Volvo has announced that it will stop buying nuclear power

[bananas]

http://www.thelocal.se/8770/

Volvo in nuclear energy retreat

Published: 12th October 2007 14:15 CET

Truck maker Volvo has announced that it will cease buying Swedish nuclear power at the end of this year. Volvo has signed a deal with Vattenfall ensuring that it does not receive energy from nuclear power sources, which it said did not sit well with the company's environmental goals.

"We place nuclear energy far down the scale. It's not sustainable from a number of aspects," Volvo's environmental chief Inge Horkeby told Dagens Nyheter.

"The raw materials used to produce nuclear energy are a finite resource and the waste management problem has not been solved," she added.

<snip>

Volvo has the stated aim of fuelling all its plants worldwide using renewable energy sources. The company has already built three farms at its Belgian plant in Gent, with a further wind farm in the pipeline for the Tuve plant outside Gothenburg.

[MrModerate]

1. On a technical level, I don't agree with Volvo's environmental chief . . .

And when compared to fossil fuels, it's quite attractive.

But it doesn't matter what I or Volvo think. New nukes are going to happen, because for all its faults, nuclear power beats cheap coal plants six ways from Sunday, and oil and natural gas are becoming too expensive to be "sustainable" (not to mention that planet-killing stuff). True, carbon sequestration and IGCC technologies can make coal less calamitous to use, but not nearly good enough.

The Beijing Olympics are going to be an absolute disaster because pollution will negatively impact most events -- and a substantial part of the pollution is from cheap coal plants, which the Chinese are churning out at a terrifying rate.

Right, wrong, or indifferent, get ready for a future of new nukes.

[phantom power]

2. I have a question about the logistics of agreements like this.

How do you "ensure" that you aren't receiving electrons from a nuclear power plant? I mean, the reactors are still running, pumping amps into the grid. And I assume Volvo is attached to that same grid. At any given time, they're drawing amps from whoever is producing them. Whether they like it or not.

[TheWraith]

4. You can't.

There's no way to draw only power from certain sources through the grid. However, you can pretend like you were only getting power from such and such source by working out what the cost would be for that power, then paying that.

[NNadir]

3. Oh really? How many electron sorters is the CAR company going to hire?

Let me guess: They're going to hire Amory Lovins to sort electrons.

They're a car company. As a CAR company, they are owned lock stock and barrel by dangerous fossil fuel companies, just like the rest of the paid off anti-nuke industry.

There aren't enough trees in Sweden to burn for gasoline, there aren't enough fields to drench with nitrogen to fuel Volvo.

Meanwhile, over at KTH, their teaching advanced courses in advanced nuclear fuel cycle management.

By the way, what happened to the stupid anti-nuke Swedish phase-out of nuclear power. What happened, did the Danes get scared of having to turn the lights off?

Oh, and what about the Forsmark "Chernobyl" that stupid anti-nukes were hawking about a year ago.

Into the memory hole?

Did it fall down a Russian gas well?