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The real question: should oil be cheap?
John Carey, Business Week
Amite Foundry & Machine is one of those gritty manufacturers at the heart of American industrial might. The Louisiana company’s fiery 2,800F furnaces melt down hunks of recycled scrap steel and recast them into massive parts for trucks, oil rigs, and other heavy equipment. Amite even turned 30 tons of metal from the World Trade Center into the bow of the Navy’s USS New York. But the company suffered as manufacturing moved offshore, and the town of Amite, 65 miles north of New Orleans, with its faded white clapboard churches and a main street that time forgot, has suffered along with it.
No more. Amite Foundry’s orders jumped 25% in 2007 and 30% more so far this year, spurring the company to hire dozens of workers. Why the turnaround? The price of oil. With the cost of a barrel of crude well north of $120, anything that can provide additional supplies, alternatives, or gains in energy efficiency is booming. One example: Canada’s oil sands. They’re boosting sales of Caterpillar’s (CAT) 380-ton-capacity mining trucks—and Caterpillar uses nearly 50 tons of Amite’s steel castings per vehicle. Sure, increased energy and commodity costs make it more expensive to produce and ship steel, says Roy Roux, sales chief at parent Ameri-Cast Technologies, but “high oil prices are mostly good for us.”…
(23 July 2008)
Spain to cut speed limit in bid to reduce oil imports
Graham Keeley, The Guardian
Spain has launched an ambitious plan to reduce energy consumption and save millions of euros on oil imports by cutting the speed limit to 50mph and handing out millions of low-energy use light bulbs.
With the introduction of a broad swathe of measures between now and 2014, Spain’s socialist government hopes to reduce Spain’s oil imports by 10% per year, cutting consumption by 44m barrels and saving €4.14bn (£3.25bn).
During the country’s sweltering summers, air conditioning systems in public buildings will be set no lower than 26C (79F). In winter, Spaniards will be allowed to turn the heating no higher than 21C (70F), with hospitals being the only exception…
(30 July 2008)
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the reactor revival is NOT ready for prime time
Harvey Wasserman, The Free Press
A devastating blow to the much-hyped revival of atomic power has been delivered by an unlikely source—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC says the “standardized” designs on which the entire premise of returning nuclear power to center stage is based have massive holes in them, and may not be ready for approval for years to come.
Delivered by one of America’s most notoriously docile agencies, the NRC’s warning essentially says: that all cost estimates for new nuclear reactors—and all licensing and construction schedules—are completely up for grabs, and have no reliable basis in fact. Thus any comparisons between future atomic reactors and renewable technologies are moot at best. And any “hard number” basis for independent financing for future nukes may not be available for years to come, if ever…
(25 July 2008)
Contributor-Billhook: Though widely suspected, this is the first authoritative debunking of the economics behind the current wave of brazen nuclear hype.
While the main impact will be to help dry up any remaining prospect of market finance for nuclear plants, further effects will be to stiffen the coal lobby’s resolve, while perhaps also causing NGOs, Govt.s and industry alike to start evaluating the wide range of energy resources in terms of their sustainability, global replicability and local legitimacy, rather than auto-pouring yet more resources into controversial wind power. It may be worth noting here that Onshore Wind Power has for decades proved a very convenient show-pony for the now-legless Nuclear Lobby.
