“Future Demand”
The U.S. will need 25% more electricity by 2030, how? Americans plan to reduce automobile emission with electric cars, but what will power them? President of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Marv Fertel, Theodore Roosevelt IV, Pew Center for Global Climate Change, and others raise these questions for American energy future.
– from energyontrial.com
“Considering New Nuclear”
House Minority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, Stewart Brand, AREVA nuclear engineer Ben Grambeau, and Christine Todd Whitman are part of the discussion on new nuclear reactors construction for the U.S. and what it means to be a leader in nuclear innovation and construction again.
– from energyontrial.com
We would like to highlight the “Energy on Trial” project. This is a documentary that “tackles a subject as dear and essential to us as the air we breathe and the nourishment we require. Without energy, we are doomed. But the way much of it is produced is terminally damaging to our environment, and to our health.” We are going to highlight some interesting segments from the documentary over the next few days.
– from energyontrial.com
From The Hill.com, we are now starting to hear of a possible summer timeframe for the Energy-Climate Bill to reach the floor of Congress:
“Authors of an energy and climate bill are hoping to bring it to the Senate floor in June or July, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Tuesday. Lieberman, the coauthor of a compromise energy and climate bill with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), said they hope for the legislation can come up in about a month, once he and Kerry have proved to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) That they’re close to achieving 60 votes for their bill.
“I’m hopeful, maybe the end of June, or July, sometime,” Lieberman told reporters at the Capitol when asked when he hoped for his and Kerry’s bill to move through the Senate.
It is often said that “as California goes, so goes the nation.” Yet many Californians have some preconceptions about how to meet our nation’s energy demand while dramatically cutting emissions, we may be headed to a stalemate in the battle against climate change. In fact, a significant number of residents remain opposed to nuclear energy, which is by far the nation’s largest carbon-free source of electricity.
Two influential leaders the California political landscape, Stanford University Academics and the Los Angeles Times, have made clear the opposing opinions gripping the state.
Stanford University physicist, Burton Richter, spoke recently during the weekly Stanford Energy Seminar on the need for Americans to overcome doubts of nuclear power, covered by an article in the Stanford University News. Richter’s presentation discussed why “it’s time for America to go green by expanding nuclear energy.” Noting that nuclear energy provides a constant source of energy generation without producing CO2 emissions, Richter said that “the main attraction for nuclear power for most of the world has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions…it has to do with available resources.” He also pointed out the need for the United States to become the leader in this field, but he noted that the policy necessary for this shift is the real challenge, saying “politics is a lot tougher than physics.”
Exemplifying this politics instead of science mentality an editorial in the Los Angeles Times this week attacked the proposed climate legislation for its inclusion of nuclear energy to meet the nation’s carbon reduction initiatives. Arguing that
“it is simultaneously a gift to polluters and the most significant step ever taken by this nation to solve the world’s most pressing environmental problem…the bill seeks to loosen safety and environmental safeguards to expedite the construction of new nuclear plants, which is both unnecessary and dangerous.”
We were not the only ones to take issue with this contradictory perspective, energy blogger Rod Adams had this response:
“It is logically inconsistent to indicate concern that spewing CO2 into the atmosphere can lead to a climate crisis and then to claim that it is unnecessary to take action to reduce the administrative burden that causes nuclear projects to require far more time and resources during construction than they legitimately should require.
Every time a new large nuclear power plant starts operating, it reduces coal consumption by about 11,000 tons per day and prevents dumping about 40,000 tons of CO2 each day. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the 104 nuclear plants that are operating in the US today allow us to avoid producing 650 MILLION metric TONS of CO2 each year. Those plants produce electricity at a marginal cost that is 32% CHEAPER than coal and only 40% of the cost of producing power from burning natural gas.
(Power from existing nuclear plants costs 2.03 cents per kilowatt hour versus 2.97 cents for coal and 5.00 cents for natural gas in 2009). http://bit.ly/anazS6
However, building new nuclear power plants in the US today costs about 3 times as much as it would in China – a portion of that is the cost of the delays imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Time is money! The only beneficiaries of the excessive rules are the people who hate the competition from nuclear energy because they have dirtier and more expensive fuels to sell.”
Yesterday, New Yorker senior editor and staff writer, Hendrik Hertzberg held a live chat with Elizabeth Kolbert to follow-up with his piece “Some Nukes,” definitely worth a read.
However, the Live Chat was an incredible open-forum, no-holds bar discussion about nuclear energy that included questions like:
QUESTION FROM PATRICK: Interesting piece. Has your position on nuclear power changed over the years? There was just a story in the local paper here in Poughkeepsie on Congressman John Hall singing at a No Nukes concert in the 70’s and now supporting nuclear energy.
HENDRIK HERTZBERG: Yes. I almost put John Hall (who represents a part of Rockland County, where I grew up and still spend most weekends) into my piece. My “position” has indeed changed. For one thing, it’s fuzzier. I used to be a no nukes guy. Who was I to argue with Jackson Browne and Bonnie Riatt, to say nothing of John Hall? But global warming has changed the playing field. I still prefer conservation + renewables, of course, but nuclear, on the whole, looks like an acceptable choice compared to fossil fuels, especially coal.
QUESTION FROM MIKEHO: when you write that nuclear power plants are terribly expensive to build—how much of that cost is actually building costs versus the costs to assuage the local residents?
HENDRIK HERTZBERG: Actually, the local residents often want the nuclear plants—jobs jobs jobs. In Sweden, which has just decided to build a nuclear plant [repository] after decades of not doing so, two towns have fought each other for the right to have it located in their back yard. Nuclear plants are inherently expensive, assuming you want to be fairly sure they don’t blow up. Once they’re built, the operating costs are fairly low, but there’s still all that debt to pay off.
Read more at the New Yorker.
We would like to spotlight a post from the blog “Into the Breach” about recent presentation by Jacques Besanainou, CEO of AREVA North America.
The blog’s author Kendall Miller writes:
“Reviving the nuclear power industry is key to true energy security. When France faced the problem of energy security they decided to go nuclear as fast as they could…
AREVA is making major investments in the US nuclear industry. They are building a fabrication facility for large steel components at Newport News. They are building an enrichment facility in Idaho. And they are building a Mixed-Oxide fuel plant in South Carolina. When they started doing these things they found that the pool of nuclear-qualified suppliers has dried up over the years. Now they are having vendor fairs in order to attract new vendors into the nuclear industry supply chain.
Nuclear power is CO2-free, power secure, and creates jobs, jobs, and more jobs.”
Read the post, “Jacques Besnainou at the Richland ANS” for the whole story.
This speech has been getting noticed ever since literally the moment it occurred, being tweeted and covered by various press…but the TED folks just put the video up.
Here is a key quote (with bolding being from us):
“So let’s look at this fourth factor — this is going to be a key one — and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy. And so the question is, can you actually get that to zero? If you burn coal, no. If you burn natural gas, no. Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
Now, when I use the term miracle, I don’t mean something that’s impossible. The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle. The internet and it’s services are a miracle. So, the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles.”
