I’ll be in Washington, DC, for the next week working at the American Nuclear Society winter meeting.  I’ll be posting at the ANS Nuclear Cafe during this time and also supporting the ANS Twitter feed with hashtag #ans11  @ans_org

I’ve got some interesting people lined up for interviews for the ANS ‘cafe’ [...]

As oil prices rose ever higher in the last decade, the optimists kept predicting rising production capacity and plummeting prices. Looks like they got it wrong.

We are entering what may be the longest stretch of no growth in world oil production since the early 1980s. But the reasons for that lack of growth differ in [...]

DoD spent $15.2 billion on energy in (Fiscal Year) 2010. Seventy four percent of this (or $11.2 billion) can be attributed to operations while the remaining 24% (or $3.7 billion) to the Department’s permanent installations and 2% (or $0.3 billion) to non-tactical vehicles.

When we look at the total energy consumption we have a similar [...]

Another round of good news about nuclear energy

Serious efforts to get reactors built continue to make progress

It is fashionable among green groups and others who have utopian visions of a low tech post industrial society to say that nuclear energy is finished as a result of the Fukushima crisis.

This is dead wrong. [...]

Is a New Round Emerging?

I was never ve ry good at history in high school. I much preferred the physical sciences, where I could derive most of the answers to test questions, as opposed to subjects like history, which required a lot of rote memorization of names and dates. [...]

I have been reading many eulogies of Steve Jobs over the past few days. Even though Apple is the highest-valued technology company in the world, Steve Jobs’ story and style re-emphasized for me many entrepreneurship lessons that I’ve learned…and perhaps forgotten…over the years. Here are my favorites:

1. Customers don’t usually know what they want

You can’t [...]

We had over 50 people register for the webinar and over 40 of them were still with us at the 90 minute mark. Another 15 people listened in on an 800 phone line.

Jaczko and I sat at at the corner of a table to facilitate the video angle (1 camera). The NRC will [...]

No Clear Cut Winner

In the past few years, the “conventional wisdom” has been that switching from coal to natural gas for power production would benefit the environment. Not only does burning gas reduce particulate emissions, it also reduces CO2 emissions. Most sources acknowledge that natural gas is not [...]

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.     – Sir Isaac Newton

All technical innovation has come from building on what came before, by using the building blocks provided by engineers who came before us. While its easy to recognize this is true for big innovations, engineers forget this [...]

with Wrong Reasons?

The Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has recently become very repetitive in his speeches regarding the Navy’s energy efforts and underlying reasons.

Take for example two of his recent remarks at National Clean Energy Summit on 30 August 2011 and at Washington Energy Summit on 28 September 2011.
He emphasizes each time [...]