She was a dream ship, not just a steam ship. But the dream turned bad. The U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) has issued a notice seeking public comment on “disposition” of the NS Savannah, the nation’s first and only nuclear-powered merchant ship, a product of the Eisenhower administration’s 1955 commitment to its “Atoms for Peace” program,… More MARAD Looks to Fate for Atom-Powered NS Savannah
Riffing on the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again, but backwards. Holtec International, perhaps the most ambitious nuclear-oriented company ever, says it can use its aspirational small nuclear reactor, SMR-160, to repurpose coal-fired power plants. The Holtec SMR design is for a 160-MW pressurized light-water reactor, still in the… More Holtec Wants to Turn Coal Plants into Nukes
Could the municipal utility members of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) that have committed to the NuScale small nuclear reactor project save significant money by dumping the unproven nuclear technology and sign up for available and new geothermal-generated electricity from local investor-owned utility, NV Energy? That’s the case made in a recent paper from… More Should UAMPS Scuttle NuScale Nukes for Cheaper Geothermal?
Coal may no longer be the uncontested king of the electric generating hill, but the dusky diamonds retain a baronial position. And overall, counting uses in other industries, coal continues to rule to energy roost. Last month, the International Energy Agency predicted that for 2022, “Global coal use is set to rise by 1.2% in… More Coal Continues as Energy Royalty
Is there a better way to employ fusion to make clean, green electricity for the Earth than giant machines, incredibly difficult temperatures to manage, neutron fluxes to dodge and shield? Researchers at the California Institute of Technology are reviving an old, heretofore implausible, concept: go into space and capture the Sun’s fusion energy directly with… More Space-based Solar: Fusion from the Source?
Think the basic science of climate change – accelerating global warming from man-made greenhouse gases showing itself clearly in the Earth’s climate record – is settled? It might be time to think again. A team of climate scientists from the University of Oxford in the U.K. and the US government’s National Center for Atmospheric Research,… More Journal Article Challenges Global Warming Basics
The fiscal year 2022 omnibus spending bill that Congress passed late last year before adjourning for the holidays, providing federal executive branch agencies some $1.5 trillion in funding through September 2023, contains a lot of money for energy programs. But it also causes heartburn among some electricity interests for what it does not contain. First,… More Energy Winners and Losers in the Omnibus Appropriations
As 2022 comes to a close and, as usual, Congress squabbles over spending for the rest of the current fiscal year (ending Sept. 30, 2023), the electric utility industry is lobbying for funds to solve the problem of an acute shortage of distribution transformers. The dearth of transformers to step down current from utility distribution… More Transformers and the Congressional End Game
Just how significant is the now-familiar meme that global warming is producing extreme weather phenomena never seen before in the US? The federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps the historic records, and they show that 2022 wasn’t extreme when it comes weather. That’s a point that climate realist Roger Pielke Jr. makes in… More Extreme Weather? Maybe Not So Much
Last month, South Africa’s state-owned electric utility Eskom reported a chimney failure at one of the operational units at the partially completed, six-unit 4.8 GW Kusile coal-fired power plant. Kusile, under construction since 2009, has four 800 MW units in commercial service, according to Wikipedia. Two are still under construction. The failed flue gas stack… More South Africa’s Electric Energy Mess: Chronic, Major Load Shedding