{"id":1198,"date":"2011-12-24T11:03:47","date_gmt":"2011-12-24T16:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/after-fukushima-fewer-nukes-most-places-more-in-georgia.html"},"modified":"2011-12-24T11:03:47","modified_gmt":"2011-12-24T16:03:47","slug":"after-fukushima-fewer-nukes-most-places-more-in-georgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/after-fukushima-fewer-nukes-most-places-more-in-georgia.html","title":{"rendered":"After Fukushima: Fewer nukes most places; More in Georgia"},"content":{"rendered":"Most countries are not building more nuclear power plants,\nand some are shutting down some of the ones they have,\nbecause Fukushima has confirmed what Chernoby and Three Mile Island\nalready told us: maybe the physics is sound, but the business\nmodel leads to unsafe plants.\nBut in the U.S. and Georgia, it’s full speed ahead for new nukes,\nregardless of the risks of radiation leaks or cost overruns.\n

\nChristopher Joyce wrote for NPR today,\n\nAfter Fukushima: A Changing Climate For Nuclear<\/a>\n

\n“We don’t see Fukushima as having a significant impact on the\n\n<\/a>\nU.S. industry,” says Scott Peterson, vice president of the industry’s\nNuclear Energy Institute. “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was renewing\n10 licenses for U.S. plants, extending them 20 years in operation. We\nwere continuing to move forward in examining new reactor designs.”\n<\/blockquote>\nNevermind that those extensions mostly go well beyond the design\nlifespans of the plants extended.\n
\nMarc Chupka, who advises electric utilities as an economist with the\nBrattle Group in Washington, wonders who’s going to pay for them.\n

\n“Right now, just the plain economics of nuclear power are\nunderwater,” he says. He notes that over the past decade,\nconstruction costs have skyrocketed and natural gas got more\nplentiful and cheaper.\n

\n“Things change significantly over relatively short periods of time,”\nChupka says, noting that it takes about a dozen years to plan and\nbuild a new nuclear plant. “That makes it an incredibly challenging\nenvironment to plan for the long term. And that adds to the risk and\nit makes investors understandably skittish.”\n<\/blockquote>\nSo we could do what Germany is doing:\n

\nGermany says the same: The government will throw its weight and\nwealth into solar and wind energy to replace nuclear power.\n<\/blockquote>\nOr we could listen to the same old excuse:\n\n\n
\nNuclear’s strength is that plants run 24\/7, unlike solar and wind\ngenerators. They provide continuous and reliable electricity,\nso-called baseload power.\n<\/blockquote>\nHere in the south, peak load is on hot days when people have their\nair conditioners on, when the sun is usually shining.\nUse solar for that, add conservation and efficiency,\nand we don’t need any new nuclear, coal, or gas-fired plants.\n

\nBesides:\n

\nGeorge Perkovich, director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the\nCarnegie Endowment for International Peace, says if Germany\nsucceeds, nuclear could be in even deeper trouble. …\n“If Germany comes\nalong and figures out how to power a very big economy, including\nbaseload needs, without nuclear, then that to me becomes a real, if\nnot a death blow, a real challenge to nuclear, because it breaks the\nwhole nuclear story that this is the only environmentally friendly\nway to provide baseload.”\n<\/blockquote>\nSo, we can get on with solar for peak load now,\nplus offshore wind.\n

\nOr we can proceed with Georgia Power customers\n\nalready paying for Construction Work in Progress<\/a> (CWIP) for the proposed\nVogtle nukes,\nand has gotten GA PSC to let gapower also\n\npass any cost overruns through to customers.<\/a>\nNot to worry, last time Southern Company built nuclear reactors on the\nSavannah River they were supposed to cost\n$660 million and actually cost $8.87 billion.\n

\nOh yes, this is the same Southern Company that claims\n\nit’s incompetent even to run a coal plant.<\/a>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nSuppose instead of CWIP for nukes gapower built solar farms for the same money.\nHow much peak electricity would we get that way?\nWhere has gapower or Southern Company or GA PSC done that calculation?\nCan we see it?\n

\nHere’s\n\nwho to contact.<\/a>\n

\n-jsq\n

\nPS: Owed to a chatty clam.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most countries are not building more nuclear power plants, and some are shutting down some of the ones they have, because Fukushima has confirmed what Chernoby and Three Mile Island already told us: maybe the physics is sound, but the business model leads to unsafe plants. But in the U.S. and Georgia, it’s full speed […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,264,265,17,18,104,21,23,24],"tags":[8753,931,28,8746,1031,167,8708,8737,380,8714,108,626],"class_list":["post-1198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-energy-conservation","category-energy-efficiency","category-ga-psc","category-georgia-power","category-nuclear","category-planning","category-renewable-energy","category-solar","tag-coal","tag-conservation","tag-cost","tag-cwip","tag-efficiency","tag-fukushima","tag-georgia-power","tag-nuclear","tag-overrun","tag-solar","tag-southern-company","tag-vogtle"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-jk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}