Yesterday I was going through some old papers and I came across one that I must have photocopied quite some time ago. It was called “Advanced HTGR Systems” and was written by Peter Fortescue of General Atomics in 1975, and published in the Annals of Nuclear Energy, Vol. 2, pages 787-799. As I looked at […]
Recently it was reported in Defense Daily that the White House Office of Management and Budget has moved to remove all research in fast-spectrum fission reactors from the DOE budget. This in turn prompted an outcry from the Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, who stated: “Prohibiting research and development on fast reactors under the fuel […]
There is a fundamental fork in the road when it comes to plotting an energy future, a fundamental difference between two approaches, grounded in the very principles of nuclear physics. It was recognized at the dawn of the nuclear age by luminaries like Eugene Wigner and Enrico Fermi. This division went on to be implemented […]
Thanks to monitoring the Twitter feed for “thorium” I find some really wonderful things on the net, like this–on their blog, “Global Artwork” did a size comparison of the amount of firewood, coal, oil, uranium, and thorium it would take to meet all of the world’s energy needs. The pictures speak for themselves! Global Artwork: […]
Forgive my alliterative title, but Dr. Per Peterson of UC Berkeley is a co-chair of the Generation IV Proliferation Resistance and Physical Protection Working Group. Several months ago on the thorium-forum he posted five specific categories of performance issues/threats that serve as a basis to assess the proliferation resistance of a proposed reactor design. As […]
Here are two articles. Both are in the New York Times. Both are written by Matthew Wald. Both are about “nuclear power” (meaning light-water reactors in this case). But they are separated in time by twenty years: The Nuclear Industry Tries Again, Nov. 29, 1989 Every plant of the more than 100 ordered since 1973 […]
For those of you who have procrastinated buying the January 2010 issue of WIRED magazine, it looks like your waiting might have paid off: WIRED Magazine: The New Nuke I especially appreciate the efforts of Rick Martin and Erin Biba in getting this article pulled together and into Wired! Thanks to the Wired article, we’re […]
Here’s the speech that I would have written for Obama to give at Copenhagen, if I had been asked: “Greetings fellow delegates. We are here to confront the issue of global climate change. For me, I must admit, I am not a climatologist nor a scientist, and there are many things that I don’t understand […]
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 […]