“Al Gore & Company will shut up nuclear will be around for a few lifetimes.”
Not that I agree with Al Gore’s Global Warming rantings, but Global Warming fearmongering has been quite helpful in restarting nuclear power plant building. That and $7/mcf for natural gas. Ten years ago, the ‘future’ was natural gas cmbined cycle plants - best economics. But it was built on the basis of cheap gas. I owned calpine stock for a while, and watched that company go to nothing as gas rose and made their gas-fired-power-plant-building strategy untenable.
The other fossil fuels rose in tandem, even coal. It’s the 1970s all over again.
Al Gore’s Global warming crusade is a clarion call to stop using fossil fuels. Well, what are the alternatives? The only on that is economical for baseload generation is nuclear. Moreover, if we did switch from coal to nuclear for 70% of our baseload electricity generation, we would cut our CO2 emissions by 40%. The global warming threat would be hugely diminished. If all we do is simply build new nuclear power plants to replace old coal plants, and do it over the next 30 years, we would go most of the way towards solving global warming.
The logic is so inescapable the more intelligent environmentalists and lefties are on the bandwagon. We need nuclear power in the mix to reduce our CO2 emissions.
I see it as a win/win/win - it’s good economics and pro-energy, gives us sustainable energy independence, and good for the environment.
Now the irony is that the environmental movement is the #1 pusher on global warming *and* the major opponent of nuclear power. This is an issue the environmentalists could end up losing their credibility over, as being the #1 impediment to solving global warming.
Those of us working stiffs in the electric utility industry predicted that natural gas rates would skyrocket, which they did. Adding a large chunk of demand vs. a slowly-changing supply did the trick. But gas-fired turbine generators were/are cheap to build, and have been politically pallatable for the last several years while coal and nuclear have been on the s-list for a few decades.
The tide has changed somewhat, and TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) spent a good sum of money re-firing the Browns' Ferry Nuclear Plant's 1155 megawatt generating unit #1, which has sat idle since 1985. This is the first (to my knowledge) move towards adding nuclear-powered generation to the grid in decades.
Coal has also taken a significant turn upward with some 14,000+ megawatts of new coal-fired generation planned to be on line in 2009. That's significant, though I'm not sure of the construction status of these proposals. I'm sure that the environazis have filed their objections to all.
I do know that the supply side is tight, and barring some additions to the supply, we will be experiencing the effects of load reduction up to and including rolling blackouts in many areas if we don't add supply.