Have you read my fellow Terra Rossa blogger William Tucker’s opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal?
Lots to like here.
I got a kick out of Bill’s re-branding of nuclear energy: “terrestrial energy,” he calls it.
He says it should be one of the solutions to climate change and our growing energy demand.
Says the Europeans are both a good example (heavy reliance on this source) and a bad example (government ownership).
Says investors need to foot the bill for new nuclear power plants and then reap the rewards.
Says we need an honest national debate about “terrestrial energy” that confronts the safety question, the storage question, the subsidy question.
Our sponsors here are more open to this discussion than others, while asking tough questions.
What do you think? Is “terrestrial energy” something America should add to its energy portfolio? I am looking forward to Bill’s book.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Alternative Energy Technology, International Environmental News, Politics/Government, Terra Rossa . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:52 pm
It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Whatever it takes to diversify the energy portfolio. Whether it’s private or government owned is irrelevant at this stage given that state intervention is the soup du jour in cases like Freddy Mac & Fanny Mae.
Clocks ticking.
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:28 am
Thanks for the invitation to post.
Many feel nuclear power has a role to play going forward. The original post above forgot an interesting metric re: Europe’s use of nuclear power - their carbon emissions (total and per-capita) are well below those of any other developed regions of similar size and population density. I don’t want to launch a climate change debate on a conservative website, but if one is interested in managing emissions from energy generation - nuclear power is essential.
Nuclear also has a role to play for those countries wishing to move toward a hydrogen economy and/or improve water supplies through desalination (pressure for energy intensive seawater desalination are increasing in, for example, drought stricken Australia).
Critiques of nuclear power’s safety are nothing more than emotive rhetoric. If one considers western designed reactors, no other industry has a better record. Even non-western designs have been dramatically improved over the past two decades. Those who aim to kill nuclear must go back decades to reference Chernobyl or poor mining practices to make their point. Modern designs and operating practices are not just safe, but the safest on Earth. If one is genuinely interested in reducing risk to human lives due to energy generation - go wage a campaign outside a coal mine in China.
Waste storage is a political issue as is spent fuel reprocessing in the USA (currently ongoing in France, the UK, Russia, India and China). Storage has been solved technically (look, for example to the WIPP in the US or the repository development in Sweden for examples).
Proliferation would only be minimally influenced by further commercial nuclear power deployment - particularly in the USA. Around the world, smaller research reactors used for materials research and production of medical and industrial isotopes (using highly enriched uranium) as well as facilities involved in other parts of the nuclear fuel cycle (enrichment/Iran) are a much more significant risk and this is where the risk mitigation money is going at the moment.
Subsidies should be (and it is my understanding that they are) distributed as a particular government deems necessary to achieve their relevant goals (emission cuts, energy security, etc.). I believe, with respect to energy, adverse changes - via competition from huge, rapidly developing, lean and very hungry markets such as India and China - are coming too quickly to rely only on market pressure for mitigating and adaptive responses. Proactive, government intervention/motivation is required. This means some manipulation of the financial equations to foster deployment of different technologies that would otherwise not have been called off the bench.