NEI Nuclear Notes

Presidential candidate John Edwards was endorsed by Friends of the Earth Action last Sunday primarily because of his stance against nuclear power . Mr. Edwards, accepting the endorsement, said: “I am opposed to the building of new nuclear power plants, which is different from the position taken by Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. FOEA’s president Brent Blackwelder had this to say: “Edwards is razor sharp and clear: we don’t want to go the route of nuclear power plants,” said Mr. Blackwelder, whereas Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton wanted to explore the nuclear option. “We intend to run an independent campaign to educate the voters,” Mr. Blackwelder said. The canvassing, advertisements and seminars will take place mostly in New Hampshire , where the nuclear issue has resonance because of the nuclear power plant at Seabrook, as well as in other states. Educate the voters? I wonder if they’ll include these educational facts on nuclear in New Hampshire ? In 200...

It’s been awhile since I’ve debunked a report so I thought I’d break my hiatus by starting on a new one. This one is from the Council on Foreign Relations titled Nuclear Energy: Balancing Benefits and Risks . To start off this post, readers should note that our CEO (Skip Bowman) and CNO (Marv Fertel) were on an “Advisory Committee” for this report noted on page 37. By reading the paper one would of course think that NEI endorsed the report. Quite the opposite. The two raised serious objections to their conclusions but apparently had no weight. However, as the long disclaimer at the front of the report notes, the advisory committee “are not asked to sign off on the report or otherwise endorse it.” Instead, these advisors are a “sounding board” to provide comments on the report after it is drafted. While Mr. Ferguson addresses the challenges to a greater role for nuclear energy, he doesn’t recognize the efforts being made today to overcome those challenges. In any event, to address clim...

NEI Nuclear Notes has visited this topic before, but it warrants looking at it again. The discussion on how best to reduce the growth of greenhouse gases (GHG) has dominated the environmental agenda in the first months of the 110th Congress. Wednesday, March 21, the first full day of Spring, promises to bring climate change to the forefront of the day's news. Former Vice President Al Gore, who testifies Wednesday on Capitol Hill, focused on ways to mitigate climate change in “An Inconvenient Truth.” In the film, Gore discussed a 2004 study entitled “Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative,” by professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala . The analysis is based on the concept of stabilization “wedges,” or measures that could be used to limit and ultimately reduce GHG emissions. These measures include efficient vehicles, an increase in nuclear power to displace coal-fired plants, greater efficiency at coal-fired power plants, an increase in wind and solar power to disp...

From one look at how the world could work to constrain greenhouse gases over the long-term, look no further then Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative . Instead of falling back on the idea of the one silver bullet to reduce GHGs, two professors, Robert Socolow, and Stephen Pacala , have broken the task into seven wedges. Here's a more complete explanation from ScienceMag (subscription required): The Stabilization Triangle We idealize the 50-year emissions reductions as a perfect triangle in Fig. 1B . Stabilization is represented by a "flat" trajectory of fossil fuel emissions at 7 GtC/year, and business as usual is represented by a straight-line "ramp" trajectory rising to 14 GtC/year in 2054. The "stabilization triangle," located between the flat trajectory and BAU, removes exactly one-third of BAU emissions. To keep the focus on technologies that have the potential to produce a material difference by 2054, we divide the stabilization t...