That's the question in Florida, and the topic of a new post from We Support Lee.
You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap...
Comments
Ultimately the argument about renewability boils down to timescale. Sources like fossil, nuclear, even geothermal, will deplete (with current technology) on human timescales (100s to perhaps 1000s of years). Sources like tidal, solar, wind, etc. will not deplete for millions/billions of years.
The big plus for nuclear verus a lot of other low-carbon sources is that it's practical for baseload today, without needing to pre-suppose breakthroughs that might not appear. IMO it's best not to speculate on breakthroughs (such as extraction of fuel from diffuse sources), otherwise you're just debating energy fantasies with people pushing impractical energy non-solutions. Breeder technology is probably as far as I'd go in terms of projection - it's been practical for decades, but hasn't been successfully commercialised. Breeding plutonium (and U233 from thorium) would take us out 1000s of years - while not renewable, I'd call it sustainable.
That should work well with the recent reprocessing plant proposal--it would be a lot easier if they didn't have to separate actinides at all.
Here is my definition of renewable: the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) is infinite. Now this is precisely what advocates of diffuse power would have you believe about their pet projects. It's not true of course, as it would violate the second law. I'd even settle for something with an EROEI >> 100 as renewable, seeing as infinity is not about to happen.