nuclear-news

The nuclear dream is looking pretty tarnished

The 20 Percenters: Nuclear Energy Faces Reality – and Its Likely Decline, US News  Once the promise of clean, near limitless energy, nuclear is now in its waning years. By Alan Neuhauser Sept. 28, 2015 LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – On construction sites in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, workers are building what may become the final five major nuclear power plants built in the United States.

Nuclear energy, once a symbol of American ingenuity, the fulfillment of the futuristic promise of near-limitless electricity and near-zero emissions, may soon face an economic meltdown.

Cheap natural gas, together with plummeting prices for wind and solar, has upended the energy sector – not only making nuclear plants’ huge upfront costs, endless regulatory approvals and yearslong construction especially prohibitive, but undercutting the very idea of a centralized power system. Industry and regulators, meanwhile, still have not devised a long-term solution for dispensing of nuclear waste. And despite the best marketing efforts by industry, ever-present safety concerns have little abated since the most recent nuclear incident: the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan following a tsunami in 2011.

“The nuclear dream looks pretty tarnished these days: that you would have an inexpensive, reliable and manageable source of energy,” says James Doyle, a former political scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “What has been shown repeatedly over the decades is that it’s not inexpensive and the question of how to handle nuclear waste has remained problematic, and it appears it will remain so for decades to come.”……

construction drive in China and elsewhere may ultimately represent the last hurrah of the nuclear construction industry – especially once utility-scale energy storage systems, widely seen as the linchpin for making solar and wind viable over the long term, become more efficient and economical and as global warming continues to worsen…..

September 28, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general