Skip to main content

Patrick Moore In Showdown With Anti-Nukes

Later today, Dr. Patrick Moore of the CASEnergy Coalition will take part in a panel discussion sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists at their annual conference. The title is, "Is Nuclear Power the Solution to Climate Change," and he'll be joined on the panel by Peter Bradford, former Vice Chair of the NRC and now with the Union of Concerned Scientists as well as Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace.

Two anti-nukes and Patrick Moore, I guess that's what SEJ thinks of as "fair and balanced".

If I sound a little skeptical of SEJ's motives, there's a reason, one that David Bradish hinted at earlier this week: SEJ has agreed to allow the anti-nukes at the Grace Energy Initiative to Webcast the panel. In isolation, that's not a problem. The problems started when Grace Energy worked to actively deceive the public into thinking that they were the sponsors of the panel.

Here's an excerpt from a press announcement they issued earlier this week:
The live GRACE Webcast:

"Dirty Power -- —False Promises: Nuclear Power & Climate Change -- is a panel discussion from the SEJ Conference called --— "Cradle to Grave: New Nukes and Old Radioactive Waste"”
Kind of nice, hijacking somebody else's event and putting your own name on the proceedings.

To SEJ's credit, they contacted Grace and got them to issue another release. But all credit here goes to Patrick Moore. Despite the fact that it appears that some anti-nukes are attempting to set a trap for him, he's moving forward regardless.

The Webcast is today at 11:15 a.m. U.S. EDT. Click here for the feed and watch the fireworks. We've got some NEI people on the ground in Burlington at the conference, so look for some first person accounts later on.

Technorati tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...