Thursday, May 04, 2006

Report of the Week: Rocky Mountain Institute Economics of Nuclear Power

This weeks report of the week is on the economics of Nuclear power. As usuall Amory Lovins manages to take a fresh look at an oft visited subject.

An example of something you may not have considered:

"not only wind arrays can lose output for an extended
period: av. US nuclear outage is 37 days every 17 months"


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Climate Change Action

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1 Comments:

At 3:40 PM, Blogger .. said...

Amory Lovins is absolutely inaccurate, and he's doing nothing whatsoever to help solve the fossil-fuel induced climate change problem with comments like this.

Nuclear outage times have gone way down in recent years. The utilities don't make any money when they have an outage. However, they have lots of expenses while doing the work during an outage.

During the last several years, actual U.S. nuclear power generation has gone up while capacity has remained the same. The reason is that there have been improvements in efficiency, including decreases in outage times. There is a chart of this at http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/reactsum.html

Utilities are businesses and they try to run their equipment in the most efficient manner possible.

If Climate Change Action is really serious about addressing climate change, you need to reconsider your stand against nuclear energy.

Perhaps the science of the issue is more important than the social alliances that have existed within the environmental movement. The anti-nuclear movement is getting quite threadbare because the reality is that when nuclear energy is abandoned, COAL usually takes its place.

As you well know, COAL is absolutely the worst fuel from a climate change perspective.

 

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