Over the years, when talking about the pros and cons of various generating assets, we have talked about economics, environment and reliability – but more recently a new word has entered the energy lexicon – Resilience. As defined by Oxford, “resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness, Read more…
When thinking about 2017, it is easy to see the bankruptcy of Westinghouse and the subsequent cancellation of its Summer project in South Carolina as this year’s big issue. But as the year has drawn to a close, the continuation of its AP1000 project at Plant Vogtle in Georgia has Read more…
People are dying – lots of people, each and every day. As stated in a study published by Lancet on October 19,” Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today. Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths Read more…
On a quiet Wednesday afternoon, I decided to go and see Al Gore’s update on climate change, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power”. While certainly a powerful update on the importance of climate change and on the need to do something about it, I was disappointed. Why? Because, once again, Read more…
We live in strange times. Globally, populism is growing in response to a deep-seated anger with so-called liberal elites. Experts are no longer respected over louder voices that support peoples’ strongly held views. There are no facts, only beliefs. While most of the world continues to support the Paris agreement Read more…
Over the last week or so, the internet has been abuzz with articles on the recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar”, by 21 prominent scientists taking issue with Mark Read more…
Not a day goes by when we don’t read something about the public acceptance problem in the nuclear industry. A recent article preaching the end of the nuclear era had a pretty strong statement that sums up like this – “Nuclear looks ever more like a 20th-century dinosaur, unloved by Read more…
Over the last few years, we have written extensively about the strength of peoples’ beliefs and how difficult it is to change them. In spite of this, I thought we were making progress with a push to more evidence-based decision making. For something as polarizing as nuclear power, facts-based decision Read more…
There is no shortage of people happy to see 2016 come to an end. It has been an extraordinary year characterized by strong popular revolt to the status quo resulting in unexpected government changes in places like Britain and Italy and a surprising result in the US election. For those Read more…
Yes, you read that right. For years, there have been efforts to demonstrate that people who live near nuclear plants or work at nuclear plants are getting sick from all that darn radiation they are receiving. Over the years these stories have been debunked as study after study has shown Read more…