Obama’s Ambitious Clean-Energy Goal Will Depend on Nuclear—and the Next President

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601794/obamas-ambitious-clean-energy-goal-will-depend-on-nuclear-and-the-next-president/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Obama’s Ambitious Clean-Energy Goal Will Depend on Nuclear—and the Next President[/font]

[font size=4]Leaders of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada are expected to call for half of North America’s electricity to come from non-emitting sources by 2025, but getting there isn’t going to be easy.[/font]

by Richard Martin | June 28, 2016

[font size=3]President Barack Obama, along with Canadian premier Justin Trudeau and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, is expected to announce ambitious new clean-energy goals at the “Three Amigos” summit in Ottawa this week. According to the White House, the three leaders will set a target of generating half of North America’s power from non-carbon-emitting sources by 2025. That is well beyond the emissions reduction targets set by the Paris climate accord, last December.

For Canada, that is not a stretch: the country already gets more than 80 percent of its electricity from clean sources, including hydro, solar, wind, and nuclear. For Mexico and the U.S., however, it will be tougher: Mexico gets about one-quarter of its electricity from clean sources, while the U.S. gets around one-third. Both of those totals include nuclear power—which, unfortunately, is on the decline.

Nuclear plants in the U.S. currently provide about 20 percent of the country’s electricity, but utilities in recent years have closed or announced plans to close several large nuclear plants, including the Diablo Canyon station in California. As many as 20 nuclear plants could be shuttered over the next decade, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. If that power is replaced by fossil fuels, it would dramatically increase emissions of greenhouse gases. Getting to the target of 50 percent clean energy generation is probably unattainable without significant contributions from nuclear power, but the industry appears to be withering.



Of course, it will be up to the next president, who takes office in seven months, to determine whether we ever attain what the Obama administration admits is a “stretch goal.” Hillary Clinton has announced a sweeping plan for increasing renewable energy if elected, but she has flip-flopped several times over the years on whether nuclear power should be part of the nation’s energy portfolio. Most recently, she says her “Clean Energy Challenge” would include grants to support new nuclear construction.

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[PADemD]

1. I lived through 3-Mile Island

We don't need more nuclear plants.

[NNadir]

2. Seven million people didn't live through air pollution this year.

Last edited Tue Jun 28, 2016, 11:18 PM - Edit history (1)

Nuclear energy saves lives, and it follows that anti-nuke ignorance costs lives.

The figures for the deaths from air pollution, which exceed the deaths of World War II every seven years, are found in the risk factor analysis Global Burden of Disease Survey published in 2013. A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

The risk of nuclear energy doesn't even appear in that publication.

The fact that you lived through Three Mile Island, meaning that you have survived 37 years, qualifies you to announce your judgement that 7 million people will not live through this year because of air pollution how?

I would submit that you don't know a damned thing about nuclear energy, nor about risk, nor about epidemiology irrespective of where you lived in 1979.

The atmosphere is collapsing. The anti-nuke stupidity that flies around is directly responsible for this awful state of affairs, in which many generations will suffer because some people in the period between 1980 and 2020 had their heads up their asses.

Have a nice day.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. I also lived through 3-Mile Island

Last edited Wed Jun 29, 2016, 07:22 PM - Edit history (3)

And I remember the Chevy Corvair (deemed “unsafe at any speed.”)

We may assume that a car built today will not be built like the Corvair, indeed, after a few years, even Corvairs were built differently. Similarly we may assume that a nuclear plant built today will not be built like the plant at Three Mile Island.

[PADemD]

6. 2014-'16 Infiniti Q50 sedans

"In certain rare circumstances, just after starting the vehicle, a software issue in the Direct Adaptive Steering system's electronic control unit can lead to a lack of steering responsiveness and change in turning radius," wrote Kyle Bazemore, an Infiniti spokesman in response to a query from Edmunds on Thursday.

http://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2014-16-infiniti-q50-recalled-for-steering-problem.html

Besides the question of cars, how many nuclear power plants today are sitting on earthquake fault lines?

Why Do We Build Nuclear Power Plants In Stupid Places?
Hazardous Facilities In Hazardous Locations Are An Undeniable Threat To All

California, the land of earthquakes, has two nuclear reactors built near fault lines, Diablo Canyon and San Onofre. The alarming prospect is that the Diablo Canyon plant was only designed with a maximum stress level of 7.5. The San Onofre plant, built between the major metropolitan areas of San Diego and Los Angeles, has a maximum stress level of only 7.0. Again, all of this in prime earthquake country.

http://www.newsfocus.org/nuclear_stupidity.htm

I would not trust any placement of nuclear power plants to corporations.

[NNadir]

7. How many California nuclear plants have killed as many people as will die in the next ten minutes...

...from air pollution?

The very, very, very, very, very dangerous assumption of anti-nukes is that every other form of energy can kill vast numbers of people unless it can be proved that nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy is without risk.

This attitude is extremely destructive and is destroying the planetary atmosphere at a record pace.

In general, people shouting the loudest about so called "nuclear stupidity" are not of the same intellectual quality - far from it in fact - as the set of Nobel Laureates who founded the nuclear energy industry.

One of them, in fact, the most influential, Glenn Seaborg, was among other things, the overseer of the development of commercial nuclear power in this country, and also served, besides being Chairman of the Atomic Energy Agency (as it was known then), Chancellor of the University of California, Chief Negotiator of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and President of the American Chemical Society. He was personally the advisor to every US President from Truman to Clinton, the author of more than 500 scientific publications, many books and the discoverer of ten elements of the periodic table, and for 60 years, a citizen of California.

Glenn Seaborg Bio

It is telling that there are people in the mindless, and frankly deadly and extremely dangerous anti-nuke junk thinking squads of internet fueled scientific illiterates who would be so poorly educated as to imply that Glenn Seaborg was "stupid."

They think that they can google their way to websites produced by people as illiterate as themselves and be convincing with third grade level shibboleths.

Diablo Canyon and San Onofre saved human lives that would have been lost to air pollution had they not been built. The decisions to shut these plants and not build replacements will kill people, particularly in California, because it's geography and geology make it a terrible place to burn dangerous fossil fuels.

One of the things that is notable about anti-nukes is that they elevate their febrile imaginations over the very real observation of real and on going tragedy before humanity. Air pollution kills 7 million people a year. That works out to more than 130 every ten minutes, dead, unnecessarily killed because dumb anti-nukes can't think, refuse to think, and insist on spewing their barely literate nonsense.

Ignorance kills.

Enjoy the coming holiday weekend.

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. The Infiniti problem affects drivers, "in certain rare circumstances."

The Corvair problem affected drivers who inflated their tires normally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#.22The_Sporty_Corvair.22

… To make up for the cost-cutting lack of a front stabilizer bar (anti-roll bar), Corvairs required tire pressures which were outside of the tire manufacturers' recommended tolerances. The Corvair relied on an unusually high front to rear pressure differential (15psi front, 26psi rear, when cold; 18 psi and 30psi hot), and if one inflated the tires equally, as was standard practice for all other cars at the time, the result was a dangerous oversteer. …

I am a knee-jerk anti-nuke. However, I try to be rational about things:

1. Climate change is an existential threat.
2. Today’s nuclear plant designs are significantly safer than the designs of half a century ago.
3. When it comes to siting new plants, corporations cannot build them just anywhere they want. They need to get approval from the NRC.
   http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/esp.html

[progressoid]

3. Do it.

[diane in sf]

4. Nuclear is not clean, it's dirty, slow, and so expensive it requires government mandates to shove

it down people's throats. It also wastes money that could be used on better solutions (wind, solar, storage eficiency). Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc. these are the gifts that nukes keep on giving.

[NNadir]

8. Really? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima killed how many people, compared to...

...the seven million people who die each year from air pollution?

The recent global survey of the 67 most prominent risk factors in human mortality, published by an international consortium of people called "scientists" did not even mention nuclear energy as a risk factor, although it had quite a bit to say about air pollution.

Anyone with an ounce of scientific literacy - this excludes the vast majority of anti-nukes - can go to a library and read it: Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.

Wind, solar and storage efficiency haven't worked, aren't working, and won't work. We spent two trillion dollars on this pop junk in the last ten years on this planet, with the result that the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere is increasing at an unprecedented rate, now averaging 3.60 ppm a year.

What anti-nuke chanting is "shoving down people's throats" quite literally and hardly (unfortunately) figuratively is more and more and more quite deadly air pollutants, water pollutants, and soil pollutants. Anti-nuke ignorance is quite literally killing the future for my children and everyone else's children on the planet; it is an effort of one generation that refused to become educated to steal the future from every generation to follow.

Every living thing on this planet is threatened by anti-nuke stupidity and ignorance.

Enjoy the holiday weekend and, since you're in California, don't breathe too deeply. Ignorance has made your air quite deadly, far more deadly than in many other places in the world.