On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 6:14 AM, Bill Lear <[email protected]> wrote: > Apparently Monbiot is serious when he says "Why Fukushima made me stop > worrying and love nuclear power". > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima > > I thought Monbiot was generally sensible. I think I'm generally > sensible and have great distrust of the long- and short- term safety > of nuclear power. >
A couple of points: safety - nuclear may well be safer than coal, not safer than wind or solar. " It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables." He has, as he admits, zero evidence for this. Also "But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal. What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. " The above is where he is right. Especially for an island like the UK, you need to connect to sunnier climates to complement wind with sun. (It works in reverse too. The UK can send wind to to climates with fewer wind resources.) Extreme localism is a fatal weakness in the Greens (and by Greens I don't mean the political party, but people who think sustainability critiques are important, and who make that part of their politics.) I would add that more tranmission can reduce the need for storage, and storage can be done by various kinds of utility scale batteries which have less impact than pumped storage (which is truly awful environmentally). Lastly he is advocating a mixed renewable nuclear grid which in terms of cost gives you the worst of all world. If you mix a lot renewable energy with a lot nuclear energy, you have to dump most of the production from either your nuclear plants or from your solar and wind generation. Either way that raises you costs a lot. Nuclear or renewable. pick one. Split the baby on this one and you just end up with a dead baby. > overlooking? > > > Bill > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Grist Blog: http://www.grist.org/member/1598 Static page: http://www.nohairshirts.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
