Skip to main content

NEI; Japan; France; Cars or No Cars?

Tricastin We’ll continue to bring you Japan updates on this page, but you may also want to take a look at NEI’s new site dedicated to Japan and Fukushima Daiichi. Called Nuclear Answers, it contains the updates, some new videos (we played some of them here in March), and – a lot of other material. Despite the nature of NEI – it is the Nuclear Energy Institute, after all – it won a lot of praise for its honest and informed coverage of Fukushima. That will continue on the new site. Well worth a bookmark.

---

One thing you can say about the French, they assume an intelligence on the part of other people that can seem rather blunt.

"There is no alternative to nuclear power today." Mr. Sarkozy told a press conference. "Those who ask for a moratorium, I find this curious. It would consist in keeping old plants and abstaining from researching new safer plants."

Mr. Sarkozy is French President Nicolas Sarkozy. And of course, he’s right, though France began its big push for nuclear energy just as the United States and other countries began to ramp down construction and has kept  building new plants since then. (And benefitted from it. Populous France is 17th in carbon emissions production, behind sparsely peopled-Canada and Australia among others – that’s a very good figure reasonably credited to nuclear energy.)

The support for nuclear energy in France has always hovered around 50 percent and has dipped some follow the event at Fukushima Daiichi. That makes it a prime candidate for the, uh, candidates to toss around in the next election.

"This will be the first time that the issue of nuclear power plays a significant role in a French Presidential election," says Pierre-Louis Brenac, an energy consultant at SIA Conseil in France. "It's a big change."

Well, we’ll see how significant. If this the best wedge issue the Socialists have, then the Union for for a Popular Movement (UMP – Sarkozy’s party – the conservative wing of French politics) hasn’t too much to worry about.

Actually, voter exhaustion will weigh more heavily against UMP – it’s been in power 7 years, and Sarkozy, who said he’s running again, has miserable favorability ratings. (He’s directly elected – it’s not a parliamentary election.)

But, UMP or Socialist, it’s hard to imagine France reversing path on nuclear energy – the Green Party is a different story, but it usually is.

---

This is what the Europeans are up to:

Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city.

There’s more, but you get the idea – make driving cars unappealing so as to push folks onto public transportation. Why?

What is more, European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United States never ratified that pact.

I would say that doing this is easier in most European countries because the infrastructure has been built to support it and there is not the entrenched car culture that exists in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Plus, there must be some public buy-in since this would be a politician career killer in countries with a car culture. In these countries, electric cars might find the sweet spot between helping the environment and keeping cars an important part of the transport scene.

There’s nuclear pick-up with electric cars, but not much at all in the European move to limit driving – except more people in electric trains means more need for electricity and nuclear certainly can find a place there.

The Tricastin nuclear facility in Southern France. Italy backed away from nuclear energy but gets about 10 percent of its electricity from nuclear. How? Plants like Tricastin, that’s how.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should