Senate Joint Resolution 67 was introduced into the Alabama state Senate on Thursday, April 10, by state Senator Greg Albritton. It passed the Senate on April 15, and passed the House earlier today. It goes to Governor Kay Ivey for her signature. (UPDATE: Gov. Ivey signed the resolution on April 23!) For many years, we […]
Thermoelectric generators powered by the decay of plutonium-238 literally opened up the exploration of the solar system to the United States. Pioneer 10 and 11 were the first probes to Jupiter and Saturn. Both were powered by American RTGs. Viking 1 and 2 landed on Mars, and survived several years to tell the tale, due […]
We had success in Colorado last night! House Bill 25-1040 (“Adding Nuclear Energy as a Clean Energy Resource.”) passed through the Senate Transportation & Energy Committee with a vote of six in favor and three against. A recording of the entire proceeding is available from the committee’s website. Senator Larry Liston, the bill’s sponsor and […]
Fusion reactors have gotten a lot of attention over the last few years. The recent excitement seemed be kicked into high gear when Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced in late 2021 that they had closed on a $1.8B funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Over the next few years, many other fusion companies were born […]
25 years ago I moved to northern Alabama and for all of that time I have been driving by the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant near Hollywood, Alabama, and wishing that I could go and get a closer look at it. Well, on the morning of March 4th, a quarter-century of wishing finally came to pass. I […]
Flibe Energy’s approach to sustainable nuclear energy is a liquid-fluoride reactor that runs on the thorium fuel cycle. Our design builds upon the technologies that were demonstrated and proven during the early days of nuclear development. To better understand the validity of our approach, we will look at the history of these early nuclear programs […]
It’s been fifteen years since I last wrote a blog post in this series about separative work, and although none of the underlying physics have changed, a few things in the market have changed. The most notable of these is the increase in interest around uranium enriched to about 20 percent, which is a legal […]
March 5, 2025 update: Jack Spencer and I did another public discussion panel around his book at the Energy Policy Research Foundation. We saw a lot of new faces there and had a very good discussion around the issues he raised in the book.
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 […]