What's the Best Energy Advice to the Next President?

It's to go nuclear according to Charles Groat at the Houston Chronicle:

The next president of the United States can strike an early blow for sound energy policy by actively promoting our increased use of nuclear power.

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Ghosts from the past and emotional arguments not backed by scientific fact continue to be used to disparage nuclear power. The fear of a Chernobyl-like catastrophe and memories of the Three Mile Island incident (which resulted in no injuries or deaths) continue to concern many despite the fact that outmoded Russian technology has long been abandoned and the safety record of U.S. nuclear power plants is admirable.

The concern getting the most political mileage is the waste issue. Deep geologic disposal has been accepted by virtually all nations as the ultimate resting place for their spent nuclear fuel or reprocessing residues. The United States has led the world in committing to a site for its waste and preparing it for licensing. We have also set records for throwing unnecessary obstacles in the way of readying the site for use. Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the proposed site for retrievable storage of U.S. high-level nuclear waste, has been studied in great detail. It is a technically sound site. But the Nevada congressional delegation, overcome by NIMBY (not in my backyard) sickness, has allied in opposition to the site with environmental interests seeking reasons to stall nuclear power development.

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Our next president and our country should learn from the French and take comfort in the fact that nuclear power has lived up to its potential in this large and modern nation.

Comments

Anonymous said…

An outstanding post. Regardless of who wins, Congress needs to make sure that the licensing process for Yucca Mountain is fully funded. The correct way to determine whether the science supporting the site is correct is to proceed with the NRC's independent review of the DOE license application.

February 26, 2008 at 1:18 AM

How Nanomaterials Can Make Nuclear Reactors Safer and More Efficient

The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …

Why America Needs the MOX Facility

If Isaiah had been a nuclear engineer, he’d have loved this project. And the Trump Administration should too, despite the proposal to eliminate it in the FY 2018 budget.

The project is a massive factory near Aiken, S.C., that will take plutonium from the government’s arsenal and turn it into fuel for civilian power reactors. The plutonium, made by the United States during the Cold War in a competition with the Soviet Union, is now surplus, and the United States and the Russian Federation jointly agreed to reduce their stocks, to reduce the chance of its use in weapons. Over two thousand construction workers, technicians and engineers are at work to enable the transformation.

Carrying Isaiah’s “swords into plowshares” vision into the nuclear field did not originate with plutonium. In 1993, the United States and Russia began a 20-year program to take weapons-grade uranium out of the Russian inventory, dilute it to levels appropriate for civilian power plants, and then use it to produce…

Missing the Point about Pennsylvania’s Nuclear Plants

A group that includes oil and gas companies in Pennsylvania released a study on Monday that argues that twenty years ago, planners underestimated the value of nuclear plants in the electricity market. According to the group, that means the state should now let the plants close.

Huh?

The question confronting the state now isn’t what the companies that owned the reactors at the time of de-regulation got or didn’t get. It’s not a question of whether they were profitable in the '80s, '90s and '00s. It’s about now. Business works by looking at the present and making projections about the future.

Is losing the nuclear plants what’s best for the state going forward?

Pennsylvania needs clean air. It needs jobs. And it needs protection against over-reliance on a single fuel source.

What the reactors need is recognition of all the value they provide. The electricity market is depressed, and if electricity is treated as a simple commodity, with no regard for its benefit to clean air o…

NEI Nuclear Notes

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