NEI Nuclear Notes

As the Electric Power Research Institute ( EPRI ) and others have documented, solving the energy-environment challenge today requires contributions from every sector and pursuit of all options. For a perspective on one of those options, carbon capture and storage (CCS), read the piece by Jeff Goodell in the Yale Environment 360 blog. Goodell summarizes a few of the challenges in moving CCS from concept to commercial scale operation. On the size of sequestration facilities needed, Goodell says: Right now, there are three major carbon capture and storage projects in operation in the world (at one of the projects in Saskatchewan, Canada, the CO2 is used to enhance oil and gas recovery; storing the CO2 is secondary). The most significant is the Sleipner Platform in Norway, where StatoilHydro, a big Norwegian oil and gas company, has been pumping nearly one million tons of CO2 into a reservoir beneath the North Sea each year since 1996. It is an enormous engineering project, deploying one ...

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University Law School has just completed a new study entitled, Making Sense of - and Making Progress In - the American Culture War of Fact . Among the topics addressed in the study was public acceptance of nuclear energy, and some of the findings like this one caught my eye ... "Cultural individualists who are told that nuclear power will reduce greenhouse gas emissions are more likely to accept that global warming is caused by humans and is a serious threat than those who are told that restrictive anti-pollution regulations are necessary," said [Dan] Kahan [Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law School. "The reason is that anti-pollution regulations threaten the values of people who like commerce, whereas nuclear power strikes those same people as a good idea." Said Kahan, "Nuclear power makes individualists see green." Sounds like something we've been saying for quite a while now. To download the ...