http://www.desmogblog.com/ capitol-hill-candidates-urging-inaction-global-warming

Just for comparison.

JFK was definitely an inspiring who could see what was possible and motivate people to reach out for it. Here is an intriguing excerpt from a speech he gave on September 13, 1962 titled The Space Challenge:

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a timespan of but half a century. Stated in these terms we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover him.

Last month, electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power.

I am with JFK - nuclear power deserves to be placed alongside penicillin and television as one of the marvelous developments of the 20th century.

JFK would surely recognize the immense potential and challenge us to solve any remaining problems and move forward with great speed. That is especially true in a world threatened by global climate change; there is no way that he would have marginalized a power source that has demonstrated emission-free, reliable, affordable power.

Here’s what Joe has to say on the “affordable” issue….

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/6/13/11021/6597

Nuclear power is likely to find a place in history along side of fishing with dynamite.

Works, but….

Currently operating nuclear plants are producing electricity for an average production cost of just 1.76 cents per kilowatt hour. A good portion of their capital costs have been paid off, they all have decommissioning funds that are substantial and growing, and they all pay about $8-10 million per year towards long term fuel storage costs.

Competitive fossil fuels have increased in price substantially compared to the baseline cases used in the studies that Joe quotes.

Buffett may have abandoned his plans in Idaho - one of the least interesting electricity markets in the country due to its small size and low average retail price - but there are a lot of very competitive energy producers like NRG, Constellation, FPL Group, Dominion, Amarillo Power, and Entergy that are moving forward with nuclear plans.

There are also some small venture funded companies that are working hard to build plants that can be manufactured and delivered to sites so they can take advantage of the economy of series production.

Economics and cost estimation are, at best, guesses, and there are plenty of opinions. Mine happens to differ from Joe’s, though we do agree on the importance of emission free electricity production to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change.

Come to think of it - why are we arguing about cost? Joe is an advocate of concentrating solar thermal energy production with enough storage to make it baseload. What kind of cost estimates do you have for that kind of system?

Current costs of power from existing nuclear have no relevance to what power would cost from a new facility.

You might want to check to see how many of your listed companies are actually “moving forward”. And if any of them are actually likely to build anything. More likely they’re just keeping some staff employed and burning through funds.

Small venture funded companies - probably eating up sucker money.

As for thermal solar, it’s getting built. Real time. With private, non-governmental money. I’d say it penciled OK.

Storage will come when we have a need. First we have to build enough so that there is some surplus to be stored.

“As for thermal solar, it’s getting built. Real time. With private, non-governmental money. I’d say it penciled OK.”

Really. Are you telling me that there are no renewable portfolio standards that mandate the use of certain types of energy sources, no production tax credits (at least for facilities that get under contract before the PTC expires at the end of this year), no local incentives, no California state government subsidies for solar, and no DOE funds being spent to enable solar facilities to be constructed?

Sure, there is private money involved, but there is also a lot of assistance.

I will not dispute that there is hesitation for investments in new nuclear power. The people who do not like to compete against new nuclear power plants have helped to establish a very long and arduous review process on top of what is already a complex technically demanding construction project. The long lead times required add huge risk and cause widely varying cost estimates because they have to predict future events and potential delays. Money most definitely has a time value and investors always seek to ensure that they get a return commensurate with the risk that they take. If they can, they also seek government support to hedge the bets. That behavior is not limited to nuclear investors.

The thing that I do not understand, however, is why people who believe that the world is facing a crisis focus so much on criticizing the cost of nuclear power instead of trying to figure out if there is a way to solve the problem. If they were brutally honest with themselves, they would admit that imposing delays and threatening protests and legal action certain do not help reduce the cost or minimize the financial risk.

Going back to the theme of the post - JFK, a true leader, recognized that going to the moon was a costly proposition and that there were still aspects of the trip that were completely unknown at the time that he made his famous promise. However, he listened to his scientific and engineering advisors who told him that they knew enough to solve the problems along the way.

I can tell you, without writing a book here, that there are plenty of us in the nuclear field who have reasonable solutions to all of the remaining issues, including cost, associated with building and operating nuclear power plants. All we want is a fair opportunity to show them to you.

The chicken littles that are running around scaring the be Jesus out of everyone with global warming doomsday predictions are the same crowd who won’t let us build any new nuclear power plants even though everyone knows that nuclear power puts no greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

If you guys really want to score some points with mainstream America and the rest of the world you will quit being two face hypocrites and lobby for the clean, renewable energy of nuclear fission.

Discloser: I am a life long Democrat and until recently considered myself a liberal. I don’t think I can say that any more as I am disgusted with my parties hypocrisy with regards to energy and I am also disgusted with the media’s one sided fear pushing of the whole global warming issue.

Sincerely
Jamie Fagan

There is plenty assistance for all sorts of energy in the US, including coal and petroleum.

Please consider http://www.earthtrack.net/ earthtrack/ library/ SubsidyReformOptions.pdf I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that report, but it wouldn’t surprise me if true.

It cites an estimate of $49 to $100 billion dollars of energy subsidies in 2006. Most of these were for things that are causing problems:

Oil and gas got 52.4%
Coal got 15%
Total fossil was 66.2%
Nuclear got 12.4%
Ethanol got 7.6%
Other renewables got 7.5%
Conservation got 2.1%
Other got 4.2%

How backwards is that! Conservation should have gotten 50%. That would have made a larger difference in all of the others than the money they got.

Isn’t that what the nuclear industry is trying to do in Norway? Going well, isn’t it?

“Far from undergoing a renaissance, nuclear power is conspicuously failing in the marketplace, for the same forgotten reason it failed previously: it costs too much, and it bears too much financial risk to attract private risk capital despite Federal subsidies approaching or exceeding its total cost. … Only central planners buy it. … They have attracted no private risk capital despite U.S. taxpayer subsidies that can now total 13 billion dollars per nuclear plant, roughly its entire cost, which exceeds the market cap of any U.S. utility save one. … The U.S. can have only as many new nuclear plants as taxpayers are forced to buy. Heroic efforts at near or over 100% subsidization will continue to elicit same response as defibrillating a corpse: it will jump, but it won’t revive.”

“Olkiluoto-3, the first nuclear plant ordered in Western Europe since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, is also more than 25 percent over its 3 billion-euro ($4 billion) budget.”

“If Finland’s experience is any guide, the ‘nuclear renaissance’ touted by the global atomic power industry as an economically viable alternative to coal and natural gas may not offer much progress from a generation ago, when schedule and budgetary overruns for new reactors cost investors billions of dollars.”

“The U.K.’s Sizewell-B plant, which took nearly 15 years from the application to build it to completion, opened in 1995 and cost about 2.5 billion pounds ($5.1 billion), up from a 1987 estimate of 1.7 billion pounds.”
…
“Landtman now says the reactor might be fully completed in 2011. The initial target was mid-2009.”