The never-ending tale of the Hanford, Wash., nuke waste cleanup waste, fraud, and abuse returns, time after time. It’s the longest-running saga of the cascading failure of the U.S. government to deal with the wastes, past and present, from its nuclear weapons program. Last Wednesday (Jan. 24), the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of… More Hanford nuke waste Groundhog Day

“We do have the opportunity to be the first generation that builds a sustainable world,” says 30-year-old Scottish data scientist Hannah Ritchie at the University of Oxford. “Let’s take it.” Ritchie has become a leading figure in a group of scientists and analysts who are pushing back at the currently dominant apocalyptic warnings about a… More The case for climate optimism

For close to 50 years, energy futurists have touted solar energy straight from the source: space-based, sun-focused solar panels beaming electricity back to earth. Why try to replicate the enormous temperatures that power the fusion reactor that is our home star? How about fusion without the incredibly difficult terrestrial engineering challenges and no greenhouse gas… More NASA pessimistic about space-based solar power

Is the Biden administration’s priority on reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations a wise move or a distraction from the more important goal of controlling carbon dioxide emissions? It’s not an easy question, despite a lot of buzz around methane reductions, claiming that action harvests (here’s the cliché) “low-hanging fruit.” Touting the program,… More Methane reductions: smart or a policy diversion?

This is a variation of a column that I have been writing yearly for decades. I write to remind readers that skepticism has been a driving factor in my over 50 years in journalism, including small and large city dailies, the Associated Press, Congressional Quarterly, Energy Daily, Electricity Daily, POWER magazine, and The Quad Report.… More Skepticism is a virtue

The Biden administration is proposing to set aside some 22 million acres of federal land in 11 western states for solar electric generation. The administration move would update its 2012 Western Solar Plan. It adds 5.4 million acres in five states — Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington state, and Wyoming – to the 16.6 million acres… More BLM ups its ambitious plan for solar on public land

The vulnerable Texas electric grid has survived Winter Storm Heather, which brought frigid weather to the Lone Star State and snow and equally frigid temperatures to the East and Middle Atlantic states. Texans, who have become familiar with cold winter weather and searing summer heat bringing statewide blackouts, responded to pleas from the high-voltage transmission… More Texas unharmed by Winter Storm Heather

The massive earthquake that struck Japan on New Years Day, killing an estimated 200, also damaged one of the country’s nuclear power plants as the nation is still trying to recover from the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster. An earthquake and resulting tsunami, an enormous wall of sea water, crashed into the nuclear units and… More Japan’s earthquake response and the U.S. regulatory paradigm

By Henry Sokolski Six years ago, my organization, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC), ran a mock exercise of a law Congress passed in 1978 but that the administration refused to implement —Title V of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978. Title V called on the State and Energy Departments to conduct country-specific analyses of how… More Forgotten, repealed nonproliferation law provision revived

The item on the agenda of the December meeting of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission looked innocuous, filled with the dry, abstract language of most of the commission’s action items. It was an uncontested “settlement agreement” among a bunch of parties on an electric transmission issue going back some 15 years. The action marked the… More The $250 million PATH to nowhere