Nuclear plants in the US keep closing
vox.com
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At this point, it will probably be natural gas then what comes next. We have plenty of resources in the US to bridge to the next power source.
In terms of total pollution, it removes the vast majority toxic waste produced by coal which kills many people. Not to mention the mercury levels in the ocean it's causing.
WE really needed advanced technologies like Nuclear Energy in the face of virtually a coal/gas apocalypse. We are now in serious jeopardy without it. Why do you think China's making Nuclear energy such a massive initiative? Even India is doing decent research on them because they're sitting on a pile of thorium.
This isn't a problem that we can be gambling with. We only get one good try at this because there will be tens of thousands of years of repercussions. The fact that we're settling with "good enough" on this could mean millions will be displaced & billions of people could starve to death. All because we're being controlled by a greedy gov, greedier lobbyists & a population too stupid to do the right thing.
The gas lobby is really powerful in the US, and it's critical to get this myth busted.
(And doubly "no", see the sibling comment)
The culture of budgeting new nuclear plants: http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2013/11/21/why-officia...
Nuclear is tied to water in problematic ways: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/the-energy-futurist/the-ener...
Vermont Yankee leaks. Seabrook might be at risk from earthquake. It's time for new and safer nuke plants.
* Increased incentives for solar (which serves as a consistent energy source during daylight hours)
* Guaranteed rates for base load nuclear generation
* A carbon tax on fossil fuel generation, used to subsidize nuclear
Across the US, we already pay for reserve capacity, known as "peaker plants". They are paid simply to sit idle all year for those few days when we reach maximum system demand. It would be similar to paying low/zero-carbon base load plants (nuclear) to produce flat out, acknowledging their fixed costs.
I cringe at the thought of a substantial number of natural gas turbine plants being built, and the price of natural gas skyrocketing.
If we want more nuclear capacity we need to be serious about it. I think LFTR probably deserves a few billions in research, if it pans out it could make nuclear competitive on price and reduce a whole crap-ton of issues normally associated with nuclear.
Solar, though, is not a panacea, for a variety of reasons: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/243plj/the_koch_at... or http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/jcap-... or http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2014/04/24/sol...
Rather than firing up the peak-demand plants when load rises, just keep the plant humming along at the same rate and throttle back the cement producer, or biomass gasifier, or fertilizer plant, or aluminum smelter, or paper mill, or desalinator, until the grid load comes back down. Any industry that can singlehandedly soak up all the excess power on additional production would do.
Also, most if not all industrial electricity users have load shedding agreements with utilities; in the event of demand spikes, those industrial users are required to curb their power use within X number of minutes.
Energy storage, using electric car batteries as grid smoothing utilities is an interesting approach. Grid sized flow batteries[1] are another interesting option.
One friend said he expects it to be shut down (or at least announced) by 2020.
Maybe this is an uninformed opinion but it will be a bummer if they do. That's a lot of lost jobs for our area (1,700). I've lived here most of my life and no one hear feels unsafe (despite being near fault lines). They spend so much money on this thing, seems crazy to shut it down. (I heard they spent $70M on their SAP installation).
Just like it takes decades to build and start operating them. It takes very very long to close and decommission them.
I knew someone who was in that business, very nice niche market!
Yes Nuclear power doesn't emit greenhouse gasses, but to say it's clean isn't true either. Nuclear waste is particularly nasty, and the politics behind dumping it are concerning.
Maybe it does not seem a problem UNTIL you found that some nuclear waste (and with some I mean A LOT) have been buried illegally and without controls not too far from your house [true story -> http://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-waste...]
"Nuclear waste is bad--but I'm okay with you guys destroying the Gulf of Mexico."
Dumping every ounce of nuclear waste we have at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico would cause less damage than Deepwater Horizon did.
And that's before you start talking about things like coal dust that actually adds MORE radioactivity to the environment than nuclear waste.
It doesn't take many comments like this to ruin a thread for substantive discussion. The desired conditions are, unfortunately, fragile.
All: please don't post comments like this to HN.
Until then, nuclear power is actually proven to work and to do so more safely than any comparably effective fuel source, so it's unfortunate to see people saying we should abandon it in favor of a technology that has a demonstrated track record of not being good enough, and thus will just lead us to rely more on fossil fuels.
Literally the only technology worth our time right now is advanced nuclear fission. Occasionally hydroelectric when they're in the appropriate location.
I wish people would realise that solar will only be amazingly useful when we build dyson spheres. But we need Fusion AND Fission to get there.
I'm optimistic about solar too, but even if it looks exponential now, this doesn't tell you much about where it will level off. That will no doubt be determined by how cheap the panels become, and how cost effective storage technologies turn out to be.
But who needs logic.
Or the fact that they require huge amounts of energy to produce. Often offsetting the energy they produce themselves by many years. Not to mention the energy for all these panel come mostly from China which uses mostly coal plants. Which also use some of the shittiest, low grade flammable dirt from Australia (it's cheap).