Skip to main content

More Pro-Nuclear Talk Over at Daily Kos

For better than a year now, we've been periodically pointing to discussions about nuclear energy that have been taking place over at Daily Kos, generally acknowledged to be the Web's leading site for progressive/liberal political discussion. And time and time again, I've been pleasantly surprised at how readers over there are willing to give nuclear energy an even break, especially when it's talked about in terms of how it can help protect the environment and provide affordable electric power.

Click here for a look in our archives to see exactly what I'm talking about. Back in the first few weeks of publishing NEI Nuclear Notes, I wrote that nuclear energy isn't a left/right issue anymore, and a lot of the discussion over at Daily Kos has borne that out.

Over the Holidays, there was another instance of this over at Daily Kos, this time in the form of a diary entry by Nathan Nadir:
[T]he nuclear industry is the only energy industry that had its environmental impact considered before it was built. This was undoubtedly because the men who conceived of the industry were socially responsible, and not because they were demonic mad scientists obsessed and drunk with power and a desire for wealth.
That's just a taste, as Nadir goes on to produce a piece of writing that is thorough, rational and data-driven. Go read it right now.

Technorati tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments

Anonymous said…
"Over the sixty year lifetime of the nuclear station, these costs again for one plant to more than 16 billion dollars in environmental and health destruction.."

Every nuclear power plant saves 16 billion dollars in health costs.

Quite a good tagline.

Why not put it into one of NEI's cheesy commercials? ;)

Show a darkened Blade Runner city full of asthamtic children covered in coal dust with skyes choked full of smoke and surrounded by dead forests (you can film the real deal in China, or use 50 yeard old journal films from Pittsburgh or London) and then contrast it with blue skyes, clean water, flowers, laughing children... and a nuclear power plant.

Great propaganda and the best thing is that it's completely true.

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...