Skip to main content

Mike Thomas: Florida Needs More Nuclear Power

By Eric McErlain
In today's edition of the Orlando Sentinel, columnist Mike Thomas is connecting all the dots when it comes to nuclear energy, economic growth and energy security.

In short, he's a supporter of plans by Progress Energy to build a new plant in Levy County, and thinks the state needs to build a lot more. On the environment:
When I explained this to one of my liberal editors, he started moaning about radioactive waste plaguing mankind for thousands of years.

Actually, nuclear power forces us to confront our waste in a neatly condensed, glowing brick. We can't just shoot it up the chimney and forget about it.

There is too much pollution for dilution to continue being a solution. The globe is getting too hot. The seas are rising too fast. The hurricanes are getting too strong.

And all of the above have a disproportionate negative impact on Florida.

What kind of high ground will we have in blocking offshore drilling for natural gas when we are a leading consumer of it?
On energy security:
This is an economic necessity as much as an environmental one.

Florida's energy use will grow by 30 percent in the next decade. Like the rest of the country, our plan is to meet the demand by building more plants that burn natural gas. These are the cheapest to build because they don't require the elaborate scrubbers put on coal plant smokestacks to clean pollutants.

They are the easiest plants to get through the regulatory process.

We are repeating the same mistake we made with oil. Once, we could produce enough to meet demand, but those days are over. As it happened with oil, we are getting tapped out.

Our natural gas production has flat-lined while usage goes up. This means we will become more dependent on foreign providers.

The biggest reserves are in the Middle East and in and around the former Soviet Union. Let's become more dependent on tyrants so we'll get sucked into more wars to protect our economy.
Read the rest right now. For more local reaction to the announcement, click here.

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

Anonymous said…
Seconded. Great Insight, and post.
December 14, 2006 at 9:29 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
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...
23 comments
Read more

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

By
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...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
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...
6 comments
Read more