NEI Nuclear Notes

Say “nuclear reactor” and what leaps to mind is a giant machine, powerful enough to run an entire city, with thousands of moving parts. But UPower Technologies has a different concept: a nuclear power plant that is mostly built in a factory, and arrives on site in two standard shipping containers. After set-up, it runs a cluster of buildings or a village. The reactor is more like a nuclear battery, with no moving parts. UPower is one of several new reactor concepts that will be the topic of discussion in the next few days. Third Way , a centrist think tank, holds an Advanced Nuclear Summit and Showcase  on Wednesday. Third Way recently issued a report on the future of nuclear power, in partnership with three Department of Energy laboratories: Idaho, Argonne and Oak Ridge. In November, the White House held a summit on nuclear energy . Behind the events is the conviction that with technological progress, nuclear power, like microchips or composite materials or a lot of othe...

An op-ed in The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago roused attention because it dinged the American nuclear energy industry as being oppressively overregulated – especially compared to Russia and China. I noted then that a focus on safety regulation risked obscuring the larger problem of the energy marketplace. To quote myself “I’d probably also focus more on markets, a WSJ thing, because reforming them to recognize nuclear energy’s value as a reliable and emission-free energy source would bolster the argument considerably.” Well, they write letters : The main problem for nuclear isn’t the NRC, but politics and the way markets are structured. Regulated market structures in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee have led to the construction of billions of dollars of reactors under way now in each of those states. Deregulated market structures in Vermont and other states where reactors have been closed give no credit to the desirable benefits of safe commercial nuclear po...

Seth Grae The following is a guest post from Seth Grae, president and CEO of Lightbridge Corporation , a leading innovator of nuclear fuel designs and provider of nuclear energy consulting services. There is a notion among some members of Congress that one way to shrink the U.S. government is to allow the U.S. Export-Import Bank to cease to exist at the end of September by refusing to reauthorize it. Allowing the Ex-Im Bank to die would actually increase the federal deficit by about a billion dollars per year and would be devastating to small businesses across the country. Overall, about 85% of Ex-Im’s transactions support US small companies . Lightbridge Corporation (NASDAQ: LTBR) is a small company that has a world-class team of experts advising governments that are starting or expanding nuclear energy-generation programs. We have the opportunity to see the bid specs these countries use in procuring nuclear power plants. From what we’ve seen, if the US loses the Ex-Im Bank,...