{"id":221,"date":"2013-01-07T08:29:41","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T13:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/nukes-economically-hard-to-justify-ge-ceo-immelt.html"},"modified":"2013-01-07T08:29:41","modified_gmt":"2013-01-07T13:29:41","slug":"nukes-economically-hard-to-justify-ge-ceo-immelt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/nukes-economically-hard-to-justify-ge-ceo-immelt.html","title":{"rendered":"Nukes economically hard to justify —GE CEO Immelt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThe CEO of General Electric,\nthe company that designed the reactors\n\nat Fukushima and Hatch 1 and 2,<\/a>\nsaid nukes are economically hard to justify.\nAnd that was back in July, before\nthe first new nukes permitted in 30 years,\nat Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River,\n\nslipped 15 months.<\/a>\nWhat’s winning? Shale gas, temporarily, but that’s just a bump\nin the road on the way to wind and solar power.\n<\/p>\n

\nPilita Clark wrote for Financial Times 30 July 2012,\n\nNuclear \u2018hard to justify\u2019, says GE chief<\/a>,\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n\n<\/a>\nNuclear power is so expensive compared with other forms of energy\nthat it has become \u201creally hard\u201d to justify, according\nto the chief executive of General Electric, one of the world’s\nlargest suppliers of atomic equipment.\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIt’s really a gas and wind world today,\u201d said Jeff\nImmelt, referring to two sources of electricity he said most\ncountries are shifting towards as natural gas becomes\n\u201cpermanently cheap\u201d.\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWhen I talk to the guys who run the oil companies they say\nlook, they’re finding more gas all the time. It’s just hard to\njustify nuclear, really hard. Gas is so cheap and at some point,\nreally, economics rule,\u201d Mr Immelt told the Financial Times in\nan interview in London at the weekend. \u201cSo I think some\ncombination of gas, and either wind or solar … that’s where we see\nmost countries around the world going.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nGE CEO Immelt may also want to talk to GE’s own research director\n\n\nMark M. Little,\n\nwho said in May 2011<\/a> that\nsolar will be cheaper than fossil power in five years.\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nLittle didn’t even explicitly mention Moore’s Law,\nas in the three-decade-long steady decrease in price\nand\n\nincrease in watts generated per $100 of PV cells<\/a>\nthat has already\n\ndriven solar deployments up exponentially and will keep doing so for years.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nShale gas is not going to last, not even so much because of\n\nfake fracking studies taking down institutes that produce them<\/a>,\nor even because\n\npeople are catching on to fracking human errors,<\/a>\nor even because\n\nnobody wants fracking underneath their back yard.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nThe same thing that has made shale gas temporarily popular will\nbe its downfall:\nprice.\n\nMoody’s is already declaring the financial uncompetiveness of thermal\ngeneration (coal, oil, and gas) companies in Europe.<\/a>\nThe resulting carbon bubble is going make such companies shift to\nwind and solar or go down, and even-more-expensive nuclear is even worse.\n<\/p>\n

\nThat’s why\n\nRenewables are Winning, Nukes are Dead, and Coal is Crashing.<\/a>\nThe winners:\nwind, and increasingly solar power.\n<\/p>\n

\nExcept of course in Georgia,\nwith our\n\nspecial financing problem.<\/a>\nHey, the legislature meets next week!\nIf enough of us ask them to,\n\nmaybe they will fix that.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The CEO of General Electric, the company that designed the reactors at Fukushima and Hatch 1 and 2, said nukes are economically hard to justify. And that was back in July, before the first new nukes permitted in 30 years, at Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River, slipped 15 months. What’s winning? Shale gas, temporarily, […]","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":[97,216,14,8,2,20,104,559,21,22,23,24,36],"tags":[8736,972,8753,969,8704,966,8701,8699,744,967,8702,8710,753,12,7,968,25,562,8737,8782,8711,8712,314,8713,970,8714,971,6,8716],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-coal","category-economy","category-georgia","category-government","category-law","category-nuclear","category-oil","category-planning","category-politics","category-renewable-energy","category-solar","category-wind","tag-activism","tag-carbon-bubble","tag-coal","tag-economics","tag-economy","tag-general-electric","tag-georgia","tag-government","tag-hatch","tag-jeff-immelt","tag-lake","tag-law","tag-legislature","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-mark-m-little","tag-moores-law","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-oil","tag-planning","tag-politics","tag-reactor","tag-renewable-energy","tag-shale-gas","tag-solar","tag-territorial-electric-service-act","tag-valdosta","tag-wind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-3z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","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=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}