In November of 1951, a small group of engineers gathered at a private astronomical observatory on the shore of Lake Angelus, in Oakland County, Michigan. They had spent the previous year visiting nearly every nuclear facility in America that they could get into with an Atomic Energy Commission clearance — Argonne, Hanford, Oak Ridge — […]
Twenty years ago today, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 22, 2006, I started this blog and wrote the first post. I was thirty-one years old. I was working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as an aerospace engineer on nuclear-power concepts for deep-space missions. I was in my third year of […]
Eighty years ago today, in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico — the Journey of the Dead Man — the first nuclear weapon was detonated in the hour before dawn. The weapon was nicknamed “the Gadget.” It was made of plutonium, an element that had not existed on Earth in any measurable quantity […]
Guangming Daily: After building the Shanghai Light Source, he pioneered a new generation of nuclear energy for 16 years At the 11th “Serve the Country Forum” held by the Shanghai Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently, Researcher Xu Hongjie, Director of the Academic Committee of the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the […]
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 […]
“ORNL molten salt concept could lead to ‘smartphone’ of reactors”, Carolyn Krause, Oak Ridger I recently had the opportunity to speak to the some of the ORNL “old-timers” who comprise the Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (FORNL) in Oak Ridge, TN. FORNL is a non-profit organization focused on promoting the goals of ORNL. I […]
Concept for Fort Saint Vrain Today we are highlighting a reactor that was a pioneer of its kind: the Fort Saint Vrain Nuclear Power Plant, located in Platteville, a city in Northern Colorado. Though the plant has since been converted to a natural gas generating station, Fort Saint Vrain was one of the first thorium-powered […]
The Zoé Reactor, December 21, 1948, during the visit of President Vincent Auriol Today we’re highlighting a historical reactor: the Zoé, the very first French atomic reactor. (And no, I’m not just writing this because we happen to share a name. But maybe I am, a little bit.) The Zoé reactor, sometimes called EL-1 (Eau […]
This is the talk that I gave over lunchtime at the Clean Growth Leadership Network conference, held in London on September 6, 2022: We’re all glad to be here and enjoying one another’s company as we talk about these important issues, but there’s no denying that we’re meeting under a shadow. All of us are […]