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 […]
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 […]
Dr. Barry Brook has read the fine print and followed the references in Jacobson and Delucchi’s upcoming article in Scientific American (you know, that thing that editors are supposed to do?) and found such a stunning lie that our nuclear blogosphere is still reeling that anyone could possibly think that they could get away with […]
A number of months ago my friend Ray Beach at NASA’s Glenn Research Center invited me to come and talk to a meeting of their local INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) group in Cleveland, Ohio. So I got in the car and drove 640 miles last Sunday to be there Monday morning at the […]
On several occasions over the last ten years I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the United Launch Alliance (ULA) rocket construction facility in Decatur, Alabama. This marvelous factory was first built by Boeing exclusively to build the Delta 4 family of rockets, but as time progressed, it later included the construction of Delta 2 rockets […]