The levelized-cost-of-fuel (LCF) is a very useful value to calculate for different sources of electrical energy. Essentially, the LCF is the levelized-cost-of-electricity (LCOE) with the capital and operations terms removed. Since many regulatory bodies, including most state-level public service commissions (or public utility commissions) make their determinations about generation capacity around the LCOE, it is […]
I traveled to Jackson to speak to the three members of the Mississippi Public Service Commission on Tuesday, October 22. They had assembled a “2024 Nuclear Summit” and were gracious enough to allow me to present our technological approach to them. I started my talk by describing the unique economic challenge that the entire nuclear […]
I was invited to speak at a panel hosted by the Greek section of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) at the Posidonia 2024 conference in Athens, Greece, this week.
(continued from part one…) I’m really sorry for how long it has taken me to get to the second part of a response to Peter Zeihan’s brief video about small modular reactors. The video was released on November 28, 2023, and I threw up a blog response the same day, but spooled up a bunch […]
HALEU is basically 20% enriched uranium, and I have watched with disbelief as it has gone from an obscure fuel option to the central fuel form for the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Development Program (ARDP). But boy oh boy, is this stuff expensive. And other people are starting to notice and realize that […]
Targeted alpha therapy is an example of a technology that is used to kill cancer. It shows particular promise against dispersed cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. A radioisotope that undergoes alpha decay is chemically bonded to an antibody and injected into the body. The antibody seeks out and binds to the desired cell, then […]
A recent paper by Lindsay Krall, Allison Macfarlane, and Rodney Ewing has garnered a great deal of attention: Stanford-led research finds small modular reactors will exacerbate challenges of highly radioactive nuclear waste Nuclear waste from small modular reactors The paper claims that small modular reactors (SMRs) will generate waste streams that are disproportionately large relative […]
These are notable quotes from Alvin Weinberg’s 1994 autobiography “The First Nuclear Era, the Life and Times of a Technological Fixer“. Thorium will create the Second Nuclear Era Until then I had never quite appreciated the full significance of the breeder. But now I became obsessed with the idea that humankind’s whole future depended on […]
Today our hopes for a thorium-powered future took a huge step forward as Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas introduced the “Thorium Energy Security Act” in the United States Senate. S.4242 – A bill to provide for the preservation and storage of uranium-233 to foster development of thorium molten-salt reactors […]
For many, many years now, we have endeavoured on this blog to help the public understand the value of uranium-233 and the unique advantage that the United States possesses with their U-233 inventory. But for just as long, we have lamented that the Department of Energy is bent on the destruction of this valuable material. […]