First in 34 years

That's the first application for a new nuclear power plant in the USA.  Very good news environmentally speaking, and a very interesting article, too.

If you're tracking the nuclear power revival in America, last Tuesday, September 25, was a milestone. For the first time since 1973, a new application for building a reactor was placed before the federal government...

Soon these new owners -- heavily staffed with veterans from the nuclear Navy -- were revitalizing the industry.

The results have been stunning. Whereas power plants traditionally ran at a "capacity factor" of 60 percent -- meaning they are up and running 60 percent of the time -- the nation's 104 reactors now run at a previously unimaginable capacity of 90 percent. (In South Korea, where nuclear provides half the electricity, the figure is 95 percent.) The average nuclear plant now runs uninterrupted for nearly two years before shutting down for refueling. Safety improvements have been spectacular. While there were 26 shutdowns of more than a year for safety reasons from 1987 to 1997 and 21 in the decade before, there has only been one over the past decade....

Yet even the best conservation scenarios only stabilize current consumption. (California has been able to accomplish this.) That still leaves us producing for 50 percent of our electricity with coal -- a billion tons a year that put three billions tons of CO2 into the atmosphere [That can't be right.  How can burning one ton of coal yield three tons of CO2? - THC]. That's 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases and 20 percent of the world's. "When it comes to providing our baseload electricity, the only choice is between coal and nuclear," says David Crane, of NRG. "You simply can't be serious about global warming and against nuclear power." (emphasis added)

Of course, Greens are religiously fanatical, not scientific, so opposing nuclear power will not pose the slightest problem for them.  It will be very interesting to see how this goes, though -- will the Greens be able to whip the American public into anti-nuclear hysteria again?  I don't think so.  They're about to discover they've over-played their global warming hand badly.

Comments

[Jonathan Cobb]

Good article.

I think the article says one ton of coal to three tons of carbon dioxide, on the assumption the coal is primarily carbon. Carbon's atomic weight is twelve, oxygen is 16, so CO2 has a molecular weight of 44. That's a bit more than three times, but coal isn't pure carbon, so the amount of CO2 produced probably works out to about three times that of the original coal once you allow for the impurities.

[pedro]

Thanks for your remarks, Jonathan, and I'm inclined to take anybody's word for it whose address ends in nuclear.org. But...
Atomic weights not withstanding, how can one get three bushels of stuff by burning one bushel? If you could collect every molecule of smoke, ash & whatnot and weigh it, wouldn't it be one pound minus a very miniscule amount of matter that had been converted into energy?
Forgive my ignorance. It's been a while since college and my kids are just now coming up on middle school, so I'm out of practice.