Energy Secretary Granholm calls for tripling of US nuclear fleet.
The Biden administration is taking climate change seriously:
Granholm calls for tripling of US nuclear fleet
Subtitle:
From the text:
"This project is a prime example of how first-of-a-kind challenges can become 'nth-of-a-kind' successes, thanks to the work of those who came before and public-private partnerships," she said. First-mover projects of this size are too big and too financially risky for the private sector to do by itself, but are too important for the nation to fail to act, she said.
"To reach our goal of net-zero by 2050, we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country. That means we’ve got to add 200 more gigawatts by 2050," she said.
"And so it’s time to cash in on our investments by building more these facilities," she added,
In a later interview with Reuters, Granholm said building new reactors at nuclear power plant sites could be a cost-effective way of expanding US nuclear capacity - and also said some recently retired plants could restart. "I do think they can come back," she said, adding that she would be "surprised" if the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office (LPO) - which recently conditionally committed up to USD1.52 billion for a loan guarantee to Holtec Palisades for its project to bring the Palisades plant back online - was not talking to operators of other shuttered plants about reopening as well. She said she was not involved in LPO's talks. The LPO does not reveal the status of loan applications...
The successful destruction of nuclear manufacturing infrastructure in the United States, which once built more than 100 commercial nuclear reactors while providing some of the lowest cost electricity in the world, by the de facto pro fossil fuel antinuclear industry, an industry masquerading as "environmental," drove up the cost of the Vogtle reactors, giving whiny antinukes, many of whom are decidedly bourgeois nickel and dime types lots of opportunity to whine about the cost of clean energy. The two reactors thus required more than 30 billion dollars to build. Although Secretary Granholm does not note it in this article, the second of the Vogtle reactors came in at a 30% lower cost than the first; the overall cost was asymmetric. The first was subject to FOAKE costs, "First of a Kind Engineering," where the engineering included the cost of rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed by appeals to fear and ignorance by people I personally regard as functional idiots. The building of the second benefited from the learning and built infrastructure that went into the first and its cost was lower.
Secretary Granholm wants this benefit to continue the trend. (There is talk of a third new nuclear reactor at Vogtle.)
Fossil fuels, about which these whiny bourgeois nickel and dime types are totally indifferent, ignoring their external costs, are "cheap" only because they are not required to manage their waste; they dump their waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, where as air pollution it kills millions of people each year, and as climate change is killing the planet as a whole. And let's be clear, the expensive and useless reactionary so called "renewable energy" scheme, embraced as advertising by the fossil fuel industry, is wholly and totally dependent on access to fossil fuels.
We hear a lot of whining by bourgeois types about the cost of building nuclear plants, all of which are borne by this generation, because the expense is something we cannot tolerate in our head up the ass culture of extreme selfishness: The reactors are gifts to future generations, the generations about whom our culture couldn't care less. The Vogtle reactors will almost certainly be operating as the 22nd second century approaches, at least if humanity arrives at the 22nd century, which it may not because the antinuke industry has been successful at demonizing our last best hope for doing away with fossil fuels, nuclear energy. The ability for the use of nuclear energy, which was a gift from the finest minds of the 20th century to our generation, has been spit upon, with an unbearable cost not only to ourselves, but to all who come after us.
Building new and sustainable infrastructure that will last for generations should not be expected to be "cheap." Decency often comes with a cost, and it is clear to me, if not to anyone else, that we should think beyond ourselves to provide a sustainable world.
I am personally very pleased with Secretary Granholm, as I was with President Obama's first Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, who pushed to get the Vogtle reactors started. These two Energy Secretaries clearly understood decency. To my mind, their efforts at Vogtle represent a huge success, which, in the name of all that decency represents, we cannot afford to ignore.
Have a nice weekend.
= new reply since forum marked as read
1. 100 years, +/- 20 years depending on maintenance, etc. (Thank you for that answer.)
2. You refuse to answer in terms understandable to a layperson.
3. Zero. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that the nuclear waste issue is a non-issue - "waste" is actually fuel that can be re-used. If this is true in practice, then it's great, and we should never hear about Yucca Mountain or similar siting concerns again. (I would actually be interested in a link to a layperson-readable article about the successes and future prognosis of the used-fuel reuse technology.)
You seem to have completely misread my intentions, but that part's okay, I'm accustomed to your posting style, and I know you get a lot of flak at DU sometimes. 
That said, I think accusing another poster of bad intentions or indifference to things that matter, or posting with the level of disdain that you show, is not in the spirit of the DU site's intentions for people who are supposedly on approximately the same page politically. I would recommend that at least occasionally you allow for the possibility that someone COULD be won over to your position, if you treated them nicely. It's just a thought.
I have to add, in reference to the question in #2: I deal with this sort of problem framing EVERY DAY in my job. It is PART of my job - in fact, a very LARGE part of my job - to answer questions for people in ways they can understand. To find what the other person's frame of reference is, then do my level best to give a reasonably accurate answer within those terms; or at least give them something to work with to which they can relate. If I insulted every customer or non-technical colleague because they don't understand MY terms, I wouldn't have a job very long.
to give approximate answers that are in the user's terminology and help that user understand the situation better.
You are trying to convince people by screaming at them, I'm just suggesting that's not an effective approach. Kind of like you are claiming that "renewable" energy technology isn't effective, but nuclear is.
Enjoy your day, I'm outta here.
The correct numbers are posted at the EIA's website going back to 1973 in table 1.2.
Numbers are important. People lie, to themselves and to each other, but numbers don't lie.
Regrettably the units in the EIA table are "Quads," an unfortunate English unit of a quadrillion "BTU." The conversion factor of "Quads" to the SI unit Exajoule is 1.055056 EJ per quad to the number of significant figures given in the EIA table. EJ, Exajoules, are 1018 Joules.
Summing, using the Excel format of the data for 2023, we see that the US energy consumption was 102.815275 "Quads" which translated to SI units is 108.4758728 EJ, or 108.4758728 X 1018 Joules.
I will translate the numbers in Quads to the SI unit EJ.
Of this, with the planet in flames owing to the whining of antinukes, regrettably only 8.546828241 EJ was produced by nuclear energy, using largely infrastructure completed in the 20th century, compared to the 1.530782861 EJ to the useless expensive fossil fuel dependent wind industry, and the equally useless expensive fossil fuel dependent solar industry, which produced 0.925854897 EJ. Biomass combustion, which contributes to the death toll associated with air pollution, contributed 5.443922261 EJ.
Whiny bourgeois antinukes have spent the last 50 years saying that we didn't need nuclear energy because so called "renewable energy" was so great. They have always been disinterested in the cost in health, environmental and direct use of fossil fuels. In 2023, the United States consumed 91.03879135 EJ of fossil fuels. Nevertheless, combined, wind, solar and biomass produced 7.900560019 EJ in 2023, less than nuclear, with wind and solar and biomass soaking up vast sums of money, and nuclear under constant attack by intellectual and moral Lilliputians despite its low external and internal costs as measured over lifetimes.
On global scale, numbers ignored by penny pinching antinukes, the expenditures on so called "renewable energy" have been extreme:
IEA overview, Energy Investments.
The graphic is interactive at the link; one can calculate overall expenditures on what the IEA dubiously calls "clean energy."
It's triply amusing because of the antinuke rhetoric that flies around here about cost. The real cost of antinuke rhetoric is global warming and a vast death toll associated with air pollution.
Thanks for your interest.
