nuclear-news

Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Breakthrough Institute etc – more like snake oil salesmen for nuclear

Nuclear pitched as the new green, Charlotte Observer , 9 Dec 15  BY EVAN HALPER“……..Investors, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, have poured about $2 billion into a few dozen small outfits, many of which are concentrated in the West. The entrepreneurs behind them are racing to design nuclear power facilities engineered to seem no more imposing than a neighborhood arts center……

That may all be possible someday, say the nuclear experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists, but that day is probably several decades and many tens of billions of dollars away. The sudden excitement around nuclear makes them nervous. They say they have seen this before.

“The people who deny or downplay the risks involved are doing a disservice to the future of nuclear power that leads to complacency, and complacency leads to Fukushima,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the organization. “This is very complex. It is hard. It costs a lot. It is slow, especially to develop advanced systems. … It seems nuclear will at most be a minor contribution over the next few decades to dealing with the climate crisis.”……

The Sierra Club says it has all the makings of a snake-oil sale.

“There is always such a rosy picture coming from the industry of what it can deliver with these technologies, yet it has such a terrible history with over-promising and under-delivering,” said John Coequyt, the Sierra Club’s director of international climate programs. The organization would prefer the Obama administration abandon the extremely costly pursuit of advanced nuclear power in favor of greater investment in renewable energy such as solar and wind power.

But that’s not the direction the White House is headed. It hosted a nuclear power summit last month during which John Holdren, the president’s senior adviser on science and technology, expressed hope of “making nuclear energy everything that it can be, and thus a major contributor in this country and worldwide to minimizing the risks from climate change.”…….

The administration announced its budget plan, including $900 million in new funding for development of advanced nuclear technologies, as well as plans to allow firms like UPower and Transatomic access to testing facilities in federally funded national research labs, which the firms had been lobbying for. This year, the House passed a resolution nudging regulators to nurture the industry.

Such moves have come at the urging of some muscular neoliberal think tanks in California and Washington, D.C.

The Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, where philanthropist Rachel Pritzker and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand sit on the board, has been a major proponent of the technologies as a solution to climate change, most famously in the 2013 documentary “Pandora’s Promise,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Pritzker is also on the board of Third Way, an influential advocacy group best known for helping centrist Democrats find bipartisan approaches to policy disputes. The group, which receives some nuclear industry funding, is leading the push in Washington…….http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/science-technology/article48767550.html

December 11, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster