Utilities Voted: "Nuclear Energy Best Investment to Meet Environmental Requirements"

That's according to Black & Veatch's latest annual survey to electric utilities (pdf). Here are the highlights:

Continuing the survey trend from past years, utility personnel believe strongly that nuclear energy is the best investment to meet environmental requirements. Nuclear demonstrated not only the highest level of support this year (77% of all respondents and 80% of all IOUs), but also a sustained increase in the level of support over the three years of the survey. While nuclear remains the preferred technology within the industry, it continues to meet considerable resistance among environmental and political groups making such investments difficult for utilities.

Wind and solar rank second and third as preferred technologies: 56% and 54%, respectively. Wind has retained its relative ranking over the 2006 to 2008 period, while interest in solar has accelerated rapidly. While not at significant levels, interest in tidal resources has also increased substantially over the last three years. Interest in coal gasification has lost ground, dropping from 22% in 2006 to approximately 10% in 2008. - p. 59

Now if we could only convince the public...

Comments

Joffan said…

Although geothermal appears elsewhere in the report, it doesn't seem to figure as one of the options in that paricular question. Odd.

November 12, 2008 at 11:37 AM

GRLCowan said…

Now if we could only convince the public...

What evidence have you that, among those (other than you) who claim the public is unconvinced, there is anyone who is not projecting onto us the opinions oil and gas tax revenues and profits require us to have?

They know enough to do that, in defiance of polling evidence. You should know enough to assert that the polling evidence is valid.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996

November 12, 2008 at 2:08 PM

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...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog