Nuclear energy folks are starting to sound a little shrill
- Nathanael Greene
- Director of Renewable Energy Policy, New York City
- Blog | About
- Posted July 21, 2009 in Moving Beyond Oil , Nuclear Weapons, Waste and Energy , Solving Global Warming
On Wednesday, the American Enterprise Institute will be holding a little pep rally for nuclear power. In the event description, they make the following standard disparaging remark about renewables, suggesting that nuclear is the option that can scale:
Yet renewable energy sources--often touted by policymakers as the panacea for resource scarcity and global warming--currently provide only 3 percent of the energy Americans consume. The role of nuclear power as a source of emissions-free electricity is often ignored.
What I find interesting about this typical analysis in the AEI energy pitch is that they deride renewables as being only a small percentage of total U.S. energy consumption and tout nuclear power as the solution; but if you compare all renewables including hydro to all nuclear as a percent of total energy consumption, renewables equals 7.3% compared to a whopping total of 8.5% for nuclear. And needless to say renewables is a much higher percentage of NEW energy supplies than is nuclear these days.
Check out this very nice graphic from EIA Annual Energy Review 2008:
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Comments
Duncan — Jul 21 2009 03:28 PM
Those aren't percentages, those are quadrillion BTU equivalents. Total US Energy Use was around 99 quadrillion BTU's, so it's close enough to a percentage that the mistake is understandable. Still, the units is right on the title of that picture in the source document.
"Renewables" 7.3 includes hydro at 2.5 - and that's likely to have "negative growth" as water resources get strained. Negative growth, of course, means declining production.
"Renewables" 7.3 also includes biomass at 3.9. Biomass normally includes things like burning tires. No chance any of it (even the non-tire burning) is carbon-free.
Subtracting those two leave 0.9 for wind, geothermal, and solar. Those are the ones with potential growth.
Oh hey, I just read recently that growth in U.S. nuclear output in 2008 was about the same as the growth in wind and solar in 2008, in terms of actual extra megawatts produced. Of course in percentage terms the growth is much higher for wind, since it provides about 1/20 the electricity nuclear provides in the U.S.
Wait, you weren't talking about percentage growth of renewables, you said "percentage of NEW energy supplies". Epic fail.
Rather than make specious arguments about which energy source is better because it did better in the market this year, wouldn't it be better to push ALL alternatives to coal and oil and gas? We've only got one planet here; everything we can do to stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere is important.