nuclear
Loan Guarantees and Energy Politics
The DOE handed out $10 billion in conditional loan guarantees for solar and nuclear plants. What do the moves say about the current energy political landscape?
Steve Chu Posts His Nuclear Rationale on Facebook
Following the Department of Energy’s announcement of a loan guarantee for a new nuclear plant, the Nobel Prize-winning head of the agency, Steven Chu, laid out his rationale for nuclear in clear and plain language.
It’s a pretty conventional argument: 1) “no single technology will provide all of the answers,” which is obviously true, and 2) [...]
A Fantastic Comment on Nuclear from Left-of-Center
Quite a debate has broken out in the comments of my post on a hypothesis for why white men support nuclear power at higher levels than other groups. Go take a look for yourself: the comments are better than the post.
One of them was so good that I wanted to highlight it here (with a [...]
Power, Nuclear Power, and White Males
Earlier today, I posted a link on Twitter to a poll showing that 66% of white men and only 35% of everyone else support “increased reliance on nuclear fuel.” People immediately started trying to draw conclusions from that data.
“So what does that mean?” asked @lostkiwi. “White males are the only ones rational enough to know [...]
When The Whole World Needs To Be Quarantined: Fantasy Architecture and Nuclear War
In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war. The marriage of the bureaucratic of the apocalyptic produces deranged offspring with very detailed models.
One 1960 Atomic Energy Commission report on a prospective 100-person post-apocalyptic “Group Shelter” is [...]
The Nucleon, Ford’s Reactor-Powered Concept Car
Wow. Take a look at The Ford Nucleon, the fission-powered concept car from a future that really never came to be. As it’s more mockup than anything else, there isn’t much information available about it. But, man, what a symbol of the nuclear craze that swept America during the 50s. You could drive it right [...]
Adventures Inside the Atom, GE’s Nuclear Power Propaganda Comic
I tell you this up front because it’s true: if you love energy and 50s naivete, you are going to love Adventures Inside the Atom, GE’s nuclear power propaganda comic.
It tells the “thrilling story of man’s greatest adventure in the unknown…and his discovery of nature’s greatest secret” through a nice Platonic dialogue between Ed, a [...]
The Postal Service and Thermonuclear War
I’m a post-nuke baby. By the time I started thinking about the world in the 90s, the Curtain had been pulled back and it was Russian ogligarchs, not generals, that seemed particularly fearsome. Our arsenal — and Theirs — seem kind of anachronistic. Silly, even. If I met one of our nuclear planners in front [...]
Fusion by 1958? A slightly optimistic goal.
This is a rather incredible peak into the modes of thinking that atomic scientists were comfortable with. In it, AEC chairman (he of the “too cheap to meter” comment) asks Alvin Weinberg, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory to try and get some kind of fusion demo ready for a UN conference on atomic energy.
“We [...]
1971 Forecast: Nuclear Will Provide 60% of the World’s Electricity by Late 90s
“Spinrad predicted that by the late 1990s almost 90% of new electrical generating capacity everywhere except in Africa will be nuclear, and that fission will supply over 60% of the world’s electricity generation.”
— Vaclav Smil in Energy at the Crossroads, referencing Spinrad’s report, “The role of nuclear power in meeting world energy needs” in Environmental [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
