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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James Greenidge
Queens NY
Thanks for listening
If the fuel storage facility was damaged, there likely would have been little impact beyond the facility site. Fuel storage pools have no active fission, and relatively low heat load compared to operating reactors. Spent fuel is often used by anti-nukes as a boogeyman. Once you understand what spent fuel is and the issues associated with managing it, the boogeyman vanishes.
That's rich, given that they never use that criticism when an author is critical of the nuclear power industry. If one must be a radiation or nuclear engineering specialist for one's praise to be valid, then surely one must be such a specialist in order for one's criticism to be valid as well.
Feel free to send a letter to your local editors pointing out the double standard. Of course, it sounds like they won't print it....