MHI expresses interest in Westinghouse

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) of Japan is one of the suitors interested in Westinghouse. The two organizations have a long history of cooperation, dating back more than 30 years when MHI licensed Westinghouse’s Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR)design. MSN Money reprinted an article from the Financial Times on the topic on July 10, 2005 under the…

Competition often drives attitudes

Discussions and articles about energy supply choices often overlook the impact of economic competition on the way that the choices are made and opinion posistions are established. Government organizations play a role because of the way that they get involved in promoting certain kinds of industries or because of the way that they gain tax…

Advanced Nuclear Economics

Steven Ayer at disinterested party has written a number of interesting articles about nuclear power and its future prospects. One of my readers pointed me to his recent article titled Nucleonomics. Unlike Steven and a number of other writers who have written about nuclear power economics, I have a direct and significant interest in getting…

Trackback added – comments?

Since Blogger does not directly support trackback, the kind folks that run the service suggest that their users wanting this feature use Haloscan commenting and trackback. The installation process was very simple, I would be interesting in hearing feedback from anyone that tries using the service from here.

Interesting explanation for Westinghouse decision

On July 6, 2005, Malcolm Wicks spoke to a group of 200 delegates of the British nuclear industry. Mr. Wicks is the UK’s minister of state for energy. He stated that the government had put a lot of thought into the decision to sell Westinghouse. A major factor in the decision process was the fact…

Nigerian Nuclear Program

Nigeria is an interesting case of an oil rich but useful energy poor country. It is a major crude oil exporter, but its citizens get by with an average of about 8 watts of electricity, which is about 1/5 of what the light above my computer uses. Apparently, some of the leaders of the country…

Better use of Tritium for power

One of the issues that I have with fusion enthusiasts is that they obscure the truth about the fuel that they plan to use. When talking about the potential for fusion to supply the world’s energy needs, they often talk about using hydrogen and point out that it is the most abundant element on the…

ITER Fusion Project manager on Science Friday

On July 1, 2005, Ira Flatow interviewed Ned R. Sauthoff, Project Manager, U.S. ITER Project, DOE Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University. As usual, I was not able to listen to the program at the time that it was broadcast, but fortunately Ira has established a podcast edition of his show, so it showed up…

Update on Westinghouse sale

It seems that BNFL’s unions are pretty upset that their employer is planning to sell off the Westinghouse organization. Here is a relevant article from Cumbria Online http://www.cumbria-online.co.uk/viewarticle.asp?id=260225.

Export-Import Bank Loan to Westinghouse Blocked

On Tuesday 28 June, Rep Bernard Sanders I-VT introduced an amendment to the foreign aid bill that would prevent the Export-Import Bank of the United States from lending $5 Billion to Westinghouse that is intended to finance the sale of nuclear reactors to China. The Sanders amendment to H.R.3057 was passed by a 313-114 vote….

Nuclear referendum in the market

BNFL has announced that they are going to sell their Westinghouse division. This sale is going to be an interesting case to watch, as it will either validate my position about the bright future for nuclear power or disprove it. Though there are a lot of legacy products with the Westinghouse brand on them, the…

Atomic Retro

I’ll admit it. I am a child of the 70’s and actually liked doing the Bump when I was in high school. I even wore a leisure suit and polyester shirts with long pointed collars. I just stumbled across a web site that had me laughing out loud. The site is sponsored by Friends of…