10-05-2016, 12:48 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-05-2016, 12:55 PM by Eric the Green.)
(08-25-2016, 04:15 PM)David Horn Wrote:(08-22-2016, 02:49 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(06-06-2016, 01:28 PM)radind Wrote: There will be a price to pay for the closing of nuclear plants.
Quote:http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/mag...8Z,FM6S9,1
Decline of US nuclear industry is accelerating
… "Over the past few years, US companies have closed or announced plans to close eight reactors with a combined capacity of 6300 MW. Fertel claimed that another 15 to 20 plants are at risk of closure over the next 5 to 10 years. “We’re driving companies to make decisions that our nation will regret for the next 20 or 30 years, or longer, on the basis of short-term, unsustainable price signals,” …Replacing all the shuttered plants with new natural-gas generation would wipe out about one-quarter of the carbon emissions reductions that are projected in the administration’s Clean Power Plan. The changeover would also cancel out 40% of the cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that the US committed to in December at the Paris climate change conference.”…
We need to replace nuclear with solar. Delay is not a reasonable option.
Ask the Germans about that. No one is more attuned to renewables and more averse to nuclear, so they were the first to come to grips with the obvious. You can't run a modern society on intermittent power, so they are biting the bullet and reopening some coal fired plants. Is that better?
In a system that uses the pooled resources from many solar and wind plants at once, there is no intermittence. That has been proven. When one is down, the others are working.
If nuclear can be made safe, it's an option. There must be no chance of a meltdown, and all nuc waste must be recycled. I reported on the old thread that there's some movement toward this, especially in Russia. Personally, I don't like the risk of entire regions becoming off limits due to another Fukushima. We may be truly fu'ked if we rely on nuk. A few hundred square miles of solar can power the world. All we need is transmission lines. The transition is not immediate, but we must go as fast as we can.
Germany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_...in_Germany