Say No to 'No Nukes' Revival

[wtmusic]

Whole Earth Catalog founder and editor Stewart Brand believes nuclear is rad.

"Recent news that Musicians United for Safe Energy is reuniting for a concert protesting nuclear power strikes these two Millennials as wholly misguided. While the anti-nuclear generation can be forgiven for the tragic outcomes of their original efforts, this attempted revival exhibits an inexcusable ignorance of the real threats faced in the 21st century.

The original No Nukes concerts, held after the Three Mile Island accident, helped derail the growth of nuclear power in the United States. What resulted was not the new energy economy powered by wind and solar power imagined by many anti-nuclear activists, but rather a massive expansion of fossil powered energy that sent carbon emissions soaring by 22 percent. Now, the septuagenarian rockers will come together this August to try to repeat their past "success."

Shit and Mercury
No Nukes front man Graham Nash recently trumpeted the group's continued opposition to nuclear power in Rolling Stone, insisting that 'coal plants put a lot of shit and mercury in the air but a coal plant won't be poisonous for 100,000 years.'

What?! Global warming is the intergenerational threat today, not nuclear power. With coal and other fossil-fuels driving carbon dioxide emissions to their highest levels in history, ours is a generation preparing for a world that will be deeply and irrevocably impacted by climate change -- a world plagued by severe heat waves, floods, droughts, and record wildfires, and the potential displacement of millions of people."

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2011/08/san_francisco_chronicle_featur.shtml

[jpak]

1. Stward Brand is a nutjob that thinks clear cutting is "good" forestry and global warming is "good" 2

Uber-Moran

yup

[kristopher]

17. The people who wrote this are listed at Sourcewatch.org

http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Breakthrough_Institute

"The Breakthrough people and their allies, among whom one must include Lomborg and Pielke Jr. at this point..., are not asking for the technologically impossible. They are asking merely for the technologically possible at an economically impossible cheap price."<2> "This disinformation campaign is almost entirely driven by fossil fuel companies and conservative media, politicians and think tanks. It is also advanced by the Breakthrough Institute and its president, Michael Shellenberger. His central myth -- a science fiction fantasy, really -- is that it would be possible to sharply reduce emissions without raising the cost of carbon pollution."<3>


Coal and nuclear, nuclear and coal - two sides of the same coin.

[txlibdem]

23. With coal and other fossil-fuels driving carbon dioxide emissions to their highest levels in history

"With coal and other fossil-fuels driving carbon dioxide emissions to their highest levels in history, ours is a generation preparing for a world that will be deeply and irrevocably impacted by climate change -- a world plagued by severe heat waves, floods, droughts, and record wildfires, and the potential displacement of millions of people."

Those oil company b*stards. I can't believe they'd be so brazen as to... tell the truth about fossil fuels causing global climate change. And the horrible future that we will leave for our progeny.

[libguy_6731]

24. +1

[libguy_6731]

25. delete

[TheWraith]

30. As opposed to BP employee Amory Lovins, who is just swell?

:eyes:

[kristopher]

32. Do you mean the Amory Lovins that the nuclear industry hates?

The author of Winning the Oil Endgame? (link below)


Executive Summary

Winning the Oil Endgame offers a coherent strategy for ending oil dependence, starting with the United States but applicable worldwide. There are many analyses of the oil problem. This synthesis is the first roadmap of the oil solution—one led by business for profit, not dictated by government for reasons of ideology. This roadmap is independent, peer-reviewed, written for business and military leaders, and co-funded by the Pentagon. It combines innovative technologies and new business models with uncommon public policies: market-oriented without taxes, innovation-driven without mandates, not dependent on major (if any) national legislation, and designed to support, not distort, business logic.

Two centuries ago, the first industrial revolution made people a hundred times more productive, harnessed fossil energy for transport and production, and nurtured the young U.S. economy. Then, over the past 145 years, the Age of Oil brought unprecedented mobility, globe-spanning military power, and amazing synthetic products.

...

The cornerstone of the next industrial revolution is therefore winning the Oil Endgame. And surprisingly, it will cost less to displace all of the oil that the United States now uses than it will cost to buy that oil. Oil's current market price leaves out its true costs to the economy, national security, and the environment. But even without including these now "externalized" costs, it would still be profitable to displace oil completely over the next few decades. In fact, by 2025, the annual economic benefit of that displacement would be $130 billion gross (or $70 billion net of the displacement's costs). To achieve this does not require a revolution, but merely consolidating and accelerating trends already in place: the amount of oil the economy uses for each dollar of GDP produced, and the fuel efficiency of light vehicles, would need only to improve about three-fifths as quickly as they did in response to previous oil shocks.

Saving half the oil America uses, and substituting cheaper alternatives for the other half, requires four integrated steps:
Double the efficiency of using oil. The U.S. today wrings twice as much work from each barrel of oil as it did in 1975; with the latest proven efficiency technologies, it can double oil efficiency all over again. The investments needed to save each barrel of oil will cost only $12 (in 2000 $), less than half the officially forecast $26 price of that barrel in the world oil market. The most important enabling technology is ultralight vehicle design. Advanced composite or lightweight-steel materials can nearly double the efficiency of today's popular hybrid-electric cars and light trucks while improving safety and performance. The vehicle's total extra cost is repaid from fuel savings in about three years; the ultralighting is approximately free. Through emerging manufacturing techniques, such vehicles are becoming practical and profitable; the factories to produce them will also be cheaper and smaller....

Read summary here
http://www.oilendgame.com/ExecutiveSummary.html

Amory B. Lovins
Cofounder and CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute

Lovins Amory Lovins, a MacArthur and Ashoka Fellow and consultant physicist, is among the world's leading innovators in energy and its links with resources, security, development, and environment. He has advised the energy and other industries for more than three decades as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. His work in 50+ countries has been recognized by the "Alternative Nobel," Blue Planet, Volvo, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, Goff Smith, and Mitchell Prizes, the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals, 11 honorary doctorates, honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects, Foreign Membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, honorary Senior Fellowship of the Design Futures Council, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Jean Meyer, Time Hero for the Planet, Time International Hero of the Environment, Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership, National Design (Design Mind), and World Technology Awards. A Harvard and Oxford dropout and former Oxford don, he has briefed 20 heads of state and advises major firms and governments worldwide, recently including the leadership of Coca-Cola, Deutsche Bank, Ford, Holcim, Interface, and Wal-Mart. In 2009, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers.

Mr. Lovins cofounded and is Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org), an independent, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, nonpartisan think-and-do tank that creates abundance by design. Much of its pathfinding work on advanced resource productivity (typically with expanding returns to investment) and innovative business strategies is synthesized in Natural Capitalism (1999, with Paul Hawken and L.H. Lovins, www.natcap.org). This intellectual capital provides most of RMI's revenue through private-sector consultancy that has served or been invited by more than 80 Fortune 500 firms, lately redesigning more than $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors. In 1992, RMI spun off E SOURCE (www.esource.com), and in 1999, Fiberforge Corporation (www.fiberforge.com), a composites technology firm that Mr. Lovins chaired until 2007; its technology, when matured and scaled, will permit cost- effective manufacturing of the ultralight-hybrid Hypercar® vehicles he invented in 1991.

The latest of his 29 books are Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size (2002, www.smallisprofitable.org), an Economist book of the year blending financial economics with electrical engineering, and the Pentagon-cosponsored Winning the Oil Endgame (2004, www.oilendgame.com), a roadmap for eliminating U.S. oil use by the 2040s, led by business for profit. His most recent visiting academic chair was in spring 2007 as MAP/Ming Professor in Stanford's School of Engineering, offering the University's first course on advanced energy efficiency (www.rmi.org/stanford).

http://www.oilendgame.com/TheAuthors.html

[TheWraith]

33. Right, the Amory Lovins that BP hires to help maintain the status quo.

The one who keeps saying that double thick windows and a solar panel or two is all you need, and ignore that massive fossil fuel industry behind the curtain. That guy.

[jpak]

39. That's NNuts

yup

[dtexdem]

2. What is killing life on eath is the enemy:

global climate change AND radioactive pollution of the environment.

[wtmusic]

3. Agree.

But you left one out: burning coal kills hundreds of thousands of people globally every year.

Increased use of coal in Germany will likely result in thousands of deaths. German nuclear is attributable for exactly 0 deaths.

Do you tell the families of coal-induced cancer victims that nuclear is safer?

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. I say neither is desirable and yet, today, both are facts of life

You insist on presenting a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy">false dichotomy i.e. either coal or nuclear fission.

I say we will not shut down either our coal or our nuclear fission plants for a while. So:

1. Let’s do our best to lessen their harmful byproducts.
   while
2. Rolling our their replacements. (e.g. wind, solar, geothermal)

[FBaggins]

5. It *isn't* a false dichotomy.

Even in an imaginary world where we someday get to 100% renewables, it will STILL take decades to get there.

What order we retire dirtier plants will make a substantial difference to an environment that could be very close to a tipping point.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. Are you saying it’s an absolute dichotomy?

It’s either coal or nuclear fission. There are no other options.

The way it is presented (i.e. either you're 100% pro-“nuclear” or you’re 100 pro-coal) is as simple-minded as George W. Bush’s, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

[wtmusic]

7. In practical terms, yes.

Everything has consequences, and dicking around with wind, solar, and gamma rays from space is wasting precious time (your Bush analogy is a straw man, because the likelihood of AGW is off the scale compared to the certainty of the existence of WMDs).

[Starboard Tack]

15. Who's dicking around with wind and solar.

I and many others get all we need and more from it. Faster production of PV panels and wind generators and infrastructure upgrades are the solution. Plus sensible consumption and conservation.

[wtmusic]

19. "I and many others get all we need and more from it."

Where exactly does your power come from?

[Starboard Tack]

22. The sun. At least 95% of electrical needs with a diesel generator in reserve

Cooking power is 90% propane, 10% microwave.
I should explain that we live on a cruising sailboat, completely unplugged from the grid.
The solar panels, total 540 watts, are connected to a house bank of 6 golf cart batteries. Plenty of power for 2-3 computers running all day, a 23" flat screen HDTV, 120 cu.ft. refrigerator/freezer, occasional microwave use, lights and other household appliances.

[wtmusic]

26. Let's check in with reality

and a typical daily consumption profile for your situation:

2 60w bulbs for 16 hrs = 1,920 wH (conservative)
3 computers running all day (16 hrs x 90w) = 1,440 wH
3 computer monitors running all day (16 hrs x 128w) = 2048 wH
Vizio VM230XVT 23-inch TV 27w x 4 hrs/day = 100 wH
1440w microwave for 15 minutes/day = 360 wH

(Assuming you meant a 12.0 cu.ft. refrigerator and not ten kitchen-sized refrigerators:)
Frigidaire FFPT12F0KW rated at 165 kWh/year = 452 wH

Daily total requirement = 6320 wH

540w solar panels x .16 (avg) capacity factor x 24 = 2073 wH/day

You've got one-third as much electricity as you need...sounds like the diesel's getting fired up a little more often than you're letting on.

[Starboard Tack]

27. Here is the reality

No 60 watt bulbs.
12 volt LED lighting total daily draw 15-20 amp/hrs
1 vaio laptop draws 4.5 amps @ 16 volts running 10 hrs/day
1 Mac I-Book running 12 hrs/day
1 I-Pad running 19 hrs/day
2 cellphones
Business 5 port/wireless router with Satellite Office VOIP phone
1 mini Verizon wireless router (battery operated)
1 Vizio 22" - 23 watts average - 4 hrs/day
Refrigeration draws 4 amps at 12 volts approx. 12 hrs/day
Microwave average 2 minutes/day max. Otherwise only used when running the generator.
Watermaker 4 amps dc - 2 hrs/day

Passive solar for hot water showering.
Propane for cooking.
Run 4.5 kw diesel generator 1-2 hrs/week for hot water/laundry/cloudy days - with 50amp battery charger

That's what we're living with at present. We recently added the 2 Kyocera 135s in May and haven't needed to run the generator since, except for hot showers on 2 or 3 cloudy days. Total about 4.5 hrs in the past 2 months. We may spring for a marine wind generator for the winter. We'll see if it's needed first. But, so far, we are very happy. Before installing the 2 new panels we had to run the generator almost every day for an hour or two.

For transportation we use the wind and occasionally the auxiliary diesel engine.
Total fuel costs including gasoline for the tender averages $40-$50/month

[wtmusic]

29. A recalc:

Lighting 180 wH
Vaio 720 wH
iBook (avg comsumption about 16w) 192 wH
iPad (avg consumption about 5w) 95wH
Cellphones/router - negligible
Vizio 92 wH
Refrigeration 576 wH
Microwave 48 wH
Watermaker 96 wH

Total 1999 wH

On paper, your energy needs are completely being met by clean solar power. But the fact that you run the generator avg 1.5 hrs/wk means 964 wH/day - almost half of your total energy consumption - is coming from diesel fuel.

My guess would be that a significant part is wasted in the form of battery resistance. I'm familiar with golf cart batteries (I have a car that runs on them) and resistance is not insignificant.

To take the "glass half full" view, it's great that half of your energy comes from solar. But our task collectively is to decide on a practical approach to providing electricity for everyone. It's clearly impractical to ask everyone to live on a boat, or to ask the infirm to deal with erecting solar panels and maintaining batteries. More importantly, the reality is that most people who can afford cheap, available power will use it, the environment be damned. To wish it wasn't true doesn't get us any closer to solving the problem.

If we supersize your setup to utility scale, it will require us to burn enough diesel fuel to provide 50% of the energy for people with PVC panels. But even worse (and unlike nuclear) solar has no significant economy of scale after 10kW. Which means anyone who didn't have their own solar array would still have to get their power from conventional sources. For most of the country that's about 50% coal.

Having the best intentions in the world doesn't guarantee we aren't making the problem worse.

[kristopher]

31. That is an absurd "if"

You wrote, "If we supersize your setup to utility scale, it will require us to burn enough diesel fuel to provide 50% of the energy for people with PVC panels. But even worse (and unlike nuclear) solar has no significant economy of scale after 10kW. Which means anyone who didn't have their own solar array would still have to get their power from conventional sources. For most of the country that's about 50% coal.".

That "If" has no relationship to reality at all.

It is like proposing what our transportation system would look like IF we scaled up your car that runs on golf cart batteries.

[Starboard Tack]

34. I think you are way off with the generator stats. Haven't used it in 2 weeks. Batteries are full

My consumption is less than 150 amp/hrs per day. That will gradually be reduced by replacing more lighting with LEDs.
Point is, one more panel and/or wind turbine would more than compensate.
And the total cost of panels and batteries is around $2000.
Living on a boat means we can't feed into the grid. My friend in Austin installed panels on his condo and his meter runs backwards year round.
If you think nuclear is the answer, I can only assume you have a vested interest.

[wtmusic]

35. I'm using the numbers you provided.

Running a 4.5kw generator for 1.5 hours generates 6,750 wH per week. Divide by 7 to get 964 wH/day. Similarly you claim to be replacing more lighting with LEDs. This is the first I've heard about "more lighting" - how many watts does that use?

I can tell you right off the bat your friend in Austin's meter doesn't "run backwards year round". At least half the year (nighttime) your friend draws energy from the grid, and mostly from burning natural gas. Creating more CO2.

So you're fudging. You claim your panels generate "more than enough" electricity, and that one more panel would "more than compensate" but the numbers don't justify it.

[Starboard Tack]

36. I said I run the generator about 1.5 hrs/wk

The charger puts out 50 amps max. to charge the batteries.
The generator runs for maybe 20 minutes each time to heat water. A 4.5 kw generators is it's capacity not it's normal output. I could get the same result from a potable Honda 2000, but diesel is more economical and much safer on a boat.
Regarding my friend in Austin. I was there the first winter when he installed the system. It was going backwards overall, even in winter. That means he put more in than he takes out. I must say he is extremely frugal and conscientious when it comes to the environment, which I find admirable.

Your numbers don't have to justify it. The reality of my existence more than justifies it.
Good luck with your nuclear option. I don't think that kite's going to fly.

[wtmusic]

37. Amps are only one factor in calculating power

You can put out very high amps at low voltage, and not end up with a lot of power. Power, and its sum over time as energy, are what is really important when comparing energy sources.

If you don't run your generator at 4.5 KW and that's what it's rated, you're just wasting fuel. Generators are most efficient at their power rating. So again: if you're running a 4.5 KW generator for 1.5 hours, you've generated 6750 watt-hours of energy each week. That is equal to almost half of the energy you say you use.

I don't think you really understand the difference between power and energy, and it's an important distinction. I'm glad that the reality of your experience justifies it in your own mind, but don't expect to convince anyone if you don't really understand it yourself.

Fortunately nuclear doesn't need to rely on luck, every country which had planned nuclear builds before Fukushima is moving forward, except for (temporarily, I'm convinced) Germany.

[Starboard Tack]

40. Well the generator doesn't actually work like that

It works on demand up to 4.5kw. Our demand would be max 2 kilowatt/hrs/wk = $3-$4 in fuel
I'm happy with that kind of use as want a backup genset. They need to be run occasionally and we like hot water.
Whatever proportion it is of our total energy is irrelevant. What is important is the minimal cost, extremely low carbon footprint, minimal maintenance and it works and makes our lives quite blissful.
That, my friend, is reality. You can sit in your box and convince yourself all day long that it isn't so, but obviously you don't have a clue how power on demand generators work among other things. The cup is half full brother. Try selling nuclear here in California And I think you'll find the NIMBY attitude just about everywhere in this country, unless you pay some withering part of the country, so desperate for money. And any power from these possible future plants is coming when? 10-12 years down the road if you're lucky.

Bottom line is, anyone can do what we're doing if they want. Much easier and cheaper on land too.

[FBaggins]

8. Does it have to be absolute?

Any dichotomy that isn't 100% pure is false?

[wtmusic]

9. You're straying into the realm of metadichotomies

and you have to have a special permit on DU for that.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. This dichotomy (as it is employed) is false

i.e. “Anything short of 100% support for nuclear fission is 100% support for coal.”

There certainly are more nuanced positions which are valid.

Painting your opponents as some sort of fanatics, simply because they don’t wholly subscribe to your dogmatic position makes you look childish.


http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/ask/2011/coal-nuclear.html

Can We Produce Enough Energy with Green Sources or Must We Rely on Coal, Oil, and Nuclear?

Ask a Scientist - April 2011

J. Fishman from Scottsdale, AZ, asks “Can we produce enough energy by using green sources, such as wind and solar power, or must we continue to rely on coal, oil, and/or nuclear energy?” and is answered by Jeff Deyette, Assistant Director of Energy Research and Analysis.

In the past year we’ve seen too many examples of just how costly our reliance on coal, oil, and nuclear energy can be. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the current nuclear crisis in Japan—the dangers of using these sources of energy to power our lives have been starkly highlighted, not to mention the climate impacts of burning coal and oil. The truth is it doesn’t have to be this way. There are cleaner, safer options available and ready for use today.

According to a 2009 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report, http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/big_picture_solutions/climate-2030-blueprint.html">Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy, the United States will be able to meet projected consumer demand for electricity over at least the next 20 years without building any new nuclear reactors or coal-fired power plants. The analysis shows that we can meet consumer demand by increasing our use of renewable energy resources like wind and solar and by increasing energy efficiency. This would reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and reduce global warming emissions from power plants by about 85 percent by 2030.

The UCS Climate 2030 Blueprint lays out a plan to increase renewable energy from about 11 percent of all U.S. electricity today to 50 percent by 2030, after cutting power demand by more than one-third through efficiency measures and greater use of http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/combined-heat-and-power.html">combined heat and power systems, or CHP (generating both electricity and heat from a single fuel source—typically natural gas). Where would all this clean electricity come from? More than half would come from hydro, biopower (from plant- or animal-based materials such as crops, crop residues, trees, animal fats, by-products, and wastes), and geothermal (heat from the earth), and concentrating solar plants with storage, all of which are available to produce electricity around the clock or during periods of high demand. Wind and solar photovoltaics would produce the rest, with wind accounting for about 20 percent of the total U.S. electricity supply. These wind results are consistent with the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2008 http://www.20percentwind.org/20p.aspx?page=Report">20% Wind Energy by 2030 study, which found such a scenario feasible. Collaborative studies by electric grid operators, government agencies, and others have all found that we can reliably generate up to 20-25 percent of our electricity from variable power sources like wind and solar.

As a result of this increase in renewable energy, efficiency, and CHP, UCS analysis found that nearly all existing coal-fired power-plants could be phased out by 2030. Existing nuclear reactors would continue operating at least through 2030 (the end of our study’s forecast period). No new nuclear or coal plants were needed beyond four nuclear plants that would likely be built as a result of existing federal subsidies, 18 new conventional coal plants that are either under construction or approved, and 12 new coal plants with carbon capture and storage to demonstrate whether this technology is feasible and affordable. However, all of these new plants could be replaced with additional efficiency, renewable energy, or new natural gas plants, at a lower cost. In fact, increasing energy efficiency and expanding the use of existing renewable energy technologies would be less expensive than building new nuclear reactors. Some other recent studies have gone beyond the UCS Blueprint and found that it may be http://www.synapse-energy.com/Downloads/SynapseReport.2010-05.CSI.Beyond-Business-as-Usual.10-002.pdf">possible to phase out coal and nuclear power entirely (pdf), and even to http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/october19/jacobson-energy-study-102009.html">reach 100 percent renewable energy globally by 2050.

…

[txlibdem]

12. Two bad things going on, which do you stop first?

Coal and Fossil Fuel use are responsible for over 2 million deaths each year, 130,000 hospitalizations for asthma along, 5300 heart attacks, billions in health costs. Pregnant women are warned against eating fish due to Mercury from coal pollution.

Nuclear power may have killed some people this year (we don't have definitive answers on that) and probably thousands will eventually get cancer over the next 30 years.

Which do you choose to end first?
1. 2 million deaths annually
2. Tragically a few thousand deaths annually

You are the boss of the world for this minute. Which one do you stop first? The one that kills far more people -- and is responsible for global climate change that will either kill or ruin the lives of millions and maybe billions of people in the coming decades?

Or do you stop the one that "makes an easier target" because it's so much easier to scare people about RAY-dee-AY-shun? Do you stop the easy target, even though it kills or harms not even 1% as many people as fossil fuels like coal and oil?

-------------------------------------------------------
Breakthrough Europe: "Coal Kills 4000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear, April 2011
http://breakthrougheurope.org/blog/2011/04/coal_kills_4000_times_more_peo.shtml

Deaths per TWH by energy source
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Global Warming May Kill Billions This Century
http://environment.about.com/b/2006/01/16/global-warming-may-kill-billions-this-century.htm

Air pollution is a major environmental risk to health and is estimated to cause approximately 2 million premature deaths worldwide per year.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs313/en/index.html

[Starboard Tack]

14. It isn't about coal or nuclear, but neither.

One wind generator can supply 500 homes. Do the math.

[hunter]

18. "One wind generator can supply 500 homes..." What does that mean to you?

The people in those 500 homes would be pretty miserable if their primary source of energy was a windmill.

Electricity produced by wind is little more than noise on the distribution network. The equipment required to suppress that noise and turn it into a useful power supply is expensive -- batteries, pumped storage, nimble natural gas power plants, "smart" networks, etc.

When I "do the math" on wind it doesn't work. If you could easily power "500 homes" like you might with even a few diesel generators, then it would work. But to make wind work you've still got to have those diesel generators or a connection to an existing power network. Sadly, this seems to be true at any scale, from a single homestead to an entire continent.

The only reason the math for wind "works" anywhere is that the value and the maintenance costs of the existing power infrastructure are discounted to an absurd degree so that wind doesn't have to carry the load.

[txlibdem]

16. Did you want the recent plan to build 11 coal power plants here in Texas?

I sure as heck didn't. They're still going to build 3 new coal power plants, increasing our share of global climate change.

See post #12 for more info about coal power.

[SpoonFed]

11. Mysterious orange crud turning up on DU E/E forums...

:puke:

PS. This is yet another old white guy.

[txlibdem]

13. Death Rate From Nuclear Power Vs Coal? This May Surprise You

http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/

[wtmusic]

20. Love that graph

An effective presentation for the innumerate.

[txlibdem]

21. That's who we'll have to reach, perfect graph

:-)

[bananas]

28. Nuclear power is an intercivilizational problem

"This essay explains that such encouragement of nuclear energy
production as a "solution" to fossil fuel-induced climate change will
create environmental problems equally as grave as those posed by a
carbon-based energy economy."

Download pdf from http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawfaculty/491/

THE INTERCIVILIZATIONAL INEQUITIES OF
NUCLEAR POWER WEIGHED AGAINST THE
INTERGENERATIONAL INEQUITIES OF
CARBON BASED ENERGY

Karl S. Coplan·

Sometime toward the end of the industrial revolution, western industrial
countries discovered a new way to power their steam engines,
which had previously been powered by burning wood and
coal. This energy source promised to power the machines of civilization
and progress far into the future. This energy source seemed at
the time to be cheap and limitless, and contained an energy density
(energy potential per unit weight) far exceeding those of fuels previously
used to power steam engines. 1 Unfortunately for the generations
that would follow, the early proponents of this energy source
simply ignored the waste by-product of this fuel cycle. The wastes
produced by this fuel will likely, at a minimum, render currently
populated places in the world uninhabitable, and, at worst, threaten
the survival of the human species. These impacts will affect generations
far into the future.

Although this paragraph could well describe the climate impacts of
burning fossil fuels, I am not talking about the carbon cycle and
global warming. I am talking about the impacts of nuclear energy
production. Proponents of nuclear energy tout the energy source as
the most promising offset to greenhouse gases produced in electricity
generation. These proponents eagerly await the additional direct
and indirect subsidies for new nuclear power plants that would flow
from various carbon tax and emissions trading schemes. Carbon
emissions trading and offset schemes will subsidize the nuclear energy
industry indirectly, by making competing fossil fuel based energy
more expensive, and by potentially offering marketable offset
credits for new nuclear energy generation projects that displace existing
carbon-based energy generation.

This essay explains that such encouragement of nuclear energy
production as a "solution" to fossil fuel-induced climate change will
create environmental problems equally as grave as' those posed by a
carbon-based energy economy. Both nuclear energy and fossil energy
impose enormous environmental externalities that are not captured
by the economics of energy production and distribution. While
emissions trading schemes seek to harness market-based efficiencies
to accomplish pre-determined reductions, they neither seek to nor
succeed in capturing the environmental externalities of energy generation.
By creating a set of incentives without capturing all of the
externalities, these trading schemes will simply distort the market,
possibly leading to a worse overall damage to the environment than
global warming by itself.

Ultimately, nuclear power production as an alternative to carbon based
energy production simply presents a choice of evils. Efforts to
reduce carbon emissions must not come at the expense of distorting
energy markets in a way that exacerbates the equally insurmountable
problems posed by the multi-millennial storage of hazardous nuclear
waste.

<snip>

[kristopher]

38. Steve Heilig responds

Nuclear Energy: Unsafe at Any Age?

Which is a bigger threat to humanity's future -- climate change or nuclear power? According to two op-ed authors from Oakland's Breakthrough Institute writing recently in the San Francisco Chronicle, it's no contest, and only the former matters: "For Millennials like us, global warming is the intergenerational threat today, not nuclear power."

This seems to me a false dichotomy. But what seems to have set them off is a coming revival of the 1970s Musicians United for Safe Energy concerts against "nukes." They note that the MUSE artists such as Graham Nash and Jackson Browne are "misguided" and maybe worse than that, tend to be "sexagenarian."

Now, leaving aside why anybody would willingly self-adopt corporate marketing labels like "millennial," as somebody who is neither adolescent nor geriatric, I'd say these young whippersnappers are themselves a bit confused. Since March's Fukushima meltdown, I've followed the debate on nuclear power more closely than I had in many years. I wrote on this topic here.
The upshot therein was that my undergraduate adviser, famed/infamous biologist/ecologist Garrett Hardin, was probably correct when he wrote in the 1970s that "a society that cannot survive without atomic energy cannot survive with it."

Subsequently, I moderated an online Collaborative on Health and the Environment forum on the Fukushima disaster and nuclear power with two leading experts, a nuclear physicist and a physician, which can be heard here -- although be warned, it is an hour long....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-heilig/nuclear-energy-unsafe-at-_b_920183.html