NEI Nuclear Notes

Lawrence Livermore Laboratories toted up energy use last year (for 2008) and found a marked drop. This year’s version (for 2009) reveals a further drop: The United States used significantly less coal and petroleum in 2009 than in 2008, and significantly more wind power. There also was a decline in natural gas use and increases in solar, hydro and geothermal power according to the most recent energy flow charts released by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. You’d be perfectly within your rights to say, It’s the economy, stupid, and that was the main takeaway from the Labs report last year. Not this time: “Energy use tends to follow the level of economic activity, and that level declined last year. At the same time, higher efficiency appliances and vehicles reduced energy use even further,” said A.J. Simon, an LLNL energy systems analyst who develops the energy flow charts using data provided by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. “As a r...

And we really mean a little more, as a new set of flowcharts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggest that folks used more renewable energy and a little more nuclear energy in 2008 than 2007. Science Daily reports : Nuclear energy also saw a slight increase from 8.41 quads [quadrillion BTUs] in 2007 up to 8.45 quads in 2008. While no new nuclear power plants came online in 2008, the existing plants had less down time. Over the last 20 years, the downtime for maintenance and refueling at nuclear power plants had been decreasing. "There's an incentive to operate as much as possible," [A.J.] Simon [, an LLNL energy systems analyst,] said. "It's a smart thing to do. You can't earn revenue by selling electricity when you're down." Gulp! I’m sure if Mr. Simon talked to any nuclear energy supplier, he’d learn that less downtime for maintenance has everything to do with the growing capabilities of the work force and the developme...

We’re pretty sure this is how we got The Incredible Hulk: The NIF [National Ignition Facility] team will fire nearly 200 individual laser beams generated by an accelerator the size of a football field. The beams converge on a single target chamber containing a capsule of hydrogen. The hope is to compress it, and creating a subatomic reaction called fusion, ultimately igniting a controlled version of the same thermo-nuclear combustion that takes place on the sun. Yes, this would indeed be fusion, under the auspices of the Lawrence Livermore Labs in California. We have demonstrated that we can break every barrier," said NIF project manager Bruno Van Wonterghem. "We have broken the energetics barrier for the largest laser in the world. This is not only the highest energy laser, it is also the most precision laser in the world." "And believe it or not, this is where we take the hydrogen in water and using Einstein's equation, turn mass into energy...