As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission celebrated its 50th anniversary Oct. 11, a word and a concept – “efficiency” – was on the minds of the staff, the commission, and the distinguished panel of former, iconic commissioners who addressed the celebration. The prominence of the term came in the new fundamental legal framework for the… More NRC at 50: Will nuclear regulation ADVANCE?
In somewhat of a surprise, the Supreme Court on Wednesday (Oct. 16) refused a power and coal industry emergency petition to stay a Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency rule to reduce power plant carbon dioxide emissions. The 2023 EPA rule, now under challenge at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, would have… More SCOTUS sidesteps political traps in environmental rules
2023 was hot, really hot. The global temperature was almost 0.3°C above 2022 levels, so much higher that even conventional analyses of global warming didn’t appear to explain it. As a recent article in Science magazine notes, iconic climate scientist James Hansen was suggesting that a new, air pollution driven warming mechanism might be at… More Hot 2023: Manmade or natural?
By Henry Sokolski As military tensions between Israel and Iran escalate, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the other media outlets are speculating about how soon Iran could acquire a missile-deliverable warhead if it decided to do so. The conventional wisdom is it would take a year or more. But, as Greg Jones and I note in the attached Foreign… More Guest Commentary: Iran Could Build a Nuclear Weapon Sooner Than You Think
On Oct. 3, researchers saw something nobody had seen for a century. Chinook salmon were swimming freely along the Klamath River in California and Oregon. The arrival of the salmon signaled that the last and largest dam standing of the four hydroelectric dams on the river, the Iron Gate dam, was no more. The dam… More Salmon return to the dam free Klamath River
The Department of Energy should stop work on the long-troubled, fabulously costly high-level nuclear waste (HLW) treatment plant at its closed Hanford weapons site in Washington state, according to the Government Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency. DOE has been working on a pilot plant to mix some 3 million gallons high-level liquid waste left… More GAO to DOE: Pause and rethink Hanford nuke waste vitrification
In Montana, local and national environmental and land use advocates are fighting a state-approved expansion of a controversial underground coal mine, the only underground mine in the state. Attorneys for Earthjustice, the national environmental law firm, have sued Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality for an Aug. 1 approval of an 12.7 million ton expansion of… More Montana underground coal mine faces deep court challenges
The surging floodwaters of Hurricane Helene slightly damaged one of the two Nuclear Regulatory Commission uranium fuel fabrication plants licensed to process highly enriched uranium, Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., in Erwin, Tenn. The plant is in eastern Tennessee, just across the North Carolina line, 0.2 mile from the flooded Nolichucky River. The Johnson City Press… More Hurricane Helene’s atomic energy impacts
In a recent article in The Nation, arguing [unpersuasively—Ed.] that the Tennessee Valley Authority should repeat its 1970s fervid enthusiasm for nuclear power to combat global warming, writer Fred Stafford begins with a rhapsodic description of driving by TVA’s Watts Bar nuke. In that description, he writes, “As I drove across State Highway 68, a… More H2O: The most abundant and most consequential greenhouse gas
NuScale Power, long touted as the most mature of the various small reactor proposals on the market, has failed to make the cut in the U.K.’s SMR design competition, undertaken by the government’s Great British Nuclear (GBN). Four competitors – GE Hitachi, Westinghouse, Holtec International, and Rolls Royce – made the finals and will submit… More Big news for small reactors: UK competition, South Korean license action