NEI Nuclear Notes

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald . Last month Bill McKibben wrote in The New Yorker magazine about a family in Vermont that had insulated its house, replaced its oil burner with electric heat pumps, added solar panels to the roof and, presumably, cut its carbon footprint. It’s a noble concept but I’m not sure it’s working. Bill and I go back a long way. We took a trip together in September, 1984, to Hydro-Quebec's James Bay plant, then nearing completion, and he wrote about it in March, 1986, in an article in The New Yorker about the various sources of energy for his apartment in New York . I believe it was one of Bill's first assignments for The New Yorker . I was then a reporter at The New York Times and wrote about the project immediately . Both of us have closely followed the evolution of energy and climate science ever since, but our pa...

When the Senate changed the filibuster rules to allow judicial and executive appointments to proceed to the floor with 51 votes instead of the 60 the filibuster required, the process was called the nuclear option, a name given it (probably) by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) back in 2006. The association has always been with weaponry not energy, but the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg goes with energy – in a notably detailed metaphor – and in notably familiar language: But global warming has changed the picture. Nuclear power isn’t the best way to reduce carbon emissions—that would be wind and solar. For the intermediate future, though, breezes and rays won’t be enough. As growing numbers of environmentalists and climate scientists have come to realize, nuclear power is much, much better than what remains the real-world alternative: fossil fuels like oil and, especially, coal. When it comes to energy, the nuclear option, though not the best of all possible worlds, is better than the one...

We’ve run a series of editorials over the last few days that take a cautious but supportive view of American nuclear energy going forward after Japan. That’s fine – the fact that writers and editorial boards are grappling with the issues is to be encouraged. Most have been judicious and measured. And we have to say that that’s true even among writers who would just as soon the entire industry close down and go away – there is a realization that shutting down nuclear means that the project of producing emission free electricity generation would take a ghastly hit. In the short run, the beneficiary of nuclear's now inevitable crisis is going to be fossil fuels. Renewable energy remains too expensive, too land-hungry, too unreliable and too small-scale to take up much slack, so cheap coal and newly abundant natural gas will do the job. This is ironic, because however high the death toll at Fukushima climbs, it is unlikely to match the casualties in the fossil-fuel ind...