Whatever happened to all those new nuclear power plants the country was supposed to build?
On the day Paul Hanrahan became employee No. 81 at a startup company known as AES in 1986, he felt liberated.
David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy and a father of five, was standing in a stubby cornfield in Bucks County, Pa., one windy evening last October when his BlackBerry began to stir. He checked his in-box, but he didn't respond, not right away. It was Sunday night, and he was on an outing with his family, waiting in line for a Halloween hayride. Nor did he respond an hour later on his way to the Amtrak station to catch a train to Washington, D.C. How could he, when he drives a Mini Cooper with a stick shift? You need both hands to manage a car like that. So it wasn't until after nine at night, having found a quiet corner of the waiting room behind a Dunkin' Donuts kiosk, that Crane finally got around to calling back John Rowe.
Scientists in the United States are developing a "synthetic tree" capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.
Is it really so smart to forge ahead with the high technology, digitally based electricity distribution and transmission system known as the "Smart Grid"? Tests have shown that a hacker can break into the system, and cybersecurity experts said a massive blackout could result.
Think of the future of green energy and the mental picture you may conjure up is one of vast solar plants glinting like a beetle's eye in the sun, or ranks of wind turbines turning in the breeze.
Iran tested its first nuclear power plant Wednesday, a stride that prompted one Iranian technician to declare it was "independence day" for the Islamic republic.
Jyoti is the Hindi word for light. It's something Pranav Mehta has never had to live without. And he is lucky. Near where he lives in Gujarat, one of the most prosperous states in India, thousands of rural villages lack electricity or struggle with an intermittent supply at best.
David Crane is a man who isn't afraid of a challenge. When he took the helm at NRG Energy in the winter of 2003, the company was mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings -- just one of many companies caught in the meltdown of the U.S. power generation industry, instigated by the scandalous collapse of Texan power giant Enron in 2001.
Whilst the energy grids we rely on to provide us with cheap and reliable electricity may have been fit for purpose in the 20th century, it is now abundantly clear that the design of 21st century energy networks will have to be very different. In Europe, the foundations for a secure, flexible and more energy efficient future are already being laid.
Whatever happened to all those new nuclear power plants the country was supposed to build?
On the day Paul Hanrahan became employee No. 81 at a startup company known as AES in 1986, he felt liberated.
David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy and a father of five, was standing in a stubby cornfield in Bucks County, Pa., one windy evening last October when his BlackBerry began to stir. He checked his in-box, but he didn't respond, not right away. It was Sunday night, and he was on an outing with his family, waiting in line for a Halloween hayride. Nor did he respond an hour later on his way to the Amtrak station to catch a train to Washington, D.C. How could he, when he drives a Mini Cooper with a stick shift? You need both hands to manage a car like that. So it wasn't until after nine at night, having found a quiet corner of the waiting room behind a Dunkin' Donuts kiosk, that Crane finally got around to calling back John Rowe.
Scientists in the United States are developing a "synthetic tree" capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.
Is it really so smart to forge ahead with the high technology, digitally based electricity distribution and transmission system known as the "Smart Grid"? Tests have shown that a hacker can break into the system, and cybersecurity experts said a massive blackout could result.
Think of the future of green energy and the mental picture you may conjure up is one of vast solar plants glinting like a beetle's eye in the sun, or ranks of wind turbines turning in the breeze.
Iran tested its first nuclear power plant Wednesday, a stride that prompted one Iranian technician to declare it was "independence day" for the Islamic republic.
Jyoti is the Hindi word for light. It's something Pranav Mehta has never had to live without. And he is lucky. Near where he lives in Gujarat, one of the most prosperous states in India, thousands of rural villages lack electricity or struggle with an intermittent supply at best.
David Crane is a man who isn't afraid of a challenge. When he took the helm at NRG Energy in the winter of 2003, the company was mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings -- just one of many companies caught in the meltdown of the U.S. power generation industry, instigated by the scandalous collapse of Texan power giant Enron in 2001.
Whilst the energy grids we rely on to provide us with cheap and reliable electricity may have been fit for purpose in the 20th century, it is now abundantly clear that the design of 21st century energy networks will have to be very different. In Europe, the foundations for a secure, flexible and more energy efficient future are already being laid.
Twenty four hours before the greatest scientific experiment of our time gets underway at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, political and scientific dignitaries assembled at a site a few hundred miles north east of the French/Swiss border at a site in Germany to inaugurate another groundbreaking engineering test.
It looks like a scene from an old episode of The X-Files: As a red-tailed hawk circles overhead and a wild pronghorn sheep grazes in the distance, a dozen people in dark sunglasses move methodically through a vast field of golden barley, eyes fixed to the ground, GPS devices in hand. They're searching for bodies.
Jyoti is the Hindi word for light. It's something Pranav Mehta has never had to live without. And he is lucky. Near where he lives in Gujarat -- one of the most prosperous states in India -- thousands of rural villages lack electricity or struggle with an intermittent supply at best.
Sandwiched between two nondescript commercial buildings in a vacant lot squats what looks like a long, plastic-shrouded greenhouse. Hanging nearby is a cluster of five-foot-long plastic sacks bulging with green slime that resemble intravenous drip bags for the Jolly Green Giant. It doesn't look like groundbreaking technology, but these scum bags in Cambridge, Mass., just might help save the planet.
Halfway around the world, a zero-carbon, zero-waste, automobile-free city known as Masdar is rising from a 2.3-square mile plot of desert in Abu Dhabi.
Whisky is for drinkin', water is for fightin'.
NRG Energy's David Crane can seem miscast sometimes in the role of a Fortune 500 CEO. He wears a child's blue Swatch with a shiny plastic band. He settles into a chair - even a boardroom chair - the way a teenager would, with one leg curled up under his body.
Widespread anxiety about the damaging effects of burning fossil fuels, coupled with a genuine fear that oil and gas will become scarce before the century ends are fueling a renewed interest in renewable energy and, in particular, solar power solutions.
The proliferation of coal-burning power plants around the world may pose "the single greatest challenge" to averting dangerous climate change, an international panel of scientists have reported.
Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue declared a water supply emergency in north Georgia on Saturday as its water resources dwindled to a dangerously low level after months of drought.
If you've read our story on Macquarie Bank you know that - regardless of that company's prospects - investors see plenty of opportunities in infrastructure.
For a long time, conventional wisdom has held that coal would easily meet the nation's rising demand for electricity. It's cheap, and there's enough of it in the U.S. to power the country for an estimated 250 years.
Joel Rheault ducks beneath the steel door of the elevator cage and steps into a freezing rainstorm -- 1,600 feet below ground, at the mouth of a cavernous concrete tunnel. Wind whips the water dripping from his hard hat as Rheault switches on his headlamp, climbs into a Toyota Land Cruiser that's been parked underground, and drives off into the darkness.
"We were at heightened security - we were at red," recalls Al Griffith, spokesman for the utility that owns the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire.
As the summer swelters on, skyscrapers and apartments around the city will crank up air conditioners and push the city's power grid to the limit -- but some have found a cool alternative
MAKING ELECTRICITY IS A DIRTY BUSINESS. Just take a peek inside the boiler at your typical power plant. Fueled by crushed coal, a fireball howls and burns at 2,500° Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt iron. A ghostly snow of ash drifts down around the fire until it hits a pipe or a ridge. There it piles up, melts and hardens into slag, which reduces the boiler's efficiency. Removing the slag is costly, time consuming, and dangerous. Slag formations can grow to the size of a small car and weigh several tons. Some workers have used shotguns to try to blast the stuff off the boiler; others have used jackhammers. Neither method works very well. For decades, slag has been the nightmare of the utility industry.
Making electricity is a dirty business. Just take a peek inside the boiler at your typical power plant. Fueled by crushed coal, a fireball howls and burns at 2,500° Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt iron. A ghostly snow of ash drifts down around the fire until it hits a pipe or a ridge. There it piles up, melts and hardens into slag, which reduces the boiler's efficiency. Removing the slag is costly, time consuming, and dangerous. Slag formations can grow to the size of a small car and weigh several tons. Some workers have used shotguns to try to blast the stuff off the boiler; others have used jackhammers. Neither method works very well. For decades, slag has been the nightmare of the utility industry.
Clouds hang low over the New Mexico desert, deep inside a military reservation a dozen miles south of Albuquerque. A breeze stirs the air; tumbleweeds roll by. Then the sun shines through and a low...
With global warming on everyone's mind, combined with a slew of electronic gadgets consuming more and more electricity, there's a greater need than ever for clean coal technology in the United States.
The Bush administration Tuesday applauded a Russian ultimatum to Iran that it will not supply fuel for Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant until Iran agrees to suspend uranium enrichment.
Most people don't spend an hour gabbing on their cell phone in the middle of the day. It's just too expensive.
Big lumps of sooty coal hardly seem like the future of energy, but that's exactly what the U.S. Department of Energy predicts. Consumption of the fossil fuel --the main source of greenhouse gas and a major contributor to acid rain, smog and mercury poisoning --will hit 10.6 billion tons a year by 2030, a near doubling of the 5.4 billion tons burned in 2003, according to the agency.
The planet's most pressing environmental problems—global warming, energy shortages, overfishing, pollution—may seem just too big to be solved with today's technology. But don't despair: A lot of br...
These futuristic projects promise to make the world greener, while making entrepreneurs some green.
Space weather forecasters revised their predictions for storminess after a major flare erupted on the sun overnight threatening damage to communication systems and power grids while offering up the wonder of Northern Lights.
"This is my sandbox, where I play," says Tom Kiser, pulling his big Chrysler sedan into the parking lot of Professional Supply Inc. We're in Fremont, Ohio, population 17,000. There's a sauerkraut f...
This is my sandbox, where I play,” says Tom Kiser, pulling his big Chrysler sedan into the parking lot of Professional Supply Inc. We’re in Fremont, Ohio, population 17,000. There’s a sauerkraut fa...
As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to take up the issue of climate change, some unusual alliances are forming - and corporate America finds itself on both sides of the debate.
While the U.S. hems and haws over reviving nuclear energy as a less expensive alternative to oil, Russia has dug back 30 years in our nuclear history to find a solution for some of its own energy woes: the floating nuclear power plant.
Rattling down a red dirt road on the edge of the Australian outback, Roger Davey hits the brakes and hops out of a rented Corolla. With a sweep of his arm, he surveys his domain - 24,000 acres of e...
CNN.com asked users for their ideas on the best way to fuel America and break the country's dependence on fossil fuels, especially from foreign sources. Here is a sampling of the responses, some of which have been edited:
Who wouldn't want to help the environment while increasing the value of their business and lowering their expenses?
The CEO of Exelon is not the sort of man you'd expect to be king of America's nukes. His mammoth utility will soon have 20 nuclear plants in its fleet (the term harks back to the industry's roots i...
Look down from the cabin of Kevin Schieffer's twin-engine King Air 5,000 feet over Wyoming's Powder River Basin, and it's easy to see why he and his investors want to build the first major new rail...
Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don't have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world--and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.
When Seamus Herron and his brother John inherited 1,100 acres of rugged farmland in Donegal, Ireland, in the 1970s, neither was sure whether it was a blessing or a curse. The northern tip of Irelan...
On a raw winter afternoon, the training manager at Cooper Nuclear Station, a power plant run by Entergy Corp. on the bleak plains of eastern Nebraska, sits across a conference table from his boss, ...
The answer to global warming may be blowing in the wind. It's probably also driving on four wheels and could be in your next tank of gas.
Outside, it's another warm summer afternoon in Madison, Pa., a forested suburb 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Inside—in a brightly lit Westinghouse control room packed with computer monitors, sc...
North Korea is planning to carry out two more explosions as part of a hydroelectric power plant project after a major blast last week sparked speculation a nuclear test had taken place, Kyodo news agency has reported.
Rick Priory was on top of the world. It was early 2002, and as CEO of Duke Energy he had taken a conservative electric utility and plunged it headlong into the newly deregulated power market. Durin...
Potentially disruptive solar storms can't reach Earth in less than half a day, scientists have determined.
In many ways it was a textbook example of urban warfare. In April a group of well-armed Shia militia in the Iraqi city of Najaf attempted to storm the local Coalition Provisional Authority offices....
It took three cruise missiles and a direct hit by a 2,000-pound bomb to obliterate Baghdad's al Mamoun telephone exchange. Putting it back together has proved to be a bit more complicated. Bechtel ...
There was never much question that one of the first companies President Bush and his administration would call on to help with the vital task of rebuilding Iraq would be Bechtel Group.
When Chinese troops opened fire on Soviet counterparts at a border checkpoint in 1969, the shots reverberated across the oilfields of Daqing. For much of the decade, a cadre of Chinese geologists a...
Just before last Christmas, at the height of the tourist season in the Dominican Republic and thus a time of serious beer consumption, a key diesel engine suddenly failed at the big Cerveceria Naci...
In 1984, Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., the legendary oilman and corporate raider, made a $1.3 billion hostile bid for Houston Natural Gas Corp. Wyatt was building a network of natural-gas pipelines that wou...
A few years back, Duke Energy CEO Rick Priory left Charlotte, N.C., and headed north to make one of his periodic pitches to Wall Street. As far as Priory was concerned, he had a pretty exciting sto...
On the western edge of the vast Nevada Test Site, where hundreds of nuclear weapons have been detonated, lies a dusty ridgeline known as Yucca Mountain. Located in a desert region of north-south mo...
One of the most exciting technologies of the new millennium is about to move a few steps closer to the mass market. The technology is fuel cells, almost universally seen as an energy-conserving, lo...
About a year ago Jason Selch, an analyst for Liberty Wanger Asset Management, had a eureka moment. Energy prices were soaring, and Dynegy, a Houston-based wholesaler of electricity and natural gas,...
Imagine a country-club dinner dance, with a bunch of old fogies and their wives shuffling around halfheartedly to the not-so-stirring sounds of Guy Lombardo and his All-Tuxedo Orchestra. Suddenly y...
Gleaming two-tone in black set against Antares Red or KYSO Blue (for "knock your socks off"), big Victory V92C motorcycles are coming off a new assembly line in the prairie town of Spirit Lake, Iow...
Bright-eyed, his silver hair a little wild at the fringes, Dr. Ferdinand Panik, 56, clearly relishes piloting a very special Mercedes vehicle briskly past the apple orchards on the outskirts of Nab...
Across Asia, big infrastructure deals are running into trouble, blighted by weakened currencies and massive cost overruns. A sign of the times: Malaysia's recent postponement of several showcase pr...
Talk about a Freudian bad dream. In January, Charles Freude, a 38-year-old engineer at the University of Oklahoma's power plant, lost his job of 11 years because he accidentally misaddressed a tast...
So many companies have surprised Wall Street with their earnings announcements (see the story on page 75) that we went back to see how some of the stocks recently featured in these pages have done....
You've got to like two things about Michael Jordan, the 60-year-old chairman of Westinghouse Electric: One, he's not afraid to shake the tree, and two, he's showing a lot of grace under media and W...
FOR THOSE who lead America's big power companies, decades of peaceful, regulated coexistence are nothing more than a memory. Today the shots of aggression ring loudly across the land, skirmishes ov...
WESTERN INVESTORS have poured some $15 billion into Eastern Europe in the five years since the Berlin Wall came down, but not everyone is happy. General Electric had to put an additional $400 milli...
With energy prices in Europe as much as twice those in the U.S., it's no surprise that Europeans are guzzling U.S. ideas for alternative fuels. Elm Energy, a division of the U.S. utility Northern I...
JUST about everybody in the global electronics industry agrees that this is the Decade of the Strategic Alliance, and for good reason. As telecommunications, computers, consumer electronics, and me...
IF YOU AIM TO PLAY in the business big leagues, it makes sense to study the moves of the established stars on the FORTUNE 500. But don't ignore the fast- growing, midsize companies struggling to ma...
American managers may soon find themselves competing on their home turf with one of Europe's hottest CEOs -- a 6-foot 3-inch Swede with a goatee. Percy Barnevik, 48, is leading Asea Brown Boveri of...
WHAT'S the essential quality a leader needs to turn a bloated, near-bankrupt company into a lean, mean, wealth-creating machine? ''Confidence,'' says David Tappan, 67, chairman and chief executive ...
HERE'S A TEST of your investment acumen. You have a choice of buying stock in one of two companies. Do you believe in return on shareholders' equity? For 1988, Company A had an ROE of 22%; Company ...
Managers and investors are starting to realize that Western Europe may well be the fastest-growing market for a host of businesses in the 1990s. Says Federal Express vice president Christos Cotsako...
GOSH, wasn't heavy industry great! Huge plants employing thousands of people making all kinds of things. Giant stacks exhaling soot -- that fine smoke of the industrial cigar -- morning, noon, and ...
With $15 billion in nongenerating power plants, the Tennessee Valley Authority was in a jam. So it hired a hotshot admiral from the nuclear Navy and gave him an army of engineers to make the plants...
THE FIRST NUCLEAR power plant in the Philippines sits on a verdant bluff overlooking the South China Sea, just off the road where U.S. soldiers marched to their death under the bayonets of Japanese...
NUCLEAR POWER was not a wonderful business to be in even before the disaster at Chernobyl. It now figures to become a lot less wonderful for utilities. Several companies that build and service nucl...
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