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Republicans push nuclear energy to lower costs
Sat Apr 25, 6:11 am ET
WASHINGTON – The U.S. should build 100 more nuclear plants rather than spend "billions in subsidies" for renewable energy if it is truly committed to lowering electric bills and having clean air, the Republicans say.
In the party's weekly radio and Internet address, Sen. Lamar Alexander said the United States should follow the example of France, which promoted nuclear power decades ago. Today, nuclear plants provide 80 percent of France's electricity, and the country has one of the lowest electric rates and carbon emissions in Europe, he said.
In contrast, renewable electricity provides roughly 1.5 percent of the nation's electricity, according to Republicans. Double it or triple it, and "we still don't have much," the Tennessee Republican said.
Democwats won't hear of it,, they think you can get by on methane!
If Barry wants to govern in a bipartisan way, this is a solid place to start.
We don't need nuclear power. There is plenty of clean energy out there.
We need to develop carbon nanotubes. They will make solar panels 90% efficient.
As Buckminster Fuller said, "There isn't an energy crisis, there is only a crisis of ignorance."
Wind Powers Dirty Little Secret
Posted on Friday April 24th by William Tucker
Theres a wonderful article in the current issue of Insight, the energy journal published by Platts, called The Unbearable Lightness of Wind.
The author, Ross McCracken, tackles the question that nobody has posed yet what are the economic consequences going to be of putting up all these wind turbines with government subsidies, mandates and feed-in tariffs that tell the utilities, Buy it whatever it costs?
The conundrum, McCracken writes, lies in the fact that wind does not directly displace fossil fuel generating capacity, but will make this capacity less profitable to maintain.
Whats likely to happen, McCracken argues, is that windmills which generate electricity only 30 percent of the time will replace some peaking power and some base-load power:
As wind provides neither baseload nor peaking plant it has no impact on reserve capacity. . . t increases redundancy in peaking plants and reduces the profits of baseload generation; potentially good for consumers but bad for investment in non-intermittent sources of power, and presenting the risk of a decline in reserve capacity. . . . [P]eaking plants would be used much less and baseload plant would see sustained period of potential below cost prices a particular nightmare for the nuclear industry.
So without contributing any reliable capacity, wind will nonetheless make nuclear, by far our most practical and reliable form of zero carbon energy, less profitable. Existing plants will be caught in a trap and new construction will be discouraged entirely. Already the British Nuclear Group is complaining that it cant build any new reactors if they have to compete against subsidized wind farms. Anti-nuclear activists are turning handsprings, claiming joyously that wind is finally replacing nuclear. But thats not whats happening. Instead, nothing will be replacing existing capacitynamely, the coal burning plants that are one of the largest sources of carbon emissionsas demand increases in years ahead. That means carbon emissions wont be meaningfully reduced, since coal plants will have to stay on line to provide backup.
Republicans push nuclear energy to lower costs
Sat Apr 25, 6:11 am ET
WASHINGTON The U.S. should build 100 more nuclear plants rather than spend "billions in subsidies" for renewable energy if it is truly committed to lowering electric bills and having clean air, the Republicans say.
In the party's weekly radio and Internet address, Sen. Lamar Alexander said the United States should follow the example of France, which promoted nuclear power decades ago. Today, nuclear plants provide 80 percent of France's electricity, and the country has one of the lowest electric rates and carbon emissions in Europe, he said.
In contrast, renewable electricity provides roughly 1.5 percent of the nation's electricity, according to Republicans. Double it or triple it, and "we still don't have much," the Tennessee Republican said.
Republicans push nuclear energy to lower costs
If Barry wants to govern in a bipartisan way, this is a solid place to start. Seems like a better way to go rather than taxing the crap out of Americans . . . . again.
We don't need nuclear power. There is plenty of clean energy out there.
We need to develop carbon nanotubes. They will make solar panels 90% efficient.
As Buckminster Fuller said, "There isn't an energy crisis, there is only a crisis of ignorance."
We don't need nuclear power. There is plenty of clean energy out there.
We need to develop carbon nanotubes. They will make solar panels 90% efficient.
As Buckminster Fuller said, "There isn't an energy crisis, there is only a crisis of ignorance."
How much energy used in America today comes from "clean" sources? How much energy that is clean continues to flow at night with now wind?
If we spend the money to create the sources for "clean" energy, won't we still need back up systems that create electricity even at night when there is no wind?
(Added later) Sorry, Annie, I should have read ahead. You made exactly the point I was wondering about.
We don't need nuclear power. There is plenty of clean energy out there.
We need to develop carbon nanotubes. They will make solar panels 90% efficient.
As Buckminster Fuller said, "There isn't an energy crisis, there is only a crisis of ignorance."
We need to develop Warp Speed too, so the Vulcans will come and save us from ourselves.
There's a lot of things we can do, with our IMAGINATIONS!
But, the rest of us choose to live in reality.
Here's the current problem with nucelar energy.
NO INSURER wants to INSURE the plants against catastropic failure.
Why not?
Do we believe that insurance comapnies would NOT insure these plants if they thought they could make money off it?
Of corrse they would...insurers are very good an doing risk/reward analysis
But they do that risk v reward analysis and conclude that while the risk of catastropy is VERY small, the outcome should that RISK become reality, FAR exceeds the benefit of issuing the policies.
So I leave it to you to understand that it is not SOCIALISM which is stopping nuclear power from expanding...it's CAPITALISM which won't play.
The timeframe in question when dealing with radioactive waste ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years,[24] according to studies based on the effect of estimated radiation doses.[25] Researchers suggest that forecasts of health detriment for such periods should be examined critically.[26] Practical studies only consider up to 100 years as far as effective planning[27] and cost evaluations[28] are concerned. Long term behaviour of radioactive wastes remains a subject for ongoing research projects.[29]
Radioactive waste - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth's crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.
Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 -- which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical diagnostic procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.
What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
