Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

kristopher

(29,798 posts)
8. Nuclear is dead and that's a good necessary part of decarbonizing our energy system.
Thu Oct 1, 2015, 11:46 AM
Oct 2015

That you are living a world of delusional constructs is sad, but not particularly important because all the rhetoric in the world cannot change this fact: fossil and nuclear are cooperative elements of the same centralized system.

Far from being a case where the choice is nuclear or fossil, what we are confronted with is nuclear and fossil fuels acting as a monolithic entity of large-scale centralized thermal generation that operates under the traditional utility economic model.

The actual alternative to that fossilized carbon/nuclear system is one of distributed renewables. I know you can't admit it (even though I'm sure you know it's true) but here is a sniff test for the newcomer to the topic.

Conventional fossil fuel dependent utilities have been embracing nuclear for decades and they haven't moved an inch off of their focus on fossil fuels. But since renewables have become an economic force - within the past 7 years for wind and 5 years for solar - the fossil centric utilities have been doing everything within their power to stop the roll-out of wind and solar.

Why?

Because, with absolute certainty, those fossil fuel dependent utilities know that distributed wind and solar spell the death of the traditional fossil/nuclear business model.

So rant, be obnoxious, mislead, misconstrue, and misdirect all you want - the path forward has been set since China decided to focus on manufacturing wind and solar equipment.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – On construction sites in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, workers are building what may become the final five major nuclear power plants built in the United States.

Nuclear energy, once a symbol of American ingenuity, the fulfillment of the futuristic promise of near-limitless electricity and near-zero emissions, may soon face an economic meltdown.

Cheap natural gas, together with plummeting prices for wind and solar, has upended the energy sector – not only making nuclear plants’ huge upfront costs, endless regulatory approvals and yearslong construction especially prohibitive, but undercutting the very idea of a centralized power system. Industry and regulators, meanwhile, still have not devised a long-term solution for dispensing of nuclear waste. And despite the best marketing efforts by industry, ever-present safety concerns have little abated since the most recent nuclear incident: the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan following a tsunami in 2011.

“The nuclear dream looks pretty tarnished these days: that you would have an inexpensive, reliable and manageable source of energy,” says James Doyle, a former political scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “What has been shown repeatedly over the decades is that it’s not inexpensive and the question of how to handle nuclear waste has remained problematic, and it appears it will remain so for decades to come.”

http://www.usnews.com/news/special-reports/the-manhattan-project/articles/2015/09/28/the-20-percenters-nuclear-energy-faces-reality-and-its-likely-decline
Latest Discussions»Issue Forums»Environment & Energy»US Nuclear Regulator Oppo...»Reply #8