Tag Archives: Wind

Nukes siphon funds from solar and wind –Jill Stein

It’s refreshing to see cogent criticism with a minimum of personal attacks.
While I think President Obama’s climate speech was indeed the best
by any president ever, that bar is low, and there is substantial
room for improvement.

PR from Green Shadow Cabinet yesterday,

RELEASE: Obama’s climate proposals fall dangerously short, ignore time-critical opportunity to revive the economy,

Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2012 presidential nominees noted,

“You can’t give your child an ‘all of the above diet’ with toxic
lead and arsenic, and think that adding some spinach and blueberries
is going to make it OK. Likewise, reducing carbon pollution from
coal does not make fracking, tar sands oil, deep water and Arctic
drilling OK. The climate is spiraling into runaway warming. Obama’s
promotion of cheap dirty fossil fuels makes coal regulations just
window dressing on a disastrous policy.”

In addition to its broad concerns on fossil fuel use, Continue reading →

Fukushima Floating Wind Begins

Japan’s TEPCO is deploying the offshore wind solution we need in Georgia.
It’s big baseload, Georgia Power and Southern Company, just like you like!

Martin Foster write for Wind Power Monthly 25 June 2013,

Work starts on Fukushima floating project:
JAPAN: Installation of wind turbines in the testing phase of the biggest offshore floating project to date will finally get under way this week, 20 kilometres off the coast of Fukushima.

Two 2MW downwind floating turbines are scheduled to be towed from
shipyards belonging to Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding in Chiba
prefecture to Onahama port on 28 June, according to a new schedule
released by Takeshi Ishihara a civil engineering professor at the
University of Tokyo and technical adviser to the project.

These are the floating wind farms

designed to survive tsunamis and typhoons.
A typhoon is the Pacific Ocean version of a hurricane.
How about we tether some of these to the continental shelf off the coast of
Georgia?
Then they plus solar onshore could replace Plants Vogtle and Hatch the same way
these wind turbines plus solar inland are replacing Fukushima Dai-ichi.

Continue reading →

French, German, and Spanish nukes unreliable in heat

Invest in nukes for

hot water in rivers damaging plants and animals
while there’s less water for agriculture and cities
and droughts and summer heat waves cause power shortages.
That’s Europe’s experience.

Or we could profit by their experience and get on with
reliable renewable solar and wind power.

The Guardian, 12 August 2003,

Heatwave hits French power production,

France has shut down the equivalent of four nuclear power stations
as the heatwave eats into the country’s electricity generating
capacities. With temperatures in French rivers hitting record highs,
some power plants relying on river water to cool their reactors have
been forced to scale back production.

Julio Godoy wrote for OneWorld.net 28 July 2006,

European Heat Wave Shows Limits of Nuclear Energy,

Continue reading →

Southern Company only building nukes because they’re not paying, we are –Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy said he’d be for nukes if they were safe or economical, but they are neither, while solar and wind are both.

After calling

the pro-nuke movie Pandora’s Promise a hoax,
he addressed “safe” by pointing out the movie’s
claimed former anti-nuke leaders were
never leaders while major nuclear utility executives
are indeed now anti-nuke leaders.
(For example, I met

former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman
in DC where he was testifying against nukes.)
Then Kennedy tore into

Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear boondoggle
and pointed out solar and wind are winning even against massive distortions
in the economic playing field caused by public service commissions
letting regulated utilities make the rest of us pay for their profits
on uneconomic nukes.

Andrew Revkin posted on Youtube 19 June 2013,

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Director of Pandora’s Promise Spar Over Nuclear Power,

The last nuclear power plant constructed in the world was in Finland.
It cost about $11 billion a gigawatt.
Now I’m involved with construction right now of one of the largest
power plants that’s in north America which is in the Mojave Desert,
and it’s

a solar thermal plant, and it’s costing about $3 billion a
gigawatt….

There’s no individual and there’s no merchant utility that will build
a nuclear power plant, because they’re so expensive.
You can’t make money on it.
The only ones who will build them are regulated utilities like
the Southern Company in Georgia… because
they make money by spending money.
They get reimbursed for their capital costs plus 12 or 15% per year.
So they’ll construct it
once they get approval from the public utility commission.
Then they want to spend as much money on their capital costs
because they’re not paying for it.
You and I are paying for it.

I don’t think Bill Gates, or I saw Paul Allen was one of the
funders of this film, that they’re going to spend their own money
building one of these [nuclear] plants….

You could make energy by burning prime rib,
but why would you take the most expensive way to do it.

And by last fall, the cost per gigawatt of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels

was already under $3 billion per gigawatt
so distributed solar PV makes just as much sense as massive desert
thermal solar, and both make far more economic sense than nuclear.
Plus costs of solar PV keep going down, pushing solar deployments
up like compound interest, while nukes always take years to build
and

always cost more than budgeted.

Southern Company is the king of nuke cost overruns, going

26 times overbudget per unit on Vogtle 1 and 2
and already

19 months late and about a billion dollarsoverbudget on Vogtle 3 and 4.
Then there are the safety issues: a failed nuke can be Chernobyl
or Fukushima and many nukes

leak radioactive tritium into groundwater
and vent radiation into the air, while a failed solar plant is
a bunch of glass.

I got into the [solar] industry
to show that there was an alternative and that the alternative
was economically viable.
And not only that, on
a level playing field,
if we weren’t giving them the subsidies to the incumbents,
our technologies would beat them and soundly.
They simply couldn’t compete.

He called the movie’s claims that solar and wind don’t work
one of the movie’s many big lies
because even without a level playing field we already built more
solar and wind power in this country last year “than we did all
of the incumbents combined”.
Plus
you’ve got to fuel fossil or nuclear plants, not to mention
the toxic waste issues,
while once you build solar or wind “it’s free energy forever”.
Kennedy also pointed out the electric grid in the U.S. could be rebuilt to deliver solar and wind power as needed for less than has already been spent on breeder reactors that are no longer in use.
The filmmaker made no attempt to rebut any of Kennedy’s points about existing solar and wind technologies that already beat nukes, coal, and natural gas, instead going on about pie-in-the-sky modular reactors.

This all illustrates why

the Georgia Public Service Commission
needs to stop letting Georgia Power and Southern Company suck radioactive
profits at the public teat and make them

get on with replacing coal with solar
instead of

letting old coal plant sites sit unused for more than a decade.
Oh, and GA PSC needs to halt the Plant Vogtle nuke boondoggle,
which is even worse than

Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant in Mississippi
as a huge transfer of wealth from the people of the state to a monopoly.

A monopoly that is supposed to be regulated as a public service.
By the Public Service Commission whose Commissioners

accept massive campaign contributions from employees and law firms
of the utilities they regulate.
It’s time for GA PSC to bat away the haze of coal smoke and the radioactive
taint that surrounds them
and go to bat against corruption and for the people of Georgia.

-jsq

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Garry Gentry read the

WWALS Watershed Coalition letter
at

the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better….

There is no need to use our Floridan Aquifer water to build more
baseload power plants while Georgia lags behind Michigan,
Massachusetts, and even tiny New Jersey and Maryland in solar power.

WWALS calls on the PSC to ask Georgia Power to conserve our water
and to bring jobs to south Georgia through solar power and wind off
the Georgia coast.

You can read

the complete letter.
Here’s

the video:

Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS

Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,

Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),

Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),

Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),

244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

-jsq

More new nukes to stop: Vogtle, Summer, and 15 more

Although

TVA’s Bellefonte nuke will never come up,
others are still being built, including TVA’s own Watts Bar,
plus 19 more.

Document-forging Doosan-supplied
Vogtle 2 and 3 in Georgia and Summer 2 and 3 in South Carolina
are

the only four actually already issued combined licences (COL)
to build and operate.

But 15 other
proposed new reactors are

“Under Review”, and all the ones in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina are within 500 miles of here: Continue reading →

TVA Bellefonte nuke won’t be built

Economics stopped another reactor, this time in Alabama,
less than a week after
San Onofre.
But more are still in the works.

Brian Wingfield wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday,

TVA Shelves Work at Alabama Nuclear Plant Amid Industry Struggle,

“Over the past few months, TVA has been looking across the
company, including at our nuclear construction projects, to
determine the work that is most important to perform,” Mike
Skaggs, the TVA senior vice president for nuclear construction, said
in the statement. “Hard decisions are necessary.”

The U.S. nuclear industry is wrestling with competition from a glut
of natural gas, which has lowered its price and made the fuel more
attractive for electric utilities. At the same time, U.S. regulators
are writing safety rules following a triple meltdown at Japan’s
Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in 2011.

The fracking backlash is building against natural gas.
And guess what’s even cheaper? Continue reading →

Review of the misleading movie Pandora’s Promise

Here’s a trailer for the “documentary” pro-nuke film that comes out today,

Pandora’s Promise.
The film discounts solar and wind energy because its makers
don’t understand the exponential decrease in solar prices or
the night backup power ability of wind connected with a smart grid.
The vast majority of the American people already are demanding
those real renewables instead of nuclear or coal,
and the economics of wind and solar are also rapidly beating natural gas.

Atom Ecology’s promotional writeup 7 June 2013,

Pandora’s Promise – Anti-Nuclear Mob Burns Environment In Coal Fired Forges Of Industry For 30 Years begins,

A new documentary film that reveals how opposition to and voting
against nuclear power turned into massive increases in coal burning
power plants. The far worse outcome for the environment as coal has
filled energy demand is the story just coming to theatres.

The tiny germ of truth in that ten years ago is just plain wrong now
that coal is not the alternative because

solar has reached grid parity with nuclear, coal, and natural gas.

The movie plays up Stewart Brand’s conservationist credentials
and his conversion to pro-nuke.

Not in that movie, but

in this TED talk,
you can see
Stewart Brand lose a debate with Mark Z. Jacobson, who argued
we can power the whole world with sun, wind, and water.
Jacobson’s summary: Continue reading →

The wind from the Cattenom nuke in France blows into Germany

From France to Berlin is as close as 32 nuclear reactors to here.
Here’s a
scenario for

“Core meltdown accident in the nuclear power plant Cattenom (France) contamination of leafy vegetables by radioactive iodine with wind from the southwest”:

I was in Germany shortly after Chernobyl, when all the cows were inside so they would not
eat the radioactive grass, and all the salads were frozen.

Here’s

a scenario for radioactive iodine in mother’s milk, with a similar map: Continue reading →

Kemper Coal cost overruns at Southern Company Stockholder Meeting @ SO 2013-05-22

SO CEO Tom Fanning used Julia O’Neal’s question about cost overruns
to tout the alleged benefits of Kemper Coal,
which include selling CO₂ to oil companies to pump into the ground to
produce more oil.
He didn’t mention that oil is then burned to produce more CO₂.

And that Mississippi lignite coal he said would otherwise stay in the ground?
Yes it and its CO₂ would stay there if SO would get on with solar instead of coal.

Before her question, he had not said much about that project, mostly this about Major Projects, at
29 minutes and 28 seconds in

SO’s own video
of
the 22 May 2013 Southern Company Stockholder meeting.
You’ll have to skip there manually, because of the SO’s video format.

SO prohibited “unauthorized” videoing,
so we don’t have the usual LAKE video on YouTube.

I always call out Vogtle and Kemper County.
Both projects are going to serve our customers for decades to come.
We’ve had some challenges with Kemper.
We’ll probably talk about those later.
But when I think about the value that these projects will bring,
I think our customers, and the economy of the southeast,
will be benefited for decades.
And we’re very excited about the progress we’re making on both of those.

It’s curious he mentioned SO’s flagship coal and nuclear projects
without saying coal or nuclear.
And if by “progress” he means Continue reading →

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange