EnergyBiz is generally read from cover to cover every issue. Page 30 of the Nov/Dec issue relates that 5 nuclear power plants are now under construction here in the U.S., 2 in Georgia, 2 in South Carolina, and 1 in Tennessee. 2016 is to be the completion date. What most are blaming for the hesitation is the low price of natural gas but something else has suddenly appeared. Go to the nearest Home Improvement hardware stores and find all the new LED light bulbs on the shelves. For $10 to $20 each no one can complain. Just 9 to 12 watts for a wonderfully bright roomful of light and lasting 46 years. Let's get this under the "Negawatts" utility subsidies as has been done with the CFLs. A simple light bulb.

Lets see, when nuclear generators go sideways, what do you affect? 100,000 or 1,000,000 lives or more with death and deformation? when a solar generator goes sideways you check to make sure the wires are tight. Hmmm. I know which one I would choose.

Energy Pulse Blog Rebuttals

First of all you must define what kind or flavor of nuclear is being advocated. The reactors from the 60's are mostly water cooled reactors. The Fukushima are boiling water reactors. These reactors are of obsolete designs, the technology didn't stand still during the 60s for reactors either.

The current design approved by the NRC is the passive cooled light water reactor, it has proven safety features that negate the flaws of past designs. and Three Mile Island came no where near a meltdown, that was just extremists pot banging to fear monger the real facts of the disaster. their motto is: Any which way you can, even if it lies!

These passive LWRs are 3rd gen design. The 4th gens don't require water except for steam generation except where the Bryton cycle is employed. There is no danger of loss of coolant as the medium used has such a high specific heat that circulatory pumps are not required. These new designs can burn up the waste from the BWRs and LWRs. The new design produced less waste that is short lived in half life duration. They can use Thorium, Uranium and Plutonium for fuel. And if you thing that nuclear plants can detonate like bombs you have little understanding of nuclear technology, the fuel is only 4% enriched! And with nuclear you can manufacture the liquid fuels needs for transportation.

PV solar and wind might seem green because the fuel is free but it's actually not. they both require 100 x the infrastructure costs for nuclear hence they are subsidized over 50 times what nuclear or coal plants are. All this infrastructure requires tons mining and processing, something only coal and nuclear can provide, plus the motors require rare earth materials, mostly from China. Solar panel production plants are the largest energy consumers for thier thermal smelters of the silicon ingots. And they both are intermittent so they require fossil backup, there just isn't any efficient storage technology available for them. So their footprint on land usage is also 100 times that of either coal or nuclear plants.

Finally, so called green energy is so expensive in the rich countries that manufacturing jobs have to be exported to make it near affordable in these countries. It's not really green in china with all the dependency on coal. Oh, didn;t they tell you that their green energy program is mostly window dressing for the stupid conned Westerners so they can manufacture more of this crap for the green-neck gullible?

People who look at renewables for replacement are like newly employed kids who get unreasonable credit and a no money down ARM on a house they would normally not be able to afford, it all seems so good at the time. It's the RPS stupid! Power companies are being strong armed by regulations to supplement their infrastructure with costly wind and PV solar farms that normally would not be employed as they are not sustainable! it's just on big con game from the ENRON days pushed by the likes of Al Gore. What you will end up with is a shared 35 square foot living quarters like I had when i was in the military with communal showers and eating facilities, that's the future of green energy! Unless your one of the elite bureaucrats, then you might actually get the luxury of a house!

So you green-necks who advocate this crap should go past the mantra and DO SOME REAL RESEARCH! Ultimately fusion would be the real non polluting energy source but that looks to be at least 20 years down the road for a pilot energy plant, the NIF plant just produced a scaler amount for a brief second, not better then a controlled thermonuclear contained blast, even though it wasn't a bomb..