Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to The Guardian, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Closure of Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant was a big step backwards in the battle to reduce CO2 emissions.
If we want to fight the climate crisis, we must embrace nuclear power
Bhaskar Sunkara
Mon 21 Jun 2021 20.18 AESTA powerful form of clean energy already exists – and it is far more reliable than wind and solar
On 30 April, the Indian Point nuclear power plant 30 miles north of New York City was shut down. For decades the facility provided the overwhelming majority of the city’s carbon-free electricity as well as good union jobs for almost a thousand people. Federal regulators had deemed the plant perfectly safe.
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, a key figure behind the move, said that the shuttering of Indian Point brought us “a big step closer to achieving our aggressive clean energy goals”. It’s hard to reconcile that optimism with the data that’s recently come out. The first full month without the plant has seen a 46% increase in the average carbon intensity of statewide electric generation compared to when Indian Point was fully operational. New York replaced clean energy from Indian Point with fossil fuel sources like natural gas.
It’s a nightmare we should have seen coming. In Germany, nuclear power formed around a third of the country’s power generation in 2000, when a Green party-spearheaded campaign managed to secure the gradual closure of plants, citing health and safety concerns. Last year, that share fell to 11%, with all remaining stations scheduled to close by next year. A recent paper found that the last two decades of phased nuclear closures led to an increase in CO2 emissions of 36.3 megatons a year – with the increased air pollution potentially killing 1,100 people annually.
…
So why, given the stakes of global warming, is there still so much hostility to nuclear power?
Some of the paranoia is no doubt rooted in cold war-era associations of peaceful nuclear power with dangerous nuclear weaponry. We can and should separate these two, just like we are able to separate nuclear bombs from nuclear medicine. And we should also push back against popular narratives around Chernobyl and other disasters that simply aren’t replicable with modern technology. …
…
Other objections to nuclear power, like its reliance on mining, are also not unique to nuclear. Renewables require destructive extraction to unearth lithium and other critical minerals. The answer to those concerns is simple: we should demand environmental and labor regulations from the state and defend good working conditions as our primary consideration. …
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/21/fight-climate-crisis-clean-energy-nuclear-power
I had to check the link twice to verify this was actually published in The Guardian. Apart from the concern about CO2 emissions, most of it reads like something I could have written.
What does this attack on nuclear closures mean for the future of renewable energy?
If even The Guardian is prepared to slam renewable energy proponents for wanting to close nuclear plants, I suggest the renewable energy death spiral has well and truly begun. We frequently laugh at the innumeracy of green claims that renewable energy will somehow save the planet from CO2 emissions and pollution, but clearly a few of them have woken up and started doing the sums.
Having said that, the Guardian doesn’t exactly have clean hands over the closure of nuclear plants. Plenty of Guardian articles have appeared over the years broadly supporting nuclear plant closures, including support for closing Indian Point, though to be fair they also print the occasional pro-nuclear article.
Wasn’t Cuomo that Governor who put Covid patients in nursing homes?
Maybe Simon would know.
Yep.
Then he tried to hide the evidence.
It seems like ‘liberals’ get a free pass to do anything no matter how stupid or corrupt.
To be fair, they tried to hid the evidence because of President Trump. They actually said that to justify their actions.
They specifically stated they hid evidence from the DOJ to stop TRUMP! from persecuting them. Phony BS, TRUMP! did not get directly involved in his DOJ, the way Clinton, Obama and OBiden have.
Obstruction of Justice. No one from the HY government has been charged for their actions.
Or murderous!
A “burden”, the Choice, a wicked solution to a hard problem.
The whole world knows Cuomo doesn’t have any smarts. I think we’re going to see a huge surge in New Yorkers’ smarts and a tearless goodbye to Cuomo and deBlazio
I live in the NY area. I think you’re optimistically over estimating the intelligence of the typical New Yorker.
Big cities are crumbling because people make decisions based on feelings. In what clown show would a person elect people who want to defund the police?
The pendulum has swung too far to the left…the good people are leaving big cities.
You’re right, and people need to realize that Cuomo doesn’t care about the truth or his constituents. A case could be made that Demo☭rats want to bring down the U.S. so that they can rule over its ashes.
Their desire to defund the police is likely a Trojan Horse to bring about a new federal police force, one that is even more politicized than the FBI.
You mean a new federal police force like the Capitol Police who killed Ashli Babbitt without any accountability whatsoever?
The United States Capitol Police (USCP) is a federal law enforcement agency in the United States charged with protecting the United States Congress within the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its territories. It answers to the Capitol Police Board and is the only full-service federal law enforcement agency appointed by the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States. Wikipedia
“rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”
“Their desire to defund the police is likely a Trojan Horse to bring about a new federal police force…”
Why do you think they’re purging the military services of all the Trump voters? The final ‘tell’ will be when they try to repeal or replace the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
That’s how most people in the world work. They act on emotion then try to find some reasonable explanations for their actions.
Something like that.
Where I live, in southern Ontario about an hour from Toronto, house prices have gone through the roof. It seems that many folks who live in the big city don’t want to do so any longer. Some folks have expressed the opinion that, given the experience with the wuflu, people see big cities as dangerous.
One of the big five personality traits, openness, is associated with liberals. Openness predicts that one thinks it’s a good idea for borders to be completely unrestricted. It looks like many people have become disenchanted with that idea and are starting to realize that, along with all the good things they bring, foreigners can also bring contagion.
So, it may become more obvious to more people that excess liberalism is dangerous. I’m hoping that will make them more skeptical. It doesn’t take much skepticism to realize that renewable energy is just a castle in the sky. It may be too much to hope that the CAGW mania will subside any time soon but it may be realistic to hope for a tipping point in support of nuclear energy.
Simon only knows about right-wing colluuuuuuusion, not criminal negligence of lefty pols.
Yeah, that’s the one. What has happened to the push to have him resign over his murdering of all those NY citizens?
There’s no post here by Simon. This ad hominin attack is unneeded and unwelcome.
I’m not defending Simon. Please wait until he posts something before posting something like this.
I must be seeing things, there is an article in the Guardian that I agree with in principle.
The day the wind gauntlets stood still. A Green blight not realized. A bird is heard singing from afar. A parade of lions, lionesses, and their cubs play in gay revelry.
unqualified, monotonic change: one step forward, two steps backward
The man from planned parent/hood, an ethical man speaks.
I’ll bet that Germany will keep their two nukes on stream and may even reopen closed ones if dismantling has not yet begun. They opened a coal plant and mine and completed a gas pipeline from Russia in a bid to save their economy no matter what the greens may say, all these signs point to peak renewables in Germany with the rest following suit (if Germans can’t make ruinables work, who is going to beg to differ).
Hard coal mines are still closed in germany, but the huge lignite quarries are still expanding where whole villages are demolished.
Nonsense. They made some adjustments at the start of their coal closure programme, that’s all.
Liar.
And purchase gas from Russia 😉
Griff is indeed a liar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine
They reopened a coal power plant just shut…
The Guardian – you just can’t fix stupid.
Speaking of which, I see that griff is back.
The grauniad sees the writing on the wall after the recent byelection results.
BoJo has overplayed his green credentials and the BLOB wants to be seen as rational.
The watermelons increasingly have to face some unpleasant facts with their professed concern for the poor-
Electric cars may make driving too expensive for middle classes, warns Vauxhall chief – The Global Warming Policy Forum (thegwpf.com)
Do I detect increasing dissension in the ranks with the vision splendid?
Volte-face much like the NYT getting out ahead of the facts to stifle them.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2021/06/20/sounds-familiar/
Won’t matter much if the transportation sector and NG appliances do not get electricated.
A question arises.
The Indian Point plant was properly licensed, constantly and properly regulated, and was deemed perfectly safe.
The question is, how, where, and under what circumstances did the state take to itself the power to close the plant. There was no rational argument that the plant must cease operation. There was no “public safety” threat or issue.
The governor simply decided he did not like the plant for his own reasons. As such, he simply told the plant owners to shut down and lose their investment.
That this is treated as legal and acceptable now speaks volumes. And more, a precedent has been set. Now the State can shut down any business or industry on a whim.
Consider this as a standard:
A politician does not like a business “in my back yard”. – Shutdown
An industry becomes “politically incorrect”. – Shutdown
Some random environmentalists see a plant and make a fuss. – Shutdown
There used to be laws regulating things in the public interest. Now perhaps the “public interest” is whatever the people currently in power deem it to be.
New York State challenged license renewals. They cited safety concerns given its proximity to NYC, and get this, low wholesale electricity prices.
Here’s a story critical of the moves. https://nypost.com/2021/04/28/get-ready-for-blackouts-after-cuomo-foolishly-killed-the-indian-point-plant/
Nice article by the Post. Couldn’t help but notice that NY’s other three plants received subsidies rather than the axe. Not surprising, as their operator has been playing the CO2 card against their base load competitors (coal and gas combined cycle plants) for many years.
Those plants are upstate. Upstate is merely a resource colony for NYC/Long Island.
What was it Clinton said about executive orders? Stroke of a pen, law of the land.
Or even worse :
This company threatens with my own rotten investments (green BS, etc.). – Shutdown.
Fission reactors are dangerous, especially boiling water and high pressure nuclear reactors, as has been proven by Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three mile Island. Moreover, they produce an unsolved waste problem, not only of spent material, but of nuclear plants that cannot, economically, be decommissioned. The alleged costs of nuclear power ignore these problems. Moreover, they are not scalable to solve the alleged CO2 crisis within the alleged time limit of 2050, much less 2030.
yup. their waste products will be around for a billion years
Well you are lucky that this is so, because you live on a planet made of nuclear waste.
If a radionuclide has a half-life of a billion years, then by definition its radioactivity is absolutely negligible.
yes
Take a block of high-level waste, wait 600 years, and its overall radioactivity is the same as the native pitchblende it came from.
But I thought climate change is about to destroy the planet.
Given the ongoing failure of renewable energy to produce the emissions reductions greens say are required, surely averting the imminent end of the world is a higher priority than eliminating the risk of nuclear meltdowns.
In any case, modern reactors are much safer than Fukishima and Chernobyl, especially passive safe designs, which are designed to quench their own fission reaction without any human intervention, when the reactor core temperature exceeds tolerance.
My personal favourite passive safe design is pebble bed, in which the pebbles physically expand when the core overheats. Heat driven expansion of the pebbles in the core quenches the nuclear reaction, by physically physically pushing the core elements away from each other.
“But I thought climate change is about to destroy the planet.”
Nope the planet will be fine.
Destroying thousands of acres of fields and forests for solar “farms” isn’t fine.
Well since nobody does that, no problem.
UK solar isn’t built on cut down forest and is allowed on low grade agricultural land, where likely land still grazed or having some conservation use
Is there anything you know that is actually true?
Obviously the woods I watched get clear-cut for a solar installation not far from my house didn’t really happen, because “nobody does that”.
hey Griffy, come to Massachusetts and I’ll show you thousands of acres of destroyed fields and forests converted to solar “farms”
Of course the planet will be fine, numnutz, just not for the reason you think. There never was a problem with our climate to begin with, and even if there was, there wouldn’t be anything man could do about it.
Don’t try to pull that logic on Simon. His stupidity is his own.
So you agree that there is no need to do anything about CO2.
The reality is that we are approaching the next ice age, which will decrease the amount of land available for growing crops. By increasing growth, more CO2 will counteract this. We should be burning MORE coal, not less!
But I thought climate change is about to destroy the planet.
Mostly it’s about destroying free enterprise.
“Fission reactors are dangerous, especially boiling water and high pressure nuclear reactors, as has been proven by Fukushima, Chernobyl,”
Chernobyl is a graphite moderated reactor, not PWR or BWR.
“Moreover, they produce an unsolved waste problem”
Fuel reprocessing. France has been doing it for decades without problem. Reprocessing in the US was banished via Executive Order by president Jimmy Carter. It was a sop to the environmental movement as part of his failed bid for re-election, nothing more.
“but of nuclear plants that cannot, economically, be decommissioned”
Nothing can be done economically if you have a regulatory establishment determined to make some disfavored activity as expensive as possible. Because some activity is expensive does not mean that the activity itself cost a lot of money. It may mean that the regulatory environment is deliberately, prohibitively expensive.
Counterpoint:
How expensive would wind power be if windmills were assessed fines ranging into the $ millions for protected and endangered birds killed, as provided by law? How much more expensive if wind farm operators were threatened with criminal prosecution if the bird kills continue, as provided by law?
And, lets consider how many lives are ended and or blighted by Western intransigence in assisting third world nations to use their abundant fossil fuel resources to achieve standards of living we achieved almost 100 years ago.
But you reckon lithium batteries are scalable in time?
Origin Warns EVs Could Overload The Power Grid If The Govt Doesn’t Incentivise Smart Chargers (msn.com)
No solar power at night when everyone wants to refuel their battery wheels for work next day.
Not to mention how we’re going to deal with the mountains of incendiary spent batteries or the indestructible windmill blades. Just print more incentives to wave away all the pesky tradeoffs.
One word Marianas trench. Okay, that’s two words but…
Recently saw a photo of parked EVs that no longer will take a charge. These are vehicles that the French government was using until the batteries died. How do you get rid of these hulks?
Its a really dangerous technology that doesn’t kill anyone (Fukushima, 3MI) or kills less tha 100 people (chernobyl) that is only expensive because fear of it has resulted in a ridiculous regulatory environment, and whose decommissionig is paid for by its operators, unlike wind farms and whose actual function reduces global radiation levels by assisting the decay of the billions of tonnes of radioactive elemenst that are already in the environment by burning them up in safe controlled circumstances…
Whereas the uncontrolled ‘natural’ reactor that powers ‘renewable’ energy kills more than 10,000 people a year due to radiation induced skin cancer…
Chernobyl was a design that was rejected in the west because of it’s inherent instability. The Soviets used it because it was cheap. To save even more money they didn’t build a containment vessel (something that is required everywhere else).
Finally, they were running a test that involved turning off almost all of the safeties, then they screwed up the test, causing them to lose control of the reactor.
Clearest possible evidence that Communism kills!
Living is also dangerous, it’s lethal.
As somebody once said, “life is a sexually transmitted disease that is ultimately fatal!”
Next time you go sunbathing, you would do well to remember that your are deliberately dosing yourself with the radiation from the biggest nuclear event for light years about us.
That the energy of ±2200 Hiroshima bombs per second is being delivered to target Earth just above your head of which ±1900 is delivered into the thermal energy of the Earth.
If nuclear power frightens you so badly you need to hide underground.
I read somewhere, if you had been standing on the boundary fence of 3MI, when the melt down occurred, maximum dose you could have received would have been equivalent of about 1.5 chest x-rays.
Not just standing there, but you had to be standing there for the duration of the crisis, some three weeks, to receive that much radiation.
Total deaths from 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima – 0, bugger all, nothing.
There were however about a dozen deaths caused by the totally unnecessary evacuation.
It never ceases to amaze me how the anti-nukes keep dragging up the same disproven facts.
It’s almost as if they are incapable of learning, or thinking on their own.
The waste problem was solved decades ago. It’s just that the politicians won’t permit the solution to be implemented.
As to decommissioning the plants, that’s funded by a bond that was posted before construction was even started.
but tell people they aren’t entitled to a whole body CT whenever they want and that their air travel will be restricted and watch the fireworks begin.
Bhaskar Sunkara’s article has the usual sprinkling of first person plural pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’.
As a collectivist student of Marxism and Jacobinism Bhaskar may be afraid that to couch his personal opinion otherwise would be construed by comrades as ‘Bonapartism’.
Well, y’know, they had to close it, the name was raycis!
The nuclear industry has been devastated by the fear of meltdowns because of Chernobyl and Fukushima and the fear of silent radiation (brilliantly played on by the movie On The Beach). The truth is modern designs do not melt down and there is an article in GWPF I read last year which unpicks how the fear of radiation was concocted by fake “scientific” research, a pattern which eerily parallels the AGW junk science.
Nuclear is the right-wing windmill. If you are left you seem to have to love windmills and hate nuclear and on the right the reverse. Reality is that nuclear is very expensive if you take all cost and guarantees into account. This includes storage of the waste for centuries, and government cost guarantees for dismantling the plants. Nuclear just as wind doesn’t exist without the government guaranteeing and investing. The argument, but windmills are also expensive, doesn’t count as nuclear is a proposed replacement for natural gas. I don’t adhere to the CO2 is a doom world, so also that argument fails.
I used to be a proponent of nuclear, until I calculated how many plants my country The Netherlands would need, and hence would need to distribute in the country. Bayesian logic applies here, and does not look only at the chance, but also the consequences. For densely populated areas the risk of even minor incidents are just not acceptable.
Just look at the following map, and apply it to any densely and/or high-value area. A small chance is true, but still with unacceptable consequences.
Map-exclusion-zone-areas-evacuation-nuclear-power.jpg (1600×1250) (britannica.com)
I’d prefer to stick to natural gas util we have fusion. Probably won’t happen soon, but we won’t run out of gas soon either.
I love how the left actually believes they can by with their various lies.
The only reason why nuclear is so expensive is because they are massively over regulated, and the regulations are constantly being changed.
There never was a problem with the waste. We could do what France has been doing from the beginning and re-process the waste. But the left through a fit and had re-processing banned.
Plants have to post a bond to cover de-commissioning.
There is no risk from properly built and operated nuclear plants.
“… an increase in CO2 emissions of 36.3 megatons a year – with the increased air pollution potentially killing 1,100 people annually.”
Who comes up with these numbers? Not 1,000 and not 1,200 but 1,100 annual deaths.
Yes, Steve, I was struck by the precision! It’s like the 350ppm ‘safe level’ for atmospheric CO2 that you will find daily on the grauniad weather page.
Egged on by ignorant so called greens our politicians have made impossible promises. As reality bites over the real costs and impacts of a green way of life more and more people will finally have to face their delusions. Unfortunately we have further to go down the green road before enough people feel the consequences that will drive a change in public opinion.
Well look: Germany and the UK and others are a long, long way down the close coal or build renewables roads – and we don’t have blackouts or basically anything adversely affecting our lives.
UK electricity bills were pretty spectacular from memory. Not a problem if you were making good money.
YET!!!!
And Watts readers have been saying ‘yet’ for the decade I’ve been reading it…
There have been multiple instances in the past couple of years where blackouts were only narrowly avoided. The number of such instances has grown dramatically.
Apart from the large blackout last year which was triggered by the failure of the offshore Hornsea Wind farm. !!!! A taste of things to come.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cgemkklp29nt/uk-power-cut#:~:text=A%20huge%20power%20cut%20brought%20much%20of%20the,generators%20caused%20power%20cuts%20in%20England%20and%20Wales.
a short blackout, triggered by a lightning strike and a fossil fuel plant going offline.
There is no evidence renewables caused this… since 2019 additional grid storage make any ill effects even less likely
9_august_2019_power_outage_report.pdf (ofgem.gov.uk)
Blackouts were unknown in the UK until the advent of Wind and Solar, unless they were caused by strikes.
In griff’s world, narrowly avoiding a blackout is proof that blackouts simply can’t happen.
You still haven’t explained why Germany and Denmark, with the highest proportion of “Renewables”, have the highest electricity prices. A year or so ago the UK came perilously close to a nationwide blackout.
The Guardian didn’t ‘demand’ anything. It simply published one of a range of arguments… notice how it covers several opinions, reporting, not authoring…
If we want to fight the climate crisis, we must embrace nuclear power
I think it is reasonable to interpret this as a demand, but I published relevant quotes, so everyone is free to form their own opinion.
As someone pointed out above, this is an ‘Opinion’ piece, not an editorial.
As if there was a difference.
From this it can only be concluded that the Guardian editor actually believes the CO2/Global Warming crap. Hilarious.
The Greens know it is a crock, they just use it in their fight to rid the earth of the pestilence known as humanity.
I thought that headline was a joke. Then I read further and…. what in the blue-eyed world????
Is this what used to be called a sea change?
Is it possible that Peak Stupidity has finally been reached, and we may/might now see some rational behavior in the “woke”??
Just askin’. I’m not quite prepared for it just yet.
No. I wouldn’t call this a sea change. I think of it more as a “broken clock is right twice a day” thing.
Perhaps the Guardian journos have finally twigged that no electricity => no Guardian => no jobs.
The Guardian? The same The Guardian that has been screaming at the top of their lungs for decades that nuclear is evil and must be eliminated? That The Guardian?
This idea “we” have to “fight climate change” is like fighting “foo fighters”.
Isn’t that what the UFO report in the USA is going to say? That the US needs to fight the ‘foo fighters’?
Closing any perfectly good power plant is just stoopid on steroids. There is no reason to “embrace” nuclear power other than to provide competitively priced, reliable energy. None.
The Guardian published this in its Opinion section. That’s not quite the same as being published in The Guardian. It may just be a case of the Guardian allowing people to give their opinion. I know that wouldn’t stretch to them giving space to the likes of Lord Monckton but it doesn’t mean that they endorse the view put forward in the article.
Exactly.
Being published at all is a big change for The Guardian.
They routinely block any information that doesn’t go with the party line, from all sections.
Said it before , will say it again.
the green renewable power lonny will fall apart when the population at large run head first into the laws of physics and thermodynamics…..and the lights start going out
It is incorect to say that the Guardian is advocating nuclear power. The article is an op-ed by a man who is: “the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist.” His opinion is not an official opinion of the institution.
Elementary Watson but you might show us the last op-ed in the same vein from The Guardian. Personally I’d start out with something less demanding like a needle in a haystack or perhaps a promo for Mike Moore’s last film. LOL.
This was written by New York based media???
<Passing out in shock>
Well, perhaps even the Guardian has noticed how damn cold it is. Maybe they realise if we don’t have clean reliable nuclear we will be heading towards cold related deaths this winter.
Or maybe the Guardian have realised, they are drinking in the last chance saloon, at the woke bar, and they need a change of position if they are going to exist past 2025.
Good to see the Grauniad coming out pro nuclear ☢️. Being an anti-nuclear environmentalist or climate activist makes as much sense as being a vegetarian cattle rancher.
The FACT that year after year the Western World is shutting down Nuclear power plant, while China continues to built NPPs is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Climate Change is caused primarily because of CO2 is a Trojan Horse for some ulterior motive.
What the world needs is the cow fart stopper…works with humans, too! If it will save just one polar bear it will be worth it.