learning community, we generally try to make sure that we do not waste any…
(CHARLOTTE, N.C. – December 4, 2012) – The Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W) (NYSE: BWC) is pleased to announce that the production-standard control room prototype for its B&W mPower™ small modular reactor (SMR) is now operational. This engineering simulator is a key milestone in the B&W mPower development program. The B&W mPower control room prototype,…
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…
There are 34 nuclear reactors located in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. Of those, 7 were shutdown for planned maintenance. Three units tripped due to disturbances on the grid or issues with one of their redundant cooling systems. The other 24 remained operational and supplied as much power as the grid could accept. On Sunday,…
I’ve spent a fair amount of time during the past few days trying to convince people who promote only certain types of nuclear fission technologies that they are engaging in the wrong battle. They are failing to recognize that all forms of fission take advantage of the incredible energy density found in atomic nuclei to…