Does anyone really listen to what Mike Sherling and the rest of the Maryland PIRGers have to say? They continue release one biased report after another and somehow the Baltimore Sun still gives them coverage. It is as if the Baltimore Sun cares less about the facts and more about publicity. To give any news coverage to planet killers like Mike Sherling and the rest of his cohorts is to be complicit in their planet killing actions.

Wind and Solar are intermittent power sources which can not get the job done of providing future reliable electrical power. Proving how wind and solar can replace carbon producing power sources is something that their proponents are unable to prove. The simple fact is that if the sun is not shinning or the wind is not blowing you must revert to carbon producing power or you will have rolling brown outs that will cost our society an untold amount of money.

Groups like Maryland PIRG would rather have rolling blackouts in the future or a continued reliance on carbon producing power sources rather than relying on cheap, clean, safe, and reliable nuclear power. Remember this the next time that an unwitting Maryland PIRG/US PIRG canvasser comes knocking on your door looking for a donation. For every dollar you give them is going to a cause that supports king coal and other carbon producing power sources. In short to give money to PIRG is to give money to a planet killing organization.

Let’s save this planet with 250 New US Nuke Plants Now,

Jfarmer9

TW: Thanks, Jfarmer9. Obviously you feel strongly about this. But instead of name calling, how about some facts and reason to back up your assertions? How quickly can 250 nuclear plants get built, and what's to be done about reducing greenhouse gases in the meantime? Can you address the environmental and carbon impacts of uranium mining and fuel processing? And how much taxpayer support do all those nuclear plants need, either directly or in the form of loan guarantees? My post, by the way, included some discussion of the challenges for renewable energy as well as nuclear.

Until and unless we have a secure plan for the long term storage and disposal (including a path to "render harmless") the waste products from Nuclear energy, we should not build new facilities. There are multiple ways to address the intermittent nature of wind and solar, including using excess power generated during high availability cycles to run hydrolysis facilities to generate and compress Hydrogen, which is a totally clean fuel, and operate hybrid plants where Solar and Wind operate in tandem to produce a more consistent flow of power.

I'm not paranoid about the safety of nuclear plants (safe and cleaner than coal) but feel that we need to address the waste problem and incorporate it into the business model for such facilities.

No one opposes improved energy efficiency. But Environment Maryland does not acknowledge its limitations, not the least of which is the fact that the population of the US will more than double by 2100, requiring everyone to halve their electricity consumption just to keep carbon dioxide emissions where they are today.. The American Physical Society has an excellent report on the web detailing how slow significant increases in efficiency will be. One major hurdle is that both residential and commercial buildings are expected to last for about 100 years, and it is very costly to retrofit them to the efficiency standards needed to approach zero net energy use. Hurdles for renewable energy sources include the need for technologies that are still experimental, like a Smart Grid, or affordable energy storage technologies. We could build nuclear reactors from the designs of the 1970's and be confident that they will function for at least 40 years, and more likely for 60 years.

In order to get the same amount of electrical energy that would be produced by the 100 nuclear reactors that Environment Maryland mentions (and using their assumptions) from 2 MW land-based wind turbines (assuming a 30% capacity factor) would require 150,000 turbines, which would cost the same $600 billion, but which will have less than half the working life of the reactors. The wind turbines will also require energy storage technology, which is unrealistically expensive today. The APS’s report is not the only one that states that new nuclear reactors can eliminate carbon dioxide emissions less expensively than wind or solar power.

The underlying basis for opposition to nuclear power is fear of harm to health from exposure to radioactivity, not cost . So, like Larry-T, many people think that storage of spent reactor fuel is a serious health hazard, even though they say that they’re not worried about the reactors themselves. There is an alternative to the Yucca Mountain proposal that has been supported by the Health Physics Society, the MIT report on nuclear power, and Senator Harry Reid. It is the interim storage in above ground concrete casks to permit the radio-isotopes of cesium and strontium to decay (their half-lives are about 30 years), followed by reprocessing of a material that would then present a significantly reduced hazard, and is also a valuable source of future recoverable fuel.

The Maryland Conservation Council’s web site contains a documented discussion of the health hazards from modern reactors and concludes that there is no credible evidence that the accident at TMI caused any harm to health, and that the reactors being designed today are even less likely to experience an accident similar to the one at TMI. The site further shows that the design of the reactor at Chernobyl is not relevant to concerns about the reactors that we have here.

Dr. Norman Meadow
Maryland Conservation Council