A California-based correspondent shared the following vignette to a private email list early this morning. An aside — had dinner with a Stanford biz prof teaching entrepreneurship. His 15 Chinese students were at the table too (big table). A few spoke English. One is international marketing head for China Nuclear Power Engineering Company — largest…
Finns are pragmatic people who love their country, but also recognize its geographic limitations. “Finland is a very cold and dark country. Electricity is very important to us. We are a kind of island in Europe, we have take care of ourselves. No one will help us if we run out of power.” Way back…
Reuters is running a series titled Breakout: Inside China’s Military Buildout. Installment number 6 is titled The U.S. government lab behind Beijing’s nuclear power push. The title is misleading; it is not about China’s world-leading, multibillion-dollar program. That program includes 29 large commercial nuclear plants currently under construction. Instead, the article focuses on a $350…
On December 12, 2013, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of NuScale as the winner of the second round of funding under the Department of Energy Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). That announcement, which had been due since sometime in September, must have been quite welcome to a lot of really talented and…
As a Navy nuke, I was carefully taught to believe that everything we learned about atomic energy had to be strictly protected from release to anyone who was not “cleared”, especially anyone who was not a US citizen. I started to question that policy after I completed my tour as the Engineer Officer on the…
Seventy one years ago — on December 2, 1942, at 3:25 pm — Enrico Fermi and his team achieved the first controlled, man-made, self sustaining chain reaction in a simple reactor. In recognition of that historical event, several of my nuclear colleagues refer to December 2 as “Critmass” (short for critical mass). The first nuclear…
By Ed Pheil I mentioned at the Thorium Energy Conference 2013 that accelerator driven systems (ADS) were likely to hurt the nuclear industry more than help it with the following discussion. The ADS proponents are justifying their participation, including with thorium, on the basis of two concepts that cater to the anti-nuclear crowd. A) ADS…
President Obama should task John Richardson with a mission similar to the one that President Dwight Eisenhower gave Hyman G. Rickover. Richardson is the current leader of Naval Reactors (NR), the organization that Rickover built. If directed, NR could begin a new assignment to show others how to manufacture complete nuclear fission power systems starting…
CNN has done a masterful job of seizing the opportunity provided by Robert Stone’s thought-provoking Pandora’s Promise to generate a passionate discussion about the use of nuclear energy — a vitally important topic — at a critical time in American history. The decision makers at that somewhat fading network should be congratulated. Of course, generating…
In the above clip from a recent interview on CNN’s Piers Morgan, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. describes how Pandora’s Promise advocates that canceling the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) project in 1994 was a mistake. RFK Jr., a man from an iconic family that has been a part of the US moneyed Establishment for the better…
> Bruce Power has successfully restored the four units at Bruce A with the cooperation of private industry, trade unions and the provincial government. The relatively compact site now houses 8 large nuclear units with a total generating capacity of 6,300 MW of emission free electricity. The successful project was driven by creative people applying…
By Timothy Maloney, PhD Editor’s note: Timothy Maloney has written a number of text books about electrical circuits, electricity, and industrial electronics. The below is a copy of a letter that he wrote to Ralph Nader in response to an opinion piece published by CounterPunch under the headline Why Atomic Energy Stinks Worse Than You…