November, 2009

Let’s take a snapshot of the legislative landscape as it relates to nuclear energy: Last week, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.) introduced a climate change bill that includes a strong nuclear title, something missing from the initial draft of the Kerry-Boxer bill. Take-away phrase...

On a crisp morning in 1937, if you asked him, he may have gone with you and his other friends to a fishing spot just over that hill. But to support his disabled father, and his mother and siblings, Virgil Clifton Summer, Jr., graduated from high school and went to work. The Parr Steam Plant had given...

The Council on Foreign Relations has an interesting interview up with James E. Rogers, Duke Energy’s CEO. Right at the start, interviewer Roya Wolverson notes that Duke is the country’s third largest producer of carbon emissions and stands to  be a “loser” in any climate change legislation. Rogers...

If you’ve been following the health care or climate change debates, you know that your local newspaper will run a story each day whether or not anything significant happened that day because of the intense interest in the subjects. Some stories can roll on for a good long time before anything resembling...

Stewart Brand has been the subject of multiple NNN blog posts over these last several weeks: his latest book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto , was reviewed and the kerfuffle between Amory Lovins and Brand has been discussed in multiple posts . Earlier this week, we had the opportunity...

No need to spend too much time on this , from the San Francisco Gate: Let's back up a little bit. Nuclear energy is unsavory to the average citizen: It creates toxic waste and entails some level of danger for those who leave [sic: live] near reactors and waste sites. Advocates insist that risk has...

Generally speaking, folks who dislike nuclear energy have lost their footing a bit because the pressing energy issue of the day – climate change – seeks solutions that nuclear energy readily provides. A fair number of former anti-nuclear   advocates have put the issues on the scale and found the...

Never say never, but the cap-and-trade provisions in the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill have made a number of Senators nervous about supporting it. A number of Republicans have termed it cap-and-tax and some Democrats are not inclined toward it either. For example, take this bit from the Times West...

This is the fourth and final post from us that looks critically at the bogus claims in Amory Lovins’ latest study. “Role of Government Myth” In his new book , Stewart Brand states (p. 84) : …Energy policy is a matter of such scale, scope, speed, and patient follow-through that only a government can embrace...

Louise Gray at the Telegraph (U.K.) clears it all up for us : Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, argues that a recent rise in temperature around the world is caused by solar cycles and other "extra terrestrial" forces. Extra terrestrial? That sounds like fun. But it...

This Week in Nuclear has a fascinating new interview (downloadable as a podcast) with engineer and writer Joseph Somsel, author of articles in The American Thinker and Energy Pulse . The discussion ranges over nuclear financial topics, touching on tax treatment of new generating stations, investment...

You would be perfectly within your rights to give us the fishy eye if we said anything other than that nuclear energy plants are very expensive to build. Most power plants suffer this problem, because costs are so front-loaded: plants take time to build, introducing bank interest charges, changes in...

The third part of our series that debunks Amory Lovins’ study which criticizes Stewart Brand’s nuclear chapter discusses the need for all emission-free technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The “portfolio myth” On page 82, Brand states that : climate change is so serious a matter, we have...

Shall we see what’s doing in the world of nuclear energy? Aris Candris, the CEO of Westinghouse makes the case in the Wall Street Journal: Nuclear energy … must play a larger role in our effort to become and remain energy independent, and to reduce carbon emissions. The growth of nuclear power will also...

Continuing on Friday’s critique of Amory Lovins’ latest study , our following post delves into discussing if wind and solar are baseload technologies. Funny enough, Lovins’ rebuttal of this myth completely misinterpreted what Stewart Brand said about baseload in his nuclear chapter and apparently ended...

One of the issues in getting the nuclear renaissance rolling – but one that is particularly responsive to capitalist imperatives – is the manufacturing of pieces that make up a plant. After all, it’s been a long time since an American nuclear plant has been built and a lot of the action moved overseas...

We can’t really call yesterday’s passage of the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill through the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee tainted, because the bill itself is almost pristine. No amendments were added to it, nothing was removed. But the process lacked a – certain – something: The Senate...

We have to give our friends in the coal industry credit – it has had a pretty good showing in the climate change bill, even if the goal of the bill builds on the hope that carbon capture and sequestration proves itself, and it survived the widespread attention given to the clean coal carolers , a well...

Three weeks ago Mr. Amory Lovins released a very pointed critique of Stewart Brand’s chapter on nuclear in Brand’s new book, Whole Earth Discipline . After reading both Brand’s and Lovins’ pieces, I understood why Lovins was so critical of Brand. It was because Brand was quite critical of Lovins in his...

Actually, Electricite de France (EDF) and Constellation Energy have been working together for awhile, including as partners in UniStar . But this is a different venture, lately approved by the Maryland Public Service Commission and, let us say, spectacularly good news: EDF is seeking to acquire nearly...

As opposed to Bob McDonnell above, governor-elect Chris Christie of New Jersey tilts rather away from the national Republican party on energy issues. Might not mean anything: It may just be that he has a genuine desire to move New Jersey to solar energy and will clear away hurdles to make it happen....

The governors-elect in this case being Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey. We’ll let the political blogs worry about what the win of two Republicans in previously Democratic-run states means (and that means no partisanship in the comments, please) and take a look at their energy...

When NEI announced its corporate sponsorship with the Washington Capitals one month ago, we knew that our advertising neighbors on the dasher at Verizon Center would be Papa Johns and Geico. Naturally, we were curious to know what other advertisers were trying to reach hockey fans across the league via...

The plausibility of using small nuclear reactors in situations where a full-scale reactor might be seen as overkill is an idea pushed, as you would imagine, by vendors with such reactors in their portfolios. In fact, a group of those vendors travelled around Washington during the early fall months scaring...

We provided you with some of the nuclear energy highlights from last week’s hearings on the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill. Now comes the finagling that makes politics so engaging for those who like to follow it, so frustrating for everyone else. This story from the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin...