Yes We Can! Long Island 2012More than 3 decades after Long Island’s Shoreham nuclear power plant was closed by protests, the Obama administration has agreed to financially support the first new reactors to be built since the 1970’s, in the form of $8.3 billion loan guarantees for two new reactors in Georgia. This controversial action points out how difficult it will be for the US to reduce green house gas emissions by 83% before 2050 as suggested in pending house legislation on climate change. The two major problems often identified by environmentalists are the disposal of nuclear waste and sitting problems due to the risk to nearby populations. Will another nuclear reactor be planned for Long Island? I’d say that is extremely, extremely, unlikely. Perhaps the bigger question for Long Islanders is: will we oppose nuclear power anywhere else in the USA even if it is deemed critical to a comprehensive plan? I hope we won’t, as I agree with President Obama that carbon free nuclear energy will be vital to any realistic plan to prevent catastrophic climate change.
WASHINGTON — President Obama, speaking to an enthusiastic audience of union officials in Lanham, Md., on Tuesday, underscored his embrace of nuclear power as a clean energy source, announcing that the Energy Department had approved financial help for the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia.If the project goes forward, the reactors would be the first begun in the United States since the 1970s.
There will no doubt be those who, without a full understanding of the consequences of climate change, will oppose the increased use of nuclear energy based on arguments that have been proven politically effective but technologically unsound. Nuclear reactors, hundred of the them, have been producing clean, reliable, and relatively inexpensive energy for up to half a century and the anti-science people can still only point to only one incident where a human life was lost, and that was with a reactor universally acknowledged to be inadequately designed, and poorly operated by improperly trained people. The nuclear waste argument is no less invalid. It is a good scare tactic but the reality doesn’t support the hype. Yes, inadequate handling could cause problems, but so far, after thousands of reactor years of operation, there hasn’t been a single verifiable reported incident of anybody getting hurt or sick from nuclear waste. Compare that to the effects of climate change that have already been blamed for much of the starvation of millions of people in parts of the undeveloped world.
President Obama has taken an important first step toward ensuring America’s energy future and toward addressing the horrific effects of climate change to which the world would be subjected if we had kept denying the need to exploit proven technology that can cleanly, reliably, and relatively inexpensively supply the energy we will need in the future, and should have been using all along, without causing further atmospheric deterioration. The US has waited far too long to come back into the real world and has unnecessary produced billions of tons of greenhouse gases, possibly contaminating the atmosphere beyond the point of no return.
You will not get an argument form me. The technology, construction, etc. are of a completely new generation and the old arguments do not hold up.
I do favor a single design plan for all nuclear plants so they are easier to regulate, monitor, repair, etc., and requiring onsite disposal so we get rid of the transportation (dangers, expense) and dumping it all in one location (yucca, e.g.)
For those who may disagree, bring it on.
Well said. We are far beynd Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. A single design plan, or at least a small number of plans, is certainly the way to go. I am not sure of the disposal issue, however, and think that onsite vs central (and it would be to more than one central area) should be on a case-by-case basis.