I have not posted to The Quad Report since March 26, due to foot surgery that kept me in the hospital for several days and largely immobile for several weeks. While not fully recovered, I am able to get back to following and sharing the energy stories that I find interesting. I will do so in the coming days.
For those who may wonder how I decide what to report on and write about, I follow a simple rule, in place for many years. If I find it interesting, I suspect there are others who will also find it interesting.
My focus for quite some time has been on nuclear power, for several reasons. First, over the past 50-some years. we (and I personally) have seen the birth of a new energy technology and industry, atomic power, its rapid growth, and its slow decline. Today, nuclear is in flux. It appears (and appearances aren’t always valid) that the conventional light water reactor technology is dead in the U.S. and perhaps elsewhere in the West. At the same time, coal appears to be on its deathbed, intermittent renewables are blossoming with still unknown consequences, gas is treading water. While sheer economics is behind a lot of this uncertainty, a significant factor is the response to fears of global warming. No one really knows what climate change will bring (although there are plenty of people and institutions who will claim they do).
In that context, there is lots going on in nuclear in the U.S. and elsewhere, although my focus is largely on the U.S. Are SMRs coming to the rescue of nuclear? Are there advanced nuclear technologies in the wings? Is fusion a pipe dream? What about molten salt? What’s the role of government?
And there are the continuing, everyday stories of interest. Will Vogtle live up to the promises of its business and state regulator interests, or will it sink under the weight of its cost. The ever-fresh Ohio nuclear bribery scandal. On-again France? Usw.
About me and my interest in energy and, in specific, nukes. I come from a long line of coal miners, going back to Europe, and landing mostly in Western Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh No. 9 bituminous coal seam. My great uncle Richard Maize was a long-time Secretary of Mines for the state of Pennsylvania. My father Earl Maize was a long-time Bureau of Mines official (he did the basic research that led to the resin roof bolt for you coal mining geeks), a coal industry lobbyist, a coal company executive, and ended his professional career teaching mining engineering at Penn State.
I mostly grew up in a southern Pittsburgh suburb during the early growth of nuclear in the 1950s and 60s, not far from the Bettis lab where Westinghouse and the Navy developed the nuclear submarine and, as an offshoot, civilian nuclear power. Our across-the-street neighbor was a Westinghouse engineer who was on the Nautilus, the first nuclear sub, for its maiden voyage. Another neighbor was nuclear pioneer Warren Witzig, who working on the Nautilus, founded the late consulting firm NUS Corp., and in 1967 became the head of nuclear engineering at Penn State. (He was a valuable source when I was reporting on nuclear at Energy Daily in the 1980s).
So I grew up with coal and nukes (and worked briefly as a writer and editor at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its early days). I was hired at Energy Daily to cover coal, which I did for my dozen years there. But I reported to work there on March 28, 1979 and the first story I was assigned to was thought to be a small, insignificant glitch at a nuclear power station in central Pennsylvania. It was Three Mile Island 2, I’ve been covering nuclear and other energy topics since, including a dozen years as editor of Electricity Daily, and a decade as a writer and editor POWER magazine.
So, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize @gmail.com)