Climate change and energy update

The Next 16 Nuclear Power Plants That Will Be Built In Your Backyard

Four fascinating documentaries about nuclear power

After all these years of hybrids hogging ouf “car pool” lanes as well as huge subsidies, we learn:

The new Chevrolet Cruze Eco can reach eye-popping fuel economy levels of more than 50 miles per gallon on the highway, which even in this era of hybrid-electric cars stands among the best. But here’s the real trick: The Cruze Eco is neither a hybrid nor electric. It runs on that “old” technology, the conventional gasoline engine. … This year, General Motors, Ford and Hyundai began selling cars with conventional engines that achieve 40 mpg or more on the highway, exceeding the fuel efficiency of some hybrids. … The new fuel-efficient gasoline cars, critics say, raise doubts about government efforts that favor any one technology over another. If subsidies are to be made, they argue, they should go to efficient cars, no matter what their power source. (more)

Solar Savior

Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells. … In the lab, researchers have achieved solar efficiencies of as high as 41 percent, an unheard of efficiency 30 years ago. Inexpensive thin-film methods have achieved laboratory efficiencies as high as 20 percent, still twice as high as most of the solar systems in deployment today. … Historically, the cost of PV modules (what we’ve been using above) is about half the total installed cost of systems. The rest of the cost is installation. Fortunately, installation costs have also dropped at a similar pace to module costs. … 

The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now. In fact, given that retail electricity prices are currently rising by a few percent per year, prices will probably cross earlier, around 2018 for the country as a whole, and as early as 2015 for the sunniest parts of America. 10 years later, in 2030, solar electricity is likely to cost half what coal electricity does today. 

Watch How a Nuclear Chain Reaction Works Using Mouse Traps and Ping Pong Balls

The Top 10 Worst Nuclear Nightmares

U.S. Nuclear Waste Increasing With No Permanent Storage Available

It Could Happen Here

From one perspective, nuclear power has been remarkably safe. The 1986 Chernobyl accident will ultimately kill about 10,000 people, mostly from cancer. Coal plants are much deadlier: the fine-particulate air pollution they produce kills about 10,000 people each year in the United States alone. 

Of course, for most people this kind of accounting is beside the point. Their horror over even the possibility of a meltdown means that the nuclear-power industry needs constant and aggressive regulation for the public to allow it to stay in business. 

Yet despite the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has often been too timid in ensuring that America’s 104 commercial reactors are operated safely. Nuclear power is a textbook example of the problem of “regulatory capture” — in which an industry gains control of an agency meant to regulate it. Regulatory capture can be countered only by vigorous public scrutiny and Congressional oversight, but in the 32 years since Three Mile Island, interest in nuclear regulation has declined precipitously. 

In 2002, after the commission retreated from demanding an early inspection of a reactor,Davis-Besse in Ohio, that it suspected was operating in a dangerous condition, its own inspector general concluded that it “appears to have informally established an unreasonably high burden of requiring absolute proof of a safety problem, versus lack of a reasonable assurance of maintaining public health and safety.” 

Even before Three Mile Island, a group of nuclear engineers had proposed that filtered vents be attached to buildings around reactors, which are intended to contain the gases released from overheated fuel. If the pressure inside these containment buildings increased dangerously — as has happened repeatedly at Fukushima — the vents would release these gases after the filters greatly reduced their radioactivity. 

France and Germany installed such filters in their plants, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined to require them. Given the influence of America’s example, had the commission demanded the addition of filtered vents, they would likely have been required worldwide, including in Japan.