nuclear-news

Tesla may well have killed nuclear power

Did Tesla Just Kill Nuclear Power? Forbes, 1 May 15 It would be almost three hours until Tesla’s big announcement, but inside a Northwestern Universityclassroom near Chicago Thursday night, the famed nuclear critic Arnie Gundersen had the inside scoop:

Tesla Motors TSLA -0.04% CEO Elon Musk was about to announce an industrial-scale battery, Gundersen said, that would cost about 2¢ per kilowatt hour to use, putting the final nail in the coffin of nuclear power……

Arnie Gundersen -“We all know that the wind doesn’t blow consistently and the sun doesn’t shine every day,” he said, “but the nuclear industry would have you believe that humankind is smart enough to develop techniques to store nuclear waste for a quarter of a million years, but at the same time human kind is so dumb we can’t figure out a way to store solar electricity overnight. To me that doesn’t make sense.”…….

Gundersen dismissed the nuclear contribution as too expensive and too slow—even if the U.S. could license and afford new reactors, they could not come online before 2023—and he replaced the nuclear contribution with batteries and conservation.

“The operative word in this discussion tonight is now. What are we going to do now to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere?”  he said. “These things can be implemented immediately. We know how to insulate a building. We know how to put double and triple-pane windows in them. We know how to build windmills and put solar cells up. These are immediate things. We don’t have to invest $50 trillion and wait 15 years for that to come to fruition.

“Producing our way out of the problem with renewables is half the solution. Conserving our way out is the other half.”

May 2, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general