Atomic Insights

Jason Ribero at Pro-Nuclear Democrats embedded the below video on his site a few days ago . I thought Atomic Insights readers might also enjoy watching it. It is no wonder why tireless fossil fuel marketers like T. Boone Pickens , Joe Romm , John Podesta , Ted Turner , and Tim Wirth are such fans of wind energy. It is good for their sales! Read More...

Sometimes I pine for the days when America's decision making bodies included more engineers. If that is too far a stretch, perhaps we can at least get back to a situation where there are more people in decision making positions who have been exposed to some of the training associated with building and manufacturing high quality products. While not all engineers are licensed professional engineers...

A few days ago, I posted a map overlay of the US visitors to Atomic Insights for a thirty day period. One commenter asked for information about international visitors. Here is a screen capture of one of the useful reports provided by Google Analytics about Atomic Insights. During the past 30 days, visitors from 98 countries have stopped by at least one time. The total visitor population is a bit over...

The UAE is one of the world's most richly endowed oil and gas producers, but it has recently signed a contract with a consortium of South Korean manufacturers to build 4 large (1400 MWe) nuclear power plants to supply the electricity baseload in the country. This decision is completely rational. The UAE has a growing, energy intensive industrial base, summer temperatures that frequently exceed...

Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com Several weeks ago, Vermont Senate President Peter Shumlin called a vote of the Vermont Senate on whether or not to give the Public Service Commission permission to issue a certificate of public good for the continued operation of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station. One of the premises underlying the decision that the Senate made to refuse that...

I am not terribly obsessive about checking Atomic Insights stats, but I happened to notice the below overlay indicating that there was at least 1 visitor from every state in the United States - plus the District of Columbia during the past 30 days. (The actual tabulated stats indicated that the lowest total was 3 from Wyoming and South Dakota, with 49 of the measured territories in double digits. The...

A good friend asked me the title question for this blog during the week. The question intrigued me enough to encourage some digging and computations. I would be interested in any questions that you have about the assumptions. Based on reading a number of different articles and checking through the tables provided by the Vermont Department of Health , the fluid that was leaking into the ground contained...

As a sworn defender of the Constitution of the United States, I believe in the importance of making decisions at the right level. Our Constitution does a wonderful job of assigning limited powers to the federal government while reserving the remaining powers to states and individuals. There is healthy tension there and room for debate and discussion on the boundaries. One of the primary strengths of...

The Vermont Department of Health has a well organized page detailing the results of the search for the source(s) of tritiated water leaks at Vermont Yankee . It includes regular updates, site maps and detailed sample results. Based on an update dated March 5, 2010, a remotely operated pipe inspecting vehicle has helped workers discover a hole in the wall of a pipe that is located in the Advanced Off...

On Friday, March 5, 2010, NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow focused on new nuclear technologies . The guest list included, John (Grizz) Deal, CEO of Hyperion Power Generation, Scott Burnell, public affairs officer of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Richard Lester, professor and Department Head of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute...

On September 23, 2009, John Felmy, the chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute (API) spoke at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, PA about the vast opportunities that the API sees for developing the shale gas that is buried about 6,000 feet below the surface. Warning: Felmy is a self-admitted boring economist, but he does a pretty fair job of describing why the oil and...

Please help me welcome NuclearFissionary.com into the growing world of pro-nuclear bloggers. This new site is a polished team effort with an eye-pleasing layout. It includes several articles on economics, history, policy and technology right out of the starting gate. Go over and say hi to Jack and his team. While you are there congratulate Greg for his web design work and Jason for his excellent article...

Decision makers in the regulated part of the business of producing electricity have short memories when it comes to the behavior of natural gas prices , but long memories when it comes to the potential for nuclear power plant construction costs to get out of hand. They publicly worry about the "bet the company" proposition of building new nuclear power plants and ask for as many assurances...

PowerGenWorldWide.com has published a fascinating interview with Chris Mowry, President and CEO, Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) Modular Nuclear Energy titled The mPower TM Modular Reactor . The conversation goes into significant detail about B&W's design decisions, target market, engineering constraints, and desire to make use of its vertically integrated North American manufacturing base....

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