Posted on 05/24/2022 7:39:30 AM PDT by grundle
As states race to keep plants open, California becomes a test case of how much the tide has shifted
Charles Komanoff was for decades an expert witness for groups working against nuclear plants, delivering blistering critiques so effective that he earned a spot at the podium when tens of thousands of protesters descended on Washington in 1979 over the Three Mile Island meltdown.
Komanoff would go on to become an unrelenting adversary of Diablo Canyon, the hulking 37-year-old nuclear facility perched on a pristine stretch of California’s Central Coast that had been the focal point of anti-nuclear activism in America. But his last letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in February, was one Komanoff never expected to write. He implored Newsom to scrap state plans to close the coastal plant.
“We’re going to have to give up some of our long-held beliefs if we are going to deal with climate,” Komanoff said in an interview. “I am still a solar and wind optimist. But I am a climate pessimist. The climate is losing.”
Komanoff’s conversion is emblematic of the rapidly shifting politics of nuclear energy. The long controversial power source is gaining backers amid worries that shutting U.S. plants, which emit almost no emissions, makes little sense as governments race to end their dependence on fossil fuels and the war in Ukraine heightens worries about energy security and costs. The momentum is driven in large part by longtime nuclear skeptics who remain unsettled by the technology but are now pushing to keep existing reactors running as they face increasingly alarming news about the climate.
(Excerpt) Read more at webcache.googleusercontent.com ...
Everything old is new again. Remember we had to go to plastic bags because paper bags kill trees?
Komanoff is on the mark. Realistically, we will be using carbon-based fuels for at least the next few decades, but if we really want to transition away from those in a human manner, assuming it’s really that imperative, proven methods like nuclear and hydropower will have to be mixed in with the unicorn-y solar and wind.
HUMANE manner.
Charles Komanoff, the head of the Carbon Tax Center and who writes for The Nation, is the Compost’s “expert”.
right - extraordinary since growing trees is quite a renewable source - the paper companies own forests and plant trees to replace them - they have zero interest in trees not growing back. Not to mention the paper is very biodegradable. Plastic is none of these things.
Of course no mention from the WP that CA buys power from AZ nuclear plant.
You mean we can NOT control it?
HOW DARE YOU!
:?)
Climate worries? 😒
And no mention from the WP that it has executed a pretty neat pivot itself.
If they make klaus schwab “King Of the World” later this week you can forget that ,LOL
90% of the people bitching about Nuclear are uneducated with respect to GEN IV MSR/IMSR Nuclear which is WAY SAFER than today’s light water reactors. They can’t melt down, self regulating by chemical design. www.terrestrialenergy.com Look at what they are doing!
When a writer uses terms such as "hulking" in juxtaposition with "pristine", you know how you are supposed to think.
Pro nuclear environmentalists remind me of medieval alchemists: doing “the right things for the wrong reason.” Alchemy was a forlorn, misguided attempt to turn lead into gold. However, it yielded tremendous advances in chemistry, a legitimate science. History should thus record the climate scam as the largest con job in human history, yet one that yielded energy independence via nuclear, solar, wind, and, of course, Tesla vehicles to ensure the common people’s freedom of movement for centuries to come...
These means they know they’re losing the argument.
The bastard set in motion the closing of California nukes. Now that Diablo Canyon is well along its planned shutdown, you just cannot reverse that decision. You reach a point of no return in the shutdown process and that plant is well past it.
He is a technology ignoramus and started in motion an irreversible process. Now he says “Whoopsie! I was wrong. Keep it running.”
His activism is going to cost Californians tens of billions of dollars.
“But I am a climate pessimist. The climate is losing.”
What’s losing is the idiotic idea that you can replace fossil energy and nuclear with fairy tales about solar and wind.
IOW, reality is getting its revenge - it always does.
I’m all for it.
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