nukes
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China to build 50+ nuclear reactors based on unsafe 60's tech, says Wikileaks
"China is currently in the process of building as many as 50 to 60 new nuclear plants by 2020; the vast majority will be the CPR-1000, a copy of 60's era Westinghouse technology that can be built cheaply and quickly and with the majority of parts sourced from Chinese manufacturers," says this cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
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Overheated river hobbles nuclear power plants
The Tennessee Valley authority has shut down three of its nuclear power plants for the second summer in a row, thanks to unusually warm temperatures in the rivers into which they would normally discharge water.
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Swede finds out why nuclear, unlike renewables, can never be DIY
Blog your experience building a nuclear reactor in your kitchen, go to jail. Them's the laws in Sweden, where the no nerd's supervillain-esque childhood fantasy fulfillment goes unpunished.
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Nuclear power's new marketing strategy: hide behind some windmills
The tagline on this advertisement for German Atomic Forum ("founded in 1959 to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy in Germany") is "CO2 Emissions = Zero."
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Tepco bulldozed hill that could have prevented Fukushima disaster
When engineers first assessed the future home of the Fukushima nuclear power plant that would eventually melt down in response to a tsunami, the site featured a striking, 82-feet-high bluff that overlooked the ocean below.
It was more than high enough to have withstood the tsunami that struck the site in March.
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Why closing NYC's only nuclear power plant would be a really bad idea
Rawwwrrr! It's a progressive cat-fight! On the one side is New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who wants to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant on the Hudson River, just 25 miles north of the Bronx.
On the other side is Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who thinks this would be a really crap idea, mostly because it would mean replacing fully a quarter of the power delivered to NYC with greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuel power plants. Also, it would probably lead to brownouts.
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Small nuclear reactors get their first customer, but are no panacea
Small nuclear reactors are the mobile homes of the the nuclear power universe -- they can be built in factories rather than on-site, then shipped to their destination and hooked up to the local power grid without any expensive upgrades to transmission infrastructure.
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Ex-nuclear engineer says it can never be safe
Back when Italy was trying out nuclear power for the first time, Cesare Silvi was one of the guys who had to figure out how to make it safe. Sometimes crazy things would happen -- once, an oil pipe burst, fouling the cooling water intake of a nuclear power plant miles away, shutting it down. Soon Silvi discovered there were many other pipes even closer to that plant; his attempt to study them was stymied by the moneyed interests who own them.
The longer he looked, the more small, improbable, but potentially disastrous scenarios piled up -- war, terrorism, plane crashes, missiles, extreme weather -- leading him to eventually conclude that if you armored a nuclear power plant against all potential disasters, you could never produce power for a reasonable amount of money.