Nuclear energy

I have been wanting to highlight this review of strategies to make nuclear energy cheap and efficient from the Breakthrough Institute for a while.

The $6.5-billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy comes amid fading hopes for an industry renaissance

The body of men and women who built the atomic bomb was vast, diverse, talented and multitudinous. Every conceivable kind of professional – from theoretical physics to plumber – worked on the Manhattan Project for three years over an enterprise that spread across the country and equalled the US automobile industry in its marshaling of [...]

A new experiment releases more energy than is pumped into fuel—a major milestone—but a long journey still remains for sustainable energy from fusion

In the summer of 1956, a handful of men gathered in a former little red schoolhouse in San Diego. These men were among the most imaginative scientists and engineers of their generation.

There’s a good article in Slate which lays out a case for shuttling some of the funds spent on subsidies for renewable energy into R&D instead.

About 50 miles from the Texas border in southeastern New Mexico sits the town of Carlsbad, home of the renowned Carlsbad Caverns. Its lesser-known claim to fame which actually might have a disproportionately long-lasting impact on the future of energy and the human species is as a site for the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation [...]

John Miller, a social psychologist and journalist who once served as an officer on a nuclear submarine has a piece on Andrew Revkin’s New York Times blog Dot Earth in which he purportedly dismisses several claims about nuclear energy and provides evidence to the contrary; these include general claims as well as those made more [...]

The Times’s Eduardo Porter has a short piece on nuclear power vs renewables where he makes a plea for supporting the development of new nuclear technologies with improved safety and efficiency.