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Obama Budget To Triple Nuclear Power Loan Guarantees
Hugh Pickens writes "When President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Wednesday that the country should build 'a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants,' it was one of the few times he got bipartisan applause. Now the NY Times reports that administration officials have confirmed their 2011 federal budget request next week will raise potential loan guarantees for nuclear projects to more than $54 billion, from $18.5 billion, and a new Energy Department panel will examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would use some of it. The Energy Department appears to be getting close to offering its first nuclear loan guarantee. Earlier this week, Southern Co. Chief Executive David Ratcliffe said the company expects to finalize an application for a loan guarantee 'within the next couple months,' while Scana Corp., which has also applied, is 'a couple months behind Southern' and is hopeful of receiving a conditional award 'sometime in the next months.'"
research funding for nuclear research such as thorium reactors or pebble bed reactors?
to increase safety and/or move onto other nuclear fuels
The public's support for that particular snippet of the state of the union was rather low, as CNN reported--so kindly point out to your non-tech friends that nuclear is the best alternative right now and we can't go entirely renewable for a long time.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Why do nuclear energy corporations get loan guarantees? Is the energy not as cheap as proponents say? Is it not profitable enough for private ventures to fund it?
The nuclear power industries worldwide already get very preferential treatment by not having to insure powerplants or paying for their waste disposal, but that apparently isn't enough.
Why is big oil being subsidized, when it's already massively profitable? And if nuclear is supposed to provide a cheaper source of electricity, why does it *need* subsidies? Every nuclear project seems to take twice as long as planned and cost an order of magnitude more than orginally estimated.
If we really want to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, why not focus on conservation? It's much cheaper than nuclear, and can even save the government money. With conservation, you also don't have to worry about accidents or nuclear waste.
This is a more environmentally friendly solution than ... wind power
What are your sources for this ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
There are huge improvement gains to be garnered with more efficient use of the electricity we generate today, greatly reducing the need for more power plants of any kind. But energy conservation and efficiency isn't "business sexy" or "politically sexy", look what happened to Carter when he tried to emphasize just being more efficient with what we have, with either electricity or transportation fuels. And he is a big nuke guy himself, he just groks being more efficient as both a longer range cost savings and also from a national security viewpoint. He had a lot of faults, but as to energy he is still the top prez we ever had.
Conservation is a boring sell for the big players (outside of some niche markets now like Data Centers are taking it seriously), wall street investors don't like it that much, there are no huge short term profits to get there because of the nature of improving systems that use electricity, it is too widely diversified there, they can't monopolize it as much. In a lot of cases, there are zero new studies, patents, or anything like that required to accomplish big gains in efficiency, no "investment" potential to rake in the short term profits.
Politicians don't like it that much, no big buzzwords and it's been seriously demonized as an idea over the years, they are afraid of coming across like quality of life deniers, that you have to sacrifice comfort for efficiency. Now that isn't true, but that is what happens with these arguments "Oh noes, I don't want to sit in some cold cave with dim light".
Of course that's silly, but the anti efficiency people, the pro "just generate more power!" folks, just push that meme and mindset, and have been very successful at it.
The "generate more power"! folks, as their top (and a lot of times only) emphasis, nuke or otherwise, make as much (non)sense as the "drill, baby drill"! folks do when it comes to transportation fuels. Want to save oil? Pretty easy, here's just one way, push three or four cylinder cars over sixes and eights. Heck, I bet single person light commuter cars could be run with just two cylinder engines today. Most people and uses for basic transportation have absolutely no need whatsoever for larger six or eight cylinder engines, and vehicles that can easily do two or three times the maximum posted speed limits. Just wasting fuel, because they can.
Back to electricity, look at most homes today, thoroughly dismal levels of insulation or planned air in or out, not even built tight, wasting huge amounts of electricity to keep ACs running near non stop in the summer, or if electric heat of some kind, wasting huge amounts of electricity in the winter. How about all that massive outside huge commercial advertising that burns all night long in big cities, or all those lit up and unoccupied offices? I am always gobsmacked whenever I visit a larger city at night to see this huge lit up disneyland/vegas blinking whooshing cascading panorama of excessive ostentatious consumption. It's like every big city is in this race to see how many light photons they can transmit to the space aliens or something, when actually zero of that advertising nonsense is really needed to illuminate the streets for people. They *could* get by with non electric commercial signage, and just have to deal with people only reading their signs in the daylight.
Can't do that though, got to be massive electricity energy hogs.
There's just tons of examples there. A huge amount of this commuting that goes on to go sit in front of a computer screen, moving meatbags twice a day by the tens of millions, by any means, personal or mass transit, instead of moving electrons and having a lot more people just stay home and work with better broadband deployment. And that would, in turn, reduce this artificial "need" for so many huge office towers for those commuters to go sit in all day in front of a computer screen, that require tremendous energy to build and maintain. Big office towers came a
environmentalists hate nuclear power, and conservatives don't think there is any need to switch from fossil fuels. So who's left to support nuclear power? only the few people who consider global warming a real problem, and have taken a rational look at nuclear power as a possible solution. And that is very few people.
This my big problem with environmentalists. Global warming is a big problem. All solutions need to be considered. But instead environmentalists are using it to promote the things they've been promoting all along. This is why people doubt the global warming theories, because it seems really convenient that all of a sudden there's this big global problem and the only solution is to do the things they've been telling us to do for decades. If environmentalists started saying stuff like "I still don't like nuclear power, but global warming is bigger than my dislike for nuclear". Then they'd have a lot more credibility.
This is a great argument that clearly has a lot of value for getting things done, lets apply it to everything we do as a country:
I don't know what type of backyard you have that you're worried about someone building an entire nuclear waste storage facility in it but you must be one rich motherfucker. Unless of course by backyard you mean some sort of arbitrary distance and if that's the case what exactly is this arbitrary distance and does everyone who has a learned opinion on the storage and handling of nuclear materials have to move within this distance?
Does this include funding for nuclear fusion projects in the US? Or just the current fission reactor based technology? One scientist said there's a 50% chance of fusion becoming a reality 20 years after it gets serious funding. I agree with him
Anything any administration does to further nuclear power and alternative energy, I am 100% in favor of.
This is my sig.
...then he should propose:
1. to store the waste in Chicago
2. to have the owners of the plant fully pay for waste storage costs
3. to have the owners of the plant assume full liability for damages from accidents
While #1 is a bit sarcastic, #2 and #3 are not.
We would at times like to believe that there are surmountable technological solutions to every problem. Sometimes there aren't.
NEVER, EVER, in the US, forego oversight when it comes to things infratructural. It just doesn't work. There are too many people around that will see money and nothing else and who don't care who dies so long as it isn't them. It's a fine country, and an enormous economic catalyst, but some things can't be left to the market alone. This is one of them.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.