Crystal River is located on the west coast of Florida, very close to where the Panhandle bends out. One of the largest local employers is a five-unit power station called the Crystal River Energy Complex owned by Progress Energy (soon to be a part of Duke Energy). Four of the units burn coal that comes…
In mid-December, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a motion against Alternative Energy Holdings, Inc. (AEHI). The motion alleged that the company was engaged in fraudulently raising funds for a $10 billion nuclear energy project. As part of the filing, trading in AEHI was halted for two weeks. At the time of the filing,…
Steve Aplin, of Canadian Energy Issues, wrote an excellent piece titled Industrial strategy and cheap energy: why China is eating, and will keep eating, our lunch that captured my attention. He described how China is increasingly taking advantage of an enormous internal market to stimulate continued economic development that is lifting hundreds of millions of…
It is well known that almost any new nuclear power plant project in the United States will attract organized opposition. Opponents will use a litany of familiar arguments and a variety of known techniques to slow or stop the project. It is also well known that continued operation of existing plants can attract opponents who…
Sometimes holiday periods can interfere with keeping up with all of the news and opinions issued about an important topic like energy. On December 20. 2010, the National Journal asked 16 experts to provide commentary on the following question Is natural gas the answer? Unfortunately for the United States, there are apparently some influential people…
After having sat out of the real estate market since 2003, I recently jumped back in by purchasing a home. I had a learning curves experience yesterday that might help me explain why I stubbornly believe that one of the best ways to lower the cost of manufacturing and constructing any product is to keep…
The truth about the health effects of low level radiation are beginning to appear in the main stream of public media. I am not sure when the segment in the video above actually ran on ABC, but it has been available on the web for more than a year. As you can see if you…
Kirk Sorensen is one of the most energetic pro-nuclear activists I have ever met. Not only is he the head nuclear technologist at Teledyne, but he is teaching at the University of Tennessee, obtaining his PhD, and raising some of the brightest young ladies I have ever met. Somehow, he manages to find time every…
I admit to a lack of original thinking. At this time of year, everyone has lists on their mind, so I will add one more. According to Google Analytics, the following posts drew the most visitors during the year. Interestingly enough, several of those posts were not even written in 2010, which provides one more…
As part of my preparations for a final post of 2010, I reviewed my 2010 Google Analytics results. For reasons that I cannot quite understand, a short post I published more than five years ago showed up as third on the hit list. Perhaps I just discovered a catchy title. Here is a updated version…
Michael Eckhart, President of the American Council of Renewable Energy (ACORE), visited with Bill Loveless on Platts Energy Week on December 19, 2010. He was invited to lay out his industry’s proposal to change electric power grid rules to favor power plants that are a hybrid of unreliable, weather dependent energy sources like wind and…
Robert Stone is an independent film maker who is working on a production titled Pandora’s Promise that explores the history and potential future of nuclear energy through a series of interviews with some of the “world’s leading environmentalists, scientists and energy experts, many of whom have undergone a metamorphosis in their thinking about nuclear power”….