U.S. Politics and Nuclear Energy
My colleague Bob Zannelli writes: It should be kept in mind that all the other candidates including Hillary are getting lots of fossil fuel money, the center of global warming Denialism. If Bernie comes out as pro nuke Hillary would jump on it. She’s not really so much anti-nuke as pro fossil fuel, but she will argue that Indian Point should be shut down if it gets her primary votes. I don’t know if Bernie can be brought around to supporting nuclear, but of all the candidates he is the only one not in the fossil fuel industry’s pocket……We need a carbon tax, something opposed by all the candidates except Bernie.
Correct, Bob. No serious candidate from the Democratic Party is going to come out in favor of nuclear energy; it would be “political suicide,” as they say. As an aside, God only knows what the Republicans think. They’re so wrapped up in building walls and hurling vulgar insults that there is no room for serious discussions on any other topic.
In any case, all politicians, even Bernie, the first honest presidential candidate in at least the last 40 years, are bound by public opinion. And in this case, unfortunately, we have a fair amount of work in front of us to deliver the truth to the garden-variety environmentalist, who, ironically, is fervently against fossil fuels but doesn’t understand the realities of nuclear. Even worse, he often isn’t too interested in questioning his beliefs.
We also need to bear in mind that, unless a carbon tax applies to the Asian countries as well as the US, it only serves to shift more manufacturing to China, where their grid-mix is far worse environmentally than ours.
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On top of this, another colleague writes: A practical and responsible carbon tax will include a provision for border adjustments so that foreign imports that are not subject to a comparable tax (e.g., from China) pay a tariff on their carbon footprint. Similarly, US exports will receive a rebate (based on the burden of the US carbon tax) to allow them to be competitive in the international market. When export countries see the US collecting and keeping the import carbon footprint tariffs, they will have a strong incentive to implement their own carbon tax and become exempt from the US tariff. See Citizens Climate Lobby — Carbon Fee & Dividend.
The noted climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, favors a carbon tax:
“Eminent climatologist James Hansen will urge U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to support a carbon tax, in a letter to be sent this week, Hansen said.”
From http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5962
In the article, Dr. Hansen goes on to explain why he favors a carbon tax rather than cap and trade. I think that there are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides. In any case, both methods have the same goal.
Dr. Hansen, along with a number of other scientists, also strongly states his position that without nuclear power we cannot reduce CO2 emissions to acceptable levels and that any risks associated with nuclear power pale in comparison with the dangers of global warming.
Take it from someone who has experienced the implementation of “Carbon Tax”, it’s an economic disaster with no benefits ! (except an enlarged bureaucracy).
Incentives work better, and produce real benefits.
There are many things I don’t like about the history or present developments in Nuclear Energy. Could someone “remind” me why Nuclear Energy is essential as a “new model” for an era without fossil fuels?
Here is the reminder.
Wind and solar power are fine if we don’t mind doing without power when the sun is not shining (and it usually is not) and the wind is not blowing (a frequent occurrence). There have been proposals to circumvent those problems.
One proposed method to get reliable power from intermittent sources is to interconnect multiple sources over a wide area. It has been said that the sun is always shining someplace and the wind is always blowing someplace. But having a huge over-capacity and interconnecting renewable power sources over a large enough area to guarantee adequate and reliable power probably would not be practical despite claims to the contrary. I have not been able to locate even one credible quantitive study that shows that it would be practical. Saying that it would work proves nothing regardless of the letters after the names of those who make such claims.
The other proposed solution to get reliable power from intermittent sources is to have gobs and gobs of energy storage. Proposed methods have included huge batteries, compressing air into underground cavities, pumped storage, elevating rail cars to a higher elevation when excess power is available and recover the energy by letting the rail cars descend to a lower elevation, storing excess solar power as heat and using the heat to generate power as required, etc. etc. Unfortunately none of these methods seems practical to store the huge amounts of energy to guarantee adequate and reliable power. Many of those who are aware of this problem assume that storage technology will advance thereby solving the problem. I seem to recall an aphorism about counting chickens before they hatch.
Germany has shut down nuclear reactors. To compensate for the loss of the nuclear power, Germany has increased the use of coal and is building more coal burning plants. In addition, Germany is importing power from other countries, including France which gets about 75% of its power from nuclear reactors. Surely that is not what we want.
Nuclear power plants can generate power 24 / 7 / 365 with 90% availability. Moreover, despite the well-publicized disasters, it has still been shown to be the safest source of power. Moreover, it is possible to design reactors which are inherently safe and do not require emergency cooling systems. Superior nuclear technology with more efficient fuel cycles can reduce nuclear waste to little more than 1% of what is now being generated and can also use our current “waste” as fuel; that has actually been demonstrated. But until such a superior nuclear technology is ready for implementation we should be building nuclear power plants as fast as safely possible to phase out fossil fuel usage as quickly as possible. The risks of nuclear power are trivial compared with the dangers of CO2 emissions.
For more information, I suggest doing a google search on the noted climate scientist “James Hansen” and see what he says about the matter.
For another opinion on the cost overruns of the Nuclear power industry here is also an article with a bit of a different slant: http://thebulletin.org/what-epa%E2%80%99s-clean-power-plan-means-nuclear-energy8763
Breath,
I strongly suggest reading “jimhopf’s” response to the article for which you provided the link; he posted it about seven months ago. He covers many of the reasons that nuclear power plants are experiencing cost over-runs. His response is too long to insert here else I would do so.
Also, consider that the article does not adequately address the intermittency problems of wind and solar power. To me it seems astonishing and bizarre that that is so often completely overlooked. When it is addressed by those who favor wind and solar power as the major sources of power, it is assumed that as more renewable power systems are built a solution for the intermittency problem will emerge. Probably most people would prefer to pay a very high price for nuclear power which is reliable than pay for wind and solar power that is cheaper but unreliable if nuclear power actually has to be that costly.
In any case, there is nothing that could correctly be considered adequate proof that wind and solar are capable of doing the job reliably. It seems to be more a matter of faith. Therefore, it would be unwise not to have a plan “B”. Otherwise, we could spend trillions of dollars BEFORE finding from experience that, because wind and solar cannot do the job reliably, we would have to build more fossil fuel burning plants.