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Nuclear TCASE

TCASE 11: Safety, cost and regulation in nuclear electricity generation

Guest post by DV82XL. He is a Canadian chemist and materials scientist. For his previous article on the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, see here, and on why an informed public is key to acceptance of nuclear energy, see here. Unless you intend to design a nuclear reactor from scratch, you are going to have to accept whatever […]

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Emissions Nuclear Renewables TCASE

Thinking Critically about Sustainable Energy (TCASE) – the seminar series

In the Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy (TCASE) series — currently up to 10 parts on the BNC blog — I consider the challenges we face in scaling up renewable or nuclear energy technologies to replace fossil fuels. The blog serialisation of TCASE will continue on BNC, but the format is now also moving into a […]

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Renewables TCASE

TCASE 10: Not all capacity factors are made equal

As I noted in a recent post, my new goal with TCASE posts is for them to be shorter, more targeted and more regular, with the aim being to break big problems in sustainable energy down into very focused questions (each of the new TCASE posts will be a maximum of 1,000 words — my […]

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Renewables TCASE

TCASE 9: Ocean power II – CETO

In TCASE (thinking critically about sustainable energy) #5, I analysed a currently deployed technology for harnessing wave energy – the Pelamis device. If you haven’t read TCASE 5 then please do so now, since it explains some of the basic physical properties of wave energy, the extend of the global resource, etc. In writing the […]

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Nuclear Renewables TCASE

TCASE 8: Estimating EROEI from LCA

The concept of energy return on investment (EROI), often called energy returned on energy invested (EROEI), is a simple and familiar one. Here is the short definition, from the Encyclopedia of Earth. To cite: ———————————————– Energy return on investment (EROI) is the ratio of the energy delivered by a process to the energy used directly and indirectly […]