Replacement Before Retirement
Jimmy Fortuna provides perspective on a policy recommendation to guarantee reliable power sources in the future.
Colorado: Let’s Go Nuclear
A strange thing happened in Colorado on Valentine’s Day in 2023. A panel of seven state legislators – five democrats and two republicans – voted 5-2 that nuclear energy should not be included in the state’s definition of Clean Energy. Does that seem strange to you? It did to me. I was in the room. …
Micro-nuclear Reactor Licensing in the United States
We met with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently to discuss several basic questions about their licensing process. You can see some of the answers and our findings below. Overall, the meeting was incredibly productive, and we’re excited to keep chatting with them. Best part: they didn’t even charge us for the cumulative 90 minutes of …
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ALARA – As Low As Reasonably Achievable
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) long ago adopted a policy referred to as ALARA (acronym for “as low as reasonably achievable”). The spirit of ALARA was to protect humans, both workers and members of the public, from dangerous levels of radiation. Tragically, what began as a well intentioned policy has essentially destroyed what could be …
Energy Abundance
The world is such a small place, and the more you write – the more people write back. Paul Hellsegg reached out to me to learn more about the F2F website and projects I’ve been working on. He’s an artist who currently lives in Norway. I’ve always wanted to visit Norway, am fascinated by their …
IRA
Executive Summary Overall Outline The nine Titles of the Act are listed below. I’ve listed the number of pages included in each Title in order to give a sense of scale of how much material is actually included in each. It would be interesting to correlate page count to dollars out (or in) as a …
Yellow Dirt and About a Mountain
While studying mechanical engineer at the University of Colorado, we learned a lot about building stuff. How do you source the right materials to construct a bicycle? Where do the raw materials come from? What’s the supply chain for all the components? And what in the world are you going to do with it once …
The Prize
In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Prize, Daniel Yergin recounts the fascinating (and sometimes terrifying) history behind the world’s most desired commodity: oil. It’s a dense read, loaded with the complete history of the adoption of the commodity – from the first Drake well in Pennsylvania up to the state of the industry in …
Technology Highlight: HolosGen
I think about it all the time: “How can we build a power system that can be deployed globally, help people everywhere, is safe, and cost effective?” In my search, I keep coming back to the high temperature gas reactor design developed by HolosGen (referred to throughout this article simply as Holos). It may as …
Iterate to Innovate
Baby steps. I recently interviewed Paul Marotta from MicroNuclear LLC for the YPE Podcast. We’re developing the podcast to generate a series of episodes on SMRs and microreactors as a way to alert the public and broader energy industry of how many different designs and technologies are currently being developed with the end goal of …