78 comments on US Department of Interior Moves to Speed Up Wind Energy
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And further uprates of existing nukes and building as many nukes as we can safely and economically, 6, 7 or 8 new US nukes in the next decade.
Best Hopes for a Rush to Wind and a further build-out of nukes
Alan
I left out the nukes because:
The reason that hardly any nuclear power plants were built over the past decades is that they're simply too expensive and too risky for investors. Without exception, all recent additions had massive cost-overruns and construction delays.
If you start planning now, you may have a few plants in 10 years. By that time one of the following (but probably more than one) is likely to have happened:
1. A kWh from wind combined with backup or transport capacity (dams, batteries, pressurized air, long-distance electricity transport) is cheaper than a kWh from a new nuclear plant (it probably already is cheaper)
2. Solar energy (including backup or transport capacity as above) will be cheaper (this will take a bit longer)
3. No solution is found for the waste (Yucca mountain was scrapped, Asse in Germany collapsed on top of the waste)
4. Another nuclear power plant blows up (most operating plants are getting really creaky, and that includes some of the American and European ones)
If only one of these predictions comes true, nuclear is dead, and deserves to be.
5) Given humans still attack each other/one anothers property - how in the world we live in are fission plants not a target of evil do-ers?
6) All human efforts fail over time. Some of the failure modes of fission are really bad. If fission was safe, why does Price-Anderson exist? Why do fines get handed out by FedGov for not following the safety rules?
re.6 : Because we take the risks from nuclear plants more seriously than equivalent, or even identical, risks from other power sources.
How about the nuke power industry has promised that fission is "safe" - yet can't even meet the governments requirements for safe operation.
And somehow, security guards are allowed to sleep on the job when watching fission plants.
If operation was happening without violation of the agreed safety rules, then the fission business would have a good chance at making the claim they are 'safe''.
No, then they would be able to claim that they were following the rules.
If they had ever killed as many people as coal plants kill every year they'd be banned, yet somehow coal is "clean" and "safe".
Folks are just afraid of what they don't understand. Coal miners dying of black lung and cave ins, acid rain killing lakes, smog, and fly-ash dumps giving the neighbors heavy metal poisoning, these are all well established and "safe" risks.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:
Safe, adj. : Free from risk.
Name me a energy source that is safe! Now if you want to talk about relative safety.
Below is a bar chart of the demonstrated death risk of several energy sources.
http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/15%20-%20Pol...
Anti-nuc people like to emphasize hypothetical risks based on worst worst case models not what has been demonstrated.
See "Black Swan - Nuclear"
Alan
Now Alan, you can’t get away that easy. :) Just blowing it off by suggesting a nuclear Black Swan event is not an argument. With only three significant nuclear power reactor accidents in the last sixty years which caused a total of fewer than 60 deaths, a number that the world coal power industry exceeds several times a week, nuclear is safer than any power industry other than hydroelectric, (note that the hydro deaths do not include dam failures).
Modern reactors have better failure analysis than most any other system with the highest probability significant release of radio nuclides being from a large military attack. New designs like LFTR would contain much less than one percent of the fission products that todays reactors have reducing the risk by another two to three orders of magnitude.
Risk can never be reduced to zero, however nuclear reactors in general, and LFTR in particular have the ability to reduce CO2 by over 75% while eliminating the need for foreign oil. Something environmentalists and economists seem to like.
A bit emotional for a "hard fact" site? How's this for some hard facts? Ontario, Canada now has 6,000 MW coal-fired generation. By June it plans to accept the bids from one of three contenders (AREVA, Westinghouse, AECL) to build another 2,200 MW nuclear and shut down that much coal gen. The new nuclear will be built on fixed-price contracts with contractor taking liability for any overruns. In Canada, no "Price-Anderson" act has been necessary. Spent fuel is stored onsite in dry casks until such time as it will be needed for use in a new fuel run in the reactors. There is some discussion of a waste burial site in the Whiteshell some time in distant future, but no real problem for present 22 reactors. Between additional new nukes, new renewables and conservation, Ontario plans to have shut down all coal generation before 2020.
Ontario's Green Jobs program http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/591708
combined with some high capacity factor new generation Nuclear power seems like a good combination to me.
A bit emotional for a "hard fact" site?
Nope - the topic has been hashed out before. And say I spend the time to, once again, hash it out. Not like your mind uis going to be changed.
Because they have more effective targets to attack.
Chernobyl is about as bad as it gets and the eventual death toll is still less than 1/7th of what coal power kills in the US every year. That's if the LNT hypothesis is true, it may well not be but it's unlikely we'll ever know; it's kind of hard to detect ~4000 cancers out of a backdrop of several hundred million that would be expected from the usual suspects( metabolism, smoke inhalation etc.).
Because nuclear energy is held to a higher standard than other power sources.
The value EPA places on a human life for determining if an action is cost effective in saving lives or not is $6.9 million(it was lowered $1 million during the Bush years). If coal power had to pay this rate for each life prematurely lost(30 000/year according to EPA) it would come to a total of $210 billion/annum.
This is not even some kind of a failure mode(unless you concede that coal is in permanent failure mode). If coal was regulated as stringently as nuclear energy every single coal plant in existance would be shut down permanently tomorrow.
Because nuclear energy is held to a higher standard than other power sources.
This begs the question WHY? When it comes to safety and environmental impact per MWH delivered, the facts surrounding nuclear power don't justify how it is regarded in the socio-political sphere. If we were to let facts be the guide and apply the same level of standards to coal, oil and gas, fossil fuels would be anathema and nuclear would be the choice. Yet, the opposite has been the case.
I might be a little slow on the uptake here, but could this be because powerful fossil-fuel interests, representing the richest corporations on the planet, wanted to knee-cap the only serious competition? For example: Amory Lovins, famous for his anti-nuke stance, and I'm sure a go-to guy for many anti-nuclear arguments said this
After realizing the grotesque amount of propagandizing that goes on with American "news" corporations in recent years, I figure this point is a valid one for consideration. Public opinion is bought and sold and facts have little to do with the matter. Think tanks, faux institutes, guru "experts" that get paid to spread opinion, are often funded by wealthy interests for the sole purpose of massaging public opinion. I think nuclear power lost the P.R. war with fossil fuel interests a long time ago, and so it is held to different standards that serve to hobble it because of the negative political climate that has been crafted over recent decades.
Quite right.
And then AGW comes along out of left field, with prominent environmentalists like James Lovelock publicly endorsing nuclear power as a necessary response. Looks like fossil's holding action may not last much longer; we can hope.