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Electricity Expert Dan Scotto: Indispensable or Not, Age Issues May Shut Down U.S. Nuclear Power Plants (Pt. 3 of 4) – text and video
Energy Tech Stocks
The U.S. couldn’t function without its 100+ operating nuclear power plants, but age issues could force many of them to reduce output or shut down completely over the next several years, warns electric utility expert Dan Scotto in Part 3 of his four-part exclusive video news report with EnergyTechStocks.com.
Scotto warned during the interview that because most of these plants are nearing or at the end of their 30-year economic lives, they are experiencing greater embrittlement, spent fuel and other operating problems that no one in Washington wants to talk about because of the economic devastation that could occur should 10 or more plants be forced to shut down, which Scotto fears could happen before any new nuclear power plants have been built.
(1 August 2008)
Russian nuclear power monopoly eyes projects in Chile, Ecuador
RIA Novosti (Russia)
DIMITROVGRAD (Ulyanovsk Region), July 8 () – Russia’s nuclear power equipment and service export monopoly is looking at working in Chile and Ecuador, a high-ranking Atomstroyexport official said Tuesday.
“We are planning to expand our range of works, including on the South American market, particularly in Chile and Ecuador,” said Alexander Glukhov, the first vice president of the monopoly.
Atomstroyexport is currently building five nuclear power plants in China, India and Iran, under contracts worth $4.5 billion overall, and has also won a tender to build a plant in Belene, Bulgaria.
(8 July 2008)
Reader AH writes:
I wanted to bring to your attention recent news that indicates Ecuador is considering building nuclear power plants in its country. the following are two links that verify this…
http://en.rian.ru/business/20080708/113539336.html [above article]
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews+articleid_2380166&ti…
Should this gain traction, it would be travesty for such a beautiful country that has the ability to create cleaner safer forms of energy. I’m hoping you can raise awareness of this issue so that resistance can be created early on.
The Nuclear Future That Never Arrived
Kurt Cobb, Scitizen
Understanding how the great hopes of early nuclear power advocates eventually turned into great disappointment may shed some light on nuclear power’s future.
In 1962 a report requested by President John F. Kennedy on the state of civilian nuclear power in the United States declared that by the year 2000 half of all electricity in the country would be generated by nuclear power stations. It also predicted that all new power station construction after that date would be nuclear.
Today, however, nuclear power generates a little under 20 percent of the country’s electricity, a figure that has varied only slightly all the way back to at least 1995. No plants are currently under construction in the United States though some new plants are expected to be built in energy-hungry Asia. So, what happened on the way to the 21st century?
… It is a sad commentary that so many who knew the planet would one day run short of fossil fuels were unable to convince the world to embrace nuclear power in a more thoroughgoing way. With enough development, with careful and serious attention to the waste problem, and with lower-cost, decentralized designs that maximize safety, nuclear power might have succeeded in making any decline in fossil fuel availability just another historical footnote–but only if deployed on a large enough scale and far enough in advance of such a decline.
Now it may be too late. The time for the development of the nuclear economy appears to have come and gone with few people even realizing it.
(29 July 2008)
