CA: Energy Commission says keep ban on new nuclear plants

AP on Bakersfield Californian ^ | 4/28/06 | Samantha Young - ap

[calcowgirl]

I want to see them on our side of the border.
I don't want us to be more reliant on foreigners for oil and power.

[ran15]

I agree with you, we should have them here. Just like we should keep and expand industry here. But the problem is I don't see it happening in the near term. Our government has expanded so out of control that it is nearly impossible to get big things like a manufacturing plant or a power plant built, or a new port built.

Unless a disaster happens like the California energy problems, then they go for the short term least politically painful measures.

Honestly at this point the only solution I see to the out of control and growing exponentially federal and state bureaucracies is to get away from democracy. Like a military dictator to restructure the system in areas like energy. I think hte kind of changes to reform the system would be too painful to ever get the support of the populace to do. Unless it was a serious situation, like a war against a major power. But even then the way they would get things done would be to give emergency powers to the executive.

After the system is reformed hopefully it could be given back to the people like what happened after world war 2 imo.

[MissouriConservative]

If energy grew on trees....lol....then liberals would really be in a pickle because they would want to hug them, not cut them down and use them....lol

[backhoe]

I have been covering, ( Or, as Seamole calls it...-backhoe's pseudoblog--... ) pseudo-blogging, this issue for years, so allow me to drop out of Lurk & Link mode for a rare bit of commentary-- we all need to get serious about our dependency on foreign sources of energy, and use our own resources.

Our consumer-based economy is driven by and dependent upon readily-available, reliable energy-- choke that off, and we'll all be back to using one rotary dial phone in the dining room, watching one TV in the living room, and driving one car per family-- probably a Hudson Hornet or a Nash Metropolitan...

We need to

1) end the nonsensical ban on offshore drilling off California and Florida--read & weep:
Castro Plans to Drill 45 Miles from US Shores, But We Can't

2) build a lot of next-generation nuclear power plants, not just for electricity, but for any process requiring heat, power, or steam.
And if we replaced our existing nuclear plants with this one there would be significant benefits.

3) end Jimmy Carter's idiotic ban on recycling nuclear waste, and reprocess the stuff rather than fighting over where to bury it. Europe has done this for decades.-- what to do with spent nuclear fuel? Answer here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1468321/posts?page=50#50 hattip:  Mike (former Navy Nuclear Engineer)

4) use the 300-500 years worth of coal we have on our own land, using the new clean-coal technology.
-Clean Coal Centre--

5) and finally, there's nothing wrong with conservation, we should all practice it- but you can't conserve your way out of a shortage. Nor is there anything wrong with "alternative" energy sources- except they don't supply the vast ( not to mention readily-available ) amounts of power we need at a price competitive to more conventional sources. Then again, there is this to ponder:
Energy From the Gulf Stream
http://www.energy.gatech.edu/presentations/mhoover.pdf

We do need to get serious about this before we get strangled by a bunch of petty thieves and dictators who don't like us much.

My tongue-in-cheek collection of energy-related links:

Sticker Shock-$3 a gallon gas? Click the picture:

And kindly note, and note well-- the first reply to this post ( when gas was $1.45 a gallon ) was derisive... so, who's laughing now?

[Myrddin]

the price paid for the kWh that you DO use will go up dramatically....you know, good ole' supply and demand...

The power in my area is mostly hydropower. There is a generating station 15 miles west at American Falls on the Snake River. The Northwest exports power.

[SierraWasp]

"They are an appointed body. It is time for change."

Well that fat-head Schwartzenegger is the appointer in chief!!! The CAGOP forclosed any Primary Election challenge to the Grinninator, so we're essentially stuck with no hope for about FOUR and a half long years!!!

He's so stupid that he doesn't realize we don't have enough cheap electricity to make hydrogen without nuclear generation in this state. So, where's he gonna git the hydrogen for his "Hydrogen Highway(s)?" Yet the people patiently put up with this crappola cause he's a danged celebrity!!! Unreal!!!

[SierraWasp]

"The cost of environmental regulations and local NIMBY groups such as TURN and RFKJr.'s buds at Earthjustus will attack anyone with the temerity to build a new plant as Mr. Bryson's associates in the NRDC did decades ago when they helped shut down Rancho Seco."

So absolutely TRUE!!!

[SierraWasp]

"Jackalyne Pfannenstiel
Vice Chair, California Energy Commission
Appointment Designation: Environmentalist
Appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger 4/20/2004 to 1/2009
Appointed Vice Chair February 2005

Just what in the heck is an "EnvironMentalist?" I understand all the other designations, but this one puzzles me! How does one qualify themselves to receive the "EnvironMentalist""Appointment Designation?"

All I've ever heard is... Just git a rubber stamp with the word "EnvironMentalist" on it and stamp yerself in the forhead and on the butt and YOU'RE IN!!!

[calcowgirl]

I think it's a state of mind. A born tree-hugger, perhaps?

I did notice in the news that one of the other Commissioners (the Davis appointee, reappointed by Arnie) just turned 80 this week. (see next post). So glad that we are getting all those fresh ideas on board!

[calcowgirl]

http://www.insidebayarea.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=3762195

Berkeley scientist wins Fermi Award
Arthur Rosenfeld, 80, is still thinking up new solutions to energy woes
By Ian Hoffman, Inside Bay Area

As a physicist, Arthur Rosenfeld worked with some of the 20th century's greatest scientific minds and had a heady role in discovering building blocks of matter with Nobelist Luis Alvarez.

Then a cartel of Arab and South American nations cut oil deliveries to the United States and Western Europe — doubling oil prices almost overnight — and Rosenfeld dropped his career in particle physics to find an answer to the energy crisis.

Rosenfeld found the solutions almost everywhere he looked — in the kitchen, in the basement, the lights overhead, out the window and in the car — and after saving tens of billions of dollars a year in U.S. energy costs, he is still finding them.

On Thursday, President Bush named Rosenfeld of Berkeley, who turns 80 today, as the sole 2005 recipient of the coveted Enrico Fermi Award for ferreting out the kind of huge energy savings since the 1970s that have other scientists calling him the "grandfather of energy efficiency."

With the Fermi award, Rosenfeld joins the likes of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Ernest Lawrence and Freeman Dyson. Not for 25 years has the gold medal and accompanying $375,000 honorarium gone to a single scientist.

"I get the whole loot," Rosenthal said Thursday by phone from Sacramento where he serves on the California Energy Commission. "My ego has gotten so big I can barely get through the door."

He was, in fact, Fermi's last graduate student at the University of Chicago, where the great Italian-born physicist inaugurated the age of the atom and trained the next generation of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, defense scientists and technical advisors to every president since.

When the 1973 Arab oil embargo hit, Rosenfeld had a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the world's premier particle accelerator in Switzerland. Instead, he holed up in Princeton with a dozen other physicists bent on tackling the problem of energy, about which Rosenfeld knew nothing.

The Princeton group quickly concluded that the United States could cut its energy consumption 90 percent, or half of European levels, mostly by what Rosenfeld calls "mindless" steps like adding insulation to homes.

He pushed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor, to turn some of their intellectual talent toward energy-efficient buildings, the sinkhole for fully a third of U.S. energy. The lab gave him an office, a tiny staff and a shoestring budget.

Rosenfeld looked at windows, did a quick series of calculations and realized they let huge amounts of heat escape in winter, then let heat in during summer — more total energy lost in U.S. homes than all the oil delivered in the Alaska pipeline. The answer: invisible, low-emissivity coatings that now are on 40 percent of residential windows installed today.

Rosenfeld and his physicists gazed at fluorescent lights overhead and realized they were all wrong. People hated the way the bulbs buzzed and flickered.

The scientists found the bulbs also could be a lot more efficient and flicker-free just by making an electronic gizmo inside called ballast turn on and off almost 1,000 times faster. Turns out, they also could be dialed down or dimmed, and with advances by the bulb makers, made into compact bulbs that today put out four times the light of incandescent bulbs and last 10 times longer.

"By the time one has burned out, it has replaced not one incandescent but two six-packs of incandescents, and you've saved one barrel of oil," Rosenfeld said. "That's 42 gallons, and in my (Toyota hybrid) Prius, that's enough to drive me to Denver and back."

Rosenfeld is a master of the flick-of-the-wrist translation from esoteric energy science to dollars and centers, and he held Berkeley students in thrall for 39 years, recruiting hundreds for the crusade.

"We saw these stories sprawl out over the blackboard and said, 'Wow, there's a career here,'" said Evan Mills, a former student who became Rosenfeld's deputy at the Berkeley lab's Center for Building Science and then took over when Rosenfeld became a senior adviser to the Clinton administration on energy efficiency.

Mills calls him a "feet-on-the-ground optimist," and Rosenfeld says with steady energy efficiency gains of 1 or 2 percent a year, two thirds of the projected growth in greenhouse gas emissions probably can be avoided.

"If you can knock off another one percent, you've solved the global warming problem," he said.

[SierraWasp]

Well his former colleague (professor at the Livermore National Laboratory) Bill Wattenburg was having an absolute hissy fit over this ignorant ruling by the Energy Commission on his radio show last night. If you turn your AM radio to 810 killocycles at 10:PM tonight, you no doubt hear part two. That station, after dark covers the entire west coast from Alaska to Mexico!!!