Recently a member of the thorium-forum who has also been a member of the “environmental” group Environmental Action, received a form letter asking him to renew his membership. He perused their website and found nothing about nuclear energy, except for the fact that here in the U.S. we now get 19% of our electricity from […]
A few posts ago I mentioned the UK TV show where they showed an army of “energy slaves” pedaling away, trying desperately to generate enough power for a single family…a better demonstration of the concept of energy slaves, I’ve never seen. I predicted we’d see more of such foolishness as the Copenhagen conference neared–what I […]
Here’s another good example of junk science being used to sell newspapers and stoke anti-radiation fear: Chicago Tribune: CT scans, cancer risk linked Using normal doses of radiation for the procedure, about one in 270 women who receive it at age 40 and one in 600 men will develop cancer as a result, Dr. Rebecca […]
I was interviewed several months ago by the author for this article. The Economist: Nuclear’s next generation One form of MSR, the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), has garnered particular enthusiasm among those who regard thorium as an attractive replacement for uranium and plutonium in the fuel cycle. (Thorium is both cheaper and more abundant […]
A few months back I blogged about going out to see the old Yellow Creek Nuclear Reactor site north of Iuka, Mississippi. I went back last Friday:You can stand in the middle of this old cooling tower and speak no louder than a whisper and yet it comes back to you nearly as clearly as […]
Using the waste heat from a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor to desalinate seawater is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It seems like a perfect opportunity since the reactor needs to reject waste heat in order to produce electricity, and that waste heat will be available in large amounts. But first of […]
Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to end work on a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Now, as president, he has followed through on that promise and directed the Department of Energy (DOE) to halt work on Yucca Mountain. This means that all of the spent nuclear fuel generated at each of […]
A lot of the folks that attended the first Thorium Energy Alliance Conference were people that had made their interest in thorium known previously–either through blogs or presentations or so forth. But we did have a few total “newbies” at TEAC1, and one of them was Dr. Mitch Jacoby, senior editor of Chemical and Engineering […]
The Department of Energy has an Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE). They have five overall strategic goals: 1. Extend life, improve performance, and sustain health and safety of the current fleet of nuclear power plants 2. Enable new plant builds and improve the affordability of nuclear energy 3. Enable the transition away from fossil fuels […]
Yesterday my wife sent me off to the local cotton gin to get some really good rich dirt for her garden beds. Fortunately my neighbor had just the appropriate pickup truck and the right disposition on a Saturday morning for such a job. So we headed off, stopped for gas and some Diet Cokes, and […]