I became deeply interested in energy in 2011, a few weeks after a powerful earthquake and tsunami swept the eastern shores of Japan, killing many thousands of people and badly disabling infrastructure needed to safely operate the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which later suffered major breakdown due to hydrogen explosions caused by fuel meltdown.
Luckily no one was hurt at the accident site due to the radiation release, and neither any citizen has ever received any meaningful amount of radiation, thought there is a lot of media misinformation and hysteria still going on after almost 5 years since the accident happen.
But inquiring minds want to know. And that is when my trip thru nuclear knowledge began.
I was always fascinated by technology, and generation of power is something I knew little about, except for visiting an hydroelectric plant on the Adda river south of Bergamo, Italy, during school.
So I had to study, and my research for trusted sources of information quickly pointed me to Rod Adams and his “Atomic Insights” website and blog active since 1995, a must-read for nuclear and energy aficionados.
Not only Rod has a great website, but he also been running a podcast, “The Atomic Show” (iTunes link here) since March 2006, and I became so passionate about the topic and the critical thinking and knowledge exposed by Rod and his guests that I went back to the very first episode of the show, and listened to each and every one of them, including the early ones in which he had a great co-host, Shane Brown, even more technical than Rod.
Last year, when I discovered Alex Epstein and his book “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” thru this event at The Cato Institute, it dawned on me that the dry technical matters behind nuclear could very well benefit from the deeper philosophical thoughts that Alex Epstein has always highlighted in his work.
I then emailed Rod about Alex Epstein and his work, and he told me that he had already been in touch with Alex and an episode of “The Atomic Show” with Alex as guest would be upcoming. Episode 230 was released on December 12th 2014 and I have added some comments on the relevant blog post. A must listen in my view.
Why am I talking about a tweet, then?
Because as recently as last Friday December 18th 2015 Rod Adams posted this update via Twitter, something which I liked very much, as it shows a deeper understanding on the whole energy discussion, broadening his view from the purely nuclear space.
It’s nice for me to see how two of my main influencers in the energy space are coming full circle back to the most important aspect of energy: every bit of energy counts, nuclear needs fossil fuels and fossil fuels needs nuclear moving forward.
We have to defend our right to energy access and deflect the attacks from those who would like to limit our access to energy. They are the really dangerous people to be on the look for.