Small modular nuclear reactor and hydrogen for energy proposals and trials are all zombie proposals sucking time, effort, and willpower away from the necessary decarbonization of our economy. This little roundup is just an appetizer course for the absurd feast of riches to come with canceled projects and crashing dreams.
Ultimately, California will have to determine whether another five years of Diablo Canyon operations is a cost-effective solution to evolving reliability needs. The plant isn’t nimble enough to respond to the rapid ramping up and down requirements caused by the massive growth in solar generation. Like a light switch, it’s either on or off. And it’s designed to operate 90% of the time — 7,884 hours a year.
The French nuclear programme was a great success, but the conditions to replicate it are gone, and there will be no new nuclear plants built because they cannot be financed, and there are cheaper alternatives (and baseload is not adapted to our new system).
Georgia Power Co. announced Monday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing and is now in commercial operation, seven years late and $17 billion over budget.
n fact, the announcements by the Ford government of 4800MW in new build nuclear projects at the Bruce Nuclear site near Tiverton, and three additional new reactors at the Darlington site east of Toronto, committed Ontario to one of the largest nuclear construction programs in the world.
Insightful analysis by an authority on wind energy and energy policy with extensive experience in the offshore wind sector.
There’s simply no space left for new (or even, soon, old) nuclear
Of the 473 commissioners for whom Heern could find information on what they did after they left utility regulation, 50% of them went to work for one of the industries they regulated, or in an industry-adjacent role such as consulting. “That revolving door is definitely alive and well,” Heern told me.
A lot of articles about the closure of the last German nuclear power plants have emphasized the cost in carbon emissions of closing nuclear plants rather than coal (more precisely: lignite) plants: see for instance Jean-Marc Jancovici, the highly publicized French pundit.
Amid a confluence of crises—the Ukraine war, an energy crisis, and climate breakdown—nuclear energy is experiencing a renaissance, at least in the rhetoric of politicians and pundits across Europe, North America, and beyond. After all, it’s tempting to propose these generators of low-carbon energy as a panacea to this daunting phalanx of calamities. But in fact, the case against nuclear power and for genuinely renewable energies has never been so conclusive—and so important. In early March, Russia captured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine—the largest in Europe with six reactors, each the size of the one that melted down in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster—and transformed it into an army base from which it fires artillery at Ukrainian positions.
2023 © Wind-Works by Paul Gipe