70th Nuclear Blog Carnival @ ANS Nuclear Cafe + LENR News

The Carnival of Nuclear Energy blogs has celebrated its 70th edition, hosted by ANS Nuclear Cafe. (H/T Brian Wang)

Here are some excerpts:

Atomic Insights

Rod Adams at Atomic Insights has coined a new word to replace “renewables”; he is now calling them “unreliables.” In this post he describes how unreliables cannot be called upon when needed or where needed to provide enough energy per unit time to enhance national economic or military power.

He also describes his life long love of the great outdoors and includes a copy of a comment he posted to a discussion with people interested in the Sierra Club. As a nature lover and self-professed “hard headed BHL” (bleeding heart liberal), Rod cannot understand why a club formed to protect wilderness areas and natural vistas would support industrial scale wind and solar energy development. He cannot imagine any logical reason that the club has decided to maintain its long time antinuclear stance even to the point of supporting the use of deep wells and horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from shale.

4 Factor Consulting

Margaret looks at four anti nuclear groups, identifying the origins of their anti-nuclear stances. It seems that groups moved from anti-nuclear weapons to anti nuclear power after the test ban treaty in the 1970′s. It appears that originally it was more of a survival strategy for the leadership than anything else. Sierra Club was pro-nuclear for a time, recognizing that nuclear power generated electricity with less impact on the land than any other option, but changed their stance in the early 1980′s.

Atomic Power Review

In this opinion piece, Will Davis tries to get at the root of why we’re still buying into the myth of solar energy as an even competitor to nuclear energy; does the problem go all the way back to the “Energy Crisis?” Probably.

ANS Nuclear Cafe

Cornelius Milmoe “NRC terminates Yucca Mountain proceeding” — Despite the ASLB and court rulings, the NRC has suspended all agency action on the Yucca Mountain application and refused to release the Safety Evaluation Report (SER) prepared by NRC staff. It seems likely the court of appeals will conclude the NRC is guilty of unreasonable delay…

Brian Wang reports on some recent testing of Andrea Rossi's updtated LENR technology.

The new test was performed at Ny Teknik's initiative. One of the motives was the discussion that has been going on during the summer regarding energy calculations for the E-cat, including the issues with steam quality.

As in previous tests, water was pumped into the E-cat during operation, and evaporated into steam. No measurements of steam quality were made but we found that:

- The temperature inside the E-cat, which we assume is the steam temperature, reached over 130 degrees, while the pressure was probably about one atmosphere.

- The steam was invisible at the outlet indicating high steam quality.

- Directly at the outlet we observed water flow corresponding to about half of the input water flow. This water may have been condensed steam, but we considered it to be non-evaporated water. _...More on the test @ NYTeknik

It appears that nuclear power will survive the current anti-nuclear hysteria from the less than pristine environmental factions. It also seems that Andrea Rossi is continuing to develop his LENR reactor, and is not likely to give up his quest any time soon.