Nov

22

A Thanksgiving Day For One Small Nuclear Reactor

November 22, 2012 | 1 Comment

The Obama Administration’s Energy Department has announced an award to support a  project to design, license and help commercialize a small modular reactor (SMR) in the United States.  The lucky partnership members are Babcock & Wilcox with the Tennessee Valley Authority and Bechtel who will receive a dollar for dollar cost match in funding to [...]

Nov

9

Fusion vs. Fission and Fission Won

November 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment

Hurricane Sandy offers an intense comparison between fusion an fission.  The region’s only functional fusion plant, the Sun, handicapped by distance, stunted by late season daylight hours and limited by the sunlit area of the North Atlantic still sent massive energy into the northeast coast of the U.S. hammering the area with rain, winds and [...]

Sep

17

How to Lose the CO2 War

September 17, 2012 | 3 Comments

How to Lose the CO2 War In an article by Mark Lynas out of UK’s The Guardian is a summary of last week’s nuclear news.  If one is CO2 concerned, the news is very bad indeed. In a strong motivator for the environmentalists the week also saw the Arctic ice cover is recorded at its [...]

Sep

14

$2.5 Million Net-Zero Energy Home for the Middle Class

September 14, 2012 | 1 Comment

The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled a new home laboratory designed to demonstrate that a typical-looking suburban home for a family of four can generate as much energy as it uses in a year. It cost $2,590,110.00.  OK, that’s a firm-fixed-price contract, and how much profit is in the [...]

Jul

30

The Changed US Patent Law – America Invents Act

July 30, 2012 | 1 Comment

The following is a Guest Post by David J French, an Ottawa patent attorney with 35 years experience practicing before the Canadian and United States Patent Offices. I have written this posting for NewEnergyandFuel in response to Mr. Westenhaus’ post July 24th entitled, US Patent Office Starts Regulations From New Patent Law.  Here is my [...]

Jul

24

US Patent Office Starts Regulations From New Patent Law

July 24, 2012 | 3 Comments

The America Invents Act (2011, H,R. 1249), the first patent law reform in 60 years has started its rule making process. Surprised?  There’s a new patent law in the U.S. and it did get done under the radar of much of the economy unlike other revolutions over the past few years. In typical Congressional style [...]

Jul

6

Are the Tables Turned on OPEC?

July 6, 2012 | 8 Comments

We’re coming up on 40 years of OPEC trying to set the price of oil as high as they can manage.  The oil market is finally at a turning point, non-OPEC production is up, demand is down, and international economics may have finally found a bright spot in ‘globalization’. This week the EU’s embargo on [...]

Jan

24

The Sparks of Economic Destruction

January 24, 2012 | 6 Comments

Your humble writer had a tense conversation with a former banker yesterday over the points that trigger economies to topple out of their comfortable zone.  Amazingly this banker is convinced the problem is not spending enough money from the government down to the poor.  The belief is printing money or “quantitative easing”, going into debt, [...]

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