The Christmas to New Year period is traditionally ‘hibernation mode’ for blogs, when page views and comment counts plummet (my hits have dropped about 70% compared to early December!). I suppose this is a time when people find better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen (family time, good food, beach/snow [...]
Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 34 Comments »
As many BNC readers already know, I was invited to write an opinion essay for ABC Environment and The Drum: Unleashed on the Fukushima situation as we approach the end of 2011. On the latter site, the essay was entitled “Fukushima, nuclear and the rational approach to energy” and drew >300 comments (many rather heated) [...]
Filed under: Nuclear, Policy | 87 Comments »
——————— Guest post by John Morgan. John runs R&D programmes at a Sydney startup company. He has a PhD in physical chemistry, and research experience in chemical engineering in the US and at CSIRO. He is a regular commenter on BNC. Energy minister Martin Ferguson has today released the Draft Energy White Paper 2011 (The Australian, ABC). The [...]
Filed under: Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 82 Comments »
The Guardian newspaper’s Environment Facebook page recently put the following to their readers: Ask the Global Energy Prize‘s expert panel your toughest energy questions and they’ll be back here on Friday with their answers. What should power our cities, homes and industry in the future — renewable energy, nuclear power, or fossil fuels? How significant [...]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 34 Comments »
The previous Open Thread has gone past is running of the recent posts lists and getting tough to find, so it’s time for a fresh palette. The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason. So get up [...]
Filed under: Nuclear, Open Thread | 436 Comments »
China is looking seriously at a range of nuclear options. From the commercial side of things, the country is building over 25 light water reactors, including four of the new US-designed AP1000. The Chinese are also pursuing a range of advanced reactor programmes, including gas-cooled pebble-bed modular reactors (the 210 MWe HTR-PM), a thorium-focused research [...]
Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 56 Comments »
With regards to Generation IV nuclear fission technology, most of the attention on BNC has been on the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), for reasons explained in this post, which I quote: The focus of this series (IFR FaD) is aimed squarely at the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) rather than other Gen IV designs, such as the [...]
Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 134 Comments »
Debate over large-scale energy storage is a regular theme in the comments on this blog. The post is intended to be a place to centralise this discussion. Some questions that might be considered in the comment thread: 1. What is the cost (per Watt hour, kWh, MWh, GWh — how does this cost scale up, [...]
Filed under: Nuclear, Renewables | 214 Comments »
Today I was in Melbourne, joining a panel of five who are the chapter authors of a new policy monograph called “Australia’s Nuclear Options“. This event was to formally launch the 61-page report, which was commissioned and published by CEDA (Committee for Economic Development of Australia), edited by CEDA Chief Economist Nathan Taylor (who also [...]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 88 Comments »
I saw two particularly depressing trend lines this week. Both were confronting enough to make me stop, sit back and just contemplate. It was not as though these came as a great surprise — I’d been following these data for years. But for some reason, the seriousness of them really struck home like never before. [...]
Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Hot News, Nuclear | 121 Comments »
Guest Post by Peter Lang. Peter is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on a wide range of energy projects throughout the world, including managing energy R&D and providing policy advice for government and opposition. His experience includes: coal, oil, gas, hydro, geothermal, nuclear power plants, nuclear waste disposal, and a wide range of energy [...]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 262 Comments »
In one of the entries on my series of posts on the Integral Fast Reactor, I pointed out that a next-generation nuclear-power-plus-full-fuel-recycling plant would require only 1 tonne of natural uranium fuel (or thorium, or nuclear waste, or depleted uranium) per year, for a 1,000 MWe plant. However, I recently got asked this related question: [...]
Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 47 Comments »
How can we compare the cost, performance and value-for-money of alternative large-scale clean energy projects? Actually, it’s pretty tough to try and avoid apples-and-oranges comparisons. Still, some adjustments can be made, such as for capacity factor, to partially levelise comparisons. Below is a simplified comparison of four recent real-world projects. All can be considered first-of-a-kind [...]
Filed under: Nuclear, Renewables, TCASE | 150 Comments »
The previous Open Thread has gone past 650 comments, so it’s time for a fresh palette. The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason. So get up on your soap box! The standard commenting rules of courtesy apply, and at the very least [...]
Filed under: Nuclear, Open Thread | 448 Comments »
Guest Post by Martin Nicholson. Martin studied mathematics, engineering and electrical sciences at Cambridge University in the UK and graduated with a Masters degree in 1974. He has spent most of his working life as business owner and chief executive of a number of information technology companies in Australia. He has a strong interest in business [...]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 110 Comments »
I’ve long argued on this blog that that fossil fuel replacement this century could, on technical grounds, be achieved via a mix of nuclear fission, renewables and perhaps also fossil fuels with carbon sequestration, with a high degree of electrification; nuclear would probably end up supplying over half of final energy. A key component of this [...]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear | 123 Comments »
In response to Steve Kirsch’s open letter recently posted here, BNC reader Gary Kahanak initiated the creation of an online petition to the White House calling for restarting the IFR program. He collaborated with Steve Kirsch, Tom Blees, Suzanne Hobbs and Tom Wigley to do this. The petition is now live. This is in response [...]
Filed under: Nuclear, Policy | 48 Comments »
Steve Kirsch of SCGI is like the Energizer Bunny — he never runs out of energy in trying to get something meaningful done on the carbon emission mitigation problem. Below is his open letter to the U.S. President’s energy and climate policy staffer. His aim: to get Chuck Till an invitation to the White House! [...]
Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear, Policy | 79 Comments »
In a recent issue of Dissent magazine, a regular commenter here on Brave New Climate, industrial engineer Graham Palmer, engaged in a debate with Mark Diesendorf on energy futures. Unfortunately, this exchange of prose is not available online, although Graham did send me a scanned version (because of potential copyright issues, I won’t post it here). The [...]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 193 Comments »
Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Greenpeace’s Plan for India —————— Switzerland. It’s smaller than Tasmania, but rather more famous and never missing from maps of Europe. Cheese and chocolates, pocket knives and [...]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 28 Comments »
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