Forget the energy fantasies: There's only one solution to global warming [nuclear power]

The Jan. 30 letter "Water for Clean Fuel" is another example of advice by earnest but naive people from the "all you gotta do" crowd. The assertion that "our inventors and researchers can develop portable systems to split water into its gasses while aboard motor vehicles" is pure wishful thinking. It is a wonderful idea, but one that bumps into the hard realities of physics.

Hydrogen is a viable fuel for motor vehicles, but it requires electric power to produce it through electrolysis. In a vehicle, fuel would have to be carried to generate the electric power somehow and then to produce the hydrogen to burn as fuel for the vehicle. It is a lose-lose situation, and it is not feasible. Each conversion incurs a loss of energy and makes the situation progressively worse.

Neither do assertions about "laser drilling" and utilizing "abandoned oil wells" make sense. Heat in useful quantities simply does not flow from the Earth except in rare geothermal locations.

The hard fact on slowing global warming is that nuclear fission energy is the only answer in the foreseeable future. No matter how much one may wish for renewable energy sources to fill our needs, they simply cannot do it.

This is the conclusion of the vast majority of scientists who study such matters. It may not be comforting, but it is reality.

Give people a choice and let them choose their conscience and freeze to death or live in the dark if they wish......

If it wasn't such a serious topic the lib response to energy would be truly humorous. "We need to stop our dependence on forign oil, but no drilling here. We need to stop coal and nat gas and nuc and hydro (the fishes you know)."

"Uhhh, how you gonna do that?" "Hydrogen and solar and used to be wind but now birds die so no wind." "Well, Hydrogen is a storage medium and will never be anything other than an energy net loss and solar costs more in energy in to fabricate and maintain than you will ever get out of it over it's lifetime."

Build 200 or 300 nuke plants and they can dream all they like without the lights going out.

http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?aaed093d-9e16-43dd-99d7-5c9079619a33

Michael R. Fox., 2/3/2006

The United States experience with nuclear energy is almost unique among the 33 nations which currently have nuclear power plants. The US power plants are uniquely costly and uniquely lengthy in construction durations. According to the World List of Nuclear Power Plants (March 2005 issue of Nuclear News, p.35ff), there are now 440 operating nuclear power plants sited in 33 countries. There are 30 reactors now under construction in 12 nations around the world, but none in the US. Many more are planned, many of which will be in Asia.

The political and regulatory climate in the US has historically been unduly hostile to nuclear reactors, relative to those in many other nations. This has been at the federal, state and local levels in many regions. This collective hostility has been reflected in federal state, and local regulations making this energy option uniquely costly in the world of nuclear reactors. It needn‚t be so, but it‚s been made that way in the US.

By contrast foreign nations have very different experiences and as a result the nuclear option is extremely competitive with other energy choices. For example, Japan completed two General Electric designed reactors in 1996 and 1997. They are designated Kashiwazaki 6 and 7, located at Kashiwazaki, Niigata, Japan. These reactors cost $1.3 billion dollars each (to be compared with US costs of 4-5 billion dollars). They were completed in 53 months (compared with 120 to 150 months in the US.) In other words, both the cost and construction duration in the US are about triple those overseas. It‚s important to note that these are American designed reactors (GE) but built in Japan. GE could not build these reactors of their own design in the US at these low costs and short construction times. A major difference is that the regulatory climate in Japan is not nearly as hostile to the nuclear industry as it is in the US.

In addition to these cost disparities there are dramatic differences in the operating costs as well. A large 1200 Mw(e) in the United Kingdom known as the Sizewell B reactor is very comparable with similar reactor designs in the US. Sizewell B operates with 375 people.

By contrast the same size US power plant (1170 MW(e)) such as Wolf Creek in Kansas, operating in the US regulatory climate requires about 1100 people to operate. This means millions more dollars in annual operating costs for energy in the US than in England.

Similar experiences are found in the large nuclear programs in France and elsewhere. France has about 60,600,000 people living in a land area of slightly larger than Oregon and Washington combined. Yet they have currently 59 operating reactors, most of them very large (up to 1500 MW(e). (By comparison on Oahu, Hawaii the entire installed electrical capacity is 1669 MW(e)).

It shouldn't need saying but that 1669 MW(e) electric capacity on Oahu, 77% from oil and 18.5% coal, emits more air pollution, more CO2, more NOx, more SO2, and more particulates, than all of the 59 nuclear reactors in France (capacity 63,300 MW(e)) combined. This is 38 times more electricity with far less air pollution. Such excessive nuclear regulation keep us from enjoying the environmental benefits of the nuclear option.

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