Is 2025 the Year that Colorado Goes Nuclear? Hopefully!
The Colorado House Energy and Environment Committee passed HB25-1040, “Adding Nuclear Energy as a Clean Energy Resource,” to the House floor on an 8 to 5 vote. Testimony went long and late into the evening. I couldn’t stay the entire time and submitted my written testimony online. I’ve provided it below, along with brief explanations […]
Putting This Week’s Fusion News in Context
By now you’ve probably seen dozens of headlines about scientists achieving a breakthrough in fusion energy this week. While the news is cause for celebration, expectations for an imminent supply of limitless clean energy should be tempered. On December 5th, the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory successfully achieved a net energy gain from […]
Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Nuclear Takes Too Long to Build
I’ve extolled the virtues of nuclear energy for its reliability, clean emissions, efficient land use, “just transition” potential, and energy security upside on several occasions. I’ve even documented why many of the fears surrounding nuclear and aversion to its deployment are often irrational and misguided. But one of the legitimate, good-faith critiques of nuclear is […]
Environmentalists For… Higher Emissions?
A new bombshell report released today by the Breakthrough Institute details the lengths gone to by a prominent environmental group and a major renewables lobbyist to produce a bogus study in order to justify closing California’s last operating nuclear plant. Here’s an excerpt: Since PG&E negotiated an agreement with anti-nuclear environmental groups in 2016 to […]
Elon Musk Calls for Boost in Oil & Gas, Nuclear
The founder and CEO of one of the world’s largest electric vehicle and battery companies wants us to “drill baby drill.” According to CNBC: The world must continue to extract oil and gas in order to sustain civilization, while also developing sustainable sources of energy, Tesla founder Elon Musk told reporters at a conference in Norway on […]
Japan’s Nuclear U-Turn
The country of Japan is often trotted out by anti-nuclear environmental types as a go-to case study for why the U.S. should eschew nuclear energy in favor of renewables to meet our emissions goals. It’s experience during the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident, when a massive tsunami triggered a partial meltdown in three of the plant’s […]
Small Modular Reactors Get New Industry, Government Buy-In
Nuclear fission truly is a bit of unicorn in the world’s panoply of energy sources. Not only is it extremely efficient at reliably producing electricity—generating zero carbon emissions while doing so—it can also be used to co-produce heat and steam. That makes it an appealing option for hard to decarbonize businesses in the industrial sector, […]
Energy and Land Use: A Sober Look at the Space Needed to Power the Future
Much of the conversation surrounding energy policy in Colorado these days has to do primarily with the emissions currently being produced and ways to continue reducing said emissions. The arguments over the role of various energy sources in getting to a decarbonized future are familiar at this point. But there has been comparatively little discussion […]
Clean and Reliable: The Case for Small-Modular Reactors in Colorado
Electric grid reliability is on the forefront of everyone’s mind following a sobering report from the country’s grid overseer. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a regulatory body overseeing grid operations across the United States and Canada, warned last month in its latest summer reliability assessment that vast swaths of the West and Midwest […]
Pandora’s Promise: if you care about kids, go nuclear
By Dr. Robert Applegate The opening scene of the documentary Pandora’s Promise brings viewers face-to-face with nuclear power plant protestors screaming scary things like “the nuclear industry is a death industry.” Then it moves to a nuclear energy supporter walking around the destroyed nuclear power plant in Fukushima with the filmmaker Robert Stone asking are […]
Pandora's Promise: if you care about kids, go nuclear
By Dr. Robert Applegate The opening scene of the documentary Pandora’s Promise brings viewers face-to-face with nuclear power plant protestors screaming scary things like “the nuclear industry is a death industry.” Then it moves to a nuclear energy supporter walking around the destroyed nuclear power plant in Fukushima with the filmmaker Robert Stone asking are […]
