The 38th Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs is up at Canadian Energy Issues. The title of the post tells some of the contents within:The Asian nuclear Revolution, energy “plans,” and questionable media reporting: it’s the 38th Carnival of Nuclear Energy.
A great deal of the post is concerned with the Nuclear Renaissance. Is it happening? How fast? Where is it happening?
Dan Yurman, of Idaho Samizdat, points out that the "Sputnik moment" of President Obama's State of the Union Speech wasn't really a Sputnik Moment. After Sputnik, American launched a well-funded effort into space, which led to a man on the moon, communications satellites, and even GPS systems. In Obama's "Clean Energy Sputnik moment," however, clean energy research and innovations are happening in Asia, not America. For example, Charles Barton discusses the Chinese initiative on thorium reactors at Nuclear Green: "Why the Chinese Commitment to the LFTR Matters."
World-wide information also comes from Brian Wang of Next Big Future, who reports on the mining and milling of uranium. Production is expanding to meet the demand. Meanwhile, Gail Marcus of Nuke Power Talk points out that the lull in plant construction is over-rated by nuclear opponents. Many of the delayed plants were a bit shaky to begin with, and many plants are being built.
Rod Adams has two posts in the Carnival. One, at ANS Nuclear Café, describes why nuclear is a "disruptively cheap and simple way to boil water." Since heat engines are the basis for most of our electricity, and steam is the working fluid in most heat engines, this is an important post! At his own blog, Atomic Insights, Adams notes that UPI reports on the supposed "cross-over" of nuclear and solar costs. This cross-over did not happen, and the New York Times had to publish a note about the error. UPI was pretty gullible in this regard. As Adams points out, UPI didn't get the memo from the New York Times.
The Carnival also refers to the post in this blog where I discovered the Vermont Energy Plan that seems to have been mislaid. A ranking Vermont senator on the important committees explained the plan to me: we have to get used to using less electricity. For all I know, the senator may be at IBM offices right now, explaining this and helping them arrange for a moving van to take their factory out of state.
Come to the Carnival. Smile at the prospects for nuclear in the future! Grin at the expanding use of nuclear power in the world! Sigh at how America has fallen behind!
And have some cotton candy, too!
