February, 2011

Andrew Revkin posted a thought provoking blog yesterday titled Bringing Responsible Oversight to the Gas Drilling Boom on the New York Times hosted Dot Earth blog . In that post he agreed with those who have recognized the need for responsible regulation of the rapidly expanding industrial activity using...

I favor David and Goliath stories, especially when Goliath is a dangerous, selfish and greedy force that puts short term profits in front of health and safety issues that may affect generations. Though I have not yet had the opportunity to watch the movie, I have learned enough about Gasland and the...

Knowing how ad placement works on the internet, I thought I would capture and share a recent experience I had while reading an article on The Hill E2 Wire titled Libyan turmoil, $100 per barrel oil fuel Republican drilling push on Capitol Hill . I love having a forward looking neighbor and...

I have just started listening to the Vermont Public Radio debate between Arnie Gundersen and Meredith Angwin on the subject of whether or not Vermont Yankee should remain running. After listening to the moderator's introduction of Mr. Gundersen, I had to stop and share some thoughts. Here is...

I am running a bit late this morning. I was out way past my normal bedtime at the Lynchburg Engineers Week dinner. What an amazing gathering - more than 300 people on a weeknight in a relatively small town who are at least as fascinated as I am with the process of creating useful products and structures...

I am haunted this early morning (0230) by a phrase seen on a blog comment yesterday. Joe Shuster, author of "Beyond Fossil Fools", was once asked WHO he worked for (implying that he was a paid mouthpiece for some evil concern). His reply was simple, true and spot-on! He replied, "For my...

Kirk Sorensen is one of the most active and articulate advocates of nuclear energy that I know. Listen carefully to this interview and see if you agree. ...read more

The attorneys general of Vermont, New York and Connecticut are once again trying to use "the waste issue" to establish control over the longevity of nuclear energy facilities. Those lawyers hate the idea that large scale, reliable, emission free energy production plants can continue to operate...

Harvey Wasserman, a long time professional antinuclear energy campaigner, is once again on Huffington Post, claiming that the repeatedly announced increase in the nuclear loan guarantee program is a "giveaway." He is dead wrong on so many levels. Aside: Please do not be confused by the...

Disclosure: I am long on AEHI. One of piece of knowledge that I continue to struggle to share with the world is the recognition that there are sometimes large financial rewards available from going negative. Many people instinctively recognize a sales pitch and often discount the source as someone...

Every once in a while I get a little sarcastic. It might get me in trouble one of these days - or should I say it might get me in more trouble one of these days. I follow a Twitter user named NaturalGasFlk who just tweeted about a post on True Blue Natural Gas titled America Has a Crush on Natural...

Every once in a while, I like to share this global view of the visitors to Atomic Insights. It is rewarding to know that the discussions we host end up reaching so many corners of the world. It is no surprise that we do not have any regular readers in Greenland or the Democratic Republic of the...

I do not hate oil companies, I hate their business model. I hate the fact that they are capturing a vast portion of the world's wealth and power by extracting an ever higher price for essentially the same product that they have been selling for 100 years with few technical improvements that make...

I love living in an era where we have access to timely videos covering subjects that have traditionally been ignored by the advertiser-supported media. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) employs forward thinking individuals who recognize the value of communicating without commercial filters. They have...

About 15 months ago, I wrote a blog titled Means, Motive and Opportunity - Who Discouraged US Nuclear Developments? After several intense and interesting conversations during the past three days, I decided that it was time to update that post and provide some additional information. Please take a few...

On January 30. 2011, Bill Loveless of Platts Energy Week interviewed Kevin Book of Clearview Energy Partners and Matthew Armstrong of Bracewell and Giuliani to get their reaction to the recent announcement that Josh Fox's Gasland had received an Oscar nomination for best documentary film. The interview...

(Source: Weekly highlight from Platts Energy Week for February 6, 2011 .) Coal is already a global market, but the opportunities for high profits through exports are on the rise. The recent torrential rainfall and tragic flooding in Queensland, Australia caused a significant amount of damage to...

More and more articles about nuclear energy are appearing to reach the conclusion that the technology is safe enough, reliable enough, and competitive enough except for the fact that the plants take too and cost too much. Some people in the pronuclear camp have determined that the only way to solve that...

I just read a BBC Science News article titled Chernobyl birds are small brained . The headline writer succeeded in his job - he attracted me to click on the link and read the article. The person who shared the link on Twitter also succeeded, by copying the link and headline into a tweet, he pointed me...

The Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant has been under attack for several years by a concerted, organized effort to force it to shut down. One of frequently employed tactics has been to widely publicize and repeatedly mention any event that puts the plant in a bad light. The tactic of repetition imposes...

Normally, I am reluctant to simply reproduce a press release, but I figured you might be interested in this one. From the Nuclear Energy Institute: As Texas copes with rolling electricity blackouts and its coldest temperatures in decades, you should be aware that the state’s four nuclear power...

The Atomic Age did not really start with a bang, and the scientists who discovered that neutrons were matter altering tools that enabled them to release vast quantities of heat energy were not really focused on building destructive weapons. Instead, atomic pioneers like Szilard, Fermi, Noddack, and Mitner...

I just spent the past hour and 9 minutes listening to the ExxonMobile earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2011. The company reported some impressive numbers. Exxon recorded $9.3 billion in net earnings for the fourth quarter and $30.5 billion in net earnings for the year. The company generated $51...

Annapolis Harbor Early Morning Ajax Eastman has just published a piece on the Baltimore Chronicle , non-profit, internet only news site. Ajax's article, titled Pulling Back the Curtain on Wind Power is one of the clearest, most concise explanations for why building massive turbines is a dumb idea...

This morning, instead of getting your daily atomic fix from here, please go to the ANS Nuclear Cafe to read a post titled Nuclear energy is a disruptively cheap and simple way to boil water . I wrote post that while musing on the important role that steam has had in enabling modern societies where machines...