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By H.J. CUMMINS, Star Tribune, September 15, 2008
With oil costing about $100 a barrel, nuclear energy is enjoying a public-opinion comeback. But not everyone is warming to nuclear as the new ‘green’ energy.
Once the stuff of disaster movies and picket lines, nuclear energy is enjoying a renaissance.
But for 30 Minnesotans in a Red Wing public library last week, at the first public meeting over Xcel Energy’s proposed expansion of its nearby Prairie Island nuclear power plant, it was clear they want no part in the revival.
Many stood to tell state regulators and Xcel executives that they oppose any expansion of the plant. Even after living next to it for 35 years they don’t feel safe, they said. Charlotte Eastin of Lake City even suggested it’s time to shut it down, “before the unthinkable happens.”
They were harsh words for a plant that has operated without a major problem since it started up in 1973. And Xcel’s director of nuclear regulatory policy, Terry Pickens, said afterward that all the concerns raised about the expansion will be addressed through the long application process.
But some version of the evening’s exchange — between skeptics and utilities that are increasingly calling nuclear power the clean, carbon-free energy of the future — is going to play out in many more communities around the country as the push for nuclear grows.
After 30 years without a single application to build a new plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission received 12 over the past 12 months, and expects another five by year-end, said spokesman Scott Burnell in Washington. And while those wouldn’t come online for years — adding to the 104 reactors operating today — federal regulators point to another, current phenomenon: “upratings,” when utilities get permission to push more output from their existing nuclear reactors — part of Xcel’s plans. Over the years, these have added 5,200 megawatts of electricity, the equivalent of more than five new reactors.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Nuclear Energy, Recent Posts, Science on September 17, 2008 - י"ז אלול תשס"ח at 10:54 pm
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By Tim Buchholz, Reprinted from American Muslim, July 11, 2008
Every day we seem to be inching more and more toward more war. According to Ali Akbar Dareini’s article in the AP, “Iran test-fired nine long and medium range missiles Wednesday during war games that officials said aimed to show the country can retaliate against any U.S. and Israeli attack.” He also says that “Israel’s military sent warplanes over the eastern Mediterranean for a large military exercise in June that U.S. officials described as a possible rehearsal for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Our boys too are running war games, preparing for a possible attack on the Strait of Hormuz, “a strategic waterway through which about 40 percent of the world’s oil passes.” All this because we say Iran wants Nuclear Weapons.The Nuclear Program in Iran is a long story, and at the beginning, is US. The US, that is. In the 1950’s the US was very friendly with the Shah of Iran. We, well the CIA, helped put him in power in a coup that removed a democratically elected prime minister. People in the Gerald Ford Administration, names we see today saying Iran should not be allowed to pursue enrichment (Dick Cheney, for one), suggested to the Shah that though Iran had plenty of oil, some day it would run out and it was time to start preparing for the future. According to Wikipedia, “President Gerald Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The Ford strategy paper said the introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.” Now, 30 years later, Dick Cheney says Iran is “already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas, nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well to generate energy.” But back to the beginning.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, Nuclear Energy, Opinion, Recent Posts on July 12, 2008 - ט' תמוז תשס"ח at 11:54 pm
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By LiveScience Staff, 23 October 2007
Nuclear power has a bright future globally, according to a report released today by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The annual report makes two projections, one assuming all nuclear capacity currently under construction or firmly in the development pipeline gets completed and attached to the grid, but no other capacity is added. In this low projection, there would be growth in global nuclear capacity from 370 gigawatts at the end of 2006 to 447 gigawatts by 2030. (A gigawatt equals 1,000 megawatts).
In the high projection, which adds in additional reasonable and promising projects and plans, capacity is estimated to rise to 679 gigawatts by 2030, for an average growth rate of 2.5 percent per year.
“Our job is not so much to predict the future but to prepare for it,” explains the IAEA’s Alan McDonald, Nuclear Energy Analyst. “To that end we update each year a high and low projection to establish the range of uncertainty we ought to be prepared for.”
Nuclear power’s share of worldwide electricity production rose from less than 1 percent in 1960 to 16 percent in 1986, and that percentage has held essentially constant in the 21 years since 1986, the agency reported in a statement today. Nuclear electricity generation has grown steadily at the same pace as overall global electricity generation. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Nuclear Energy, Recent Posts on October 24, 2007 - י"ב חשון תשס"ח at 9:36 am
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BOONSONG KOSITCHOTETHANA , Bangkok Post, August 1, 2007
Nuclear power is a controversial subject around the world, with both critics and proponents very keen to have their views heard. The debate whether the world should build more nuclear power plants to meet the estimated 50% surge in global electricity demand in the next 25 years, is now upon us here in Thailand.
Nuclear power has become a hot issue here after the government in April approved a master plan for power supply development which called for the installation of 31,790 MW in additional generating capacity over the next 15 years. For the first time, nuclear energy was specifically included in the plan, with a 4,000 MW capacity plant to be put in place by 2020-2021 at an estimated cost of US$8 billion. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Nuclear Energy, Recent Posts on August 1, 2007 - י"ז אב תשס"ז at 9:15 am
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Source:
Inderscience Publishers
Date:
July 25, 2007
Keywords:
Energy and the Environment, Renewable Energy, Environmental Science, Wind Energy, Nuclear Energy, Energy Technology
Science Daily — Renewable does not mean green. That is the claim of Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University in New York. Writing in Inderscience’s International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology, Ausubel explains that building enough wind farms, damming enough rivers, and growing enough biomass to meet global energy demands will wreck the environment.
Ausubel has analyzed the amount of energy that each so-called renewable source can produce in terms of Watts of power output per square meter of land disturbed. He also compares the destruction of nature by renewables with the demand for space of nuclear power. “Nuclear energy is green,” he claims, “Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Nuclear Energy, Recent Posts on July 25, 2007 - י' אב תשס"ז at 9:22 am
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Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better.
The nuclear industry recently trotted out two new leaders of its campaign to encourage the building of new reactors. They are Christie Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. This campaign is the latest sign that nuclear power is getting a more welcome reception from some environmentalists who have moved on to bigger worries.
True, most environmental organizations remain adamantly opposed to any expansion of nuclear power and instead look to conservation and renewable energy to get us out of the fossil fuel age. But when the ecologist James Lovelock ? creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that Earth and all its organisms behave as if they were a single living system ? urges his colleagues to drop their “wrongheaded opposition” to nuclear energy, it is clear that fissures are developing. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Nuclear Energy on September 14, 2006 - כ"א אלול תשס"ו at 7:07 pm
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