Commercial supplies of HALEU needed to enable advanced reactors

Jake DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, the cofounders of Oklo, a start up company that is developing a 1-2 MWe nuclear reactor-based power system for remote areas, have been credited with drawing attention to a problem that can be solved by a government policy decision. “Nearly all advanced reactors have a need for low enriched fuel…

Advances in high temperature nuclear reactor fuel – TRISO integrity at 1800 C!

The Idaho National Laboratory released the following exciting news on September 25, 2013. IDAHO FALLS — A safer and more efficient nuclear fuel is on the horizon. A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have reached a new milestone with tristructural-isotropic (TRISO)…

Fast reactor advocates throw down gauntlet to MIT authors

I have an all-star team of people I can assemble to debate your position on the urgency of fast reactors (top DOE brass, nuclear industry, environmental leaders, etc). You pick the place and time. Near the end of 2010, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a summary of a report titled The Future of the…

Successful Alternatives to Fossil Fuel

Successful Alternatives to Fossil Fuel

The New York Times published a story titled Certainties of 1970s Energy Crisis Have Fallen Away that caused me to fire up my keyboard to send a note back to the author. Following my personal mantra of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”, I thought I would share that note with you. Ms. Galbraith: Your article titled…

Plutonium: Valuable Fuel or Costly Waste?

For more than forty years, the United States and the Soviet Union built nuclear weapons and aimed them at each other’s heartlands. The process of building those weapons was expensive in strict monetary terms and in terms of sacrificing investments in more productive enterprises. Now, however, the confrontational attitude between the two countries has been…

Welcome to: Atomic Energy Insights

The Simple Facts One pound of uranium contains as much energy as 2 million pounds of oil. Releasing that energy from the uranium results in less than one pound of waste material that can be stored in a simple container for decades with no effect on the environment. Burning 2 million pounds of oil will…