In theory, the “all of the above” energy policy has a certain amount of appeal: why should government pick winners and losers? Why not–since no one knows the future–as a matter of policy pursue all energy sources? One obvious issue is the availability of sufficient resources to effectively support all energy sources. But there is…
Every year (well, this is the second year), the trade website Utility Dive conducts a survey of about 400 electric utility execs across the country to find out what they think about the future of their business. The good news about the survey this year is that many of them seem to get a very…
Just in case there was any doubt, “Americans ‘overwhelmingly’ prefer solar and wind energy to coal, oil, and nuclear energy, according to a Harvard political scientist who has conducted a comprehensive survey of attitudes toward energy and climate for the last 12 years.” So begins a New Year’s Day column in Forbes by Jeff McMahon…
This post originally appeared on dianuke.org, a site run by a group of dedicated people working against nuclear power in India particularly and South Asia generally. It also ran on the Mining Awareness blog, from which we repost it with a few edits. Vladimir Sliviak is an ex-officio board member of NIRS and the longtime…
GreenWorld seems to have garnered a lot of new readers this week–not that we expect them to stick around long: rather, there’s been a jump among nuclear power advocates and industry members. On Monday, we published a piece titled Nuclear industry goes hysterically ballistic over Yankee shutdown. It quickly became one of our most-read posts…
NIRS launched GreenWorld a year ago this week to provide a new means of communicating with our members, clean energy activists, the media, legislators and regulators, energy professionals, and the public at large across the globe. We wanted to be able to break stories, track trends, and highlight studies, reports, and other work that isn’t…
The long-awaited shutdown of the Vermont Yankee (VY) reactor on December 29 was celebrated across New England over the weekend; I’m told the party in Greenfield, Massachusetts Saturday night was especially festive. After decades of campaigning, especially over the past 15 years when the Nuclear Free New England campaign kicked off at an action camp…
Fracking dominates the energy headlines, and there is no doubt that the cheap natural gas produced by fracking is a major contributor to the ongoing economic woes of a good number of nuclear reactors and coal plants. But fracking has its limits and its own problems. Not only is protest against the practice growing (for…
Everyone knows that solar and wind power are variable energy sources; neither on its own produces electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. For that matter, no electricity source can do that indefinitely: nuclear reactors have to be shut down for weeks for refueling every 12-18 months and occasionally…
The big nuclear news in the omnibus federal budget bill currently before Congress is that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project receives no new funding for 2015–much to the chagrin of some in the nuclear industry and its Washington backers. Small victories do matter, and that is indeed a victory. Although given the makeup of…