Green World Blog
News, views & musings for our nuclear-free, carbon-free future
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Opening Day: Hope, activism, and the future of nuclear power
Today is Major League Baseball’s Opening Day. Forget for a moment that technically three real baseball games already have been played; today is the official opening day for most teams. Opening Day is a day of hope and renewal. There are 30 teams in major league baseball: as the season starts, they are all even…
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Nuclear Newsreel, Thursday, March 27, 2014
A Nuclear Newsreel today focused mostly on clean energy developments…Note: GreenWorld will not publish tomorrow, March 28, 2014 (the 35th anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident). We’ll be back on Monday, March 31 with a special Opening Day essay! Watch for it. Another one bites the dust. A major investor drops out of proposed…
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Nuclear Newsreel, Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Nuclear Power An investigation by the Mainichi newspaper found that a Japanese government team withheld high radiation data monitored at three sites near the damaged Fukushima reactors. The team also seems to want to change its assumptions about radiation exposure–a move that would lower projected doses. For example, their original assumption was that farmers in…
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Nuclear Newsreel, Tuesday, March 25, 2014
What kids pick up at school can lead to wholly unanticipated consequences, as every parent knows. And no, I’m not talking about their schoolwork, I’m talking about the virus that tore through our house last week with a hurricane-force torrent and laid up Daddy for five full days (kids, of course, were fine after 24…
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Nuclear industry’s wishful thinking knows no bounds: No, Ukraine crisis is not going to boost nukes in Europe
Nuclear power hasn’t worked out so well for Ukraine so far. There is no reason to believe it’s going to help now either. Never let it be said that the global nuclear power industry lets a good crisis go to waste….the industry is now promoting the far-fetched notion that the conflict between Ukraine and Russia…
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Nuclear Newsreel, Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Nuclear Power *It’s probably a lost cause, and it’s certainly a dangerous, expensive and unnecessary program, but that isn’t stopping South Carolina from trying to keep those taxpayer pork dollars flowing to the Savannah River Site. Yesterday, the state filed suit against the Department of Energy for its recent announced plan–which it appears to be…
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Goldman Sachs sees a solar future for the U.S.–and that has nuclear utilities running scared.
This is Germany today, but it is what the U.S. will increasingly look like over the next decade. Goldman Sachs says declining prices of solar plus battery storage means that by 2033 homeowners will no longer need to be on the grid in U.S. And that will happen sooner in expensive electricity states like New…
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Nuclear Newsreel, Monday, March 17, 2014
Nearly 30 years later, radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear accident continues to plague life in the region. Some days I really wish this global warming stuff would hurry up and happen…ok, just a lame joke but really, it’s another snow day here in Washington, DC–in mid-March!–our tulips are halfway up already; the government is…
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Nuclear Newsreel, Friday, March 14, 2014
Nuclear Power On EcoWatch, Harvey Wasserman rounds up a bunch of recent articles and statements from sources ranging from Amory Lovins to Ralph Nader to, yes, GreenWorld, reflecting on the third anniversary of the beginning of the Fukushima disaster and what lies ahead for nuclear power. An illegal radioactive waste dump has been discovered in…
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The utility death spiral, stupid utilities and grid defection
Much has been written so far this year, including in these pages, about the “utility death spiral,” in which electric utilities that fail to adapt to changing technologies and electricity delivery systems like rooftop solar and distributed generation generally will gradually (or quickly, depending on one’s perspective) wither away and disappear. Warren Buffet thinks the…
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