The final review of the radiation leak at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Stations (SONGS) has been completed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Among its findings are that Southern California Edison (SCE) responded appropriately to the issue, while Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a company based in Japan, is to blame. They found that Mitsubishi’s “faulty …
Tag Archives: energy
London Olympics may be the greenest, most sustainable ever
With the opening ceremony of the London Olympics only days away, organizers prepare to celebrate what may be the one of the greenest Olympic Games to date. For Olympic organizers, sustainability has been a major focus in planning the Games’ venues. Forbes notes that existing or temporary venues are utilized whenever possible. For permanent structures, …
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International Space Station has a Large Hadron Collider – and it’s collected 18 billion cosmic rays
The largest-ever experiment in space has reported the collection of some 18 billion “cosmic ray” events that may help unravel the Universe’s mysteries. Run from a centre at Cern, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aims to spot dark matter and exotic antimatter. At the heart of the seven-tonne, $2bn machine is a giant, specially designed …
ARPA-E – a new federal agency created to fund research of promising, but unproven, energy technologies
ARPA-E: A Good Beginning for U.S. Energy Innovation By Bill Gates Clean energy and innovation are two areas that I’m passionate about, so I’ve been looking forward to investigating some interesting new energy technologies at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit this week. ARPA-E is a new federal agency—the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—created in 2009 to fund …
San Onofre Nuclear Plant shut down for the summer – does Southern California still need it?
This summer may be just a test run for operating Southern California’s electrical grid without a nuclear plant. The latest report on the outage at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station shows the replacement of four massive steam generators was accompanied by serious design flaws, with no clear solution in sight. Both stakeholders in San …
What is the Higgs boson and why does it matter? (in simple terms)
What is the Higgs boson and why does it matter? (in simple terms) If you remember basic chemistry, the atom is made up a proton, neutron, and electron. Those were the basic building blocks of life when I was a kid. I remember illustrations showing the neutron and proton in the center with the electron …
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Ring of Fire Derecho – travelled 600 miles from Iowa to D.C.
On Friday, a historic, record-setting heat wave covered a sprawling region from the Midwest to the Southeast. All-time high temperatures records of 109 were established in Nashville and Columbia, South, Carolina and tied in Raleigh and Charlotte which hit 105 and 104. Here in Washington, D.C., the mercury climbed to an astonishing 104 degrees (breaking …
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What’s it like going solar (installing panels on your roof)?
I’ve been seeing a lot more solar panels installed on homes. Which has me wondering, what is the impact on cost, inconvenience, and utilities. Scott over on the Zero Waste Blog has the perfect, written-by-an-engineer, write-up. It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is a meaty excerpt: So what has the impact been? …
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Alfred Hitchcock’s definition of happiness
“A clear horizon — nothing to worry about on your plate, only things that are creative and not destructive… I can’t bear quarreling, I can’t bear feelings between people — I think hatred is wasted energy, and it’s all non-productive. I’m very sensitive — a sharp word, said by a person, say, who has a …
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Why Amsterdam, Copenhagen are bike friendly cities
“The bicycle was regarded, more than most places in the world — as ‘good for society,’” he writes in an email. “After the bicycle boom in the late 1800s, many cycling clubs merged and then many of them merged again, morphing into cyclist ‘unions’, with political goals. What happened in most countries in the early …
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