While Australia and New Zealand slavishly follow the EU’s obsessive focus on “renewables” despite the mathematically incontrovertible fact that they just cannot feasibly replace fossil fuels, some in the US are recalling America’s “can do” spirit – and making next-generation nuclear happen.
Five minutes’ scribbling on the back of an envelope is all that’s needed to show that current “renewables” (biomass, hydro, solar and wind), will never satisfy the energy demands of a modern, industrialised society – and absolutely not within the timeframes demanded by the Krazy Klimate Kult. The only viable replacement for oil and coal is nuclear – it’s that simple. But nuclear is the one energy technology the green-left religiously refuses to countenance.
The U.S. is currently involved in a massive effort to revamp the nation’s fading nuclear power industry by developing safer fuel and power plants. Idaho National Laboratory is a key component in that plan started during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration[…]
Much of the hysteria around nuclear energy – despite the demonstrable fact that it has by far the safest track-record of any energy technology – relates to older, 50s and 60s era reactors. But nuclear technology has hardly stood still for decades. A new generation of small modular reactors (SMR) are much cheaper and safer than the old-school plants and their iconic cooling towers. The US military is developing SMRs that will fit on a truck.
The push to revamp nuclear power plants coincides with shifting attitudes on nuclear power as it has become apparent that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar won’t be able to replace the burning of fossil fuels to meet demands.
“Pretty much any studies that you look at, the carbon emission reduction goals that utilities, states and countries are looking to achieve cannot be done without nuclear power,” Wagner said.
He also said support for nuclear power among elected officials is partly driven by competition with Russia and China, which have become exporters of nuclear technology.
The great hypocrisy of virtue-signalling EU nations like Germany is that for all their palaver about “going green”, the truth is that they are largely outsourcing their emissions to Eastern Europe. Not only does this not actually lower emissions, it creates a strategic nightmare, with major Western powers increasingly dependent on Russia and China for their basic energy needs.
The lab is also helping a Utah utility and an Oregon company with plans to build a dozen small modular reactors at the Idaho site. Those reactors would be conventional light-water reactors, but designers say they would be much smaller, safer and cheaper to build than the large light-water reactors now used across the U.S. to generate electricity.
The Idaho lab is also looking at ways to recycle spent nuclear fuel, as well as process nuclear fuel in such a way that it produces more energy and less spent material. The nation currently has no repository for spent nuclear fuel, and most of it remains at the commercial nuclear power plants that produce it. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says there is about 77,000 tons (70,000 metric tons) of spent fuel throughout the nation.
WTOP News
Waste remains a concern, not least plutonium with the potential to be recycled into weapons material, but SMRs will at least drastically cut the amount of waste. More importantly, emerging nuclear technology, such as thorium reactors, have the potential to actually burn off existing waste.
If the green-left really want to cut carbon emissions, it’s long past time for them to drop their hysterical, quasi-religious proscription on nuclear energy.
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