Environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explained to Fox News host Tucker Carlson that it’s not possible to shift the country’s grid completely to renewable energy.
“I was one of the founders of, sort of, the first Green New Deal back in 2003, 2007,” Shellenberger, the founder of Environmental Progress, began. “People don’t remember President Obama, we spent about $150 billion on renewables between 2009 and 2015, and we just kept encountering the same kind of problems.”
Shellenberger laid out the two main problems that plague wind turbines and solar panels: unreliability and low energy density.
“They just depend on when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing, which is 10 to 40 percent of the year,” he said, demonstrating how the intermittent energy production of wind and solar makes them unreliable sources of power. “Something people are not as aware of: the low energy density of sunlight and wind. Basically what we’ve been finding is that the lower the energy density of the fuel … the bigger the environmental impact.”
Because solar and wind produce such small amounts of energy, according to Shellenberger, they require a much larger amount of land to generate electricity.
Instead, the Environmental Progress founder touted the benefits of nuclear energy, a source of power that can generate large amounts of reliable energy while emitting zero carbon emissions. However, Shellenberger said the public has yet to fully embrace nuclear energy because they associate it with nuclear bombs, past nuclear accidents and a desire to use energy that harmonizes with the natural world.”
“That turns out to be a bad idea because the more natural resource we use, the worse it is for the natural environment,” he said.
As environmental activists become more alarmed about the threat of climate change, many are re-evaluating how they perceive nuclear power. The U.S. nuclear industry currently supplies about 20 percent of the country’s total electricity, but it provides roughly 60 percent of its zero-carbon electricity. A growing number of climate change-oriented lawmakers are now passing subsidies and support programs to keep nuclear plants in operation.
Shellenberger went on to say it was “very disappointing” that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s widely publicized Green New Deal does not include provisions for nuclear energy.
Ocasio-Cortez’s original FAQ document on the Green New Deal, in fact, called for a phase-out of nuclear power. However, following the botched rollout of the deal, her team took the anti-nuclear language off their website.
Read more at Daily Caller
Nuclear power is the safest of all types power despite the highly publicized accidents. The reason goes back to energy density. Whether you are building windmills, hydroelectric dams, fossil fuel plants, or nuclear there will always be some fatal construction accidents. Nuclear power plants have such a high energy density that the deaths per unit of energy is lowest.
When it comes to using nuclear power in the future it will be safer because of lessons learned. A very good friend of mine is a nuclear engineer specializing in safety who has been to Chernobyl explained what happened. Their instruments showed extreme readings as things went wrong. These readings were so different that the operators didn’t believe them so they didn’t shut the plant down when they should have.
In the future you can bet if the instruments indicate something is wrong appropriate action will be taken. As far as Fukushima, we can be certain new nuclear power plants will not be built where they could be impacted by a tidal wave.
I forgot to say that even though nuclear power is safe, it should be a small part of our energy mix. The reason is cost. Nuclear is a more expensive than fossil fuels though significant cheaper than solar and wind. Since anthropological climate change is a fraud, there is no reason not to use the most economical energy available.
In a open market those that want to pay for expensive unreliable power should put their money where their mouth is . The earth has a fever religion
should be treated like religions are . If being RC floats your boat then donate to RC if you wish just don’t expect the rest of us to pay for your belief system . Humans have never been in charge of the climate and anyone who implies we do is at best delusional .
Virtue signalers fill your boots, buy all that not so green power all u want .
Like the Tesla Subsidy Corporation when the money dries up from tax payers the thing collapses .
We could apply the open market right now. Each household and business would select where it wanted its energy to come from. There is no reason it couldn’t be more than one type of source with percentages defined. Then the utility would buy power with the goal of matching the collected requests of its customers. Each customer would be change the rate for the power they had selected.
This doesn’t have a snow ball’s chance in hell of passing because the environmentalists have excessive power for their numbers. They want to force everyone else to follow their religion and in many cases they have been successful.
Nuclear power and reasonable cost equals oxymoron . Why? Society’s intolerance of risk.
The industry is forced to adhere to best practise principles. I remember the Darlington nuclear station, before completion, had to replace planned hardware with the latest greatest. All suppliers’ contracts were paid. If you’re into conspiracy theories or just plain cynical, it’s an easy system to “game” . Darlington ended up costing more than double the estimated price tag.
What happened at Fukashima is easily explained. Essential equipment should be located intelligently. Germany is not comparable to Japan, but no matter. It scared the Germans stupid.
I hope that Michael Schellenberger can revive the argument for nuclear power, it is desperately needed. As a child of the late 60s /early 70s, I truly was eager for the coming of “the atomic age” to provide abundant and reasonable-cost electric power. It is saddening and maddening that nuclear power stations are being closed at a terrifying pace while the demo-socialist fools attempt to take us all back to the stone age.
LOW ENERGY DENSITY.
We’re going to be hearing that more often. The lunatics have squandered billions. For what?
Energy security? No. Energy deprivation.
What if the collective effort pushing green energy had been invested in nuclear fusion? We’d be closer to harnessing the sun’s not-so-secret powers, 24/7.
Wind Turbines and Acres of Solar Panels are harmful to Birds especialy the larger ones(Eagles,Hawks,Buzzards,Etc)and the turbines are terribly noisie their also a eyesore on the landscape and many people dont wan them in their areas for that reason
To find out if a “climate change” pusher is serious about really reducing CO2 emissions (please stop say carbon emissions!) but is opposed to expanding nuclear power generation you know that they are not really serious. There is a snowball’s chance in hell to ever have our electric generation to be done solely by the so-called renewable sources.
We need to remember that one of the three motivations that got the anthropological global warming movement going was to force de-industrialization by making energy scarce and expensive. Organizations with that goal augmented the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970’s when most people thought that we were running out of fossil fuels. It is certainly true that nuclear is a zero emission power source but it fails to achieve the goal of de-industrialization.