nuclear power
hrynyshyn | June 17, 2010What happened at Three Mile Island in 1979 led to a new regulatory environment that increased the costs of building and running nuclear power reactors in the U.S. The environment was so hostile to the industry that no new reactors have been ordered since then. There are several in the planning stages, but none have been approved. The question now being debated among energy analysts is whether or not what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico at the moment will lead to similar challenges for the oil industry.
Of particular interest is the precedent set this week when BP agreed to pony up $20…
hrynyshyn | June 10, 2010A debate at TED in February over nuclear power's merits as a clean source of electricity featured Whole Earth Catalog guru Steward Brand (pro) and Stanford energy systems analysts Mark Jacobson. A lot of ground covered in 23 minutes, including just how much ground various clean energy options cover.
The winner? It was a slam dunk for ...
I'll let you figure it out for yourself.
"Does the world need nuclear energy?" is an important question, for at least two reasons. First, Congressional legislators seem intent on including increased support for the nuclear industry in any climate or energy…
tlambert | September 8, 2009Way back in August 1988 on Usenet I wrote:
Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all
(if it's really happening - we probably won't be sure until its too late)
caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad - burning fossil fuels
could well be more harmful to the environment than nuclear power.
The evidence I've seen since then has convinced me that it is almost certain that greenhouse gases are causing warming and that burning fossil fuels is more harmful than nuclear power.
Fran Barlow kicked off a discussion on nuclear power in the open thread with…
bcohen | September 4, 2009I had the chance to interview Rebecca Solnit for The Believer. It's on shelves now, in their September issue. They've also put the full text of it on-line at their website. (Here it is.)
To quote the interview's intro, Solnit is the author of twelve books. She is a journalist, essayist, environmentalist, historian, and art critic; she is a contributing editor to Harper's, a columnist for Orion, and a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com and The Nation; she's also written for, among other publications, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Review of Books.
She talks…
hrynyshyn | June 12, 2009Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Thursday that Canada is getting out of the medical isotope business. The implications of the decision, which appears to be motivated primarily by a desire to avoid further political embarrassment, go beyond the confines of the country's health-care system. It also hints at some tough times ahead for those responsible for overseeing the world's nuclear industries.
First, Canada until recently produced close to 40% of the world's supply molybdenum-99, a radioactive isotope that decays quickly to technetium-99, which is widely used to help diagnose cancers…
hrynyshyn | March 26, 2009Few technologies give rise to more spirited debates among environmentalists than nuclear power generation. So it was with some trepidation that I started to read an essay on the subject in last week's Washington Post. This is the same newspaper that took six weeks to run a rebuttal to George Will's latest attempts to obfuscate the climate change debate and still hasn't run a correction for the myriad mispresentations contained therein. So maybe it's not surprising that "5 Myths on Nuclear Power" by hitherto unheard of Todd Tucker is similarly hobbled by a lack of respect for reality.
Here are…