Skip to main content

Editorial Round-Up

Dan_River_Danville_Virginia From The Macomb (Mich.) Daily:

The agonizing restatement of Murphy's law at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in northern Japan threatens to delay once again a promising expansion of our own nuclear power generating capacity.

It should prompt a check and recheck of plans and proposals for new nuclear plants in this nation. But we question if anyone can offer well-founded objections to nuclear plants of improved designs in areas which are not seismically active.

Me, either - even in seismically active areas, actually. We won’t know until much later the role the earthquake played at Fukushima, but the tsunami added a wild card that most regions of the United States don’t have to worry about.

In any event:

Nuclear energy, for all its opposition, has some useful life left. Solar and wind power in the long run can provide the cleanest, safest source of energy. But until they can be put to use on a larger scale, we should use whatever other clean energy is at hand. For the next few decades, at least, nuclear energy fits that requirement.

Not the most ringing endorsement, but it’s okay. I’ll take it.

---

From the Lynchburg (Va.) News and Advance:

Nuclear reactors have been safely generating power around the world for more than four decades, and for any other industry, three disasters in more than 40 years would be a safety record to be envied.

The public needs to calm down; the environmentalists need to quit trying to make political hay of a grave crisis; the politicians simply need to grow a spine.

I’m not sure I’d be quite this harsh. They grow them tough in Lynchburg;

An Associated Press story earlier this week about the number of U.S. nuclear plants near fault lines played into feeding the public’s irrational fears of the nuclear industry. After all, the idea of a nuclear plant near the site of a possible earthquake would scare just about anyone. But in Japan, it was not last week’s earthquake that caused the current crisis; it was the ensuing tsunami that severely damaged the coolant systems at the plant.

I’m not sure yet that the earthquake wasn’t determinative and neither is the News-Advance editorial board, but I must say, this is the most pugnacious defense of nuclear energy I’ve seen yet.

---

The Danville (Va.) Register-Bee offers a negative editorial, but mostly about the costs of a nuclear energy plant:

A fact not mentioned about nuclear energy by those advocating its use is there has been a growing volume of comments about the capital cost of nuclear-powered electric plants becoming prohibitively expensive.

And goes on from there. Its alternative to nuclear energy is interesting:

The IGCC electric plant does not burn the coal. Rather it uses a thermo-chemical process to produce the gas stage from the coal. The resulting gas is stated to be virtually free of fuel-bound nitrogen. Pollutants, such as sulfur (98 percent removed), particulates and trace minerals, are removed in IGCC processing and sold as by-products for other industrial uses. IGCC results in a small stream of carbon dioxide, which can be captured. The slag is sold for use in building roads or manufacturing wallboard and the plant has “zero process water discharge.” A second such unit, producing twice the electricity, has been considered, at a projected cost of $2 billion.

I’ve nothing against this per se – I guess the idea is to propose carbon capture as a base energy source to replace nuclear energy, but it seems an awfully rosy picture. Consider:

I [Hildred Shelton wrote the editorial] do not feel obligated to support uranium mining in Virginia regardless of the findings of the NAS study, and I do not see why anyone else should so feel either.

But coal mining seems a-ok. Well, you can’t win ‘em all.

A view of the Dan River – hence, Danville.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Wind and Solar may be pie in the sky, but "carbon capture" is pure fraud.
Joffan said…
"three disasters in more than 40 years would be a safety record to be envied"

Mmm. Even more so when one of those (TMI incident) was definitely not a disaster, and the Fukushima accident is not a disaster either, to-date.
Mark Flanagan said…
Joffan - A broad definition of disaster is " a sudden or great misfortune or failure," according to Merriam-Webster. Works well enough. In the narrower sense, the tsunami/earthquake qualify better.

Mark
Joffan said…
Mark, without descending to dictionary wars, I'd say the "disaster" reference can reasonably be inferred to be in terms of human impact (as distinct from economic impact) when the words "safety record" are in the same clause.

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan - a disaster in any terms, sure.
Anonymous said…
Three units experiencing simultaneous partial meltdowns, three reactor buildings destroyed by hydrogen explosions, and a situation still not stable after three weeks, isn't a disaster?

This defies common sense. good luck selling that line.
Joffan said…
Anonymous: one always needs good luck when selling evidence-based evaluations, so I offer my thanks in proportion to your sincerity.

Certainly Fukushima is a financial disaster for Tepco - no argument there. But as I said - and which you selectively ignored -the phrase that "disaster" occurred in was specifically referring to "safety record", not to finanaces.

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

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

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin