A huge milestone has been achieved in the United States as Watts Bar Unit 2 produced its first electricity; becoming the first new nuclear plant in the US to start up in 20 years since Watts Bar Unit 1 came into service in 1996. Unfortunately, this good news was overshadowed Read more…
This month in the United States, the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act was passed to support federal research and development and stimulate private investment in advanced nuclear reactor technologies. All this good news about investment in the future made me think about how we use the words advanced and innovation Read more…
As Canadians, we were truly excited when this past fall, Arthur McDonald of Queens University in Canada was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with Takaaki Kajita of Japan for discovering that neutrinos have mass. Dr. McDonald and his Canadian team captured neutrinos using a uniquely sensitive new detector Read more…
The past few weeks have seen lots of excitement as the world reached agreement to tackle climate change in Paris. What is key to the Paris deal is a requirement that every nation (all 195 of them) take part. Ahead of the talks, governments of 186 nations put forth public Read more…
When we look to the future, people the world over are hopeful for an era of abundant reliable electricity supplying all of our energy needs; all at a reasonable cost and with little to no impact to the environment. Unfortunately, in many western countries the politics of electricity planning has Read more…
Have you ever seen something that just amazed you? We were wowed by a recent YouTube video showing what the Chinese have achieved in turning conventional high-rise construction on its head. A 57 story building was built in 19 days – yes – 19 days! Who would ever believe this 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…
It was with great interest that most of us listened to President Obama put climate change back on the US agenda in his state of the union address this month. “After years of talking about it, we are finally poised to control our own energy future. We produce more oil Read more…
Hard to believe we have already come to the end of another year. It was a year with both highs and lows for the nuclear industry. I will talk about this more in the new year. But for today, I wanted to close out 2012 by writing about something that Read more…
I have just done my first pass of the Word Energy Outlook 2012 issued by the IEA this November. Many of you will have seen some of the headlines – one of the most intriguing is that the US is expected to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2017 Read more…