Al Gore recognizes that any solution to global warming is going to require a revival of nuclear power. He was edging toward that in his House of Representatives testimony last week — yet downplayed the idea on the following grounds: “Nuclear power plants are the costliest to build and they take the longest time and at present they come in only one size — extra large.”
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Nuclear plants take more time to build and are more expensive than comparative coal plants, but they are not prohibitively expensive. The Japanese are now building reactors in five years at competitive prices. Higher construction costs are more than compensated by lower fuel costs and higher capacity ratings. America’s existing nuclear plants are now operating so profitably that Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal recently proposed a windfall profits tax because the state’s reactors were making too much money.
And this is all before environmental considerations are factored into the equation. In three years of operation, a 1,500 MW coal plant will spew three million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — the prime source of the world’s carbon emissions. An identical nuclear reactor will produce only a few bundles of highly radioactive fuel rods that can be safely stored in a nearby storage pool.
Read the full text of this op-ed at the Wall Street Journal Online.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . 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.
April 5th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
The editorial in the Wall Street Journal (’Our Atomic Future’) was excellent. It reminded me of warnings years ago by Petr Beckmann, whom I hope appears in the forthcoming book. Not only is atomic energy the way to go, coal is decidely not !
One recommendation, that the call for Atomic Energy is also a denunciation of the stupidity and heartlessness that keeps us hostage to coal and its attendant evils. Lets take a moral stand: We must do this.
Otherwise, atomic energy will never even enter the conversation.