Jun
25
A Better Kind Of Number For Decisions
June 25, 2008 | 1 Comment
Professors Richard Larrick and Jack Soll at Duke University assert in their article in Science on June 20 2008 that gallons per mile has more value than miles per gallon.
I agree, as I’ve figured that way and look to what it costs to get the miles we need traveled. Miles per gallon just confuses things [...]
Jun
5
A Look Via California At Alternatives and Efficiency
June 5, 2008 | 3 Comments
The American Petroleum Institute who by their gracious effort to get a cross section of bloggers invited yours truly, to attend the Newsweek, Chevron, Woods Institute and Precourt Institute at Stanford University panel discussion. The disclosure is the API covered the travel and lodging, no big surprise, and I see they get a great deal [...]
May
22
The Cruel Honesty of the Merits
May 22, 2008 | 2 Comments
The price of oil has about doubled in less than a year. Coal has jumped up a similar percentage, too. The specialty press, the Internet writers, mainstream media, investors, producers and customers are by some perspective or another agog at the whole thing. Things are different now and will get a lot [...]
May
6
Nuclear Power Growth Without New Plants?
May 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Brian Wang of NextBigFuture posted about improvements to atomic fission processes with four new concepts that are making their way forward. With atomic fission provided the U.S. with about 20% of the electrical power generation even minor improvements are significant. Any new fission plant is faced with difficult, time consuming and expensive barriers [...]
Apr
1
New Hope For the Holy Grail of Nuclear Power
April 1, 2008 | 2 Comments
Last week saw the delivery of a paper by Liviu Popa-Simil, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear engineer, and now a founder of a private research and development company called LAVM. With Claudiu Muntele of Alabama A&M University the men say they have a concept that transforms the radiation of atomic decay, a [...]
Mar
21
2000 More Years of Nuclear Fuel
March 21, 2008 | 1 Comment
Most of us are thinking that uranium is the fission fuel and for practical reasons today, that is so. The pluses are raw ore mining, processing and reactors all exist and there is a lot of experience on hand with new technology and innovations coming to produce much more energy. The downside is [...]
Mar
17
Technology that encapsulates atomic fuel first conceived and researched as early as the 1950s at the Oakridge National Laboratory and in partnership with West German teams has re-emerged and recovered to levels approximate to the best achieved in the 1960s by the West German teams. Today’s efforts lead by the Idaho National Laboratory with [...]
Feb
28
The Choices In Atomic Fission
February 28, 2008 | 4 Comments
With the post on Monday February 25th 2008 logging so much traffic both regular visitors and new folks I will list and lightly discuss some of the potentates in the fission reactor field. Links where available are included, offering a succinct guide to quick information.
Reactors are considered by their “Generation” starting with the Gen [...]
Feb
25
Finding The Facts In the Midst of Emotions About Atomic Power
February 25, 2008 | 3 Comments
Old enough to remember the horrors and extensive coverage of the U.S. Three Mile Island crises and the Chernobyl Disaster, many others and I have lodged a stop order in our thinking when atomic fission is mentioned as a way to power up the electrical grid. Add to those the incessant and furtive efforts [...]
Feb
19
Why the Pure Hydrogen Economy Is Dying
February 19, 2008 | 6 Comments
Man has been moving to carbon enriched with hydrogen for a couple of centuries now. One could say we’re decarbonizing, because since the dawn of the fire until the discovery of coal we burned primarily wood. Wood has a carbon to hydrogen (C:H) ratio of 10 to 1 or wood has 10 carbon [...]
