Green World Blog
News, views & musings for our nuclear-free, carbon-free future
-
Don’t Let #DirtyEnergy TRUMP the Climate!
NIRS is launching a new campaign to stop a national bailout to promote nuclear power and coal. No one knows exactly what the Trump administration’s plans are yet, but we expect them to be announced very soon. This will reportedly kick off with a Department of Energy report claiming that nuclear and coal need more…
Read More -
The Astronomical Cost of New Subsidies for Old Reactors: $280 Billion.
GreenWorld has covered the unfolding story of the American nuclear power industry’s clamor for new subsidies and bailouts since it started in 2014. Purely as a spectator sport, it might have been entertaining to watch the country’s largest utilities go from proclaiming a “Nuclear Renaissance” a decade ago to peddling the message that “Nuclear Matters.”…
Read More -
Watts Bar 2: Winning a Battle While Losing the War
New Electrical Generation From Wind & Solar Is 21 Times Greater Than That Expected from Watts Bar 2 (prepared by the SUN DAY Campaign, October 2016) [Editor’s Note: GreenWorld is pleased to publish this guest post by Ken Bossong, of the SUN DAY Campaign. Ken puts the startup of the first U.S. nuclear reactor in…
Read More -
New York Just Proved Why Bailing Out Nuclear Power Is a Bad Idea
New York approved a $7.6-$10 billion subsidy to prop up uncompetitive nuclear power plants–twice as much money as it will take for the state to achieve a goal to generate 50% of its electricity with renewables by 2030. Yesterday, New York became the first state to adopt a policy to subsidize aging, uncompetitive nuclear reactors.…
Read More -
Michael Mariotte: Counterweight to Nuclear Energy (1952 – 2016)
Let us be clear: without Michael Mariotte’s decision in the mid 1980’s to devote his talents to stopping the nuclear industry, many things would be very different today. Michael could not do what he did without Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), and the many thousands of people who work with NIRS could not have…
Read More -
Exelon seems to think the rules are for others
Cover sheet of NRC letter to Exelon raising questions about the company’s efforts to reclassify public documents on emergency planning. It might seem that we’re guilty of dumping on Exelon in these pages, which is possibly true, especially since there is an apparently endless supply of Exelon-initiated issues worthy of bringing to public attention. After…
Read More -
How to take on the nuclear shills: here’s one approach.
Exelon’s aging, unprofitable Quad Cities reactors. Earlier this month, we reported that climate scientist Dr. James Hansen and the pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute’s Michael Shellenberger had leaped–apparently on their own–into the battle over the future of some of Exelon’s unprofitable nuclear reactors in Illinois. In a nutshell, Exelon wants a taxpayer and/or ratepayer (it doesn’t really…
Read More -
How low can they go? Hansen, Shellenberger now shilling for Exelon
Exelon’s Clinton reactor nearly bankrupted the small utility and rural co-ops that originally built it. Despite being bought for a few cents on the dollar by Exelon, it still isn’t economic and Exelon is “threatening” to close it. Photo by cryptome.org. While some potential legal challenges remain, the approval of the Exelon-Pepco merger by the…
Read More -
Wishful thinking: the basis of new nuclear economics
Generation IV reactors are not going to save the nuclear power industry. That nuclear power’s miserable economics are pretty much killing the industry, especially in the western world, is a reality acknowledged by virtually everyone at this point. After the first burst of reactor construction from the late 1960s until the early 1980s collapsed under…
Read More -
Exelon: now the nation’s largest electric utility
This building–an artist’s rendition–doesn’t actually exist. Yet. But now that Exelon is the nation’s largest electric utility, who knows what it could do? Exelon has long been the nation’s largest nuclear power utility. Now it is the nation’s largest electric utility, period. Yesterday, the Washington, D.C. Public Service Commission, which had twice rejected the proposed…
Read More