Blog Carnival of Nuclear Energy #9 at Rod Adams' Place

Rod Adams is hosting the 9th Blog Carnival of Nuclear Energy, with a good selection of articles from the best nuclear bloggers.

First, Rod discusses the wager between optimistic futurist Brian Wang and energy pessimist Michael Dittmar. Dittmar not only believes in Peak Oil Doom, but apparently also believes in Peak Uranium Doom! Brian is taking Dittmar to the cleaners:

Brian Wang at NextBigFuture had a bet going with Michael Dittmar based on several posts and commentary at The Oil Drum. Michael believes that the world is running out of uranium and predicted that world uranium production for 2009 would be just 44,000 tons or less. Brian predicted 49,722 tons with the bet being set at the mid-point of 47,383 (over under). The actual number was 50,572 tons. Brian won the bet. You can read all about it and find some of the background links at World Uranium Production for 2009 Was 50572 tons. (I found it fascinating and ended up spending an hour or so reading the back story.)

Dittmar has also predicted that world uranium production will not go over 45,000 tons/year through 2018. He is and will be more and more wrong. Dittmar published his wrong predictions in arxiv and had it published on theoildrum.com and Technology Review Arxiv blog and the Economist magazine and several newspapers. _AtomicInsights

Nice going, Brian!

More from Rod Adams' 9th Nuclear Carnival:

Dan posed a thought provoking question at Cool Hand Nuke titled Are Investors Wary of New Nuclear Builds

On Idaho Samizdat, Dan Yurman talked about the current trends in new nuclear power plant supplies with his post titled Is Asia rising to dominate the global nuclear industry?_NuclearCarnival9

More at the link above. And for those who have not kept up on all the nuclear energy carnivals, Rod has kindly provided links to all of the previous carnivals #1-8 in the series, just below carnival #9.

Something important is happening in the nuclear energy field. With the coming of safer, smaller, more modular nuclear reactors, nuclear energy is making itself suitable to most types of power demands -- large or small. Factory-built reactors that require very little supervision to operate safely, are likely to overturn the prevailing beliefs about nuclear power.

As good sources of uranium and thorium are developed, and better ways are devised for recycling used fuel and disposing of contaminants, any remaining fears about the long-term sustainability of nuclear energy should be quelled.

And just when everyone finally gets comfortable with the idea of small modular fission reactors, someone is going to come along and make small modular nuclear fusion viable.