For an international flashpoint, the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea just southwest of Okinawa, are unprepossessing. A group of small, uninhabited stony islands, they cover only 7 square kilometers total. These isolated pinnacles “are apparently ready for disintegration by the first disturbing cause, either gales of wind or…
Our recent webinar on The Future of Cleantech Investment prompted an unusual amount of comments and reactions, a fair percentage of which was skeptical. Adjectives like “non-objective,” “puff piece,” and “amateurish” got tossed around. The main objection of the skeptics seemed to be that the overall optimistic view of our…
It’s been a tough summer for USEC, Inc., formerly U.S. Enrichment Corp., the private company set up in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, by the U.S. government to process uranium from dismantled Soviet warheads and sell it on the open market to the nuclear power industry. Uranium…
The U.S. State Department has been tap-dancing for the last week, trying to quell the outrage over remarks made by Todd Stern, America’s chief climate negotiator, in a speech at Dartmouth College. Stern implied that global, top-down targets for limiting climate change – specifically, the goal of keeping global warming…
The U.S. Department of Energy is collaborating with China on thorium-based reactors with molten salt cores, according to a report on Smart Planet. Written by Mark Halper, a United Kingdom-based energy reporter who writes for several U.S. and U.K. publications, the report both confirms what I reported in SuperFuel –…
(Originally posted on Sept. 9, 2011) The rare earths crisis, if you want to call it that, intensified this week. Two days after Chinese state media reported that production would cease at three major mines in eastern Jiangxi province, China’s rare earth’s heartland, officials from Japan, the U.S., and the…
Welcome to the new website to support the new book, SuperFuel by Richard Martin. A groundbreaking account of an energy revolution in the making, SuperFuel tells the story of thorium, a naturally-occurring element that is so safe you can hold it in your bare hand, that’s four times more abundant…
