[eclipse]

Translation: Can't afford Nuclear Reactors and EV's. So the Nukes have to go. Can't afford Shale Gas either.

Now ask asg70 what electricity generation will charge the EV's? It doesn't exist.

Is it any surprise that the eV Fanboys don't like Nuclear?

What? Today's nuclear is already cheaper than coal if you include the fact that coal kills nearly 3 million people a year, which is about 650 Chernobyl disasters (and the west NEVER built a single Chernobyl reactor — surprise surprise, not all nuclear reactors are the same!) https://tinyurl.com/pqgdd5q
This is why George Monbiot says: “….when coal goes right it kills more people than nuclear power does when it goes wrong. It kills more people every week than nuclear power has in its entire history. And that’s before we take climate change into account.”
https://tinyurl.com/93nm9sn
The health costs nearly double the cost of coal! You pay once in your electricity bill, and again in your public health bill.
https://tinyurl.com/6m2o7c5
Dr James Hansen has calculated that by displacing coal, nuclear power has already saved 1.8 million lives.
https://tinyurl.com/ydx6mxrb

HOW TO REPLACE OIL?
The transport oil market is roughly divided in half, with light vehicles using petrol (gasoline) and heavy vehicles using diesel. America's renewable labs, NREL, have done the math and concluded we could mostly replace petrol with EV's on today's grid, without building a single new power plant! Just turn all existing power plants up to full and let them run that way all night. Most light vehicles like family cars and delivery vans could be charged by today's grid! “For the United States as a whole, 84% of US cars, pickup trucks and SUVs could be supported by the existing infrastructure.” http://tinyurl.com/y6b6s7nx
Technology Review August 2013 puts it this way: "the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States." http://tinyurl.com/y3qvtv5k
That's like saying we can replace a third of the total oil market without building a single new power plant — just by buying EV's.
Heavy diesel vehicles like long haul trucking and mining and harvesters are a little more problematic. They will require new nuclear power plants to separate out hydrogen and CO2 from seawater to make a synthetic diesel or 'e-diesel'. But because CO2 is 28 times more concentrated in seawater than it is in the air, they've got that price down to almost parity with today's oil prices, and that *includes* the cost of building the nuclear reactors to power the process. They can also set it up to make airline jet fuel the same way. After all, the idea came from the US Naval fleets to make fighter fuel on nuclear powered aircraft carriers out in the ocean! https://tinyurl.com/y6oq9f3m   https://tinyurl.com/yytd3k7s
Dr James Hansen has a colleague at his Science Council for Global Initiatives by the name of Tom Blees. Tom makes a compelling case in his free book "Prescription for the planet" that we should just nationalise the energy market and get our governments provide cheap affordable clean electricity from nuclear, and various renewable replacements to oil from this abundant power source as well. See Chapter 9 "Cui Bono" at this link. https://tinyurl.com/yxef25veBut whatever the mix of government and private sector, one thing is clear. The sooner we start building modern safe breeder reactors that eat nuclear waste, the better.

[dissident]

The RBMK reactor was the not the cause of the Chernobyl "accident". It was the criminal "experiment" that was conducted on a full scale production reactor that caused the runaway regime. If no such "experiment" was conducted and the reactor was operated as designed, then nobody would know any incident by the name of Chernobyl.

It is hard to believe that this "experiment" was properly authorized. Any sane advisor to upper management at the government level would have stopped it in its tracks. Such experiments are only to be done on test reactors and under controlled conditions. We are not talking about some sort of tuning of production plants after their initial deployment. The RBMK was being operated for decades before this "accident".

If there was some actual part failure at this power plant then we could call it an accident and talk about what a dangerous design it was. Criminal "experiments" can be arranged to produce meltdowns at all nuclear power plants, except possibly for the III+ generation. The control systems of these reactors would have to be sabotaged to allow criminal idiots to stage dangerous "experiments".

[eclipse]

The RBMK reactor was the not the cause of the Chernobyl "accident". It was the criminal "experiment" that was conducted on a full scale production reactor that caused the runaway regime. If no such "experiment" was conducted and the reactor was operated as designed, then nobody would know any incident by the name of Chernobyl.

It is hard to believe that this "experiment" was properly authorized. Any sane advisor to upper management at the government level would have stopped it in its tracks. Such experiments are only to be done on test reactors and under controlled conditions. We are not talking about some sort of tuning of production plants after their initial deployment. The RBMK was being operated for decades before this "accident".

If there was some actual part failure at this power plant then we could call it an accident and talk about what a dangerous design it was. Criminal "experiments" can be arranged to produce meltdowns at all nuclear power plants, except possibly for the III+ generation. The control systems of these reactors would have to be sabotaged to allow criminal idiots to stage dangerous "experiments".

Hear hear!

[sparky]

.
In the old soviet Union , the electrical generator were under the authority of the electrical grid
one of the problems was how would the grid react to a shutdown
the authorities decided to run a failure test
the local nuclear management told them vehemently that it was a VERY VERY bad idea
they were overruled by their tutelar authorities and told that if they did not comply ,
other people would be found who would
the technicians decided that if something really stupid was going to be done , it was better if that was them doing it , they knew the plant inside out and which safety system had to be neutralized and which one to keep

the test proceeded , starving the reactor of cooling water every operators were watching with some trepidation
as soon as they could , they declared the test over gave the GO to restart the water pumps
when the water rushed in , the highly radioactive and overheated reactor core created a dissociation of the water molecule in Hydrogen and Oxygene which then recombined as an explosion
the 100 feet concrete lid weighing several hundred tonnes flipped like a penny and the core fuel with the graphite blocks were thrown all over the place

the official responsible for forcing the test was send to Siberia

[eclipse]

.
In the old soviet Union , the electrical generator were under the authority of the electrical grid
one of the problems was how would the grid react to a shutdown
the authorities decided to run a failure test
the local nuclear management told them vehemently that it was a VERY VERY bad idea
they were overruled by their tutelar authorities and told that if they did not comply ,
other people would be found who would
the technicians decided that if something really stupid was going to be done , it was better if that was them doing it , they knew the plant inside out and which safety system had to be neutralized and which one to keep

the test proceeded , starving the reactor of cooling water every operators were watching with some trepidation
as soon as they could , they declared the test over gave the GO to restart the water pumps
when the water rushed in , the highly radioactive and overheated reactor core created a dissociation of the water molecule in Hydrogen and Oxygene which then recombined as an explosion
the 100 feet concrete lid weighing several hundred tonnes flipped like a penny and the core fuel with the graphite blocks were thrown all over the place

the official responsible for forcing the test was send to Siberia

Yes, and so let's not do that again. However, I am kind of in favour of nationalisation of the energy sector (French style) and having the government agency standardise high safety modern designs like the CAP1400, and just rolling them off the production line for the next 10 years. By then they could have perfected ThorCon's non-breeder MSR's and of course be trialling the biggest badest beast of them all, the MCSFR breeder that eats almost any fuel or nuclear waste!

The following is what Dr James Hansen's friend Tom Blees wrote on energy economics.

“The implementation of a global energy plan requires some fresh thinking in order to provide oversight on a worldwide level. Elimination of the profit motive would be a great place to start. Looking at the record of publicly owned utilities in the United States, which serve fully 26% of American consumers with an enviable record of dependability and rates averaging 18% lower than private utilities, provides a strong argument in favor of extending the nonprofit model to a global scale. There would be many compelling advantages to such a plan, and few if any drawbacks. Indeed, unless one considers the inability of utility companies to skim off profits as a negative feature, there would seem to be no drawbacks whatsoever.

This is hardly a radical concept. Indeed, it is already a reality on a national level in France, where their AREVA national nuclear power agency oversees all aspects of their nuclear industry, from mining, power plant construction, training, reprocessing, and every other detail up to and including waste disposal. The only obstacle to copying their system and implementing it worldwide is political. They have clearly demonstrated its effectiveness. Let’s examine the features of this proposed nonprofit global energy consortium and how it will work. We’ll call it, henceforth, the Global Rescue Energy Alliance Trust (GREAT). The international negotiations and hard choices required to create such a system will be formidable, requiring policies that will cut harshly against the corporate and political grain—more in some countries than others. But nobody ever said that implementing a plan to save the planet was going to be a bed of roses. In reality, though, we’ll see that aside from the impossibility of placating the greediest power mongers (in both senses of the phrase), the advantages of such a system would be overwhelmingly positive for the rest of us
.
Corporatist true believers (free market ideologues) will undoubtedly argue that GREAT is a matter of ideology, and its supporters will surely be tarred as socialists or even communists in the inevitable efforts to discredit this proposal. But GREAT is not a matter of ideology, it’s a matter of sanity. Just as the world lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation during the long tense years of the cold war, so we will continue to live under the threat of nuclear terrorism until we recognize the fact—not the opinion—that the only way we can ever hope to remove the threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is to put the entire nuclear fuel cycle under strict international control. This perforce requires us to end the era of private utility companies’ involvement in nuclear power. As newclear power assumes its role as the dominant energy source of the future, the only recourse for private utilities will be in renewable technologies that contribute to the overall energy supply system. Given that IFRs and the existing thermal reactors will likely supply the vast majority of power at least in the near term, it stands to reason that the overall energy infrastructure and administration will fall under the purview of GREAT, making electrical generation and distribution a de facto near-socialized system. (Since usage will still determine users’ costs, it would not be a socialized system per se, but more akin to a cooperative. But what’s in a word?) If wind and solar power are practical alternatives to nuclear, as their proponents maintain, then there will be plenty of room for investment by private sector energy companies, though given the history of manipulation of energy markets it would be prudent to limit the generating capacity of any one company…”

From Chapter 9, Cui Bono, Prescription for the Planet free to download here:
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf

[Tanada]

Progressive Left Seeks to Shut Down Earth-Friendly Nuclear Power Plants

At a recent debate on CNN, the two leading progressive senators, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, pledged to shut down America’s nuclear power plants. Such a rash decision would cause lasting environmental damage.

From an environmental standpoint, it is hard to beat nuclear power. It produces no air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions (just harmless steam). It results in fewer deaths per unit of energy produced than virtually all other forms of energy, such as wind power or fossil fuels (nobody died at Three Mile Island). And it provides the steady flow of energy needed for a carbon-free or low-carbon power grid, because unlike wind or solar power, it produces a constant, reliable flow of electricity regardless of whether the weather changes.

As the Washington Examiner notes, shutting down nuclear power plants would increase greenhouse gas emissions, and make it harder to prevent climate change:

“The International Energy Agency has concluded that meeting the goal of keeping warming to no greater than 2 degrees Celsius would require doubling global nuclear energy generation capacity by 2050. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is often cited as the leading authority by liberals, reached a similar conclusion.”

There is a strong consensus among both conservative and liberal energy experts that getting rid of nuclear power would be a bad thing. Writing at Neurologica, the liberal anti-Trump writer Steve Novella notes that nuclear energy is a blessing, not a curse:

“Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced.

“Nuclear waste can be dealt with, and the newer reactors produce less waste, and can even theoretically burn reprocessed waste from older plants. …

“This is also the option most likely to succeed. We do have examples from other countries. Germany tried to go completely renewable and closed their nuclear plants, and now have to build coal-fired plants to meet their energy needs. Meanwhile, the countries that are doing the best with low carbon energy are France and Sweden, who invested heavily in nuclear. This is why Bernie’s plan would be a disaster, it would exactly follow the failed strategy of Germany, but on a larger scale.”

As Michael Shellenberger notes, “Every major study, including a recent one by the British medical journal Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity.” Indeed, “wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants.” Moreover, “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste.” As a result, “experts fear solar panels will be shipped, along with other forms of electronic waste, to be disassembled — or, more often, smashed with hammers — by poor communities in Africa and Asia, whose residents will be exposed to the dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”

In The New York Times, Harvard’s Steven Pinker and two environmental experts noted that nuclear power plants are essential to the success of a green power grid, and it “is a fantasy” to rely on renewable energy alone:

“Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine … renewables work only with fossil-fuel [or nuclear] backup. Germany, which went all-in for renewables, has seen little reduction in carbon emissions, and, according to our calculations, at Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early. … [W]e actually have proven models for rapid decarbonization with economic and energy growth: France and Sweden. They decarbonized their grids decades ago and now emit less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. They remain among the world’s most pleasant places to live and enjoy much cheaper electricity than Germany to boot.

“They did this with nuclear power. And they did it fast. … France replaced almost all of its fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power nationwide in just 15 years; Sweden, in about 20 years. In fact, most of the fastest additions of clean electricity historically are countries rolling out nuclear power.”

Nuclear power plants in the U.S. have been expensive to build. But as that New York Times article notes, the cost per plant could be greatly reduced:

“They don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. The first product off any assembly line is expensive — it cost more than $150 million to develop the first iPhone — but costs plunge as they are built in quantity and production kinks are worked out. … China and South Korea can build reactors at one-sixth the current cost in the United States.”

In the United States, nuclear power plants are becoming more efficient and reliable. So nuclear energy production peaked in 2018, even though some nuclear power plants have closed or are being shut down by anti-nuclear politicians in states like New York.

Progressive presidential candidates have endorsed the Green New Deal, which once sought to shut down nuclear plants. Its original blueprint said its “plan is to transition off of nuclear” as “soon as possible.” After energy experts warned that the Green New Deal would “increase emissions” of greenhouse gases by shutting down nuclear plants, architects of the Green New Deal backtracked and stopped including shutdown plans in the Green New Deal.

But shutting down nuclear plants remains on the political agenda, as the recent call for it by Senator Warren and Senator Sanders shows. If a nuclear-plant shutdown is added back into the Green New Deal, that could substantially increase its cost and reduce its environmental effectiveness. The Green New Deal’s cost has been estimated by a think-tank as at least $50 trillion and potentially over $90 trillion (four times the size of the U.S. economy).

Beyond the issue of nuclear power plants, the Green New Deal could increase greenhouse gas emissions in other ways. It proposes “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States,” even very old buildings. In many cases, such upgrades would consume more energy than they would save. Thomas J. Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research said the Green New Deal’s construction projects would cause a lot of pollution: “How much steel is this going to involve? How much concrete? Think about the sheer amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere for retrofitting alone.”

LINKY

[dissident]

Burning of waste is not "theoretical". It is here today. The BN-800 has been loaded with MOX fuel (mixture of so-called waste and some enriched uranium or plutonium) and is demonstrating closed fuel cycle nuclear power in reality. The only countries on the planet with serious modern reactor deployment efforts are Russia and China. India to some extent, but not so much. The whole of the "1st world" has flushed itself down the toilet with retarded anti-nuclear hysteria. This includes France, which is joining the suicide by stupidity club.

Another "progressive" known as Jimmy Carter started the decline of the US nuclear industry by banning fuel reprocessing. Interesting how anti-nuclear clowns sabotage the proper disposal (i.e. use) of nuclear "waste". One would think that they are actually two-faced and want "waste" to be a never-ending problem.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Burning of waste is not "theoretical". It is here today. The BN-800 has been loaded with MOX fuel (mixture of so-called waste and some enriched uranium or plutonium) and is demonstrating closed fuel cycle nuclear power in reality. The only countries on the planet with serious modern reactor deployment efforts are Russia and China. India to some extent, but not so much. The whole of the "1st world" has flushed itself down the toilet with retarded anti-nuclear hysteria. This includes France, which is joining the suicide by stupidity club.

In is a multifaceted problem and attitude to nuclear energy is only one of countless aspects of it.
Why not to observe what's going on on the West and have a laugh at it?
I have even made a thread for it in open discussion called Progressive Mental Disease
Just relax and observe:
Suicide of Western societies is a great fun to watch.
Watching intellectual decay of white western mobs is a real thrill.
It gives me kicks every day.
America is the best here.
Bundles of morons led over the cliff by president idiot. Currently the best show in town.

[dissident]

Burning of waste is not "theoretical". It is here today. The BN-800 has been loaded with MOX fuel (mixture of so-called waste and some enriched uranium or plutonium) and is demonstrating closed fuel cycle nuclear power in reality. The only countries on the planet with serious modern reactor deployment efforts are Russia and China. India to some extent, but not so much. The whole of the "1st world" has flushed itself down the toilet with retarded anti-nuclear hysteria. This includes France, which is joining the suicide by stupidity club.

In is a multifaceted problem and attitude to nuclear energy is only one of countless aspects of it.
Why not to observe what's going on on the West and have a laugh at it?
I have even made a thread for it in open discussion called Progressive Mental Disease
Just relax and observe:
Suicide of Western societies is a great fun to watch.
Watching intellectual decay of white western mobs is a real thrill.
It gives me kicks every day.
America is the best here.
Bundles of morons led over the cliff by president idiot. Currently the best show in town.

If only it were so benign. We are living on the surface of the same planet so seeing the 1st world flush itself down the toilet is not an isolated process with no impacts. And I am living in the middle of this PC phase transition. I do not relish a blend of Huxley's and Blair's totalitarian utopias forming around me.

If that sounds hysterical, the empirical evidence is there that the current generation does not have the mental capacity and desire to propagate the culture required for a sane society. Circle-jerk echo chamber "thought" injected by "woke" social media is the perverse new normal. Sooner, rather than later, all of the institutions that defined the (relatively) free world will wash away.

[EnergyUnlimited]

If that sounds hysterical, the empirical evidence is there that the current generation does not have the mental capacity and desire to propagate the culture required for a sane society. Circle-jerk echo chamber "thought" injected by "woke" social media is the perverse new normal. Sooner, rather than later, all of the institutions that defined the (relatively) free world will wash away.

We are likely to observe decay of infrastructure (due to a lack of skill and will to maintain it).
On the top of it obvious intellectual decay.
Authoritarian phase may not last that long due to a lack of intellectual resources to maintain efficient surveillance state and general unruliness of the mob.
Mafias will start undermine legitimate governments as time pass.
Brown people and their gangs will carve for themselves increasing sectors of cities and at some point everything will fall to chaos.
This can already be seen in countries like Sweden of France (or in California in the US)
Transition to failed state may be swift and failed state brings with itself a sort of peculiar freedom, other than you are used to but still.
It may not be that bad for those who want to live fast & die young.
First world will be terminated by decay to idiocracy.

[mousepad]

Brown people and their gangs will carve for themselves increasing sectors of cities and at some point everything will fall to chaos

CA with more than 50% brown people has GDP 1.5x higher per person than good old france.

[jedrider]

Why blame the 'woke' generation dissident, when the boomer generation has already clearly made a mess of things.

We may have just enough oil to get us to the end of the plank we are walking. Things can fall apart so quickly, that nuclear energy may not be practical amid social, political, economic and climatic disruption. Probably a good thing IMO.

[Tanada]

Beaver Valley nuclear plant will remain open past 2021

The Beaver Valley nuclear power plant in Shippingport was scheduled to shut down next year. But Energy Harbor Corp., the new name for the formerly bankrupt FirstEnergy Solutions, announced Friday that it will keep the plant open after all.

The power station employs 1,000 people and has a total capacity of 1,872 megawatts, enough to power more than 1 million homes.

FirstEnergy Solutions notified regulators in March 2018 that it planned to close the plant claiming it was not economic to operate without some kind of subsidies for carbon-free electricity. The company pushed for legislative help in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where it operates two nuclear plants. The effort didn’t progress in Pennsylvania, but Ohio last year passed legislation that FirstEnergy credited with keeping its power plants viable.

What changed in Pennsylvania, according to Energy Harbor President and CEO John Judge, is Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a program for capping and gradually decreasing carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector in 10 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

It requires coal, gas and oil-fired power plants in the participating states to pay a fee for their carbon emissions. Much of the resulting revenue is spent on efforts to improve air quality and cut greenhouse gas emissions further.

Joining RGGI, Mr. Judge said in a statement, “will begin to help level the playing field for our carbon-free nuclear generators.”

Mr. Wolf announced his intention to add Pennsylvania to the 10-state program in October. The Department of Environmental Protection is writing rules to guide Pennsylvania’s participation, with a full first draft expected in mid-April. The goal is to join the program in 2022.

Energy Harbor warned that if the state doesn’t stick to that timeline, the company “would need to revisit deactivation.”

Nuclear operators have said the plan is critical to preserving Pennsylvania’s remaining nuclear plants, which do not emit carbon dioxide when they create electricity but face punishing competition from power plants running on low-cost natural gas. Because fossil fuel plants would need to purchase carbon emissions credits and nuclear plants wouldn't, the nuclear plants would become more cost-competitive in the market.

Modeling in October by economic research nonprofit Resources for the Future found that a carbon price of around $3 to $5 per ton would be enough to keep open Pennsylvania nuclear plants that would otherwise close by 2026. In the greenhouse gas initiative’s most recent quarterly auction, carbon allowances were sold at $5.65.

The Republican-led Legislature has so far balked at the plan, fearing its impact on the state’s substantial natural gas and coal industries.

State Sen. Gene Yaw, R-Lycoming, who heads his chamber’s environment committee, said in February that if the governor is not prevented from joining the initiative by the General Assembly or the courts, it “will lead to a discriminatory and job killing tax on all coal and gas fired electric generation plants in the Commonwealth.”

The Wolf administration called Energy Harbor’s decision “very encouraging.”

“Reducing emissions and maintaining existing clean energy resources are primary components in the fight to address climate change, and energy companies like Energy Harbor recognize this,” Mr. Wolf’s spokeswoman, Elizabeth Rementer, said.

“That Energy Harbor is reversing course specifically because of our efforts to participate in RGGI is a concrete example of the importance of this policy, and one that Pennsylvania is extremely pleased to hear.”

LINK

[dissident]

Here we see how the Republicans are compromised against nuclear power. For some retarded reason they think that if their states produce coal and gas, then they need to only ever see those fuels used for everything. That is pure nonsense. There is more than enough room for both nuclear and fossil fuel based power. And perhaps coal should be consigned to history where it belongs and not become some partisan pivot for inanity.

Have Carter's insane restrictions of fuel reprocessing been removed? It looks to me like they have not. Instead of fixating on coal production, perhaps US politicians should rectify this obvious hobbling of the ability of the USA to handle nuclear "waste" and other issues such as disarmament (although now we are entering a phase of re-armament).

[diemos]

And perhaps coal should be consigned to history where it belongs and not become some partisan pivot for inanity.

Everything that can be dug up and burned, will be dug up and burned.

It's just a question of when, by whom, and who will get to burn it.

[Tanada]

Depending on how the next four months develop people might be really really happy they have a fission power plant in their area.

Stop and think for a minute, a fission power station has up to 18 months between now and its next refueling outage which is when major repairs are conducted. Your local coal burner and natural gas burner have limited onsite storage of fuel to get them through a supply disruption, usually about three weeks for a large coal burner and a week in the form of stored liquid fuel for a gas plant like the one two miles from my home. They have four large gas turbine generators that usually operate as peaking plants but that can fill in when someone else is shut down and they are on a large diameter gas line for their normal fuel. They also have three 30,000 gallon (eyeball estimate) liquid fuel tanks they keep in reserve for pipeline gas interruptions.

If things get bad and coal train shipments are delayed or below demand they will burn through those stockpiles quicker than most folks can imagine. It is less of a risk for the gas burner as the heating season is ending and supplies are currently plentiful and delivered basically invisibly through underground networks. But if this lasts several months all sorts of disruptions might take place just from things going wrong.

Are road/railroad crews going to be working through the lockdown to keep the infrastructure in good enough shape? A lot of rail workers are near retirement age, it is not beyond the realm of possibility a lot of them decide to stay home rather than risk infection. As for the roads, my are scored something like a C- and should be okay for a while, but lots of places in America have scores of D or less on the infrastructure quality score sheets and it wouldn't take too many delays to force bridge closings in various places that would snarl things up but good. It isn't as if you can hire Air freight to deliver a hundred thousand tons of coal a week to a power station if the rail network gets fouled up.

[dissident]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVZbBBHrI4

An example of populist insanity. Any vote that is very close to 50/50 on a given question indicates no consensus and is basically a random coin toss. This is different from the US presidential vote numbers because there is no regional split involved.

[dissident]

Why would I invest in a breeder reactor today when uranium is so incredibly cheap?

The cost is the same (in the real world, not grifter world afflicting the NATO west) and you deal with something called "waste" that is the all time biggest BS political pretext against nuclear power.

[Tanada]

After 48 Years, Democrats Endorse Nuclear Energy In Platform

It took five decades, but the Democratic Party has finally changed its stance on nuclear energy. In its recently released party platform, the Democrats say they favor a “technology-neutral” approach that includes “all zero-carbon technologies, including hydroelectric power, geothermal, existing and advanced nuclear, and carbon capture and storage.”

That statement marks the first time since 1972 that the Democratic Party has said anything positive in its platform about nuclear energy. The change in policy is good — and long overdue — news for the American nuclear-energy sector and for everyone concerned about climate change. The Democrats’ new position means that for the first time since Richard Nixon was in the White House, both the Republican and Democratic parties are officially on record in support of nuclear energy. That’s the good news.

The less-than-good news is that the Democratic Party platform pledges to deploy outlandish quantities of new solar and wind capacity and do so in just five years. Further, the platform ignores the amount of land needed for that effort and how it would end up driving up the cost of electricity for low- and middle-income consumers. (More on that in a moment.)

About a decade ago, a high-ranking official at the Department of Energy told me that a big problem with nuclear energy is that it needs bipartisan support in Congress. That wasn’t happening, he said, because “Democrats are pro-government and anti-nuclear. Republicans are pro-nuclear and anti-government.” That partisan divide is apparent in the polling data. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Republicans strongly favored nuclear energy but only 42 percent of Democrats did so.

The last time the Democratic Party’s platform contained a positive statement about nuclear energy was in 1972, when the party said it supported “greater research and development” into “unconventional energy sources” including solar, geothermal, and “a variety of nuclear power possibilities to design clean breeder fission and fusion techniques.”

Since then, the Democratic Party has either ignored or professed outright opposition to nuclear energy. In 2016, the party’s platform said climate change “poses a real and urgent threat to our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures.” The platform contained 31 uses of the word “nuclear” including “nuclear proliferation,” “nuclear weapon,” and “nuclear annihilation.” It did not contain a single mention of “nuclear energy.”

That stance reflected the orthodoxy of the climate activists and environmental groups who have dominated the Democratic Party’s discussion on energy for decades. For instance, in 2005, about 300 environmental groups – including Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and Public Citizen – signed a manifesto which said “we flatly reject the argument that increased investment in nuclear capacity is an acceptable or necessary solution….[N]uclear power should not be a part of any solution to address global warming.” (The Sierra Club, the biggest environmental group in America, says it remains “unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.”)

What changed the Democrats’ stance on nuclear? I cannot claim any special knowledge about the drafting of the platform, but it appears that science and basic math finally won out. While vying for their party’s nomination, two prominent Democratic presidential hopefuls — Cory Booker and Andrew Yang – both endorsed nuclear energy. In addition, Joe Biden’s energy plan included a shout-out to nuclear.

While the pro-nuclear stance is a welcome change to the Democratic Party’s view on energy, the new platform also says that “Within five years, we will install 500 million solar panels, including eight million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 wind turbines.”

To call that a stretch goal would be charitable. The Democrats say that there is an “urgent need to decarbonize the power sector.” But attempting to do so with such massive quantities of solar and wind simply isn’t feasible, particularly in just five years. To put those numbers in perspective, the Solar Star project is one of the largest solar facilities in the country. It has about 1.7 million solar panels and at full capacity, can generate 579 megawatts of power. Thus, deploying 500 million solar panels (which would have a capacity of roughly 173,700 megawatts) would require building nearly 300 projects the size of Solar Star.

The wind numbers are equally daunting. The United States currently has about 60,000 wind turbines with a capacity of about 104,000 megawatts. Where are the Democrats planning to put those forests of turbines? In New York, a state dominated by Democrats, the backlash against the siting of large renewable projects has been so widespread that earlier this year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed through a measure that allows the state to override the regulations implemented by local governments when siting energy projects. In California, where Democrats have controlled the state government for decades, wind capacity has been essentially unchanged since 2013. Meanwhile,only 73 megawatts of new wind capacity is being built in New England. No new wind capacity is under construction in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Nor do the Democrats mention what building all that capacity will mean for ratepayers. But some basic estimates show how expensive it will be. Let’s assume each megawatt of solar and wind costs $1 million. At that price, adding 277,000 megawatts for new wind and solar capacity will cost about $277 billion. That figure is far too low as it ignores the cost of high-voltage transmission lines, substations, and the batteries needed to offset the incurable intermittency of the sun and the wind. But even at that price, it works out to more than $800 for each American. (Last year, energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimated that “full decarbonization of the US power grid” would cost about $4.5 trillion.) Whatever the actual tally, there’s no doubt that overhauling the power grid will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and that cost will ultimately be passed on to low- and middle-income consumers, either through higher taxes or higher electricity rates.

The essential point here is that talking about changing our energy and power systems is easy. Making real change happen takes decades and is staggeringly expensive.

Over the past two years or so, bipartisan support on Capitol Hill has led to new laws, including the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act and the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act that will help stimulate the development and deployment of new nuclear fuels, materials, and advanced reactors. So yes, the Democratic Party’s new support for nuclear energy is welcome and overdue. The hard work will be in turning that support into new reactors.

Forbes

[dissident]

Looks like the D. Party is not exclusively high on BLM and Antifa crack. It is some sort of miracle. Maybe corporate money did enough talking or maybe the insanity of anti-nuclear hysteria has sunk in. But another reason that most Americans will not recognize is the fact that Rosatom is dominating world wide nuclear reactor sales (68%) must be sticking in the craw of perennially Russophobic D. Party. That would be an absurd reason to change a platform but we are living in absurd times. I wonder whether Carter's ban on reprocessing and burning of so-called waste will finally be removed.