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 […]
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 […]