It had been a full week for us, and on Saturday morning Laurence O’Hagan took us for a drive up to Cambridge to see the Baroness and relax some. Riding in a car in the UK was still quite a new experience for me. Sitting in the “drivers side” of a car and having no […]
Thursday, September 8th began with a media opportunity at the British Science Festival that was set up by the Weinberg Foundation. I participated on a panel of six speakers, including Baroness Worthington, discussing the results of a recent poll showing that public support for nuclear energy was still quite strong in the UK. Guardian: UK […]
Can a liability be turned into an asset? That was the essential character of the question that Baroness Bryony Worthington asked in the House of Lords on September 7th, 2011. I had the privilege of being in the House of Lords as she asked the question, and the response was very positive from both sides […]
“Does thorium have a role to play in generating energy for the UK?” That is the central question that brought me to the United Kingdom as Flibe Energy to participate in the launch of the Weinberg Foundation, a new non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to the advancement of thorium and the fluid-fuelled reactor. Our trip was […]
I had the privilege of meeting Bryony Worthington, founder of Sandbag.org, in July 2009 when she was a member of the panel that would deliver the Manchester Report, which was a part of the Manchester International Festival sponsored by the Guardian newspaper. Sandbag works to purchase and “retire” carbon credits, thus reducing the amount of […]
Last night I was flying back to Alabama from TEDxYYC in Calgary, and somewhere over the middle of the continent I found myself with a few hours and a recorded program I had been meaning to watch. I pulled it up on my laptop: “Plan-B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization,” a PBS documentary built around the […]
In trying to answer the persistent question about LFTRs: “why wasn’t this done before?” I’ve obtained a report from 1962 made to President Kennedy where future development options for nuclear power were laid before him. Alvin Weinberg specifically references this report in his 1994 memoir (“First Nuclear Era”) and goes on to say that it […]
I was very fortunate to meet Dr. Kazuo Furukawa in person several weeks ago, and he shared with me a fascinating talk that had somehow escaped my attempts to discover everything Alvin Weinberg said or thought or wrote down about the molten-salt reactor. The talk was called “The proto-history of the molten salt system” and […]
I should have known right from the moment I walked in the building that this was going to go well. Right inside the main door are two large statues; one of James Prescott Joule, the famous physicist and thermodynamicist, and the other of John Dalton, chemist and pioneer of atomic theory. As I walked by, […]
Not far west from the ruined community of Cefn Croes lies the Snowdonia Mountains of Wales, the site of one of the United Kingdom’s most beautiful National Parks. It was to Snowdonia in 1971 that a young Amory Lovins came at the behest of David Brower. Young Lovins, a three-time college dropout with an unearned […]