The Nuclear renaissance began in the 1990s when reactors began to achieve better than 90-percent up time. The next step is to build new plants on time and within Budget. -Nuclear Energy Institute.

The 67th Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs is online now at Next Big Future.

This post is the collective voice of the [...]

There was a time not all that long ago collaboration was not all that radical a concept, in the business world and even in Congress.

Lately collaboration has become more of a buzzword, something that businesses and their PR departments are pay lip service to. Maybe they even aspire to collaborate with their partners; maybe they [...]

The day renewable energy generation is creating more electricity in the U.S. than nuclear power generation seems like a long way off for many of us. There are a few select areas in the country where windmill and solar panel farms take up large swaths of land. When I see these renewable energy farms it [...]

Some time ago an economist with whom I had an extensive exchange suggested that the best way to incentivize an energy transition would be to tax what we don’t want and let the market do the rest. It was really such an elegant approach and an impractical one, I thought.

The economist’s view was that if [...]

A reader said to me recently that it sounded like my recent posts on the Japanese situation were ant-Japanese. I was surprised to hear that, because nothing could be further from the truth. But if he thought that, others might also have the same impression, so I thought I [...]

The discussions that have been going on in Japan regarding the need for greater independence of the nuclear regulatory organization have, to date, focused mainly on the organizational independence. There are really at least three types of independence that are important – organizational independence, independence from the [...]

It has occurred to me that some of my previous posts may sound too much like I think I have a neat set of answers to “fix” the Japanese nuclear program. In trying to make certain points–and to keep my word count under some control!–I have sometimes not gone into all the ifs, ands, and [...]

One area that has been somewhat neglected in the discussions of regulatory independence in Japan is the role of the technical capability of the regulatory staff. In the long run, this factor is probably as important as the other factors that have been discussed, including the organizational independence and the implications of amakudari, and deserves [...]

I am now going to risk compounding the error of working outside my area of expertise. In a recent blogpost, I talked about the revelation that TEPCO engineers were concerned about a GE decision on the placement of the diesel generators at Fukushima, but that nothing was apparently done about their concerns. I attributed this [...]