new topic: The Union of Concerned Scientists now in favor of nuclear power. Good idea? bad idea? https://reason.com/blog/2018/11/13/union-of-concerned-scientists-for-nukes?utm_medium=email
I have been and remain an advocate of nuclear power. Even the worst disasters have not had the global impact that we are seeing and will see from fossil fuels. We have to quit loading the air with carbon. In fact, we have to remove carbon from the air to avoid the worst probable consequences. It takes power to scrub air of carbon, and it's not all gonna come from geo, wind, and solar.
The stealth topic switch was pretty spectacular. Yes I agree that nuclear power needs to be a significant portion of our energy portfolio. Renewable resources simply can’t do it all.
Count me in as a strong supporter of nuclear power - Yucca Mountain needs to be opened ASAP. We need modern technology running these plants and serious research into breeder reactors.
UCS probably got paid off by Exelon. They are on a full-court press trying to get subsidies for their uneconomic nuclear plants. (I'm kidding, but then I'm not entirely sure I am kidding.) I'm not too keen on nuclear power. The capital costs are now so extraordinarily high to be able to build in a secure way. And, we've lost a lot of expertise in being able to build them in the US on time, on budget, and within parameters. China is where the expertise lies today. And, I am very wary of our complete inability to come up with a good disposal plan for nuclear waste. I can't understand how anyone can be comfortable continuing to use the chamber-pot when we don't have anywhere to empty it. We're just kicking a potentially giant problem down to some future generation.
@jcf this would be a good application of satire if you understood what that was. Sadly, I fear Mr Valdez is not being satirical. I suppose he views nuclear waste as capable of destroying the lives of billions people everywhere as opposed to climate change might only risk contaminating a barren mountain for thousands of years.
Young feller, I am here for you. I felt the pain and agony you were having with me and my posting style then and now. Or is it now and then? Regardless, I'm a deeply empathic person, who strives to help young folks like yourself navigate the challenging landscape of internet forums. I hope you take that to heart.
Sweet Lou, thank you for your kindness. Your empathetic nature shines through your various posts. And, if at times, they seem extreme or make little to no sense, I recognize that it is your way of teaching us less knowledgeable in the ways of internet posting. My eternal gratitude. (Am I doing this right?)
He's been a complete assclown for a long time, way back when he was a New Yorker and such. Pro nuke, here, btw.
You do have to appreciate the irony - the greatest achievement of the environmentalist movement was stop cold the nuclear industry and turn us back to fossil fuels - an achievement which may now spell climatic doom.
Honestly, unless the climate change deniers are right, we're already screwed. I remember I went to an alumni lecture by a professor of physics in which he was advocating essentially turning our entire electric generation fleet to nuclear because of climate change. But at the same time he was arguing how imperative it was, he was explaining how impossible it was -- the high capital cost of building so much, the difficulty of turning over generation fleets in third world countries, the strain of so much nuclear disposal, the lack of expertise and capacity to build nuclear plants. Pretty depressing lecture. And we can see -- especially after Trump's election -- how dim is the hope of some robust international cooperation to proactively tackle this problem. Even the Paris Accord we pulled out of wasn't so ambitious as to pretend to solve the problem, just blunt it. In the US, having nuclear in the generation mix helps keep the carbon down. It'd probably been great for us if we'd gone bigger with nuclear generation a half-century ago. Nuclear is great in the old utility structure -- large baseload production that runs all the time with no threats to its fuel supply (like coal piles that can freeze or gas pipelines that can be cut off). But I see the energy industry in the US evolving to something much more distributed. Millions of small generation and storage assets on a two-way distribution infrastructure. Residential solar, commercial rooftop solar, community solar and wind, fuel cell gen, combined heat and power units, battery storage, dispatchable EV batteries, demand response and dispatchable water heaters and hvac -- these are some small-asset resources to build a sort of energy ecosystem on. The large utility territories can also be cut up with more nimble microgrid structures that can import and export. It's pretty green for one (though I worry about the impact of mining for battery storage), but there is reliability and resilience benefit from having so many independent energy assets on the network. There is a lot of hand-wringing in the industry right now (by people who want handouts from their coal and nuclear generation fleets) about all the renewables coming on line who say we're going to have blackouts when a cloud passes overhead. Right now, we still need the traditional generation sources to keep that from happening, but when the renewables infrastructure is mature, there will be so many diverse sources on a broad network that it's not going to be a problem. What does not fit that well in the future I see are nuclear power plants, even the smaller new nukes. Maybe some as a couple of big assets in a tapestry of diverse sources. But compared to solar and wind and battery, I expect they are too capital-intensive, have comparatively high incremental costs, not financially nimble, and not as environmentally friendly because of their demands for water and the lingering problem of not having a secure disposal site. There is a debate in the industry right now that started with Obama's CPP and continues with Trump's coal subsidy plans. Exelon, the biggest nuclear operator, is looking for handouts everywhere because their nukes can't compete with gas and renewables on price. So they are selling the states on their no-carbon profile. New York has agreed to hundred of millions (actually over a billion I think) in subsidies so they achieve their now-dead CPP goals. Illinois too. Even with no CPP, I understand and appreciate that they want to clean up their carbon. I love them, but I think they're idiots. One, carbon is not the only environmental threat for us to contend with (e.g., I'll take an incremental contribution to the global march to a slow death over nuclear fallout in Illinois or New York). Two, those hundreds of millions would be better spent building the new smart grid infrastructure we need for the new energy economy than on providing sufficient return to shareholders that they'll consent to continue running uneconomic plants. But, regarding the aforementioned current course, I think we're screwed no matter what. Whatever we do regarding carbon, China, India and Africa will sink us. We need to learn to adapt to a hotter planet. I do think we need to mitigate our impact as much as possible, and I think we need to show the developing world the path forward on carbon-neutral generation. We should maintain expertise in nuclear generation (regain it really, because we don't know how to build them in a commercially viable way anymore), but the path forward that we need to mature is distributed renewable resources.
