10 Comments Add your own

• 1. redrover  |  June 17th, 2008 at 1:27 pm

  Of course, Bob Abboud supports building more nuclear power plants. That’s the business that he and many of his nuclear engineer buddies are in.

  There’s nothing quite like running for public office in order to improve your own business – how wonderfully altruistic!

  There is one big question that none of these nuke-junkies has bothered to address, much less answer.

  What do they plan to do with all the nuclear waste that these plants will generate?

  I oppose building fission-based nuclear power plants until this country has developed and implemented all other ways of conserving energy and generating energy renewably and non-toxically.

  So I would support an “interstate highway program” to

  1] develop solar, wind, wave, fusion and other renewable energy sources, and
  2] develop state-of-the-art energy conservation methodologies,

  and then impose them, by law, upon the public, just as the phone company imposes area codes, just as the health department requires childhood vaccinations, just as the state of Illinois makes auto drivers buy liability insurance.

  Securing adequate energy resources is a matter of national survival, but it should not come at the expense of the survival of this planet’s future generations.

• 2. Menlo Bob  |  June 17th, 2008 at 4:27 pm

  Redrover sez: “There is one big question that none of these nuke-junkies has bothered to address, much less answer.
  What do they plan to do with all the nuclear waste that these plants will generate?”

  After an extensive search and exhaustive research, Yucca Mountain is ready to receive our nation’s nuclear waste. Currently it’s being stored at each nuclear power plant. Environmental activists want it kept there in an effort to kill nuclear power generation. They oppose Yucca Mountain because, they say, Yucca Mountain hasn’t been shown to leak after a million years.

• 3. Chuck Sweeny  |  June 17th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

  I knew I’d get you guys going with these energy posts! We can re-process the fuel, as the French do. There’s no reason we can’t do a number of things at once, including wind and solar, and develop gas-electric automobiles. But we have to get serious and actually do something. Right now we’re just spouting hot air.

• 4. Craig Knauss  |  June 18th, 2008 at 8:42 am

  A) If I remember correctly, most of Frances nuke plants are small, boiling water reactors (BWRs). Byron has two huge, pressurized water reactors (PWRs). The much smaller reactors at Dresden would be more comparable. But close enough for the concept of pursuing nuclear power.

  B) Engineering and design will start very soon on two new nuke plants down in South Carolina area.

  C) Yucca Mountain is NOT ready to accept spent fuel. I wish it was. And it will only handle high level nuclear waste.

  D) We have tried reprocessing spent fuel in the past. It was cost effective at the time, because the price of new fuel didn’t escalate nearly as much as they expected. Also our plants found they could burn up the fuel to a higher extent than before which made for longer runs between refueling outages.

• 5. Craig Knauss  |  June 18th, 2008 at 8:44 am

  In Comment 4, item D it should say that reprocessing was NOT cost effective at the time. Sorry.

• 6. Scott Summers  |  June 19th, 2008 at 5:50 pm

  Hello. It’s a three way race for Congress this year. I’m on the November ballot as the Green Party candidate. Please visit my website, www.SummersForCongress.com

  I am opposed to the expansion of nuclear power.

  For the sake of brevity, I’ll limit my reasons to the first one hundred and four.

  Reasons 1 – 100. Memo to Mr. Abboud: What? What? You want to build one hundred new T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T T-A-R-G-E-T-S ????

  Reason 101. Sorry, Messrs. Manzullo and Abboud: as a condition of even PROPOSING more nukes, it’s up to proponents like you to have a plan for dealing with the (polite word) stuff. (Oh, and by the way: make the investors, and the stockholders of the utility companies, and their ratepayers – not the taxpayers – pay for it.)

  Reason 102. No more subsidies to the nuclear industry for (a) research (b) construction and (c ) disposal. Whatever happened to capitalism in this country?

  Reason 103. No more federal insurance caps on nukes: make the nuclear industry pay for its own insurance, at market rates — if they can get it, that is.

  Reason 104. State insurance regulators should compel insurers to remove nuclear exclusions from policies – or at least offer an optional endorsement. (And did you know that, homeowners? If your home gets irradiated from a nuclear accident at oh, say, Byron, you probably have no coverage, because your insurer pointedly excludes nuclear accidents?)

  Let’s talk the obvious. Absent huge public subsidies, and absent a requirement that the nuclear industry (and not the public at large) come up with ways of storing the stuff, and absent the almost complete lack of financial liability in the event of an accident, nuclear energy simply would not be able to compete in the energy marketplace.

  It’s time to STOP building more reactors! And if only we would let market forces rule — there wouldn’t BE any more reactors!

  Americans consume more energy per capita than any other people on the planet. All of us — myself included — need to go on an energy diet. (And current market forces, and capitalism, and supply and demand — NOT handwringing about global warming — are compelling precisely that!)

  Thanks.

• 7. Craig Knauss  |  June 20th, 2008 at 8:35 am

  Good luck Mr. Summers. It’s not easy running on a platform of absolute, total ignorance. You are a brave man.

• 8. redrover  |  June 20th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

  Dear Mr. Summers,

  Manzullo and Abboud represent two sides of the same (corporate-contributed) coin.

  Once the votes have all been cast and counted, the legitimate concerns of those citizens absolutely and totally ignorant enough to vote for either of them will quickly be forgotten and/or dismissed in favor of the corporate agenda by whoever is the “winner” of that imaginary election.

  Thanks for doing your patriotic duty.

  There are none so blind as those who will not see.

• 9. Chuck Sweeny  |  June 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 pm

  Mr. Summers, explain France to me, please. 80 percent of the country runs on nuclear power; they reprocess and reuse the fuel, too.
  No accidents, no terrorist targets. France runs its high speed electric trains on nukes. Sounds pretty cool and non carbon dioxide emitting to me.

• 10. Scott Summers  |  June 27th, 2008 at 12:02 pm

  Mr. Sweeny:

  Thank you for your comment and questions.

  I am largely unimpressed by the French example.

  I’ll be brief (at least for the moment). Reprocessing has its own subset of troubling technical problems. And it is not waste-free: the French, like we, have yet to settle on a repository for the “leftovers”.

  “Non carbon dioxide emitting”? Mining, and plant construction and maintenance, and transportation, and other functions incidental to nuclear generation, rely on fossil fuels. So too do processing and reprocessing — unless they are running off of a nuclear-powered generator, of course.

  I’ll leave security issues, and proliferation and terrorism threats, for another time. (Suffice it to say that I am profoundly concerned by these as well.)

  My principal argument against nuclear power, however, is economic. It was once thing fifty years ago for governments to promote and subsidize a nascent technology and industry. But the time is long past for nuclear power to become self-supporting.

  Nuclear power is not commercially viable. It remains a “factor” only because of massive public subsidies, both direct and indirect. As a matter of public policy, I think that the subsidies must end.

  I believe that it’s time to call out nuclear power worldwide for what it is: a spectacularly failed experiment. It’s time to move on.

  Thank you.

  Scott Summers

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