July, 2008

A couple of days ago I mentioned that the Maryland Public Service Commission would be holding a series of meetings in southern Maryland for people interested Unistar's proposal to build a third nuclear power plant at Calvert Cliffs. Here are the details for the time and place of those meetings: What...

Apparently my meeting radar was off recently and I missed learning about the Global Nuclear Renaissance Summit in Alexandria, Virginia on 24 July until it was too late. I would have taken time from my day job, especially if I would have known that Dale Klein was going to spend some time talking about...

I have a Google Alert set to inform me whenever there is a news article that includes the string PBMR - which is a unique string that means someone is talking about Pebble Bed Modular Reactors. For the last couple of days, I have been frustrated by the fact that all of the articles returned to me in...

One of the big reasons that I continued to be fascinated by coated particle (TRISO) in graphite matrix fuel is the fact that it is possible to adjust the fuel to moderator ratios to obtain a variety of neutron spectra. By choosing to add less moderator, it is possible to harden the available neutron...

I have mentioned NuScale's small light water reactor project several times in the past few months. Growing buzz about small reactors that can be built in series production schemes Cookie cutter plants may reduce initial costs of new nuclear power Endurance and resilience - key attributes of an atomic...

I have forgotten to mention an article in World Nuclear News from June 2008 that you might want to keep handy as a reference. It is titled Exploration drives uranium resources up 17% . Here is the lede from that article: Current economic uranium resources will last for over 100 years at current consumption...

Mark J. Perry is a professor of finance and economics at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan. He recently published an opinion piece titled Should Congress OK new nuclear power plants? Yes: We must replace natural gas that I found on Bradenton.com. (Bradenton is a city on the west coast of...

After Amy Goodman interviewed Amory Lovins for Democracy Now, she wrote a blog post on TruthDig.com titled Don’t Drink the Nuclear Kool-Aid . I do not think that Amy is one of those bloggers who notices when others have something to say about their posts; she apparently is not even one who participates...

I am off to my day job now, but I need to point out that Amy Goodman at DemocracyNow.org interviewed Amory Lovins on July 16. He was once again introduced as the "Chief Scientist" of Rocky Mountain Instituted and he once again went through his standard litany of deceptions including a denial...

According to a Thursday July 17 article in the Baltimore Business Journal titled Clean energy advocates rally against Constellation Energy's proposed nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs the Maryland Public Interest Research Group and the Chesapeake Safe Energy Coalition are advocating a focus on energy...

One of my favorite readers - you know who you are - let me know that the Wall Street Journal Environmental Capital Blog is talking about small reactors today. You can find the article at Proliferate! Are Many Small Nuclear Plants the Energy Answer? . They are not the only ones mentioning this idea in...

On June 3, 2008, Apache Energy's Varanus Island gas production facility off the coast of Western Australia experienced an explosion and fire in one of two pipelines carrying gas from the large processing plant to the mainland. The fire spread and caused damage to the second pipeline. The accident...

I noticed yesterday that I had missed two interesting articles in the Financial Times last week (July 8, 2008) - Oil price prompts nuclear move and Total and Eni eye nuclear option . Apparently, Total (a large French oil company) and Eni (a large Italian oil company) have determined that their future...

On Sunday July 13, I published a chart that illustrated the amount of heat energy input from oil and nuclear power that was converted into US consumed electricity in the years from 1954 (right after Eisenhower announced the Atoms for Peace program and Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which...

Many observers, perhaps even most observers, claim that the growth of nuclear power has nothing to do with oil consumption. They claim that nuclear power is limited to electrical power and that there is very little oil used to generate electricity. I want to dispel that rumor right now. Since I do not...

T. Boone Pickens is making a lot of waves in the energy world - again. He has 60 years worth of history in the business as a wildcat driller, corporate raider and hedge fund manager who is proud of the fact that he has paid more than half of the taxes that he has ever paid after his 70th birthday. He...

Every once in a while, I feel the need to step away from politics and detailed technical considerations about the existing machinery designs for systems that can use nuclear heat to remind myself why fission has fascinated so many people for so long. The bottom line is that it is a clean, immensely dense...

As a currently serving military officer, I am not allowed to campaign for a particular candidate or political party. I am part of an organization that is subordinate to the authority of civilian leaders and required to follow their orders. I am also required to be respectful of those in my chain of command...

Though most of us suffer when energy prices increase, there are some who benefit greatly. Conversely, when energy prices fall precipitously, there are some who suffer massive losses of wealth and power. The part that is unfair is that the people who benefit from high energy prices have designated representatives...

I have done some reformatting of the graph of non combustion energy sources in the US during the period of 1949-2006. Following the suggestion of Kirk Sorensen, I put wind, solarPV and geothermal on the bottom of the chart in an attempt to better illustrate their growth. Feedback is welcome. Source of...

This is a time compressed post whose major purpose is personal - I need to work a bit on my graphing skills and on my use of the Blogger software that enables Atomic Insights. Quite a while ago, I promised to find some graphs that would show the real energy path that the US has taken to show the contrast...