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Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), chair of the House energy committee, told Politico that House Republicans intend to attach language pushing approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline into an expected February bill to extend the payroll tax holiday. “ We’re going to be using it, every opportunity to push Keystone .” Republicans are also considering attaching it to the upcoming transportation spending bill .

Tags: author, barack-obama, brad-johnson, economy, january-2012, joe-romm, rep-fred-upton-r-mi, security, tar-sands

See also  James Hansen slams Keystone XL Canada-U.S. Pipeline: “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts”

Tags: donate, feeds, global-warming, joe-romm, keystone-xl, lgbt, media, security, solar-energy, thinkprogress

In 2011, global investment in renewable energy  surpassed fossil fuels for the first time.  And the U.S. surged back into the lead in clean investment ahead of China by about $8 billion. So what, other than bad journalism, explains this nonsensical headline and image from the top tech magazine Wired? Actually, it is just bad journalism, pure and simple.  Indeed, the magazine itself clearly wanted a sensationalistic headline — and even more sensationalistic photo — to get eyeballs in this highly competitive media environment. The story simply doesn’t justify the headline. That’s obvious from the fact that the story itself includes this summary of wind energy prospects: Outlook: Cheaper prices for turbines should result in lower costs for wind power by 2014. Though growth has slowed since 2008, this sector is still expected to cover about a third of any increased energy consumption in the US between now and 2035. Huh?  An energy industry that barely registered any significant U.S. capacity or generation a decade ago is now  expected to provide a third of the increased energy consumption in the next quarter century — and that’s somehow a clean-tech “bust” which warrants an exploding wind-turbine image?  Amazing (and I will repost a response to the article by a leading wind expert below). For the record, I’m not saying the wind industry doesn’t face a near-term challenge in the face of unconventional gas and a GOP Congress unwilling to support a crucial tax credit.  Climate Progress has made clear that it does (see “ Policy Uncertainty Threatens 1,600 American Wind Jobs at Vestas — and 37,000 Jobs Nationwide “).  I’m saying that there has been no bust in the industry yet, there doesn’t need to be one, and, indeed, the prospects  for the industry over the next couple of decades remain very strong, as the article itself makes clear. I asked Eilperin about the headline and images, which I thought were completely unwarranted.  She makes clear she had nothing to do with them: “I stand by the story, which accurately portrays some of the challenges the U.S. clean tech faces in light of the current fiscal and political climate. The piece also highlight some of the industry’s bright spots, including the fact that cheaper conventional PV panels has made the expansion of distributed solar generation and utility-scale solar projects more affordable. As many magazine readers would understand, I had no input into either the display art or the headline that accompanied the piece.” Readers know that headlines  are the most important part of any such story, seen by  at least 10 times as many people who read it — and in the internet era, it’s likely that 20 to 100 times as many people see the headline from a  respected magazine like Wired . Wired should retract and change the headline. I blame the editors for this — but I don’t agree with Eilperin’s assessment of the story itself.  I think it is flawed, especially its discussion of solar energy. The piece uses Solyndra as a stand-in for the entire US solar industry and devotes over one third of the piece to the now-bankrupt company.  But Eilperin and Wired seem completely unaware of the fact that Solyndra was always a one-of-a-kind solar play that made sense only if silicon prices stayed high.  In that sense, it was obviously part of a ”portfolio” investment strategy by DOE, a hedge against their much broader strategy, which was based on silicon prices coming down.  As Bloomberg Government made  clear in a recent analysis that received virtually no coverage in the media, “ the focus on Solyndra is not proportional to its impact .”  About 87% of the DOE loan portfolio is low-risk. You’d never know from the Wired piece that in 2010,  America was a net exporter of $1.9 billion in solar products .   You’d never know that the U.S. solar industry grew 100% in 2010 and another 100% in 2011, making  it perhaps the “ fastest growing ” industry in America. How does Wired make the case that the solar industry is a bust when there are ” over 100,000 Americans are working in the solar Industry .” Promise :  … In 2010, the solar industry predicted that as many as 500,000 people would be directly or indirectly employed in the US solar sector by 2016. Reality: As we head into 2012, the number is more like 100,000. Prices for conventional solar cells have fallen 40 percent in the past year, due largely to a flood of panels from Chinese manufacturers, which have benefited from plunging silicon prices and government support. The price drop has eviscerated the US solar manufacturing industry. Seriously.  Apparently because there is one solar study that said we would have 500,000 jobs 4 years from now, the super-fast growing industry with 100,000 jobs is a bust.  For the record: It is a 2011 study . The 500,000 number assumes a 5-year extension of the crucial Treasury Grant Program . The 500,000 number is based on direct, indirect and induced jobs. Induced jobs roughly double the total! Yet Wired still had the chutzpah  to use this image as its depiction of this staggeringly successful American industry: Wired Caption:  ”Solar: Cheap panels from China have viscerated the US industry.” No, the industry isn’t quite yet disemboweled.  Again, one part of the U.S. industry — manufacturing of solar cells — certainly faces a great challenge from China. But the article  is quite confused about the impact of shale gas on solar, asserting: Meanwhile the price of natural gas has fallen by 77 percent since 2008, and the cost of producing electricity in gas plants is down 40 percent since then. Renewables simply can’t compete. In the case of solar, the article  utterly misses the key point that solar photovoltaics generally compete with the retail price of power, not the wholesale price. I asked one of the leading experts on solar energy, Jigar Shah, for a response.  Shah, who founded the pioneering solar company SunEdison, writes me: Since 2000, commercial electricity prices have gone up by almost 5% per year.  Even after the crash in wholesale prices from the financial crisis of 2008, most electricity customers are still paying much higher prices than the historic 0.6% annual rate increases in the 1980s and 90s.  The reason for this is that all of the infrastructure in the United States is “old”.  Most of the coal plants are over 40 years old and realistically cannot be run for more than another 10 to 20 years.  Most of the substations in the United States were built before everyone decided to install air conditioning.  When new natural gas plants are built, it isn’t the gas plant that is so expensive, it is the changes in the grid required to accept this new concentrated electricity source that makes up the bulk of the expenses. With installed solar prices approaching the $2/Wdc mark for commercial rooftop systems, it is now more cost effective than retail electricity prices for over 20% of all US electricity covering 200 utilities in 29 states.  The persistence and the excitement fueled by the VC community caused over 5,000 contractors to invest their hard earned money to make solar in the local community a reality.  The final step in the solar transformation is about finance, not about technology.  In 2008, the solar industry was on the cusp of finally creating ways for common Americans to invest in solar power, to put their money where the poll numbers already suggest their heart is.  This last step was postponed by the financial crisis and is finally ready to be started again.  There are ten individual initiatives that are being led by entrepreneurs, well-known private equity managers, and large well capitalized companies all headed for the same objective, bring low risk solar assets to the public markets so that pension funds and individual investors can benefit from what Warren Buffet already knows — renewable energy projects have a higher yield and are a safer investment than corporate bonds. In the oil, electricity, and transportation industries we have annual capital expenditures into infrastructure (not consumer products) of almost $2 Trillion per year.  The combined revenues of HP, IBM, Cisco and others that sell hardware for information infrastructure is almost 10 times less than that.  Shifting the investment into our core energy infrastructure is a multi-decade struggle that has resulted in 2010 with more money going into new renewables of $187B  while only $157B went in to new fossil fuel and nuclear generation.  Given that investment banks, law firms, and jobs care about new stuff being built all shifted their loyalties to the renewables side of the ledger.  In 2011, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said that since 2000 we have invested over $1 Trillion in clean energy broadly — $243B in 2010 alone.  This means that with current growth rates, our next Trillion will take only 4 years and by 2020 we will probably be at $1 Trillion annually — over 50% of the almost $2 Trillion needed by the whole energy industry. Financial innovation is about building trust.  Investors need to believe that these technologies have almost zero technology risk or 100,000 hours of field testing.  They need to know that the financial products are structured in a way that clearly takes into account all of the risks.  While these steps are easier for clean energy, they are not trivial.  The efforts of the VCs and the US Government mean that we now have a set of technologies that meet this profile and have been accepted by the grand masters of finance such that they can reach $1 Trillion of annual investment by 2020.  Like the oil and gas industry, more innovation will always be possible, but meeting the final hurdle of acceptance by the finance industry is something that the oil and gas industry knows how to do.  And now so do we. So, no, the US solar industry has not busted yet, and the future  is incredibly bright.  Would it be even brighter if  Congress were willing to extend the tax credits?  Of course, but solar is here to stay in any case. NOTE:  Eilperin attempted to interview Shah for the story, and he declined to be interviewed. As for wind power, Tom Gray of the American Wind Energy Association posted this response [scroll to bottom] on Wired’s website : 1) Wind is close to cost-competitive with new natural gas generation, even at today’s unsustainably low natural gas prices, and has positive offsetting benefits. Adding wind farms to a power system helps lower fuel prices and electric rates and make them more stable and predictable.  For example, the Colorado Public Utility Commission recently approved a 25-year, 200-megawatt (MW) power purchase agreement between Xcel Energy subsidiary Public Service Co. of Colorado and NextEra Energy for power from the Limon Wind 2 project. The Colorado PUC underscored how the contract would be cost effective for consumers, saying, “the contract will save ratepayers $100 million on a net-present-value basis over its 25-year term under a base-case natural gas price scenario.” As Bloomberg New Energy Finance lead wind analyst Justin Wu recently commented, “The public perception of wind power tends to be that it is environmentally friendly, but expensive and intermittent. That is out of date in the best locations, where generation is already cost‐competitive with fossil fuel electricity, and that will be the case for the majority of new onshore turbines installed worldwide by 2016.” 2) States that rely more on wind power have seen their electricity rates rise more slowly than states with little or no wind. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the 40 states with least wind installed (and the District of Columbia) saw electric rates rise by just over 34% between 2005 and 2010.  By contrast, the top 10 states in wind generation (with wind providing between 5.1% and 15.4% of electricity) saw an increase of less than 11%, or less than one-third as much. Electricity rates are the result of a number of factors, so wind can’t get all the credit.  However, it makes sense that a resource with zero fuel costs, when it is available, is going to push the most expensive (and dirtiest) power plants on a utility system off line and save consumers money. [See " The 5 States With the  Most Installed Wind and Solar Power Saw the  Least Increase in Electricity Prices from 2005-2010 ."] 3) Rep. Stearns is misinformed.  Wind energy is an American manufacturing success story. The wind industry has been a bright spot through the depths of the recession, creating one of the fastest-growing U.S. manufacturing sectors. Wind is actually insourcing a whole new manufacturing sector. Sixty percent of a wind turbine’s value is now produced here in America, compared to 25% prior to 2005. As the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service recently found, American wind manufacturing facilities have grown to almost 400 in 2010, up from as few as 30 in 2004. The key to that expansion has been the federal Production Tax Credit for wind, which has helped the companies that build wind farms to attract investment and create a market for turbines. A recent study from Navigant Consulting finds that with stable tax policy, the wind industry can grow to nearly 100,000 American jobs in the next four years, including growing the wind manufacturing sector by one third to 46,000 American manufacturing jobs. This will keep the wind sector on track toward supporting the 500,000 jobs by 2030 envisioned in a report by the U.S. Department of Energy during the George W. Bush administration. The development of clean, renewable energy sources such as wind power is critically important for the future of the country and everyone who uses electricity now and in the future. Wind energy is clean, abundant, and homegrown, and its cost is dropping. The case for continuing to invest in its growth through a reasonable low tax rate remains strong. And to change course now would only shut down a new U.S. manufacturing sector, just as it is starting to deliver on a large scale. Let wind finish the job. – Tom Gray, American Wind Energy Association So, no, there hasn’t been a bust in clean tech yet, and the industry is poised to do unbelievably well in the coming decades.  Yes, the foes of clean energy in Congress can put a crimp in the near-term growth, but the technological and marketplace reality is  very promising for renewables in the medium term.  And, of course, the ever accelerating reality of climate change means renewables are the inevitable winner in the longer term, no matter how hard their  opponents try to kill the US industry.

Tags: 2012-at-1029-pm, economics, headlines, in-2011, joe-romm, media, solar-energy, thinkprogress, tweets

Gawker reported today that Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the weekly newspaper the Atlanta Jewish Times, wrote in a January 13 column about what options Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Neyanyahu might have if he receives a report that Hezbollah is about to attack with thousands of rockets and Iran has “reached nuclear launch capabilities.” In this hypothetical scenario, Adler says that an Israeli diplomat will have informed Nethanyahu that he “cannot expect much help from the United States due to its newly implemented military budget and the administration’s never ending ‘Alice in Wonderland’ belief that diplomacy is the answer.” One option (Option three), according to Adler, would be for U.S.-based Mossad agents to assassinate the President of the United States: Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies. “Yes, you read ‘three’ correctly,” Adler says, “Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?” In a statement today, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) condemned Adler’s editorial: “ It is the height of irresponsibility to make the horrific suggestion that the State of Israel should assassinate the President of the United States of America ,” [NJDC President and CEO David] Harris said. “To dare to give such despicable ideas space in a newspaper — no less in the words of the paper’s owner and publisher, and a Jewish newspaper at that — is beyond the pale.” As for Adler, Gawker caught up with him to see just what he was talking about. He said he wasn’t advocating for assassinating President Obama. “I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen,” Adler said, adding, “I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers.” “We’ve gotten a lot of calls and emails,” Adler told Gawker. “Nothing from the Secret Service, though. Yet,” Gawker’s John Cook adds. Update Adler told the Guardian that he deeply regrets writing the column suggesting that Israel assassinate Obama. It seems that Adler isn’t remorseful about suggesting that the president be assassinated, but that his readers might think Israel actually will do it: Adler said he understood why readers might interpret his writing as suggesting that Israel is seriously considering assassinating the US president but that is not what he meant. “No, no, no. It’s unfathomable, unthinkable,” he said, adding: “I’m definitely pro-Israel to the max.”

Tags: author, donate, economy, health, iran, january-2012, joe-romm, president, security, thinkprogress, var-jplayerswf, war

A city council in Ohio is seeking legal opinion as to whether Cuyahoga Falls can provide family membership rates to a city sporting facility for gay couples legally married in other states, the Akron Beacon Journal reports . Shane and Coty May — who is an Iraq war veteran — married in D.C. in October and asked the facility to convert their individual memberships to a family plan. They were told their marriage “was not considered real” and that “until the State of Ohio recognizes gay marriage then my marriage license means nothing.” Mayor Don Robart says the council is unlikely to rule in favor of the couple and dismissed an online Change.org petition that is clamoring for the fitness facility to change its policy. Robart claimed “that for every person who signed the Mays’ petition, there is a resident opposed to extending the family rate to gay couples. “As soon as we make an exception for the gays, we will get a taxpayer lawsuit saying why are you giving them a break when their marriage is illegal in Ohio?” he said.

Tags: author, fitness, january-2012, joe-romm, media, ohio, sponsor, tweets

Despite a strong La Nina event cooling the Pacific Ocean, 2011 was about the 10th hottest year on record , scientists have found. “It’s clear over time the El Niño years tend to be the warmer years and the La Niña years tend to be the cooler years,” said Tom Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. “This year the La Niña-related temperatures for 2011 were as warm as anything we’ve seen in the past, very close to the year 2008.” Every year since 1976 has been warmer than average, according to NOAA. While 2011 was the coolest year in the 21st century, it was tied with the second-warmest year of the 20th century, notes Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman.

Tags: author, barack-obama, director, economy, global-warming, green, health, january-2012, joe-romm, security, var-jplayerswf

Our guest blogger is Jerome Hunt, a Research Associate for LGBT Progress at American Progress. Today, the Fighting Injustice to Reach Equality, or FIRE initiative, at the Center for American Progress released a comprehensive report about the policy priorities of black LGBT Americans outside of marriage equality. “Jumping Beyond the Broom: Why Black Gay and Transgender Americans Need More Than Marriage Equality,” specifically examines the issues of economic insecurity, educational attainment and outcomes, and health and wellness disparities this population faces, and offers a host of policy solutions to bridge the gaps. The key finding of the report is that black LGBT Americans continue to experience stark social, economic, and health disparities despite significant gains in securing basic right for LGBT people over the past decade. For example, black gay Americans earn $10,000 less than their black heterosexual counterparts and face higher rates of poverty and unemployment as well. Black lesbians are more likely to suffer from chronic diseases (i.e. heart disease and diabetes) than others, and black LGBT youth are more likely to end up homeless and living on the streets compared to other youth. These social, economic, and health disparities are often ignored as broader gay and transgender policy priorities—including marriage equality—receive the time and attention of advocates and the mainstream and LGBT press. They’re also neglected by racial and economic justice agendas that fail to include the needs and priorities of gay and transgender populations. In short black gay and transgender Americans fall through the cracks of silo’d policy and advocacy efforts – so we must make progress in bridging these gaps. “Jumping Beyond the Broom,” shows how progress can be made by applying an intersectional lens that accounts for race, class, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity in federal policy analysis and advocacy. The report also makes recommendations that Congress and federal agencies could adopt that would help eliminate the disparities between black gay and transgender people and others. Recommendations include ensuring full LGBT inclusion in social safety net programs; developing a comprehensive federal response to LGBT homelessness; adopting safe schools polices; implementing the Affordable Care Act in a fully LGBT-inclusive way at the state and federal level; and collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity across key federal surveys of the public. The FIRE Initiative will explore many of these policy issues in-depth in the months to come, including through additional publications and public events.

Tags: affordable care act, barack-obama, health, january-2012, joe-romm, jumping-beyond, marriage-equality

A provision in the health care law that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ health care plans until the age of 26 is working, new analysis from the Employee Benefits Research Institute confirms. According to the Institute, “the percentage of people between ages 19 and 25 being carried as a dependent on a parent’s employment-based coverage increased from 24.7 percent in 2009 to 27.7 percent in 2010 . The number of young adults with employment-based coverage as a dependent increased from 7.3 million to 8.2 million” as uninsured teens find coverage or shift into dependent insurance if they lose their employer-sponsored insurance. However, the economic recession and increasing health care costs are still causing Americans over the age of 50 — or those who actually use more care — to skip health care services. Relying on data from the National Health Interview Survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Institute found that almost 22 percent of “households reported that they have made some changes in their prescription drugs to save money, and nearly as many report that they have either skipped or postponed doctor appointments to do so.” Twenty seven percent of households “reported difficulty in paying their monthly bills”:

Tags: economy, green, health, health care reform, igor-volsky, january-2012, joe-romm, pennsylvania, security, sponsor, var-jplayerswf

Even the Koch-funded Berkeley study found recent surface warming  “on the high end” and speeding up .  And scientists have long known that the overwhelming majority of human-caused warming was expected to go into the oceans, which  just keeps heating up pretty darn steadily (see graph below). But there is certainly a lot of natural variability (aka noise) in the long-term trend for surface warming, which the deniers doggedly exploit to confuse the public.  This short video by Ole Christoffer Haga is a great visual explanation of the difference between climate and weather: There are various ways to remove the short-term “noise” of natural climate variability from the temperature record to reveal the true global warming signal. One recent study simply calculated and removed some of the best understood sources of the noise, “the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability)” — see Sorry, Deniers, Study of “True Global Warming Signal” Finds “Remarkably Steady” Rate of Manmade Warming Since 1979 . If you remove the natural influences and then average the 5 major surface temperature and satellite-based lower-atmosphere estimates, you get this: The authors of the study note the “adjusted data show clearly, both visually and when subjected to statistical analysis, that the rate of global warming due to other factors (most likely these are exclusively anthropogenic) has been remarkably steady during the 32 years from 1979 through 2010.”  They conclude: Its unabated increase is powerful evidence that we can expect further temperature increase in the next few decades, emphasizing the urgency of confronting the human influence on climate. Sadly the noise from the deniers also continues unabated. Finally, whatever slight slowing in global warming some groups may have observed in the past decade, not only was it driven by this “noise,” it was primarily in the surface temperature data set.  The oceans kept heating up: Figure 1:   Revised estimate of global ocean heat content (10-1500 mtrs deep) for 2005-2010 derived from Argo measurements. The 6-yr trend accounts for 0.55±0.10Wm−2. Error bars and trend uncertainties exclude errors induced by remaining systematic errors in the global observing system. See Von Schuckmann & Le Traon (2011).  Via  Skeptical Science . A 2009 NOAA-led study,  “An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950 ” concluded, “since 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating.  Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean. ” So the warming continues just where scientists expected it. Related Post: It’s “Extremely Likely That at Least 74% of Observed Warming Since 1950″ Was Manmade; It’s Highly Likely All of It Was

Tags: 2012-at-1202-am, author, climate-change-deniers, dogs, global-warming, health, joe-romm, lgbt, prokaryotes, security, war

James Bond villains blamed for nuclear’s bad image The evil villains in James Bond movies are being blamed for casting a long-lasting shadow over the image of nuclear power, says the president of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Prof David Phillips says that Dr No, with his personal nuclear reactor, helped to create a “remorselessly grim” reputation for atomic energy. Prof Phillips was speaking ahead of the 50th anniversary of the movie. The chemistry organisation says it wants a “renaissance” in nuclear power. Prof Phillips says the popularity of the Dr No movie from 1962 created an enduringly negative image of nuclear power – as something dangerous that could be wielded by megalomaniacs with aspirations to world domination. The villain of the movie, planning mass destruction from his secret Caribbean hideout, eventually dies in the cooling pool of his nuclear reactor, having been foiled by James Bond, played by Sean Connery. No, this isn’t a story in The Onion .  It’s actually from the BBC .  You can listen to the interview here . Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima — these aren’t to blame for nuclear’s bad image.  It’s Ian Fleming and Hollywood.  Well, actually not Ian Fleming, since the original book didn’t have the nuclear power stuff.  In the book, Dr. No is buried under a chute of guano.  Darn you, anti-nuke screenwriters! To paraphrase the other interviewee, Prof. Tom Burke, blaming Bond villains for creating a bad image for nuclear power is like blaming the enduringly negative image of the Mafia on the Godfather movies and the Sopranos.  And no, I’m not comparing power of the atom to the power of the mob, although they do have one thing in common — they  charge more and more over time (see “ Does nuclear power have a negative learning curve? “): Average and min/max reactor construction costs per year of completion date for US and France versus cumulative capacity completed Now that’s scary! The cost of new nuclear power plants have continued to escalate in the United States, France, and other countries since 2000: French nuclear giant  “Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns.” (5/09) Toshiba tells San Antonio its new twin $13 billion nukes will cost $4 billion more. The city balks. (10/09) Stunner: New Nuclear Costs as Much as German Solar Power Today — and Up to $0.34/kWh in 2018 (6/11) I suppose dealing with nuclear power has one more thing in common with dealing with the mob —  when things go wrong, they go very wrong (see “ Radiation Covers 8% of Japan ” and  Fukushima Surprise: Radioactive Rice “Far Exceeding” Safe Levels Found in Japan ). Returning to the absurdist BBC interview: But the Royal Society of Chemistry, which promotes the work of chemical sciences, says that it also meant that millions of people who saw the film saw nuclear technology being presented as a “barely-controllable force for evil”. Later Bond villains, as part of their cat-stroking, laser-pointing, world-destroying repertoire, also had nuclear ambitions. When there are worries about nuclear safety – such as following the tsunami in Japan – the Royal Society of Chemistry fears that the public reaction is still shaped by such emotive, negative associations. As such, Prof Phillips says that when nuclear power is discussed “it is not at all surprising that the public at home and abroad are sceptical”. Of course, it couldn’t have anything to do with the actual nuclear accidents. In any case, it isn’t the accidents per se — or even the media image of nukes — that have killed the much-hyped nuclear renaissance, it is in fact the exorbitant cost of nuclear power that has turned utility executives into modern day Dr. No’s when it comes to nukes — see  Exelon’s Rowe: Low gas prices and no carbon price push back nuclear renaissance a “decade, maybe two.” What the accidents have shown is that we can’t do nuclear power on the cheap: New reactors are intrinsically expensive because they must be able to withstand virtually any risk that we can imagine, including human error and major disasters (see “ Japan and future of U.S. nuclear power “).  Unlike James Bond, we only live once.

Tags: 2012-at-429-pm, congress, economy, green, health, joe-romm, lgbt, nuclear-energy, tweets, wind energy