More Bloggers For Nuclear Energy

Add Half Sigma to our growing list of supporters:

Nearly all new electric plants use natural gas because clean burning natural gas is the only thing that can get approved to be built. But the problem is that the U.S. and Canada have only a finite supply of natural gas that is quickly being used up. The price of natural gas is now at all time highs.

Uranium, on the other hand, is very plentiful, and there’s enough uranium to supply our energy needs for hundreds of years. Even coal (our primary source of electricity) isn’t as plentiful as uranium. Furthermore, uranium is mined in politically stable and friendly countries like Canada and Australia so there’s no fear of the supply being suddenly cut off by an Islamic revolution.

And over at Seeing the Forest, Dave Johnson is pondering some weighty issues as well:

I think we have to do whatever we can to stop putting carbon into the air. Replacing the emissions from cars and coal-or-oil-burning power plants with the fear that used fuel rods might somehow escape their containers 10,000 years from now seems like a fair trade-off. We can spend that time finding out where to put the fuel rods instead of putting carbon and pollutants into the air. And a lot of people would literally breathe a whole lot easier if we stopped dumping car and power plant exhaust into the air as well. And there's that whole war and terrorism problem that comes form the need for oil and the things people do to get it...

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics

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Sneak Peek

There's an invisible force powering and propelling our way of life.
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Some people might say it's kind of unbelievable.
They wonder, what is this new power that does all these extraordinary things?

A Design Team Pictures the Future of Nuclear Energy

For more than 100 years, the shape and location of human settlements has been defined in large part by energy and water. Cities grew up near natural resources like hydropower, and near water for agricultural, industrial and household use.

So what would the world look like with a new generation of small nuclear reactors that could provide abundant, clean energy for electricity, water pumping and desalination and industrial processes?

Hard to say with precision, but Third Way, the non-partisan think tank, asked the design team at the Washington, D.C. office of Gensler & Associates, an architecture and interior design firm that specializes in sustainable projects like a complex that houses the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. The talented designers saw a blooming desert and a cozy arctic village, an old urban mill re-purposed as an energy producer, a data center that integrates solar panels on its sprawling flat roofs, a naval base and a humming transit hub.

In the converted mill, high temperat…

Seeing the Light on Nuclear Energy

If you think that there is plenty of electricity, that the air is clean enough and that nuclear power is a just one among many options for meeting human needs, then you are probably over-focused on the United States or Western Europe. Even then, you’d be wrong.

That’s the idea at the heart of a new book, “Seeing the Light: The Case for Nuclear Power in the 21st Century,” by Scott L. Montgomery, a geoscientist and energy expert, and Thomas Graham Jr., a retired ambassador and arms control expert.

Billions of people live in energy poverty, they write, and even those who don’t, those who live in places where there is always an electric outlet or a light switch handy, we need to unmake the last 200 years of energy history, and move to non-carbon sources. Energy is integral to our lives but the authors cite a World Health Organization estimate that more than 6.5 million people die each year from air pollution. In addition, they say, the global climate is heading for ruinous instability. E…

NEI Nuclear Notes

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