The flagship project of the US nuclear energy renaissance is in trouble. The people of the great state of Georgia and the investors in Georgia Power may end up footing the bill for actions that have been taken to delay the project. I feel a personal and a professional attachment to the story; I want…
Watch the full episode. See more Colorado State of Mind. On Friday, June 24, 2011, the Colorado State of Mind program aired a discussion about nuclear energy that featured respectful conversation from several different points of view. The impetus for the discussion was to reflect on the implications of the recent Associated Press portrayal of…
Several months ago, I signed up to receive press releases from Representative Ed Markey, mainly so you don’t have to endure the pain yourself. On June 21, 2011, I received one titled Markey, Welch to GAO: No Way to Assess Integrity of Buried Pipes at Nuclear Reactors that offers some food for thought about the…
Yesterday, I pointed Atomic Insights readers to a series of articles that provide an overview of the history of the antinuclear movement. In addition to recently reading those articles, I have been rereading a 1982 book by Bertrand Goldschmidt titled “The Atomic Complex: A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy.” The two self-assigned homework projects…
On June 15, 2011, the professional staff at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission provided a brief to the commission. It was the second of three planned status updates on the Task Force Review of NRC Processes and Regulations Following Events in Japan. The briefing started with a report by Bill Borchardt the NRC’s Executive Director…
Two articles that appear in the New York Times on June 15, 2011 should help to make it more clear to more thinking people – Russia, the world’s largest natural gas exporter, stands to gain the most money by an illogical, politically driven shift away from nuclear energy. It baffles me why there is so…
Circumstances sometimes create some rather strange alliances. This week, despite being a proud liberal who proudly supports public education, comes from a family of union school teachers, appreciates the value of being covered by a single payer medical plan and voted for President Obama, I find myself cheering for a group of representatives who are…
The Energy Collective, is an aggregation site that provides a wide variety of views about energy. It is often a place with high quality discussions, but it can also be a site where article placement decisions completely baffle me. Yesterday, I visited The Energy Collective and found out that the best, most visible spot on…
I realize that my topic selection during the past couple of days might have given the mistaken impression that NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko’s action to derail the Yucca Mountain project is the main reason that I think that the man is a hazard to the prosperity of my grandchildren. People who have been reading Atomic…
Dr. Gregory Jaczko has successfully elevated the office of Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission into a position of far higher visibility than the often obscure office has received in a very long time – at least since it was an office called the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and inhabited by David…
The US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology has released a report of its findings on the politically motivated budgetary maneuvers that NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko employed to starve his own staff of the funds required to complete their legally mandated review of the DOE Yucca Mountain repository application. He took that…
On May 10, 2011, the Friends of the Earth, a group that has professionally opposed nuclear energy since the late 1960s, issued a press release that challenged the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s refusal to extend the public comment period for the AP1000. Here is a quote from the press release describing how the group organized…