Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire

Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Nuclear power -- alive and well 1 year later

New post from Oil and Glory



Posted: 09 Mar 2012 07:22 AM PST
Nuclear power -- alive and well 1 year later: Technologist Bill Gates well explains why the nuclear power renaissance lives on despite the Fukushima earthquake-tsunami disaster: We simply know of no other mass, non-carbon source of baseload electric power. So it is that, a year after the Japanese nuclear accident (pictured above, precautions in the Fukushima area), there is hardly a blip in the total number of planned new nuclear reactors around the world. Just two of Japan's 54 nuclear plants are up and running, and Germany has closed eight of its 17 plants. Yet the rest of the world is different: China and India appear to have slowed their respective plans for a large-scale buildup of nuclear power in order to accommodate their booming economies, but neither seems likely to actually cancel any of the construction. And, according to the World Nuclear Association, 60 nuclear plants are currently being built (list) around the world, about the same number planned prior to the March 11, 2011, Fukushima accident. Gates argues that, given the unreliable nature of wind and solar power, the sole current substitute for the energy density of fossil fuels is nuclear power. He explains: "Nuclear power provides 1 million times the energy as hydrocarbons." A simple enough calculation.

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