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What is the smart grid all about? A new book—a dictionary—attempts to define and demystify the jargon and bafflegab surrounding the buzzing smart grid. It’s a somewhat flawed but worthwhile first attempt at unraveling the often bizarre and sometimes baloney-filled smart grid nomenclature.

While industry interests were trying to get on board the smart grid gravy train last fall in Washington, D.C., in rural West Virginia folks were dealing with the force of a political locomotive pushing a high-voltage interstate grid, with property owners opposed and labor in favor.

It’s no longer a 9-to-5 world. Management gurus Peter Stark and Jane Flaherty offer advice on how to manage time in today’s multi-tasking environment.

Natural gas is back, says gas guru Bobby Hefner, and in a big way. New technologies, new discoveries, low prices, and new optimism characterize a natural gas industry that just three years ago was bemoaning its future and looking to foreign LNG imports as the industry’s salvation. Today, the gloom is gone, and the gas folks are clicking their gaseous heels in glee.

In a series of ironies, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has voted to reject an early finding that the U.S. can adequately manage nuclear reactor spent fuel, in the wake of the Obama administration’s decision to pull the radioactive plug on Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The vote by the majority Republicans on the commission effectively puts a temporary ban on new nuclear reactor construction in the U.S.

U.S. Democrats in the White House and Congress are in an unseemly race to get something, anything, enacted into law before the December climate gab fest in Copenhagen. But it’s a fools’ game and unlikely to succeed.

What’s to learn about regulation from Julia Child and Michael Pollan, gurus of the food world? Plenty, says Scott Hempling of the National Regulatory Research Institute.

Don’t let your fears of inadequacy limit your ability to succeed in your life and career.

July 17, 1955, was the first time electricity generated by a U.S. nuclear power plant flowed into a utility grid. The experiment required Utah Power & Light to disconnect itself from the power lines to the 1,200 residents of Arco, Idaho, and plug in the Argonne National Laboratory experimental boiler water reactor, BORAX-III. The plant produced merely 2 megawatts for more than an hour, as planned, after which linemen reconnected the town’s grid to the utility. Since then, the U.S. nuclear industry has demonstrated excellence in operations, but more than 50 years after that first nuclear power supply, it is lagging far behind even developing nations in new construction.

News items of interest to power generation professionals.