The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission this afternoon announced it is cancelling its annual “Regulatory Information Conference” (RIC) because of fears of the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19. The conference has routinely drawn several thousand participants annually to the agency’s Bethesda, Maryland headquarters, and was scheduled for March 10-12. In an announcement, the agency said it … More Breaking: Coronavirus causes NRC to cancel conference

The UK has passed a law mandating zero net emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases by 2050. Airplanes emit a lot of CO2 and cannot run on batteries, or not very far anyway, so what do net zero air travel emissions look like? We now have two studies on this question, diametrically opposed. They … More Analysis: A tale of two airline futures

Freeman Dyson, a true polymath — mathematician, physicist, theoretician, inventor, experimentalist, philosopher, ethicist, essayist, advocate, and heretic — died last week in Princeton, N.J. He was 96. I recommend the conventional obituaries, particularly in the New York Times and the Washington Post. My 2012 book, Too Dumb to Meter, has a chapter – “Flatulence in … More Freeman Dyson and TRIGA

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday (Feb. 27) charged Dominion Energy’s South Carolina utility SCANA Corp. and two former executives with civil fraud in connection with the 2017 $10 billion collapse of the V.C. Summer nuclear plant expansion. The securities agency said the company and its top executives repeatedly lied about the progress … More Feds charge fraud in V.C. Summer nuclear failure

The U.S. government’s 75-year history of feckless management of military nuclear wastes at the Hanford, Wash., site has drawn new criticism from the Government Accountability Office. The congressional watchdog agency, in a report released Feb. 20, said the Department of Energy had failed to adequately analyze the May 2017 collapse of a plutonium uranium extraction … More Government’s retched record on nuclear waste rolls on

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission today surprisingly rejected a Pacific coast LNG export terminal. Both Democratic Commissioner Richard Glick and Republican Commissioner Bernard McNamee turned down the request of the Jordon Cove Energy Project for a terminal to be sited in Coos Bay, Ore. McNamee’s vote was a surprise as he and fellow Republican Chairman … More FERC halts approval of $10B LNG export terminal

Here’s a bizarre energy tale out of always bizarre California. Bankrupt PG&E is offering free, carbon free electric power to the state’s burgeoning “community choice aggregator” (CCA) electric distributors – which have already won a major portion of the San Francisco-based power behemoth’s load – for sales to their customers. Among those CCAs to whom … More PG&E offers free carbon-free electricity

Examined carefully, the apocalyptic climate emergency narrative is an empty shell. Just what the looming catastrophe looks like is never explained. There is no there, there. But there is a good reason for this carefully crafted silence, namely no plausible scenario whereby global catastrophe comes from global warming. As the CLINTEL manifesto points out, the … More Commentary: Climate catastrophe not

President Trump, a consummate liar, charges “fake news” anytime a news account challenges his views on any topic. No matter how well-researched and sourced, if Trump doesn’t like it, it’s fake news. My friend David Hahn-Baker suggests a nickname for Trump: Pinocchio. Particularly scary, many of Trump’s cult followers automatically accept his assessment of the … More “Fake news” and skepticism

While electric vehicles get a lot of hype in the U.S. and abroad, they remain very much a niche market. The Institute for Energy Research notes, “Despite exponential growth, with a record 2 million or so electric vehicle sold worldwide last year, only one in 250 cars on the road is electric. Only Norway, which … More Vehicle charging: An EV major problem