Check out this quiz over at the American Petroleum Institute to see how well you know nuclear's competitors. I scored nine out of ten.
A tip of the hat to Nick Loris.
A tip of the hat to Nick Loris.
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...
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No mention of how much oil can be drilled on US offshore, how quickly can it be put to market and how long it lasts.
No mention of how much EROEI the Canadian tar sands have, and its polluting effects.
No mention of how close we are to next generation biofuels and how much land is needed to cater to US oil needs by growing switchgrass.
No mention of how much needs to be invested on trains and electrifying the transport sector. No mention of how that compares to investing in oil.
Oil is a weak thing as compared to coal, you don't need nuclear to beat oil. Oil could be beaten by pretty much anything.. natural gas, wind, biofuels.
Fighting oil is not an environmental issue, it is purely an issue of economic security.
Nuclear is needed when we talk of replacing coal, this is the true environmental issue.
One fact that the major oil and gas companies keep touting as a positive is something that I believe is actually quite negative - insiders own less than 5% of the stock in the company. They are managers with interests other than the best interests of the stockholders. Their compensation is based on metrics that might not be best for the long term health of the company.
I think it is very telling that ExxonMobil has poured more than $118 billion of its capital in the past five years into stock purchase plans. The main purpose of such plans is to bump the stock price - usually temporarily. If they really wanted to return the money to the investors - especially tax exempt pension funds, they would raise the dividends, not buy back stock.
ExxonMobil is not the only major making that choice. From my point of view it really makes it clear that their message of "do not raise our taxes, we need the money for investing in future energy" a blatant lie.
Keep comming!!!
Abhishek
http://innovideas.blogspot.com