Comments on: Conservatives Heart Nuke Power

By: The “Baseload” Myth | GPACE

The “Baseload” Myth | GPACE — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:46:36 +0000

[...] plants these days are the ones where governments are making the decisions. David Frum replied with a series of wildly overbroad assertions ranging from false to highly misleading, with no evidence or links to support them. (Nuclear power [...]

By: The Baseload Myth | GPACE

The Baseload Myth | GPACE — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:34:45 +0000

By: envirogy

envirogy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:01:04 +0000

looking at the different sides of this blogument. Envirogy submits his two cents and suggests that maybe it ’s not a republican or democrat thing. Maybe some industries as volatile and dangerous as nuclear need stringent government oversight.

By: The atomic headache. « E N V I R O G Y

The atomic headache. « E N V I R O G Y — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:53:22 +0000

[...] Conservatives Heart Nuclear power – David Frum – Frum [...]

By: BrentB

BrentB — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:04:52 +0000

I’d go for nuclear plants, but I’m not sure anyone really knows what they cost these days. What DO they cost? Are they cheaper than the alternatives?

I’ve heard some prohibitive quotes from projects in other parts of the world — exceeding end-user rates of $0.25/kilowatt, more than the putative cost of solar projects, and imposing huge tariffs on utility customers — but I’m not sure what the price would be in the U.S.

By: balconesfault

balconesfault — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:14:08 +0000

The nuke plants should be located far from any cities, perhaps in the remote mountains or desert.

Ummm … about 2.5 litres of water are evaporated for each kilowatt-hour produced via nuclear energy.

By: David Frum says “Conservatives Heart Nuke Power.” Too bad they don’t “brain” it. | Climate Vine

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:45:20 +0000

[...] uninformed David Frum wades into the debate over nuclear power with a post headlined, “Conservatives Heart Nuke Power“: First Brad Plumer in the New Republic, then Matt Yglesias on his site have marveled at the [...]

By: Celebrity Paycut - Encouraging celebrities all over the world to save us from global warming by taking a paycut.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:18:09 +0000

[...] I always thought it was conservatives who accused progressives of being driven by their heart and not their brain. A painfully uninformed David Frum wades into the debate over nuclear power with a post headlined, “Conservatives Heart Nuke Power“: [...]

By: sinz54

sinz54 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:08:06 +0000

J W:
The study you cited didn’t look at scalability.

Nuclear is the ONLY source of energy that has been proven to scale up to the national needs of a nation as big and affluent as the United States. No one, NO ONE, has yet attempted to scale up solar panels to a nation the size of the U.S.

I was an engineer for 25 years, and I can tell you that ideas that looked great as one-off prototypes often fell apart when you had to scale them up by two or three orders of magnitude.

To get enough energy to power a nation like the United States, you would have to pave over thousands–perhaps tens of thousands–of square miles of fragile desert ecosystem with solar panels. All these enviromentalist freaks haven’t yet started protesting THAT–but they will.

It makes no sense to pave over half the deserts in America with solar panels.

By: sinz54

sinz54 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:03:54 +0000

John McC:

But the problems [of nukes] are not negligible; potential terrorism targets have not been mentioned here, for example.

That's one reason I favor Obama's proposed new energy grid. The nuke plants should be located far from any cities, perhaps in the remote mountains or desert. A superconducting grid can move that power anywhere it's needed with virtually no lossage. And legislation should be devised that allows a utility company in one state to site its nukes in another (if that's not possible now).