"Nukes are Green". The headline was "The biggest environmental threat we face is global warming, not nuclear power."

10 de abril, 2005

Lo publico para usarlo o que lo usen en el caso de emplear centrales muy grandes, que impiden garantizar un servicio de calidad comercial, que además pueden ser muy contaminantes.

Nicholas Kristof wrote an article today in the NewYork Times entitled "Nukes are Green". I made the following comment to his article...

josevanderhorst - 9:04 PM ET April 10, 2005 (# 20703 of 20703)

Nukes vs Energy Efficiency and Demand Response
The argument that nuclear power is green needs to consider nuclear waste costs to be complete. Natural Capitalism, the book written by Hawken, Lovins and Hunter Lovings, has enough insights about waste reduction to develop different and solid arguments, even without considering nuclear power. Performing whole-systems engineering of the electric power system will lead to the preservation of ecosystem services through the integration Energy Efficiency (EE) and Demand Response (DR) to other existing technologies to sharply increase economic efficiency. The book recommends starting to solve the problem from the demand side with EE, in such an aggressive way as to avoid capital investments, in generation, transmission, distribution and utilization, by what they name as "tunneling through the cost barrier". DR is a risk management tool, based on information technology and advanced metering, which leads to fully functioning, and the integration of, wholesale and retail markets. DR is like the glue to integrate distributed generation and storage resources, and the means to mitigate short run price volatility, and long run boom-bust behavior. Just as the DC-3 designers had to integrate 5 technologies, to ushered in the era of commercial air travel (see The Fifth Discipline of Senge), the last of which was wind flaps, so are DR and EE the needed technologies to start the era of reliable and cost effective commercial electric power system.