I have talked before about using isotope heat in various practical applications, including freeze protection in northern Canadian communities. In a CBC radio interview on this, I mentioned to the interviewer that there is nothing unnatural about this: hot springs,…
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Isotopes for heat: an old new idea whose time came, went, and has come again
In 1961, a year after my birth, the world’s first nuclear powered automatic weather station was installed on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian high arctic. Unlike nuclear fission, which is right now providing the electrical output shown in Tables…
Nuclear “waste” is a solution to major public health problems
The alleged problem of nuclear “waste” is perhaps the most comically overblown aspect of the entire debate over nuclear energy. You would never know it from the usual media reports, but the “waste” product of nuclear reactors—that is to say,…
One gram of “garbage” per day: we should all be so lucky
Yesterday’s Toronto Star carried a curiously soft-hitting front page headline about nuclear “waste.” While trumpeting the fact that Canada has produced over 2 million bundles of it—which sounds like a lot—the Star gives no point of comparison with the waste…
Innovation, water, and energy: semi-conductors cannot defeat physics
I was at a “maker’s lab” the other day, where inventors experimented with computer numerically controlled (CNC) designs of motors, and motored systems like three-dimensional printers. It was fascinating. There is technology today, a lot of it open-source, that enables…