At the recent summit of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, the member countries signed an agreement to reduce carbon emissions, and an increased use of nuclear power in these countries was cited as a key step toward accomplishing this goal. Vietnam and Thailand are two countries that have already started steps to build nuclear plants – the first in those nations.
I have made the point several times that reducing carbon emissions in the United States is important, but will ultimately not make a significant global impact if developing nations, particularly those in Asia, do not also make cuts. The fact that the ASEAN countries have started to move in this direction is encouraging. And the fact that they intend to rely on nuclear power to do so makes them more progressive in this area than the United States. It’s time for us to follow their lead and start building some new nuclear power plants of our own.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Alternative Energy Technology, International Environmental News . 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.
August 25th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Actually, after the nuclear building industry committed hari kari, gov’t subsidies are drawing out new plans.
TVA has announced plans to finish the mothballed & 60% complete Watts Bar 2 (1.2 GW) in five years for an estimated $2.5 billion. This is shortly after they restarted the 1 GW Browns Ferry 1 24 years after a bad fire there shut it down.
Texas Utilities has ordered two 1.7 GW nukes from Mitsubishi and Constellation has a deal with the French Areva to build one 1.6 GW nuke at Calvert Cliffs to join the two existing 0.9 GW nukes there.
Quite a few more US nukes are “in the hopper”, more than there are gov’t subsidies for, so it will be interesting to see who gets the Gov’t $ by building first and who chickens out and cancels. A multi-billion $ game of musical chairs !
August 29th, 2007 at 12:53 am
Why do they need government subsidies? If nuclear cant pay for itself, we should not use it. Otherwise what happens when the subsidies run out? The rate payers end up paying for mothballed plants for plants that are not cost effective. Its also interesting that foreign companies are being hired to build these plants.
September 8th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Loan guarantees aren’t exactly subsidies. If the plants end up half-built or mothballed after government guarantees their loans, the government will of course be out that money, but if the plants go ahead and produce, they’ll prevent natural gas consumption, and that means the government will still be out money, because natural gas is more than ten times as costly as uranium, and in some markets it is heavily taxed.
If the loans are not guaranteed by government, then the developers will have to be looking over their shoulders lest the government, eager for gas revenue, finds some excuse to shut them down. That extra risk translates into a higher cost of money (a higher interest rate).