The intermittent nature of nuclear power

[kristopher]

4. You couldn't be more wrong.

It is a given that one of the major problems with continued or increasing dependency on nuclear power are the consequences when it lets you down. When the situation is a non-emergency like this the outages often last weeks, months or even years, meaning that large amounts of backup power must be procured unexpectedly and consequently at high costs. And, when the failure is catastrophic such as Fukushima, then you have large blocks of national infrastructure (such as in Germany and Japan) that have to be replaced - again unexpectedly and at high costs.


The issue has never been whether there are negative consequences Baggins, it has been and is the need to firmly plan for a transition off of nuclear just as we need to firmly plan for a transition off of fossil fuels. Germany has been planning their transition for more than a decade, so the disruptions of accelerating that change are minor compared to Japan.

If there is a major Fukushima or Chernobyl scale incident near a population center in the US, do you think even an industry friendly NRC is going to be able to keep our 100+ reactors on line? Instead of extending the licenses for these plants they need to be replaced with renewables. The more renewables are deployed the harder it is for coal and even natural gas to stay online and make money.