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...
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By 2017 another 8GW could be added. This is 90 billion kwh total. A 12% increase from the current 790 billion kwh.
wind in 2006 was 32 billion kwh.
the Watts Bar plant should be finished in 2014. Adding another 9 billion kwh.
Other new power uprating technology could further enhance existing nuclear capacity.
50% power uprates from donut shaped fuel and coolant additives
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/jan/tech/kb_nuclear.html
It is not just global warming and climate change, it is 30,000/year dead in america from air pollution from coal. that is why we need wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear moving as fast as possible. Save real lives now. Plus while the coal plants are running stick better scrubbers and gas bags no them.
(are you going to post this, or only comments you agree with?)