Turkey: The devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria has again raised the issue of whether nuclear power plants can withstand such events. Earthquake safety has long been a consideration in the U.S. and elsewhere, as geologic faults are common and earthquakes entirely unpredictable. Earthquake resistance is on the safety agenda of most advanced, nuclear countries. … More Nuclear Roundup: Turkish Temblor; Hinkley Costs; EDF Woes

A federal court judge has overturned a plan to expand Montana’s only underground coal mine, ruling that the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) repeated approvals, the most recent in 2020, of the 7,100-acre, 175-million-ton expansion plan by Signal Peak Energy for the Bull Mountains Mine No. 1 near Roundup, Montana, … More Court Orders New Environmental Review for Notorious Montana Coal Mine

The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. And Georgia’s Southern Co. investor-owned utility announces further delays in startup of Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the only nuclear power plant under construction in the U.S. In its annual financial report issued yesterday (Feb. 16), the company said it will push the startup … More No Surprises Here: Further Vogtle Nuclear Delays

There is a growing view that the ambitious climate goal of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement – keeping the rise in the global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius – is, as a practical matter, unattainable. Much of the official world of global warming clings to 1.5, as demonstrated at the COP 27 climate conference in … More If 1.5⁰C Is the Past, What’s the Future?

Once the billion-dollar (including $195 million in taxpayer money from the Department of Energy) Petra Nova project to test carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) from coal-fired power plants shut down in Texas in 2020, many analysts proclaimed the technology was a dead end. A report last year from the Institute for Energy Economics and … More Is CCS a Dead Letter Technology?

U.S. District Court Judge Miranda Du in Reno this week (Feb. 6) gave a conditional green light to a proposed large, new lithium mine in northern Nevada, rejecting attempts by local environmentalists, Indian tribes, and a local landowner to halt the project. Du generally ruled in favor of the Jan. 2021 decision by the Interior … More Nevada Lithium Mine Gets Conditional Court Approval

Renewables will lead the new electric generation parade this year, led by solar, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. According to EIA’s Feb. 6 “Today in Energy” report, “Developers plan to add 54.5 gigawatts (GW) of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to the U.S. power grid in 2023, according to our Preliminary Monthly Electric … More EIA’s Generation Parade: Solar, Storage Boom; Coal, Gas Retreat

Aluminum, sulfur, salt. Common, everyday items. They may be the basis for low-cost electric battery storage, supplanting expensive lithium-ion technology. If so, they could provide a low-cost way to store intermittent renewable electricity from wind and sun, using abundant, domestically available material. In an article published last August in the journal Nature, 16 researchers from … More Researchers Propose Revolutionary Battery

This is a variation of a column that I have been writing once a year for decades. I write it to remind readers that skepticism has been a driving factor in my over 40 years in journalism, including small and large city dailies, the Associated Press, Congressional Quarterly, Energy Daily, Electricity Daily, POWER magazine, and, … More In Praise of Skepticism

Rare earth elements are not rare. Economically exploiting them for commercial purposes is difficult. And some of the 17 rare earth minerals are increasingly important in a world that is increasingly electro-centric. Windmills, electric vehicles, lighting, smart phones, televisions, advanced computing, advanced nuclear power plants, and many other end uses depend on rare earths. Science … More Rare Earths: Plentiful, Important, Difficult to Exploit