Maine Yankee II? III? IV? ... Thanks but no.
Because not paying attention is one of my core skills, I didn't notice when Patrick Moore decided that the best response to atmospheric carbon loading is fission. Stewart Brand is of the same mind.
I'm not. Then again, I didn't co-found Greenpeace or start the Whole Earth Catalog. I spent those years organizing Diablo Canyon and Seabrook protests, in the Narcoleptics AG, linking uranium mining on Indian land to waste disposal, also on Indian land, with "military" and "civilian" enrichment and use of enriched uranium, and production of plutonium in between -- the whole fuel cycle -- from cradle to ... there is no grave.
Last fall I was writing the Venezuelan Embassy and CITGO months before the deal was announced that brought discounted fuel oil to low income Mainers and the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies. Because Abenakis are not Federally Recognized Indian Tribes, and the Maine Legislature even declared Abenakis extinct in the late 1800s, to "settle" the land claim question forever (or not), the DC firm hired by Venezuela didn't include Abenakis in the token amount of oil steered to the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies. It was worse in Massachusettes, where none of the Venezuelan oil went to Indians. Even so, it cost Pleasant Point Gov. Melvin Francis, Passamaquoddy Tribe, his life driving home from the close-the-deal meeting.
In 2001 Maine generated 22.7 million metric tons of CO2.
1000 megawatts of electricity burns 7,300 metric tons of fossil carbon, and produces 7,300 metric tons of atmospheric carbon. Maine needs a lot of 1000 megawatt reactors to offset its 2001 carbon budget, a lot more than just one new, Generation III reactor in Wiscasset.
A reactor in every town large enough to burn 1000 megawatts of electricity is probably not what anyone has in mind. It is surprising that the only solution to the rising curve of atmospheric carbon loading is centralized, very highly capitalized, weapons programs adjuncts, with enormous temporal persistence issues. Then again, the Sierra Club had a leadership challenge in its last cycle by a group convinced that Indians from Mexico and points south were the primary forces causing environmental degredation in the US, and the ZPG folk never shook their sanitary hysterectomies roots for Indian and Colored women in the Eugenics Movement of the first half of the 20th century.
The 2001 statewide Field Poll in California had a 59% favorable for construction of new nuclear reactors. The pro-nuke number in 1984, the last time the Field Poll posed the question, was only 33 percent. It is clear that we don't live in the 80's any longer. Nukes having twice Bush's favorables is funny, but not wicked funny. I know who the nuclear nut men are, and they're not particularly altruistic, or able to thrive in a democratic, decentralized, political culture. And they don't have a compelling, or a competitive product.
We could use a term like "liberal hawks", which describes the Dems who signed up for the triumphalist portion of the NeoCon adventure in carbon procurement, for the folks who've signed up for the historically inevitable triumph of Peaceful Nuclear Energy (second round).
Fission hawks?
Comments
Taking no position pro or con the substitution of nuclear for fossil energy, I'll still point out that "megawatt" is a unit of power, not energy, and to generate 1000 megawatts of power for a year, using a coal fired power plant would require about 8 million tons of coal, not 7 thousand. (The rule of thumb is that one megawatt hour requires about 1 ton of coal). The actual number of megawatts required by all of Maine would then be about 6000, or 6 giga-watt nuclear plants.
In actual fact, these things don't substitute, because much of the CO2 generated in Maine would be from mobile sources, and we don't run automobiles on electricity at present.
Posted by: James Killus | April 17, 2006 07:13 PM
Thanks for the corrections James. Jonah has had me up now for most of the night for several nights in a row and I looked at that and thought "damn zeros, someone will correct me", and you have. Thanks.
You're right that they don't substitute one-for-one, but some part of Maine's carbon budget is from fixed point boiler firing, and to replace even a quarter of Maine's carbon budget would be much much larger than putting Maine Yankee back together again.
I hope he sleeps through the night tonight.
Posted by: ebw | April 17, 2006 08:47 PM
Fission Hawks sounds good......yet, it's a damned disturbing turn of events. Like an atheiest suddenly becoming a fundamentalist. Sigh.
Posted by: Sine.Qua.Non | April 17, 2006 10:18 PM
You're welcome. I've stumbled on many a units calculation myself.
I've seen some of Moore's and Brand's arguments, and they aren't looney or entirely uninformed, and there have certainly been excesses in anti-nuclear rhetoric. That said, I'll put in my own two cents by suggesting that, whatever the technical and economic merits of substituting nuclear power for coal, the current regulatory and political climate in the U.S. is so corrupt that nuclear power is just too dangerous to embrace. That fact is pretty starkly shown by the need for federal authority to circumvent insurance liability requirements (otherwise no corporate entity would touch nuclear power).
Moore and Brand at least can say that they aren't philosophically opposed to such "socialist" constructions, something that many pro-nuclear hypocrits cannot.
Posted by: James Killus | April 18, 2006 01:14 PM
I almost wrote the word Stalinist, then decided to leave the final para as is, rather than discuss "socialist centralization".
It would have distracted, but you point is spot on that without the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, the "free market" in fissile fueled steam would not exist.
Posted by: ebw | April 18, 2006 02:09 PM