During the past several years, I have been following the progress of a strange situation in my adopted state of Virginia. Despite being a state with a long history of mining and mineral extraction, we have a law in place that forbids mining one specific element-uranium. The law is technically just a temporary moratorium put in place in order to give the state's regulators time to draft effective regulations, but the law enacting the moratorium was put into place more than 30 years ago.

The world oil market is not a free market. Prices are manipulated by a small number of producers that adjust production rates to achieve desired prices that are high enough to provide maximum profits, without being high enough to encourage customers to aggressively pursue alternative energy sources.

Conventional wisdom says that the general public was introduced to atomic energy by the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to that version of history, the introduction instilled a strong dose of fear that remains to be overcome.

It's hot out! Across much of the United States, the largest heat wave of the summer has been stagnating all week.

One of the single most valuable pieces of energy real estate in the United States is located a few miles outside of Chatham, Virginia, less than an hour's drive from my home. Millions of years ago, natural forces concentrated about 119 million pounds of uranium in a relatively small volume of what is now a cow pasture. That is enough raw material to supply all of the nuclear power plants in the United States with all of their fuel needs for a little more than two years. If valued at today's suppressed, post-Fukushima market price, the deposit is worth about $7 billion.