Another Department of Energy clean coal technology project is staggering and looks like it is about to fall well short of the finish line. This time, it is the Texas Clean Energy Project, into which DOE has committed some $450 million, and which the agency’s inspector general has said has consistently missed project deadlines and […]

Molly Macauley, a prominent economics researcher on space, science and climate issues at the Washington think tank Resources for the Future, was murdered while walking her two rescue dogs last Friday night around 11 p.m. in the upscale Baltimore neighborhood of Roland Park. According to police reports, she was stabbed and died at a local […]

Nuclear power in the U.S. appears to be in a major decline, with announced retirements and potential retirements far outpacing the four new projects (I don’t count TVA’s Watts Barr 2 as “new”) now underway. At the same time, the world outside the U.S., particularly Asia, is seeing substantial growth of nuclear generating capacity, with […]

More news from the fusion “fornever” front. Physics Today reports that the Department of Energy’s highly-touted inertial confinement laser fusion project – known as the National Ignition Facility or NIF – looks like a bust. If so, it would join all the other big-government failures over decades to establish fusion as a source of electric […]

My late father was a mining engineer. He had lots of interactions with economists over his long career in government, the private sector, and academia. His take: “An economist is someone who goes from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.” I was reminded of his view by a report in Electricity Daily of a […]

Much of what has been the policy prescription for global warming from greens and the left – a 100% renewable energy system based on cheap solar and wind generation, low-cost storage, and policies for managing consumer demand — which might be characterized as “decarbonization” – is likely to fail and make matters worse. That’s the […]

Self-indulgent. Pointless. Arrogant. Undemocratic. Zealotry. Those are just a few epithets I would direct at the loony leftist “fracktivists” who have targeted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for protests over the commission’s exercise of its duties under law with regard to siting natural gas infrastructure. The whacktivists, who have revived their protests from last fall […]

Don’t like much about LWRs, Molten salt doesn’t thrill me at all. Sodium makes me want to run, But helium looks cool. I’ve seen what may be the future of civilian nuclear power, thanks to Dr. Christina Back at General Atomics in San Diego. I hope it works. It isn’t going to be easy. GA […]

Could this be a connect-the-dots situation? On April 27, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Andre Porter, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, is stepping down, taking a job with an unnamed regional electric transmission organization. Electricity Daily speculated that the job might be with the PJM Interconnection. On April 27, the Federal […]

I was at my desk in the Energy Daily newsroom on April 26, 1986 when someone handed me a bulletin ripped from one of the wire service machines in the National Press Club building in Washington, where our office was located. The bulletin said a nuclear power plant had exploded in the Ukraine in the […]