Why Doesnt The Usa Become 100 Nuclear Energy Dependant

David Kahana

France made a very explicit decision at the time of the Arab oil embargo that they did not wish to be dependent on external sources of energy for electricity production - they converted to nuclear power by a government managed effort. They put their very best engineers to work at building their reactors and then running their nuclear power program.

They scaled up production of reactors very rapidly because they made a public decision to do so.

Nuclear power has no chance of approval by the US public in the near future due to the extremely skewed public perception of the risks of various means of producing energy.

Witness the references here to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

These were hardly catastrophic events in human history. Very few deaths resulted, and none from Three Mile Island or Fukushima... yet these names are regularly invoked in such discussions as this one. And they are invoked in the absence of any comparison with the health effects that result, because half of all electric power worldwide is generated by burning coal.

So nuclear power was not, is not, and will not become a practical option for energy production in the US, and that is mostly due to public fear.

Electric powered vehicles are also not yet developed to the point where they are comparable in cost and performance to petroleum powered vehicles, so it is not possible to speak of switching to anything like a 100% nuclear powered US in the short term. About 40% of energy consumption is connected with transportation - so at most one can speak of switching the vast majority of electricity production for purposes other than transportation to nuclear power, over what would be an extended period of time, probably several decades.

Electricity consumption amounts to about 40% of total US energy consumption, of which 20% currently comes from nuclear power, so that about 8% of total US energy

consumption is provided by nuclear power, and all of that comes from only about 100 operating nuclear power plants.

This figure could easily have been 80% of electricity production (32% of energy consumption) by now, had nuclear power plant construction not been terminated starting in the 1970s, due to irrational public fears that were actively stoked by the anti-nuclear movements.

The current aggregate US production of electricity from "renewable" sources of energy - including wind and solar, but omitting hydroelectric generation, the last of which has been almost fully developed in the US - is negligible on the scale of total consumption at the current time.

There is often a tendency to ignore the realities of implementing "renewable" technologies in the real world, when people start to talk about solar and wind power.

This appears to be due to a kind of religious faith that exists among the advocates of these technologies.

But these technologies nevertheless do have their uses. If human population growth were being controlled, at much lower rates than are currently the case, and if population could be stabilised at much lower levels than currently exist, then these technologies might ultimately prove to be sufficient for all human needs.

But populations are currently growing rapidly, and despite the optimistic projections of the UN demographers that the growth rates will decrease in the future, worldwide energy demands will still increase enormously, if all people start to consume energy at the rate that Americans do, or even at the rate, about 1/2 of the American rate, at which Europeans consume energy.

The realities of solar and wind power that Im talking about relate to such mundane problems as the well-known fact that the sun doesnt shine all the time, and the wind doesnt blow all the time, so that the electric power generated from wind and solar generators must be made capable of being stored for some time, and then transmitted over very long distances, if solar and wind power are really to provide a significant fraction of electricity production in a nation the size of the US.

Thats assuming that one doesnt plan on building a huge overcapacity of wind turbines and solar photovoltaic cells, and then simply dumping the excess, when it does exist, and relying on other means for generating the baseload, when that excess doesnt exist.

And how does one generate the baseload, when there is a shortfall?

Storage is very costly on the time scales that are required for wind and solar power, and long range transmission of power is also very costly.

Which is not to say that solar and wind power should not be actively researched, and implemented, where it is reasonable to do so.

Passive solar technologies could certainly be used to greatly reduce the wintertime use of heating oil and natural gas in the Northeastern US. Changed construction codes would be needed.

A better transmission grid might well be a net benefit.

But in fact, the writing is already on the wall... the actual direction in energy production in the US is towards increased production and use of hydrocarbons, including mainly coal and natural gas, for electricity production in the US.

Thank you, Jane Fonda.

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