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Overheated rods & rhetoric
A little knowledge is sometimes a dangerous thing - particularly when fundamentally incomplete technical knowledge is used to make sweeping engineering recommendations. The latest example of this is the concern over the spent fuel storage pools at...
Minding the (partisan) gap: partisan divisions in support for nuclear
Via NEI's twitter feed comes this story of a new Gallup poll on energy and environmental issues similar to that released by Pew which I dissected a few weeks ago.Image via GallupFor the most part, the trends are indeed quite similar -...
The EPA's coal mandate: An opportunity for nuclear, a giveaway for natural gas
Today the EPA issued its first-ever regulation on carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, limiting emissions to 1000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. Given the fact that the average coal plant vastly exceeds this...
Not all energy is fungible - and it matters
Via the NYT Green blog comes a new survey by the Pew Center indicating that a smaller majority of Americans now prefer further federal funding of research into alternative energy technologies (specifically, wind, solar, and hydrogen) as a priority...
Looking back at Fukushima one year later
It's been a year now since the Great Tōhoku Earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan, leaving over twenty thousand dead and tens of thousands more homeless and displaced. On top of this was the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility...
Small modular reactors in Iowa?
The land of Iowa - home of hogs, corn, windmills, and... SMRs (i.e., small modular reactors). Or at the least, that last part may be true pending a proposal before the Iowa Legislature (HF 561) is passed, allowing for among other things,...
The other thing Vogtle has revived: Nuclear hysteria
Editor's note: This is a modified version of Steve's orginal post which you can find in it's entirety here.They say no one likes a buzzkill, but almost as if on queue, the NRC's announcement of its issue of the first combined operating license (COL...
The End of Natural Gas Price Volatility?
We hear it all the time - natural gas prices are volatile. Here are graphs for natural gas prices and crude oil prices over time that I uploaded to Wikipedia a while ago to illustrate this exact point.Natural GasCrude OilBut firstly, we need to make...
Vermont Yankee Lives to Power Another Day
The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, supplier of 73% of Vermont's emission-free electricity (and approximately one-third of the state's total electricity), won its day in federal court today, thus granting it the right to keep the doors open and...
Effective vs. Ineffective Nuclear Advocacy
Recently, there's been a push among supporters of nuclear energy to try and promote nuclear energy-related petitions in the White House's recent propaganda stunt online citizen petition initiative, "We the People". Some of these petition topics...
The GOP Debate: Don't Bet on Yucca Mountain
The Obama administration's controversial decision to zero-fund (and effectively cancel) the Yucca Mountain spent fuel repository - in violation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act - was generally regarded as a decision which would only be reversed by a...
Civilian Nuclear Energy Programs as a 'Fig Leaf' for Proliferation: Does It Matter?
The Washington Post today featured an interesting article detailing many of the difficulties and setbacks encountered by Iran's enrichment program, post-Stuxnet. In part what it illustrates is the technical difficulty of actually attempting to...
