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Can Nuclear and Wind Help Each Other?

Jerome a Paris shares his thoughts at The Oil Drum:
...as I will show below, the best way to push nuclear is also the best way to promote wind power...

Comments

Anonymous said…
What we need are cities, energy systems, and transportation links that are weatherproof. That excludes weather dependent, grid destabilizing, expensive, and ugly wind complexes. The best way to promote wind sourced energy is to forget about it. Which comes first, NEI, truth or accommodation politics?
Anonymous said…
I'm with Randal.

NEI's position must be that nuclear power is unequivocally superior to diffuse power, such as wind or solar. Nuclear power has no weakness that wind power can address. Nuclear power is just as safe and environmentally friendly as diffuse power (actually more so), yet emphatically superior in terms of reliability, capacity factor and scalability.

Whenever I hear that wind power and nuclear power can work together, I think of Stacy King. Who is Stacy King? Stacy King was a teammate of Michael Jordan's. One night, MJ dropped 69 points. When asked about MJ's performance, Stacy King said, "I'll always remember this as the night MJ and I combined to score 70 points." So yeah, wind power and nuclear power work together, just like Stacy King and Michael Jordan.
Anonymous said…
So Nuclear Notes posts a link, and Randal Leavitt thinks that this constitutes an endorsement?

Wind is indeed free. If wind turbines were free, one could make a lot of money selling electricity when the wind blows. In actuality, wind turbines are expensive because it takes a lot of steel and concrete to build a machine that can harvest power from a low-energy density source.

Given the 3 candidates now remaining in the race, we will have carbon controls in place in the next couple of years. As long as we keep the government from mandating energy technology via a national "renewable energy portfolio standard," we will then see how the economics of low-carbon wind, nuclear, and carbon capture and sequestration really compare. Should be interesting.

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