Even a broken clock is right twice a day. That is one of the sayings that I remember whenever I read works about energy by people like Amory Lovins or Ralph Nader and find myself agreeing with something they have written. (I rarely agree with either of them, but that does not mean that I…
Steve Kirsch, an MIT graduate and enough of an entrepreneurial success to have an auditorium at the school that carries his name, has updated his challenge to the faculty at his alma mater in a post on The Huffington Post titled Is MIT Afraid to Debate Nuclear Report?. Steve is quite serious about this challenge…
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…
In the March 23, 2010 issue of the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven Chu published an op-ed piece titled America’s New Nuclear Option that describes the Administration’s growing interest in smaller nuclear energy systems that can be produced in factories and delivered nearly complete to sites around the country and around the world. Here is…
On January 21, 2010, I caught up with Forrest Rudin and TJ Trapp of Hyperion Power Generation. Forrest is Hyperion’s Chief of Staff; TJ is the Vice President of Engineering. They were on the road meeting with various stakeholders to explain more about their product. They took the time out of their schedule to provide…
On Thursday, October 8 and Friday, October 9, the US Nuclear Regulator Commission hosted a workshop to discuss generic issues related to licensing of small and medium-sized nuclear reactors. The meeting was billed as the first in a series on the topic. The NRC managers responsible for Advanced Reactors organized the meeting because they have…
Tom Sanders is an advocate of building right sized reactor power systems to meet human needs. He is a leader of a team working on that technology at Sandia National Laboratory. He is also the President of the American Nuclear Society. He has been doing a lot of traveling lately, answering questions about his vision…
Sometimes, games really do change while few people are watching. That is what happened yesterday when Babcock and Wilcox announced their mPowerTM modular nuclear power plant. The big difference is not the basic technology – after all, the mPower reactor is a pressurized water reactor using the same kind of coolant, the same kind of…
(Like all parts in this series, the reference book is Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved written by Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian and published in January 1978 by Basic Books, Inc. of New York.) One of the primary themes running through Light Water is the fact that the economic predictions associated with…
Every once in a while, I like to curl up with a good story that has villains, well meaning good guys, international intrigue, and perhaps even a moral. Sometimes those stories have happy endings, other times they leave you hanging and waiting for the next installment. I just finished such a book – Light Water:…
Two years ago, Steve Kirsch, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, was sure that the US did not need nuclear power. Now he thinks it can save the planet. Find out what changed his mind. More and more people who are sincerely concerned about the impact that human activity is making on the planet are…
I got notified via a Google Alert on “small nuclear power plants” about a post on a blog that I had not previously visited. The post was titled The Environmentalists Nuclear Debate (2) Mark Lynas. The post provided a link to a very interesting article by Mark Lynas in the New Republic titled How nuclear…