NEI Nuclear Notes

Bob Metcalfe has an interesting futurist editorial in the Wall Street Journal: The good news is that the big names in nuclear energy -- like Areva, Hitachi, General Electric and Toshiba -- have recently been joined by a bevy of high-tech start-ups seeking to develop advanced nuclear-reactor designs for both fission and fusion energy production. So far, there are five fission and two fusion start-ups, among them Hyperion, NuScale and Tri Alpha. We don’t want to quote much – too much on Metcalfe’s mind to paraphrase. He considers current nuclear technology too expensive, though he give a kind of indirect thumbs up to the kinds of mini-reactors Babcock & Wilcox recently introduced, and perhaps oversells fusion – still essentially a lab project. Even as a peek into the future, we found ourselves quibbling a lot. But it tweaks the brain and is therefore worth a read. --- Geothermal’s in town and shaking things up. While prospecting for heat in Basel Switzerland a few y...

Congress is barely grazing over the energy issues that will doubtless absorb them more as the year goes along, so we thought we wouldn’t be able to declare the outer limits of this debate for quite some time. By “outer limits,” we simply mean the most extreme position imaginable for or against an emerging policy. We may have found the outer limits on cap-and trade, per Smart Politics : “I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us ‘having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people – we the people – are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.” This is Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) (Smart Politics operates from the University of Minnesota). We’re genuinely surprised that anyone can gin up this level of rhetoric on cap-and-trade – m...