nuclear
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Discovery of Fukushima contamination in areas identified by Greenpeace
TEPCO, the owners of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, just announced that they found contamination levels 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal in sediment from the Fukushima coast. TEPCO did the sediment testing late last week — in areas Greenpeace identified for testing in our research plan — after we were […]
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Earth Day Aftermath – – Hope or Despair?
On Earth Day last week, I saw a burger wrapper tossed from an old Buick and was stunned that anyone still thought it was OK to use our shared city habitat as a personal dumpster. Later that same day however, I saw a homeless man pick up a Styrofoam cup from the gutter and drop […]
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Chernobyl, 25 years later
Today is the 25th anniversary of the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Here's part one of a spooky-as-hell film showing scientists venturing inside the plant's cement sarcophagus, which keeps its nuclear material contained (for now). A few other things to look at today: What's the ecology of Chernobyl today? Some wildlife has returned, but […]
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Chart of the day: the U.S. energy mix in 2035
It is important for everyone working or advocating around energy to understand how the power mix is expected to change in the next 20 years or so. To that end, I’ve pulled a chart out of the consulting firm Black & Veatch’s “Energy Market Perspective,” an analysis of U.S. energy markets that they update every […]
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What if the $152 billion to clean up Fukushima were spent on geothermal instead?
Here's a crazy idea: why not use the enormous geothermal resource under Japan — which is after all sitting on a "ring" made of "fire" — as a source of nearly always-on baseload power? I asked Alex Richter, an Icelandic financier of geothermal energy projects, how much geothermal energy $152 billion would buy. (That's the […]
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Wind turbine suffers catastrophic failure; no one is irradiated
Last month, a wind turbine on a North Dakota wind farm suffered a "catastrophic failure" when "oversight" and "human error" — features of energy infrastructure which scientists suggest are unavoidable — led to the enormous turbine falling off its mount. The most recent reports indicate that so far the only casualties are a wide swath […]
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Japan could rebuild faster with renewables, says report
In the wake of severe natural disasters, how is Japan going to get its electrical infrastructure back online? The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability has an answer, and it's anything but business as usual. By deploying a mix of renewables and energy efficiency technology, they argue, Japan's need for electricity could be met three […]
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Nuclear Reactor May Kill 192,000 Annually
Oh, wait a minute. I got that wrong. I meant ethanol reactor, not nuclear reactor. From a paper published in the spring 2011 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons–the official journal of the AAPS (Association of American Physicians and Surgeons): Research by the World Bank indicates that the increase in biofuels […]
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Reactor 2 at Japan’s Fukushima plant in full meltdown, says expert
The radioactive core of the second reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant appears to have melted through the its steel casing, and is now pooling on the concrete floor below, Richard Lahey tells The Guardian. (Lahey is former head of safety research for boiling-water nuclear reactors at General Electric, so he would probably know.)
