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...
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NEI's position must be that nuclear power is unequivocally superior to diffuse power, such as wind or solar. Nuclear power has no weakness that wind power can address. Nuclear power is just as safe and environmentally friendly as diffuse power (actually more so), yet emphatically superior in terms of reliability, capacity factor and scalability.
Whenever I hear that wind power and nuclear power can work together, I think of Stacy King. Who is Stacy King? Stacy King was a teammate of Michael Jordan's. One night, MJ dropped 69 points. When asked about MJ's performance, Stacy King said, "I'll always remember this as the night MJ and I combined to score 70 points." So yeah, wind power and nuclear power work together, just like Stacy King and Michael Jordan.
Wind is indeed free. If wind turbines were free, one could make a lot of money selling electricity when the wind blows. In actuality, wind turbines are expensive because it takes a lot of steel and concrete to build a machine that can harvest power from a low-energy density source.
Given the 3 candidates now remaining in the race, we will have carbon controls in place in the next couple of years. As long as we keep the government from mandating energy technology via a national "renewable energy portfolio standard," we will then see how the economics of low-carbon wind, nuclear, and carbon capture and sequestration really compare. Should be interesting.