Free Republic

When Steven Chu, a Nobel physicist who had lately devoted his career to climate change and clean-energy research, was nominated by President Obama for Energy secretary in December 2008, it seemed like a perfect match. Until then, the Energy Department had actually played very little role in energy policy. Despite its name, the agency's chief mandate is to guard the nation's nuclear arsenal, and to clean up Cold War-era defense nuclear waste. In most years, about two-thirds of its budget goes to nuclear weapons and waste cleanup, while roughly 10 percent to 15 percent goes to energy research. The idea...

Energy czar Carol Browner needs to go the way of disgraced green-jobs czar Van Jones: under the bus and stripped of her unbridled power to destroy jobs and lives in the name of saving the planet. ASAP. One of the Beltway’s most influential, entrenched, and unaccountable left-wing radicals, Browner has now been called out twice by President Obama’s own federal BP-oil-spill commission and Interior Department inspector general. How many strikes should a woman who circumvented the Senate confirmation process and boasts a sordid history of abusing public office get? Pushing the question — and shining a bright, hot spotlight on...

Using a nuclear explosion to try to plug the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico might sound like overkill, but a Russian newspaper has suggested just that based on past Soviet successes. Even so, there are crucial differences between the lessons of the past and the current disaster unfolding. .The Russians previously used nukes at least five times to seal off gas well fires. A targeted nuclear explosion might similarly help seal off the oil well channel that has leaked oil unchecked since the sinking of a BP oil rig on April 22, according to a translation of...

, Markus Häring caused some 30 earthquakes -- the largest registering 3.4 on the Richter scale -- in Basel, Switzerland. Häring is not a supervillain. He's a geologist, and he had nothing but good intentions when he injected high-pressure water into rocks three miles below the surface, attempting to generate electricity through a process called enhanced geothermal. But he produced earthquakes instead, and when seismic analysis confirmed that the quakes were centered near the drilling site, city officials charged him with $9 million worth of damage to buildings. The geothermal drill in Switzerland was shut down after it caused 100...

The government is upgrading the X-ray technology that detects flaws in its nuclear weapons stockpile. The new machine, called the Confined Large Optical Scintillator Screen and Imaging System, or CoLOSSIS, uses thousands of 2D X-ray images to produce one 3D image depicting the inside of a nuclear weapon — the same way CT scanners generate 3D images of the inside of a human body. Developers say the new system will pick up more defects in the nuclear stockpile than the current 2D sensors and will eliminate the need to disassemble weapons to search for problems, which is a process that...

Atom smashers at a U.S. national lab have produced temperatures not seen since the Big Bang — 7.2 trillion degrees, or 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior — in work re-creating the universe's first microseconds. The results come from the 2.4-mile-wide Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven (N.Y.) National Laboratory. Since 2000, scientists there have hurtled gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light. These smash-ups heat bubbles smaller than the center of an atom to about 40 times hotter than the center of an imploding supernova. Scientists say the results have given them...

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has announced that it recently completed the installation and successful startup of a new surveillance diagnostic tool that is capable of detecting aging defects on critical components in the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. In response to NNSA's need to implement cost effective, optimized inspection of nuclear components (also known as "surveillance transformation"), scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) teamed with NNSA's Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, to develop a new X-ray computed tomography (CT) system to image nuclear weapon components. The new CT scan will enhance NNSA's surveillance program...

U.S. Department of Energy scientists say they've created a computer algorithm that allows a substantially enhanced view of nuclear fission. The Argonne National Laboratory scientists said the algorithm, known as the neutron transport code, enables researchers for the first time to obtain a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor core. "The code could prove crucial in the development of nuclear reactors that are safe, affordable and environmentally friendly," laboratory officials said in a statement. To model the complex geometry of a reactor core currently requires billions of spatial elements, hundreds of angles and thousands of energy groups -- all...

Russia has reneged on an agreement to deliver a total of 10 kilograms of plutonium-238 to the United States in 2010 and 2011 and is insisting on a new deal for the costly material vital to NASA’s deep space exploration plans. The move follows the U.S. Congress’ denial of President Barack Obama’s request for $30 million in 2010 to permit the Department of Energy to begin the painstaking process of restarting domestic production of plutonium-238. Bringing U.S. nuclear laboratories back on line to produce the isotope is expected to cost at least $150 million and take six years to seven...

CEI's 'Send Your Underwear to the Undersecretary' Campaign Goes *Virtual* Faster Relief for People Tired of 'Regulatory Wedgie' by CEI Staff June 18, 2007 Washington, D.C., June 18, 2007— CEI’s campaign against the U.S. Department of Energy’s disastrous washing machine efficiency rules has gone virtual. Rather than physically mailing underwear to the Undersecretary of Energy, the public can now email “virtual underwear” from CEI’s website with a few mouse clicks. This makes it far easier for those fed up with poor-performing washers to register their protests with the agency. This is the latest salvo in CEI’s campaign against the DoE...

WINDSOR LOCKS, Conn. -- An astronaut glove stitched together on a Maine engineer's dining room table won a cool $200,000 Thursday in a NASA competition. Peter Homer, an engineer from Southwest Harbor, Maine, won NASA's first-ever Astronaut Glove Challenge after a two-day competition here at the New England Air Museum near Bradley International Airport. "It feels good," said Homer, whose two home-built spacesuit gloves beat entries from two other teams to take home the top prize. "It took a lot of sitting at the sewing machine."

Leading players in the petroleum industry, including Saudi Arabia and Exxon Mobil Corp., are aggressively arguing that plenty of crude oil remains for world consumption, in an effort to counter critics who contend crude output is about to plateau. That argument, known as peak-oil theory, has provided intellectual backing for the boom in crude prices and sowed doubts among some policy makers about crude's long-term reliability as an energy source. Such doubts, coupled with concern over sky-high prices, have added impetus to the search for oil substitutes -- including in Washington, where President Bush this year declared the U.S. "addicted...

Over the Weekend President George W Bush concluded a 3 day visit to various Command Centres relating to Hurricane Katrina and Rita returning to the White House Sunday afternoon. Vice President Dick Cheney was admitted to the hospital for the elective surgery on his knees. It was announced after doing both knees (originally only one was to be done but surgery went so smoothly it was decided to do the other) that he might be in hopital for up to 48 hours, in fact he was only in for 27 hours and walked without any assistance to his limo early...

In December 2004 the Department of Energy, Office of Science, completed its review of cold fusion and published online, "Report of the Review of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions." This was briefly reported in some newpapers and journals. A short statement was published on a DoE website. We have more detailed information, including the complete set of comments from the anonymous scientific reviewers themselves. This is not available at the DoE website. See: http://lenr-canr.org/News(Please scroll down to the third news item.) The second news item is about a book that I wrote myself. It is the first deliberately amusing book about...

Looking for a place to grow marijuana and live, rent-free, in a cave with all the creature comforts of home? Why not a canyon, tucked away within the 40 square miles of the nation's top-secret nuclear weapons research facility in Los Alamos? That's where Roy Michael Moore, 56, was recently discovered living in a cave equipped with a glass front door, a wood stove, a bed, electricity-generating solar panels with batteries to store the power, and lights. "From the campsite that I saw, he had been there quite a long time," said Los Alamos deputy fire chief Doug Tucker. "He...

The U.S. and other world governments already have detailed secret plans for first contact.When UFOs land, a series of plans created to deal with nuclear emergencies and biological attacks will be activated. Within the scientific community, the question is no longer whether extraterrestrial life exists, but if ET is smart enough to do long division. Scientists are of two minds regarding the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Skeptics acknowledge simple life-forms might be found on other planets, but insist that intelligent life is unique to Earth. Their belief is based on the assumption that Earth possesses unique physical attributes, including a...

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators have documented 1,300 cases of lost, stolen or abandoned radioactive material inside the United States over the past five years and have concluded there is a significant risk terrorists could cobble enough together for a dirty bomb.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Average fuel economy for the galaxy of shiny new 2003 model cars and passenger trucks headed for showrooms is 20.8 miles per gallon, about 6 percent below the high point set 15 years ago. It's a trend reflected in consumers like Russel Fyock, recently in the market for a compact or mid-sized car. "I buy a car for what I need it for and fuel is just a thing to go along with it," said Fyock, 64, of Falls Church, Va. "Compared to inflation, gas has remained pretty cheap since the 1950s." Among the highest achievers, the...