NRG Abandons Project for 2 Reactors in Texas

[Viva_La_Revolution]

Source: NYTimes

The company planning the largest nuclear project in the United States, two giant reactors in South Texas, announced on Tuesday that it was giving up and writing off its investment of $331 million after uncertainties created by the accident in Japan.

But the project — planned by NRG, a New Jersey-based independent power producer, and its minority partner, Toshiba — was in considerable doubt even before the accident at Fukushima began on March 11. Texas has a surplus of electricity and low prices for natural gas, which sets the price of electricity on the market there.

The project could go forward if circumstances changed, said David Crane, the chief executive of NRG, but he said the prospect of that occurring was “extremely daunting and at this point not particularly likely.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/business/energy-environment/20nuke.html?_r=1

[WatchWhatISay]

1. Some rare good new here in this blood red state

Of course the governor and state legislature had nothing to do with it.

[freshwest]

2. Hurray!

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Keep an eye on them just in case.

But..still..good news and shows there is sensitivity to public pressure.

Yayyy.

[SnakeEyes]

4. hooray for hysteria!

[stockholmer]

5. it's a start, shut every uranium-fueled reactor down globally with all due deliberate speed

humans will just have to adjust their energy consumption and innovate their way to safer power generation

[merwin]

7. While they're at it, shut down all oil and coal production.

With all due deliberate speed, of course.

Coal mining has killed more people and destroyed more of our landscape than nuclear.

We have seen what happens when a single oil rig has a failure...

Solar is an option, but how much energy goes into producing the product and shipping it? I honestly don't know.

People have a misguided idea of what "green" is. It certainly is not the prius, with it's battery that travels the world before being placed inside the car. Those also have to be replaced after a relatively short time, which adds to waste.

I suppose we could litter the country with wind farms that double as bird catchers.

There is no energy source that has zero associated cost to it... Nuclear would be a great option if they would use fuels that have slightly less radioactivity and halflife than the current sources.

I really do wonder why nuclear is written off after a failure of a plant that should have been closed for safety risks... considering all the failures that happened would have not occurred if they were using the current design of that particular BAR (already in use in Japan). That is like blaming ford today for someone's old Pinto exploding. Yet the CURRENT deep water drilling rigs we use that have almost no failsafes destroys the gulf and everyone forgets about it a few months later.

[Taft_Bathtub]

8. Thorium is the better option

Cleaner, recycles/burns radioactive waste, can't enrich uranium into weapons grade, can't meltdown.

[stockholmer]

9. notice I said 'uranium-fueled', plus shut them in a reasonable manner, I am not coming from 'green'

perspective on this. I am coming from a radiation cancer plague perspective that will kill at bare minimum 200,000 to 400,000 people (and IMHO many many more as these reactors will indeed continue to get worse and worse).

The next two years will be one of many more massive earthquakes due to solar maximum activity, etc. One Fukushima is bad enough, what if there are 1 or 2 more? I do not like taking this gamble over the next decade with millions of lives in the potential balance.

When you factor in a true accounting of Chernobyl-caused deaths (close to 1 million so far, based on hundreds of thousands of pages from recently translated Russian studies) uranium-nuclear power is just not safe. We can agree to disagree, but on this point I shall never yield my convictions.

On top of all this I never even touched upon the storage issues of spent fuel.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Btw, for a good report on the true potential of alternative energy and how IT CAN replace what we have now, see this:


http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf

Providing all global energy with wind,water,and solar powr,PartI:

Technologies,energy resources,quantities and areas of infrastructure,and materials

Mark Z.Jacobson a,n, Mark A.Delucchi b,1
a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University,Stanford,CA 94305-4020,USA
b Institute of Transportation Studies,University of California at Davis,Davis,CA 95616,USA


Wind, water and solar (WWS) power could meet all new global energy demands by 2030 and could replace pre-existing energy sources by 2050 at a similar cost to current carbon-based fuels, suggests a two-part study.

The researchers investigated the material, technical and economic feasibility of satisfying the world's energy needs using 100% WWS. Based on a projected global need of 11.5 trillion watts of end use WWS power in 2030, supply from WWS could exceed demand by more than an order of magnitude, the study suggests. The authors estimate roughly 84% of energy needs in 2030 could be supplied from around 4 million 5-MW wind turbines and 90,000 300-MW solar power plants, with the remaining 16% coming from solar photovoltaic rooftop systems, geothermal, tidal, wave and hydroelectric sources.

Affordable, rapid transition to large-scale, perpetual and reliable energy requires significant expansion of transmission infrastructure, targeted economic policies, including a shift in subsidies from fossil fuels to WWS systems to encourage adoption, combined with significant social and political effort, say the authors

[merwin]

10. To me, wind and water have the most potential.

Like nuclear, solar suffers from the need to be fairly high tech, whereas wind and water have been used effectively for centuries.

The only issue I have with wind power is that they are horribly ugly and litter the landscape.

Sorry, I glossed over the Uranium specified :)

Nuclear can be done safely. However, I cannot speculate as to why uranium is used instead of material that is safer. Probably the same reasons we are still using so much coal/oil.

Also, our energy grid could use an overhaul in general... I am sure it is terribly inefficient.

[bananas]

6. Hurray for common sense!

This project has had so many problems already!
:applause: