TXU Applying To Build 2 New Power Plants In PA - Yes, They're Coal-Fired - Dallas Morning News

[hatrack]

TXU Corp. will probably file applications to build power plants outside of Texas in the next few days, after holding preliminary meetings with regional environmental regulators in Pennsylvania about the permitting process.

TXU met with officials of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in Wilkes-Barre and Williamsport, Pa., in September and October. Those regional officials handle environmental permits for the state's North Central and North East regions, said agency spokesman Kurt Knaus.
They came into DEP for a pre-application meeting," he said.

The Times Leader newspaper in Wilkes-Barre reported that TXU is considering building coal-fired power plants near the small towns of Hazleton and Shamokin.

EDIT

TXU declined to comment on the meetings with Pennsylvania regulators. The company said a few months ago that it opened an office in the area, but a spokeswoman wouldn't say Tuesday where the office is located.

EDIT

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-txupa_20bus.ART.State.Edition1.316ace8.html

[Turbineguy]

1. If they can build 2 new

relatively clean burning plants and shut down a few smaller dirty ones (I seem to recall a loophole by which dirty plants did not have to conform to new regs) that would be an improvement.

[phantom power]

2. It won't improve the pollutant that's going to kill us all: CO2.

[NNadir]

3. Oh good. I'm a downwinder.

It's too bad that they can't make the waste more radioactive than it already is. Then someone would care about it.

[hatrack]

4. But they'll have mercury - or isn't that exciting enough for you, NN?

:evilgrin:

[JohnWxy]

5. This is why we need a carbon emissions tax to force utilities to build IGCC plants.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=73404&mesg_id=73404

these coal plants are going to be built. IT would be much better to make sure they were IGCC plants than traditional coal plants that pump all the CO2 strait into the air. IGCC plants prevent the CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. IT is captured for sequestration.

[NNadir]

6. It is immoral to build any coal plants of any kind. No IGCC plants are planned

on a commercial scale anywhere on this planet, not in PA, not in New Jersey, not in Japan, not in China.

They have huge capital costs - and high fuel costs - and the technology is unproved on a commercial scale. As always those who lobby for them are simply substituting wishful thinking for reality. I note with moral disgust that even if these plants were being built as a standard, they would still release billion ton quantities of carbon dioxide, and the mining of the billion ton quantities of coal would still involve wholesale destruction of the environment.

Coal sucks. It is killing the fucking planet. People who advocate coal of any kind are killing my family and I don't fucking appreciate it at all.

If you want fucking coal plants, build them in fucking Iowa near the ethanol refineries. There is no such fucking thing as "clean coal."

They should be building nuclear plants near here, not fucking filth machines.

[JohnWxy]

7. NINE IGCC plants are planned to be built in the next decade in the U.S.

Tampa Electric Company (TECO) operates one of four IGCCs operating today. they are 15% - 20% more expensive to build than a conventional coal plant but operate 15% more efficiently.

OF 75 coal plants planned to be built in the next decade 9 (nine) are to be IGCC plants.

This is not enough. We need to enact a arbon emissions tax to push that number much higher.

this technology works and is a helluva lot better than allowing traditional coal fired plants which do not capture carbon dioxide to be built.

From an article in Nov issue of Discover magazine:

http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-06/features/clean-coal-technology/

"the Polk power plant is one of just four of its kind in the world. If we are going to survive our coal-fueled future, we will probably need a whole lot more like it."


" Of 75 coal-fired plants planned for construction over the next decade, only nine are slated to be IGCC, largely because an IGCC plant costs about $1 billion, 15 to 20 percent more than a conventional one. { But they are 15% more efficient to operate_JW: "This two-­turbine scheme makes an IGCC plant about 15 percent more energy efficient than a conventional coal plant."}
"The biggest obstacle is simple economics," says Holdren. "There is no incentive for capturing carbon in the United States, India, or China. The most important thing that could happen to drive IGCC forward would be putting a price on CO2 emissions in the form of a mandatory economy-wide 'cap and trade' approach, which is what a Senate resolution passed last summer recommended."
~~
~~
The Polk plant, on the other hand, has been a very good investment. Tampa Electric actually makes money from the pollutants that the IGCC process removes from the coal. The utility sells sulfur captured from the syngas to the fertilizer industry. Slag left from the coal is sold to the cement industry. All the slurry water is recycled to the gasifier; there is no waste water and very little solid waste. "Almost nothing goes to a landfill," Shorter says.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[NNadir]

8. You need to learn the difference between a commercial plant and a demostration plant.

You are here all the time about renewable energy of course, and the fact that you are here talking up coal is hardly surprising. The fact is that renewable energy is completely insufficient to address climate change, which is what I fucking say every fucking day, coal boy.

Even now you're posting all sorts of nonsense about wind power, but on the very same day in the very same place you are trying to dress up coal.

It fucking pisses me off, because it's a direct assault on my family, since these fucking coal plants are being built in my fucking backyard. The reason I am stuck with these pigshit plants is because there are morons who have demonized the cleaner, safer, and more economical alternative, nuclear power.

You say that nine IGCC plants are being built. Bullshit. They are talking about building them, but none are on order. By contrast, all over the world there are nuclear plants not only on order, but being built. In the last 5 years, 5 new nuclear plants were built in Japan alone and they are operating.

You come here with the audacity to complain about Chernobyl, but you give not a flying fuck about millions who have died from coal operations, and not just operations in accident situations, but in normal operations. You don't even fucking know where the Big Sandy River is, but you will tell us all sorts of mystical nonsense about Yucca Mountain. You are here pretending that we should be happy with reduced emissions, emissions reductions which are wholly suppostional, and not industrial practice anywhere. Personally I think you should screw off. Reduced emissions are NOT acceptable. We must eliminate emissions which is only possible with nuclear power. Unfortunately, even if you suck down reduced emissions over there in the corn lobby offices, they still find their way here. Like a crazy lady filling up her apartment with gas while she tries suicide, your self murder is killing other people, innocent people who don't give a shit about your dark fantasies.

The fact is that you are reading Discover magazine to try to figure out the serious matter of energy, and as usual you are clueless about what you are talking about. In fact even this popular magazine contains information which you ignore:

From your own fucking link, should you fucking bother to read what it fucking says:

Industry advocates brag that the United States, which has 27 percent of all known coal reserves, is "the Saudi Arabia of coal," with enough to burn for the next 180 years at the current rate of use. Unfortunately, coal is as filthy as it is cheap and abundant. When burned it releases three pounds of sulfur dioxide and four pounds of nitrogen oxide for every megawatt-hour of operation. The nation's plants produce a total of about 48 tons of mercury annually. "If all the coal-burning power plants that are scheduled to be built over the next 25 years are built, the lifetime carbon dioxide emissions from those power plants will equal all the emissions from coal burning in all of human history to date," says John Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Bold is mine.

And don't give me some fucking silly pipe dream about sequestration facilities, because they don't exist either.

You are commercially clueless as well as scientifically clueless. The fact that there is one pilot plant that can sell coal waste doesn't mean that 300 plants like it can be built and sell the same waste.

In fact, in your other pipe dream, ethanol, the market saturation of the co-product, DDGS, is already depressing prices and impacting both the environment and the profitability. There is no evidence at all that the market for carbon dioxide approximates the amount of carbon dioxide that could be recovered from any coal plant.

There is no evidence at all that any IGCC plants on a commercial scale will ever be built, and if they are built there is no fucking evidence whatsoever that they will be even remotely safe.

Coal is filthy. "Clean coal" is fucking marketing lie, lipstick on a pig.

[JohnWxy]

9. The quote you provided is describing standard NON-IGCC coal fired plants.

the whole point of the article is that these coal fired power plants are going to be built but that there is a technology which can capture the CO2 and prevent that enormous CO2 emissions from conventional coal fired plants. The quote you provided was describing what conventional coal fired plants will do - contrasting that with IGCC plants which keep the CO2 from being released into the air.


The coal plants are going to be built. It's just a question of do we want them to be built as conventional dirty coal plants or IGCCs?

[NNadir]

10. This is complete nonsense, as usual.

I am an environmentalist, not a hack.

I will never accept that coal plants have to be built. The only reason that coal plants have to be built is because of people who oppose nuclear power. Every single "renewables will save us" fraud there is - every single one - ends up apologizing for coal and dressing it up as something other than the pig shit strategy it is. The reason for this is very clear. All the talk about wind, solar blah, blah, blah, can replace fossil fuels. It isn't happening and it's not going to happen.

If of course, renewables were a viable strategy, no one would have to say as you do, "The coal plants are going to be built." They don't have to be built. There is an option. Everybody who knows anything at all about energy knows what coal does, provide continuous base load power, precisely what nuclear energy does, and does with extraordinary safety.

You cannot produce one person in this country who has been killed by nuclear energy. I can easily produce many people - including all the victims of air pollution - who have been injured by coal. Yet you say, the "coal plants will be built." Bullshit. If people have moral courage they will not be built.

The only viable strategy for addressing climate change and saving lives from deadly coal is the strategy that has been commercial for 50 years: Nuclear energy!

The fact is that no industrial scale IGCC plants exist. On the other hand 441 nuclear plants operate. No industrial scale IGCC plants are under construction. Twenty eight nuclear plants are under construction. No industrial IGCC scale IGCC plants are on order. Sixty two nuclear plants are on order. No industrial scale IGCC plants are proposed. One hundred and sixty-two new nuclear plants are proposed.

The fact is that the "renewables will save us" game is an excuse for avoiding that coal is dangerous, deadly, unsustainable, and unimaginably destructive. It is very, very, very, very, very transparent that the very same people who oppose nuclear power - which is responsible for exajoule scale production of energy and has operated without a single fatality in more than 30 nations - always try to pretend coal is clean.

Although IGCC plants are not commercial, their external costs have been estimated by appeal to the small demonstration plants that have been built in the "lipstick on a pig" effort that you are now advocating as you admit that renewable energy will not and is not working.

The Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland has estimated that the external cost without a CO₂ scrubber is between 2.4 and 3.0 cents per kilowatt-hour where that is the fucking cost of destroyed environments and destroyed lives, and not the cost of building and operating the filthy piece of shit in the first place. Even with a CO₂ scrubber - and let's be clear and say that such scrubbers are even more fanciful than the IGCC plants themselves - the external cost of the filthy piece of shit is 1.1 to 1.4 cents. By contrast, the cost of an ordinary light water reactor is 0.5 cents.

When one adds the operating costs, construction costs and the fuel costs, i.e. the internal costs the situation is far more dangerous and disgusting. In fact the operating and maintenance costs for a nuclear plant are 0.19/GJ cents, whereas the operating and maintenance costs for a filthy pig IGCC plant are 3.9 eurocents/GJ.

http://www.etsap.org/worksh_6_2003/2003P_rafaj.pdf

With this information we are now in a position to calculate directly how much death and environmental destruction is wrought by a mealy mouthed decision to build a filthy piece of shit IGCC plant instead of a nuclear plant.

North Carolina's Brunswick nuclear station, one of the smallest nuclear plants now operating in this country, produced million megawatt-hours of electricity in 2003 which translates into 25.3 million gigajoules of energy.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/reactors/brunswick.html

Using the Paul Scherrer institute figures we see that the external costs - that is costs in death and destruction in the environment - of a IGCC plant would be $987,000 per year, or over the sixty year life time of a the plant about $36 million dollars. That's one fucking small plant. By contrast, again using the Scherrer figures, the cost for the nuclear plant was about $126,000/year. Over sixty years that's less than $8,000,000 dollars.

Thus over the lifetime of the plants, the idiotic decision to build an IGCC plant the size of the Brunswick Station would cost 52 million euro dollars in unnecessary environmental destruction. If one were to build 100 such plants - about the size of the nuclear fleet, the filthy pig IGCC plants would cost 5.9 billion euro dollars in unnecessary environmental and human destruction.

But that's just discussing the pretend IGCC strategy, which is just a fucking pipe dream for coal apologists. The real coal plants, the conventional coal plants for which the IGCC pretend game is actually a "bait and switch" strategy, comes in at the low end at 7.5 cents/GJ and the high end at 13.5 eurocents/GJ. In the real case, the kind of coal plants that are really being built thus each coal plant causes an additional

There are 441 nuclear plants operating. Thus the replacement of these nuclear plants with make believe IGCC plants - not that humanity would survive that, would cost humanity $2.3 trillion eurodollars beyond what the nuclear fleet cost ($334 billion). Replacing them with conventional coal would cost 5.6 trillion to 8.6 trillion eurodollars. Thus we see that the decision to choose conventional coal over nuclear would be the equivalent of destroying an amount of value that is on the order of the entire GDP of the United States.

Note that this is just destruction of the environment and destruction of human health and lives. This does not cost about the internal cost, the cost of the fuel itself.

Coal is not clean. It is not safe. It never will be clean. It will never be safe. "Clean coal" is a lie.

[Porcupine]

11. We all know coal is bad and "clean coal" is a lie......

but people in the US are not going to buy the reactors are safe theory when the MSM freaks out over Iran's reactors every other day. When nuclear physics are big, bad secrets that involve national security and convoluted politics we don't distinguish between bomb and plant.

Current reactor programs involve processing fuel, sending it through the reactor once, then reprocessing it. It's the shipping steps that freak people out. Six hundred pounds of plutonium on an aircraft is world news. There should be no need to ship these materials in these quantities.

There still is no thorium-fueled, plutonium-eating reactor that you can point to where everything coming out of the reactor has a half life of 500 years or less. If there is please show us. I think that CANDU reactors and Helium cooled reactors are too complicated for people to believe in their safety.

Of course it doesn't help that the primary proponent of nuclear power for a community of 100,000 is incredibly foul mouthed and rude either. People in the US will accept nuclear power about the same time we regain trust in the authorities that would control the plants and fuel cycle. Right now those authorities are all conservative war proponents and Enron type corporatists.

You may have a wait.

[NNadir]

12. Oh, so your argument is that people should commit suicide because they're stupid.

Wonderful.

I'm sure I accept this.

Actually the percentage of stupid people is falling dramatically around the world. Nuclear power is increasingly popular among the public in many nations. As recent poll showed 53% of Democrats supported it.

As far as the need for thorium reactors - not one person anywhere has ever been killed by the storage of spent nuclear fuel. So it is stupid to insist on an immediate need for this. The need for the long term will be for economics, not safety.

[Porcupine]

13. it's not stupid to be suspicious of centralized authorities. They lie.

That wonderful Texas utility Enron lied to to us. The people who run the Hanford waste facility in Washington have been proven to lie. I suspect that we could find many of the US's nuclear regulatory authorities have lied to us.

The waste products from nuclear reactors represent a poisonous threat to the general populace. People understand this. We can live without nuclear power.

[NNadir]

14. It is stupid to oppose nuclear power.

We will not live without nuclear power, and all the puerile fantasies in the world will not change this. You, neither anyone else mangling the language with words like "poisonous," this to describe something that neither you nor they demonstrate has actually killed anyone, can never be accused of thinking. There is no fucking "threat" from nuclear power in the United States, or France, or Belgium, or Switzerland, or Sweden, or Japan except for the one you have made up or hallucinated.

You don't give a fuck about "coal wastes" - which would for a rational person consist of carbon dioxide and air pollution. Five million people a year could die from air pollution and it would not stir your tiny moral sense. In fact, 5 million people a year do die from air pollution and still, still, still, still...you want to define a "threat."

Nonsense, pure nonsense.

The threat to humanity is not nuclear power plants, but the form of ignorance that insists that nothing be done about climate change because poor thinkers can't get a hold of their childish imaginations. It is this ignorance which is killing the planet.

Not one of you who repeats these silly little chants has ever been graced with an original thought.

This is a thread about coal. I fucking contend that coal is a threat because it actually kills people. All one has to do is to google the words "air pollution", coal and deaths, and one can instantly get 655,000 hits on the subject including scientific references.

For instance here is an abstract from a 2002 Lancet study showing the effects of banning coal in Dublin.

Here is what the abstract says:

About 116 fewer respiratory deaths and 243 fewer cardiovascular deaths were seen per year in Dublin after the ban. INTERPRETATION: Reductions in respiratory and cardiovascular death rates in Dublin suggest that control of particulate air pollution could substantially diminish daily death. The net benefit of the reduced death rate was greater than predicted from results of previous time-series studies.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12401247&dopt=medline

Every single one of these 116 deaths in Dublin, and millions of similar deaths around the world could have been avoided with nuclear power, not that you give a flying fuck. You'd rather pay attention to theoretical dead that do not exist in the form of dead bodies so much as they exist in your foetid little imagination. Why? Because you are indifferent.

The difference between you and me is that I favor, no, I demand, the banning of coal and you don't.

If you had either the courage or the smarts of course to demand the banning of coal, you would offer no plan to do it except a weak kneed cowardly appeal to wishful thinking. But you don't have the courage and you don't have the smarts to demand the end of coal.

It is always the same with people who say they want to ban both nuclear and fossil fuels with their blind and unsupportable faith in renewables. Mind you that most renewables actually have a higher external cost than nuclear, but again, you just don't give a fuck. You might first start with all kinds of balderdash about wind, or solar, or (filthy) biofuels but like every other single representative of your cult, you would end up apologizing for coal. Why? Is it because renewables are bad?. No it's simply because they are insufficient. The fucking world, not that you can count, demands 467 exajoules, and renewables have a hard time producing - even with hydro - 20 of them. Without hydro, renewables can't manage 5 of them.

Instead you whine about so called "nuclear waste." You talk about what could happen and elevate it over what is happening. Every single one of you who advance these tired, weak, bits of rote dogma is exactly the same.

Fuck your religion. It's deadly.

I am here defending my children against you and your nonsensical cant.

By the way, referring to your earlier silliness on this thread, you don't have a clue about how many people understand nuclear energy. The number of people who understand nuclear energy, that is the number of people who are educated, numbers in the millions, the tens of millions, not the thousands. In fact it is easy to estimate that the number of people who have worked in a nuclear station somewhere on earth is easily over a million.

[XemaSab]

15. Hey, hey, hey.....

The dude in the next cube from me at work is working on finding sequestration locations.

Saline aquifers as well as enhanced oil recovery are on the table.

These issues are being discussed on high levels.

You're right, there are kinks, such as finding a location that has access to coal, is away from national parks, is near an appropriate sequestration formation, and is near transmission lines. But these are not insurmountable.

I don't like coal, but we've got to make do with what we have, and siting a nuke would be just as big a hassle.

[NNadir]

16. I don't work there but I know the dude in the next cube is not discussing

a sequestration site that is in the billion ton per year range.

I am perfectly convinced that both you and the guy in the next cubicle have good intentions, as maybe the people "on a very high level," but I am also convinced that none of these people actually know if what they intend will work in a meaningful way. I don't think the problems are "kinks." I think they are incredibly important expressions of a complete lack of information.

I am never going to buy the argument that we have to "make due" with coal. As far as "issues with siting" and hassle, rationally the issue with siting any coal facility of any type should be a huge hassle because coal plants are extremely, incredibly dangerous, all of them. People are building coal plants near me. I am pissed off about it. I want them to build nuclear plants.

I'm probably not speaking for California, but almost everywhere else, people who live near nuclear plants are their biggest supporters. Why? Because they're clean.

The main difference to my mind between a nuclear plant and a sequestration plant is that nuclear plants have been operating for more than 50 years, and their properties are well understood. Indeed the failures of nuclear technology have drawn the limits on what works and what doesn't work. None of this is true for sequestration plants.

A few places where carbon dioxide is "sequestered" exist where carbon dioxide is being used to pressurize oil wells. The famous Statoil field apparently is leaking already:

Chadwick et al., (2003) show that CO2 injection has formed a vertical chimney, within the Utsira formation sandstones and mudrocks, of increased relative permeability. This points to physical leakage through thin mudrock seals being a short-term (decades) problem for saline aquifer disposal. This is not necessarily fatal to the promising concept, but is a problem which needs to be assessed and quantified. At present the question remains—will leakage occur at all through the mudrock top seal, and if so at what rate? Using the logic of Hepple and Benson (2003), a leakage rate of less than 0.01%/y means that zero leakage must be detected at the Utsira formation injection site until 2005, and to confirm less that 0.001%/y leakage, then no leakage must be detected until 2023 (Chadwick, pers. comm., 2004). Either of these target leakage rates, if durable over millenia, would be successful for long term storage...

http://www.ifp.fr/IFP/en/IFP02OGS.nsf/(VNoticesOGST)/7F8489B80C1C16F480256FFD00523FCF/$file/haszeldine_vol60n1.pdf?openelement

Also of note in this paper is the picture of the "Crystal Geyers" in Utah, where outgassing of CO₂ has lead to wonderful geyers that have become tourist attractions.

Here is another quote about presumed chemical reactions in which people put great hope:

Modelled predictions can differ greatly from reality. For example. it has already been noted that the dawsonite predicted by geochemical models (Knauss et al., 2001) does not occur widely in nature, and further natural examples from CO2 rich oilfields (below) show that in many cases dawsonite, or zeolites, have not been identified at all.

Bold mine.

In another part of the paper they write:

The purpose of disposal is to slow the rate at which additional fossil CO2 enters the biosphere. At some future geological time, this CO2 will return to the surface through natural cycling. If this time is less than the recovery time needed for the biosphere, then no net environmental benefit will have been achieved. It is important to estimate the timespan needed for natural processes of CO2 cycling, to return the anthropogenic CO2 to its preindustrial level. That is the minimum time needed for subsurface CO2 disposal. Kheshgi et al. (1996) have simulated the recovery time needed (Fig. 2). If CO2 peaks at 550 ppm in 2050, 2 × the present atmosphere level (i.e. if CO2 emissions are halved by 2015), this timespan is 103 y (IPCC, 2001, scenario A1B). If the rate of CO2 emission continues to increase on a fossil fuel intensive basis (IPCC, 2001, scenario A1F1), to exceed 1200 ppm by 2175, then the recovery time needed is longer than 104 y. Simulation of CO2 storage has considered the acceptable retention times necessary to achieve such targets (Lindeberg, 2003) and concludes that CO2 must be retained for longer than 7000 y. Leakage rates from storage sites must be 0.01%/y or less (Hepple and Benson, 2003) to ensure that
CO2 is stored for a sufficiently long timespan.

Bold mine again.


Sequestration is speculative. The paper clearly delineates that all of the discussion is about concepts whose actual performance and reliability is unknown. From my perspective, it yet another example of wishful thinking, since people over-estimate what it can do because thinking about what it could do is coincident with what they want to hear.

In the meantime, the many people have rather extreme negative ideas about what does work.

I am here to say that I do not support the burning of coal in any way, shape or form. I want coal banned. I do not say this thinking that it will be easy, but the fact is that people need to change their thinking if we want to survive. We have a perfectly good, safe and clean alternative to burning coal with or without all sorts of futuristic pretense. That option is nuclear energy.

[JohnWxy]

17. You need to learn what a commercial demonstration plant is - no Nuke has achieved commercial status.

The TECO plant in the article was a commercial demonstration plant. It has been a unqualified success. The TECO plant is making money for the utility. The nuclear industry on the other hand could not exist as a true commercial enterprise. Without massive government support nuclear power would not be able to compete. thus there had not even been one nuke plant that would meet the definition of a commercial demonstration plant. the nuclear industry only exists because governments underwrite it.


http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-06/features/clean-coal-technology/


The Polk plant captures all its fly ash, 98 percent of its sulfur—which causes acid rain—and nearly all its nitrogen oxides, the main component of the brown haze that hangs over many cities. Built to demonstrate the feasibility of a new way to wring economical power from coal without belching assorted toxins into the air, the $600 million plant has been running steadily since 1996. "It makes the lowest-cost electricity on TECO's grid," Shorter says. "It also has very, very low emissions. Particulate matter is almost undetectable."

What is both distressing and remarkable about the Polk plant is that it could do much more. "There's no requirement for mercury capture, but 95 percent of it could be captured very easily," Shorter adds. More important, the plant could also capture nearly all of coal's most elusive and potentially disastrous emissions: carbon dioxide, the main gas that drives global warming.


MORE on nuclear power costs:

http://baltimore.bizjournals.com/baltimore/stories/2006/11/20/focus2.html


"..industry experts say it still remains unclear whether investors will lay out the huge capital costs -- anywhere from $3.4 billion to $6 billion -- needed to make a new nuclear reactor a reality.

"We're going to build new nuclear plants, but no one's really sure how much it's going to cost," said Peter Fox-Penner, principal of the Brattle Group, a firm that consults for the power industry.

The federal energy bill passed last year contained a lucrative tax credit for the first few new nuclear plants, as well as protections against delays from licensing problems and litigation.

Still, David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., said there are better uses for taxpayer dollars than subsidies for nuclear power plants. Without those subsidies, he said, companies will not be able to make the plants feasible economically.

"The track record for the existing fleet of reactors was one of very optimistic projections and very costly reality," Lochbaum said "That problem hasn't gone away."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As I said, the nuclear power industry has yet to build a nuclear power plant that can meet the definition of a commercial demonstration plant.

[NNadir]

18. There are no nuke commercial plants?

I think you write so badly because you think so badly.

The billable receipts for power are available on line, not that you give any evidence whatsoever of having any comprehension of what a number is.

The electric industry last year billed $298 billion dollars:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/table3.xls

Now, I know that you do not do doodly squat about numbers or about where where energy comes from, and just make shit up after cruising around the internet to find links that support your absurd biases. Nevertheless, your complete misapprehensions of reality aside, last year, nuclear energy produced 20% of the electricity in this country. It follows that nuclear revenues were about $60 billion dollars. It is your contention that this $60 billion dollars is a subsidy?

Sixty billion dollars is more revenue than GM produced. It is almost the annual cost of the war in Iraq.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/amendments/supplemental_2_14_05.pdf

Look, people bitch all the time about the ethanol subsidy, which produces very little energy in spite of all the money thrown at it to satify the political connections of the corn lobby. Is that subsidy $60 billion dollars too? Do you really think that people are so stupid as to not notice a $60 billion dollar subsidy?

Why do they not notice this "nuclear subsidy?" Because it doesn't fucking exist, that's why. It was made up by idiots who think that other people can't think.

I am on record, nonetheless, as advocating, becaue climate change is real and not an invention, a massive worldwide subsidy for nuclear energy. I believe that the world should spend 4 or 5 trillion dollars immediately to expand nuclear power to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. If the dopey claims about nuclear subsidies were true - and they aren't - this would be a good thing, not a bad thing.

[Dr Batsen D Belfry]

19. Coal will remain the option of choice so long as

the Repukes/Bushistas are in power. It is the same reason why the ports deal is so desireable.

Follow the dots

Coal

1) The most economical way of shipping large quantites of coal throughout the US is by rail
2) Snow was appointed Treasury Secretary
3) Snow's previous job was Chairman of CSX, the largest rail carrier in the US
4) Snow's last act as CSX Charman was to sell to Carlyle
5) Poppy is involved with Carlyle

Freight

See above, and note that more freight means more profit to Carlyle.

DBDB