RE: Scientists: Nuclear power isn't viable without corporate welfare
@klassman6 - yes, I am well aware of what 6000 MWe is. Your
response indicates to me that you are a bit confused.
A MWe is a unit of power, not a unit of energy. It represents the
instantaneous amount of work that can be done. With 4-6 large
nuclear power plants, you can generate 6,000 MWe. The 4 units
whose sites are being prepared at Vogtle (Georgia) and VC
Summer (South Carolina) will each produce about 1120 MWe,
while the unit that is under consideration for Calvert Cliffs Unit 3
can produce 1600 MWe and the two units at South Texas can
each produce about 1350 MWe.
As you can compute, with just four widely distributed projects
involving a total of 7 units, the finalists for the loan guarantee
program could completely use up the 6,000 MW that is eligible
for the PTC. In fact, they would have the capacity to produce
8780 MWe if all of them were operating at full power.
If they each achieve the ability to operate as well as the average
nuclear plant in the US, those four projects would produce about
70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, which is very
close to the amount of electricity produced each year by every
single wind turbine operating in the US today.
Those four projects, however, were once just the leading edge of
a wave of planned new construction that included about 18
projects with 32 total units. Those later units would not need any
hand up because the manufacturing and design infrastructure to
support them would have been installed to support the first few
units.
That is why I am so angry about the efforts of organizations like
the Union of Concerned Lawyers to discourage investment that
provides a return instead of the subsidies for weak and unreliable
sources of energy that cannot compete and cannot take markets
away from fossil fuel without continued injections of taxpayer
money.
I strongly suspect that the force behind the antinuclear
movement is the fossil fuel industry - it hates the idea that every
single large nuclear plant removes a market for about 5 million
tons of coal each year or about 200 million cubic feet of natural
gas each day.
Every single reactor-year of delay that the opposition inserts into
the nuclear revival represents at least $365 million in additional
sales for the natural gas industry under present decision making
trends.
That extra insulation you added reduced your consumption.
However, actions to halt nuclear plant construction during the
1970s and 1980s stopped the US from continuing a path that
would have eliminated coal from the power market by 2000 and
gas by 2010. We could, by now, have an electric power system
that resembles the one in France, with nearly all of our power
from emission free, non fossil sources. Instead, we are burning a
billion tons of coal and consuming about 7 trillion cubic feet of
natural gas in the act of producing electricity.
We also could be powering every ship on the sea with atomic
fission and using electricity instead of oil or natural to heat homes
in the midwest and northeast.
Dumb. Short sighted. Exceedingly profitable for the coal, natural
gas and oil industry.
