Skip to main content

Riding the Rails with Nuclear Energy

By

hoisting Trains that travel via electric power are “green,”  as we currently accept the the term, because they do not use (much) diesel fuel. And, if the electricity they use is not generated by a carbon emitting source, it’s like hitting the daily double of greeniness. An advertising bonanza. Rooty-toot-toot! Now if train food were improved, they could also eliminate the methane problem, but one emission at a time.

We frankly don’t know which American trains might qualify for this designation, but this story from The Guardian covers the European scene.

Travelling by train is the green way to go. In the month when the government seems set on railroading us into a third Heathrow runway, even ministers will agree on that. You can "travel greener" with Arriva to Wales. Or hop aboard Eurostar, which claims to "generate 10 times less CO2 than flying" to Paris. Or emit "78% less" than flying if you take one of Virgin's tilting Pendolino trains to Glasgow.

And wouldn’t you know that nuclear energy appears somewhere in the equation:

Eurostar does so well because its trains are mainly powered by French nuclear power stations. The company can't quite bring itself to say "our trains are greener because they run on nuclear power", but that is what it means.

We’re not sure why the French would hesitate to make this point since so much of everything (80% to be exact) is powered by nuclear energy. Maybe because nuclear acts as a great leveler where it is so prevalent. If Eurostar benefits as much as all other French electric trains, there’s no advantage to claim. (But since the advertising seems to be versus planes, they could still bring it up – so we officially don’t get it.)

Writer Fred Pearce, in what we might call classic Guardian style, goes into a lot of detail about just how green these trains really are, looking for purity. It’s an interesting read.

We don’t really recommend travelling this way – it’s liable to end in tears in a small town jail - but if you’re going green and really want to score points with like-minded friends, the frugality demonstrated here can’t be beat.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
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...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
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...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
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...
6 comments
Read more