“Al Gore & Company will shut up nuclear will be around for a few lifetimes.”
Not that I agree with Al Gore’s Global Warming rantings, but Global Warming fearmongering has been quite helpful in restarting nuclear power plant building. That and $7/mcf for natural gas. Ten years ago, the ‘future’ was natural gas cmbined cycle plants - best economics. But it was built on the basis of cheap gas. I owned calpine stock for a while, and watched that company go to nothing as gas rose and made their gas-fired-power-plant-building strategy untenable.
The other fossil fuels rose in tandem, even coal. It’s the 1970s all over again.
Al Gore’s Global warming crusade is a clarion call to stop using fossil fuels. Well, what are the alternatives? The only on that is economical for baseload generation is nuclear. Moreover, if we did switch from coal to nuclear for 70% of our baseload electricity generation, we would cut our CO2 emissions by 40%. The global warming threat would be hugely diminished. If all we do is simply build new nuclear power plants to replace old coal plants, and do it over the next 30 years, we would go most of the way towards solving global warming.
The logic is so inescapable the more intelligent environmentalists and lefties are on the bandwagon. We need nuclear power in the mix to reduce our CO2 emissions.
I see it as a win/win/win - it’s good economics and pro-energy, gives us sustainable energy independence, and good for the environment.
Now the irony is that the environmental movement is the #1 pusher on global warming *and* the major opponent of nuclear power. This is an issue the environmentalists could end up losing their credibility over, as being the #1 impediment to solving global warming.