click here to return to the Calico Cat homepage

The return of nuclear energy

An article about nuclear power graces the front page of Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal (see An Unusual Pitch From French Giant: Nukes Are Green - subscription required).

The article focuses on the French company Areva, which is currently owned by the French government, but may be going public in the next year. Areva could be an interesting investment opportunity, because there are no other publicly traded nuclear power companies.

The article points out the following about nuclear energy:

(1) Nuclear power plants don’t emit greenhouse gases.

(2) Finland recently decided to build a new nuclear reactor.

(3) It’s possible that environmentalists may come around and start supporting nuclear power:

Global warming has caused some environmentalists to make peace with nuclear power. James Lovelock, the British scientist who was one of the founding fathers of the Green movement, has become actively pro-nuclear. He argues that the 45 proved deaths caused by Chernobyl pale in comparison with the estimated 30,000 Europeans who died from this summer's heat wave. He blames climate change caused by greenhouse pollution. Nuclear energy "is the only clean source of energy we have as far as the atmosphere goes," he says.

It is my viewpoint that nuclear power most certainly is the electricity source of the future. The world has vast supplies of uranium. Enough to supply power for hundreds of years. What is not mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article is the unfortunate news that oil and natural gas are resources that are being depleted and which we will be running out of. Windmills have not proven to be a cost effective way to produce electricity in large quantities. Additional hydroelectric plants cannot be built because all the good places to build such plants have already been exploited. There is only one Hoover Dam, you can’t build a second.

So all new electricity has to come from either natural gas, which we are now starting to run out of in the United States, coal which is plentiful right now but very polluting, or nuclear power plants which don’t emit any pollution into the atmosphere at all. The lack of alternatives will force people to come around, although it may not happen for another decade.

If hydrogen fuel cell powered automobiles ever become a reality (and this is something that I'm very skeptical about), we will have tremendous needs for new electrical plants to power the hydrogen manufacturing facilities. Everyone talks about how great hydrogen powered cars would be, but no one ever says where all the hydrogen would come from. Nuclear power will be the only way to provide all the electricity that will be needed.

posted Saturday, November 15, 2003

0 Comments: