Obama Wants More Nuclear Power. Does that Make Sense?

Clean energy advocates may have noticed that President Obama didn't just tout solar and wind in this week's State of the Union address; he also encouraged the construction of new natural gas, clean coal, and nuclear power sites. Natural gas and clean coal aren't all that clean (that's for another column), but nuclear may be a decent option. Should we be paying more attention to it?


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New Storage Technology: A 100 Million Ton Stone

EscoVale Consultancy Services has come up with a new technology that Archimedes, Barney Rubble or your average Druid engineer would recognize.

The company, based in England, is proposing a sort of upside-down version of pumped hydro storage using a 100 million ton rock. In classic pumped hydro storage, water from an upper reservoir is released to fall into a lower reservoir. On the way down, it flows through a turbine and creates energy.

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My Kingdom for a Moment of Silence

I’m currently reading a non-fiction book titled One Square Inch of Silence, and it’s about how an auditory ecologist (if you can imagine this) who chose one little inch in a national park to protect from sound pollution, why he did this, and what happens next.  This has made me hyper-alert to noise–lawn mowers, traffic, planes overhead, that music blaring from the teen’s car across the street, and the piercing of my quiet moments by the sound of the seemingly-endlessly-repeated question, “Mom?”  If the author of that book can protect his little inch in the world, perhaps I can find a little silence here at home as well.  All roads seem to lead to insulation, don’t they?  But how about a vertical garden to bring “insulation, noise control, and a little urban reminder of the world outside” (as it says on this blog, about the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, which is pictured).  It’s like a little taste of that national park (and Europe) right on my home. Wouldn’t this be something?

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