September 2014 was a most interesting month in the fight against climate change. As world leaders prepared to meet at the United Nations Climate Summit on September 23, there was a large global march in New York on September 21 to bring public concern for climate change to their attention. Read more…
Quite often we hear about the problem of attracting financing to support new build nuclear projects. In fact financing will be a topic of major interest at a number of upcoming nuclear conferences. While it is easy to agree that financing nuclear projects is a big challenge, in my Read more…
Recently, the 2014 edition of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Energy Technology Perspectives (ETP) was issued. The ETP is issued on a two year cycle; the current edition takes the World Energy Outlook 2013 forecasts and looks to the longer term out to 2050. With climate change now becoming even Read more…
“It’s always amazing when a United Nations report that has global ramifications comes out with little fanfare.” So starts an article in Forbes talking about the most recent UNSCEAR report on the consequences of the Fukushima accident in Japan. Three years after the accident, UNSCEAR, the United Nations body mandated Read more…
Last month I talked about innovation in the nuclear industry focusing on the perception that nuclear is not innovative. Since then I attended the Canadian Nuclear Association annual conference. Its theme this year was “Developing the next generation” which in this case focused on developing the workforce of the future. Read more…
A comment caught my attention at a recent nuclear industry event. The comment was that a hi-profile agency with a mandate to do research in advanced technology across industries had no interest in attending any events to learn more about nuclear power – primarily because “nuclear is not innovative”. In Read more…
As we come to the end of another year, it is not a nuclear issue that I want to discuss but rather the broader issue of our need for reliable electricity. Last month I started with a quote from the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2013 highlighting how important energy has Read more…
As I started to read this year’s World Energy Outlook (WEO 2013) from the International Energy Agency (IEA), it was the very first line in the executive summary that caught my interest. The report starts out with “Many of the long–held tenets of the energy sector are being rewritten.” It Read more…
After many years of effort, this month it finally happened. The UK government and EDF Energy, the French-owned UK integrated energy company, agreed to a strike price making the first new nuclear build in the UK in a generation, at Hinkley Point C, a reality. It was a long hard Read more…
Over the summer we talked about Pandora’s Promise, where 5 prominent environmentalists had changed their mind from being against to being supportive of nuclear power. They visited Chernobyl and Fukushima, explored the realities of the technology, sought the scientific truth and came away supportive. That being said, looking at the Read more…