News today that a quake has caused a fire at a nuke plant in Japan follows revelations of operator error that could have caused an accident at the 1,316 MW Krummel reactor in Germany, owned by Vattenfall Europe. When a fire broke out at that plant in late June, operators panicked and put the reactor on emergency shutdown, against their guidelines, and put the reactor at risk. Then Vattenfall tried to cover up what happened.
I learned of this at SolarFest this weekend in central Vermont, where thousands converged to learn and share ideas toward a safer and more sustainable energy future. Fellow vendors said that it was the best crowd for this perennial event they'd seen -- was it merely the "year of the climate" effect? Perhaps, but there was a real sense of determination shared by all the folks I spoke with about my organization's renewable energy plans. As Bill McKibben said so well from the main stage on Saturday, this event used to be about good things we should do. Now it's about all the things we must do.
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
Blowing up our clean energy future
Comments
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rethinkable Posted 7:45 am
16 Jul 2007
I'm a 28-year-old German living in Canada and I still watch the daily news from Germany. I was actually just watching the news about this incident, when I received your blog update on this topic.
The one good thing about this incident, is that they will shut down the Vattenfall power plant, because there was a dispute on weather they should or should not keep this plant running.
Further, this will also re-encourage Germany to keep their deadline of shutting all of Germany's nuclear power plants down by 2016 (I'm not quite sure what the actual date is anymore, but they had one set at one time).
I'm still so surprised that Canada is just building a new power plant, which is going to be ready by the time that Germany has intended to shut it's last nuclear power plant down by!!!
Just an interesting observation...
Cheers,
rethinkable.com
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:06 am
16 Jul 2007
In order to be safe, it requires transparency.
However every time something goes wrong, they always try to cover it up.
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JMG Posted 1:22 pm
16 Jul 2007
Not very convincing; the best numbers I can pin down suggest that nukes emit about 30-60 gms of CO2 over the life cycle (including construction, mining, enrichment) for each kWh produced at the plant (and that's even including the crappy thermal efficiency of steam plants -- about 34%).
Coal plants produce about a kilo per kilo -- on the order of a kilogram of CO2 per kWh (using the same kind of low efficiency steam turbines).
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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AEV Posted 2:08 am
17 Jul 2007
Lot of folks, though, are not even aware that many utilities can currently provide them clean energy from wind, solar or small hydro if they request it.
Check out SmartPower.org to learn how to get your community to start using clean energy.
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