It's a Wall Street Journal kind of week. On the front page of today's edition is a story about nuclear energy in France. I've got no big take-home lesson from it, but some bits are interesting in their own right.
First, some incisive framing:
France's experience spotlights a daunting aspect of today's energy crunch: The world will have to face hard choices long before science comes up with definitive answers. There's mounting evidence that global warming is happening and that finding big new pools of oil is getting harder. But it's not yet clear how serious global warming will be or whether petroleum is running dry. If politicians and businesses act and these concerns prove overblown, they could waste vast sums of money. If they postpone action and the facts validate today's concerns, the future choices could be a lot harder.
Yup.
And here's something I didn't know. To kickstart its nuke industry in the '70s ...
... France signed long-term deals with other countries -- those that didn't have the political stomach to recycle nuclear waste in their own backyards. In effect, France defrayed the cost of its own nuclear program by contracting itself out as a global nuclear-waste processor.
Needless to say, that's caused some domestic angst.
And finally, no story about energy would be complete without at least a reference to shady U.S. goings on:
[State-owned energy company] Areva is now hoping to take advantage of provisions in last year's U.S. energy bill to win contracts to build a fleet of reactors in the U.S. Last month, after declaring in his January State of the Union address that the U.S. is "addicted to oil," President Bush cited the success of France's nuclear strategy. "The best way to meet our growing energy needs," he said in a radio address, "is through advances in technology."
Areva recently hired as chairman of its U.S. unit the Bush administration's newly retired energy secretary, Spencer Abraham.
Let the insider dealing begin!
Comments
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Sogo Posted 7:00 am
28 Mar 2006
Nuclear energy has lots of downsides. But if you consider global warming a catastrophe that is happening much more quickly than anyone thought...
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David Roberts Posted 7:53 am
28 Mar 2006
What makes you think nuclear power is the best, fastest, most economical way to get non-fossil-fuel power up and running?
www.grist.org
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GRLCowan Posted 5:51 am
30 Mar 2006
Public servants have disposable income that, more than the rest of us, they can reasonably anticipate will continue reliably for years. So they fund charities. The ones that must seem most charitable to them, although not to me, are therefore the ones that fight alternatives to fossil fuel power.
So, which alternative to fossil fuel power has already mostly driven oil out of the US electricity market, has increased from 3 million barrels per day, oil equivalent, to 11 million in the last 25 years, and has the most groups trying to stop it?
--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion, nuclear cachet
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