Gregory Jaczko
Fmr. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman and Commissioner
Nuclear Power and Climate Change
Posted: 12/14/2015 3:23 pm EST Updated: 12/14/2015 3:59 pm EST

As world leaders convene in Paris in an attempt to prevent a rise in global temperatures, the nuclear industry has -- not surprisingly -- seized this moment to once again promise the perfect solution to the climate challenge. Having witnessed this industry up close for the last decade and a half, I am concerned that the uniquely perfect promise of safe, clean, predictable, and affordable nuclear power will divert our focus from solutions that will actually work to control greenhouse gas emissions.

As the country operating the most reactors and the place where commercial nuclear technology was first envisaged and developed, the United States is a strong bellwether for the future of the current generation of nuclear power plants. And the future appears limited. In the next fifteen years, an avalanche of nuclear power plant closures will see nuclear power go from about one hundred plants in operation today to just a handful. Nuclear will become a blip in the electricity supply without a meaningful ability to alter the course of the nation's greenhouse gas emission profile.

The falloff in nuclear production may already have begun. Since I left the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2012, eight plants have either closed or indicated they intend to close before 2019. Operational blunders and safety lapses have played a role in several of these plant closures. But lack of economic competitiveness is the primary driver for these closures. Cheaper intermittent sources and depressed natural gas prices have reduced power prices to the point that nuclear's perceived economic advantage is erased. Predictably the power companies that rely heavily on nuclear plants have pushed to reform electricity markets through lobbying of state legislators to reward their particular brand of carbon free electricity. Despite these efforts, the potential for more safety equipment problems and tight profit margins means the likelihood is strong that more plants will retire prematurely. Therefore the onset of the impending shutdown of reactors in the next fifteen years may be overly optimistic; it may begin earlier.

One solution to stop this nuclear plant decline is to squeeze even more operational life out of the existing plants by granting a second twenty-year extension to the plants' licenses. Technical and safety limitations due to the age of major components, however, make it likely that a second license extension for any particular plant will be a far more involved, expensive and difficult process. The industry recently announced one plant would attempt this process. Even if this one plant demonstrates a successful path to obtain a second license extension, it is unlikely that all plants still in operation today will be able to take advantage of a second life extension. Their license will simply have run out before they can prepare the necessary application.

The other solution to this impending mass retirement of reactors is to build new ones. Given the lead-time of about ten to fifteen years for nuclear power plant design, approval and construction, a massive program of new construction would need to begin within the next few years to start to replace the soon-to-be-retiring units....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregory-jaczko/nuclear-power-and-climate_b_8806792.html

Preferably delays until the end of time.

Biggest risk analysis failure in human history.

...against humanity.

The fact is that the world built hundreds of reactors in a period of 20 years back in the 1960's, and the reactors operating from that period have saved millions of lives that would have otherwise been lost to air pollution.

The fact that is now challenging to do what was easily done in the 1950's and 1960's represents an obvious decline in our thinking and working ability, and something like this does not occur in a sane world, but unfortunately our world is increasingly insane.

The reactors built then still easily outproduce all of the stupid and toxic so called "renewable energy" programs foisted upon humanity at a cost of two trillion bucks per decade with little or no result, the only result being the fact that climate change is accelerating and not decelerating, and that the same applies to deaths from air pollution.

Every single reactor built by previous generations was a gift to the future. They are still saving lives.

Very, very, very, very stupid people who hate that which they cannot understand - owing to their innate intellectual incompetence - ran a ethically challenged marketing campaign against nuclear energy, causing the decline of nuclear manufacturing capability, thus making it challenging to build reactors, since every reactor built today is subject to FOAKE (first of a kind engineering) challenges.

These ignorant people all behave like arsonists complaining about wild fires when they deign to open their useless mouths to spew more ignorance about how nuclear reactors "can't be built," even though hundreds have operated for decades.

History, should it survive the collapse of our environment, will record how stupid, how evil, how indifferent and how poorly educated this set of baleful individuals were. They all represent, to a man, to a woman, crimes against the future.

It is unfortunate, that the golden age of physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering is being brought to a close by the political contempt emerging around the world for these very beautiful arts, particularly in the United States, a nation that once was, in the mid 20th century, a leader in substituting knowledge and its technological application for fear, ignorance and stupidity.

More than 4 million people will die this year from outdoor air pollution, millions more from indoor air pollution connected with burning "renewable" biomass, this while dumb shits who burn oil gas and coal to rail against nuclear energy on the internet issue yet another round of pure bull about their "renewable energy" fantasies which, like Godot, never arrive.

The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale (Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015))

The people who caused this state of affairs are nothing, if not evil.