U.S., UK Aiming to Triple Nuclear Power by 2050, Recognizing its Reliability and Efficiency
The move is being ahead of the COP28 meeting of climate cultists. Furthermore, Sweden and Sri Lanka are among the countries looking to nuclear energy options.
The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference will convene from November 30 to December 12 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). This is the annual meeting of climate cultists, formally titled the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 28).
Legal Insurrection readers may recall the climate cultist antics at these conferences have been a mixture of troubling and entertaining:
- At COP27, China and India were not agreeable to the ridiculous temperature goals being proposed, which is part of a proposed global pact.
- The COP26 event featured a lame dinosaur ad promotion (Don’t Choose Extinction campaign).
- COP25 ended in complete failure (or success, if you like reliable energy at reasonable prices).
As we gear up for another two weeks of globalist political puffery and virtue signalling, it is important to note that the green energy dominoes have been steadily failing since COP27. Some of the more sensible policy makers have come to realize that solar and wind do not provide the steady, affordable, and efficient energy required for civilized living in the modern world.
Therefore, countries are beginning to turn to the only other fuel source that could be an effective replacement for fossil fuels: Nuclear energy.
The US will lead a push at the COP28 climate summit to triple the amount of installed nuclear power capacity globally by 2050, marking a major turnaround for the controversial technology at the climate negotiations.
The declaration will call on the World Bank and other international financial institutions to include nuclear energy in their lending policies, according to a document seen by Bloomberg News. The US will likely be joined by the UK, France, Sweden, Finland and South Korea in the pledge to be signed Dec. 1 in Dubai, according to people familiar with the matter.
That will be followed a few days later by a nuclear industry commitment to triple generation resources from 2020 levels, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the information isn’t public.
Sweden is going all-in for nuclear energy.
Sweden’s government said it aimed to build the equivalent of two new conventional nuclear reactors by 2035 on Thursday to meet surging demand for clean power from industry and transport and was prepared to take on some of the costs.
By 2045 the government wants to have the equivalent of 10 new reactors, some of which are likely to be small modular reactors (SMRs), smaller than conventional reactors.
Energy Minister Ebba Busch said the government was planning a “massive build out” of new nuclear power by 2045.
“It’s decisive for the green transition, for Swedish jobs and at heart for the welfare of our citizens,” she told reporters.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall the chaos on the island nation of Sri Lanka, when the president of that nation had to flee a very unhappy population. In part, the problems at that time stemmed from the country going “green” and resulted in food riots triggered by the lack of produce using ‘climate-friendly’ farming techniques.
Sri Lanka has learned its lesson, at least when it comes to reliable sources of energy.
Sri Lanka will call for expressions of interest (EOI) in setting up nuclear power plants, its energy minister said on Friday, as it seeks cheap electricity to support its economic recovery.
The primary source of energy in the island nation is from imported oil and coal, and hydropower. The government aims to produce 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and it sees nuclear power as a low-carbon option for its energy mix. It aims to be carbon neutral by 2050.
“The government intends to include the safe use of nuclear energy as a part of the long-term generation plans,” Energy Minister Kanchana Wijesekera said in a post on the X social media platform, after meeting officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Colombo.
The government “will call for EOIs for establishing nuclear power plants & modern technology”, he said.
I am looking forward to the new narratives from our media and elite politicians about the virtues of nuclear energy, after years of demonization.
“Nuclear is 100% part of the solution,” John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last week. “It’s clean energy.”#uranium #nuclear https://t.co/jshtJA1uoa
— Muddy (@MrChris_Timmins) November 15, 2023
I can’t wait to see what this year’s global climate cult antics will be. Stay tuned!
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Comments
John Kerry flipped on nuclear? That made the old surprise meter twitch.
Apparently even Jahwn learned the lesson of Germany’s nuclear fiasco…
Nuclear Fi$$on! Toshiba has an interesting design for small reactors to power out of the way places. NIMBYs will not be happy from the thought of nukes …. Oh, and who has a major financial stake courtesy of Hillary? Russia. Those cattle futures were nothing compared to this.
Personally, I see small nuclear reactors as essential to heavy industry & cities, and solar electric as being viable for lower population density residential. Our grid is seriously out of date and expensive to replace. Distributed power is innately more robust. Rural communities can be islands power wise, and when shit hits the fan, continue to operate normally.
Very large power plants are attractive targets, as are substations. Distributed power is much less susceptible to both intentional and natural events.
Very true. Cheap redundancy and overcapacity is the easiest and best solution – hence lots of coal plants.
Distributed power is great, but the problem with distributed solar, say, is that at times when the solar isn’t available it isn’t available for everyone based on it and they all come back on the grid for alternative electricity at the same time. This is why distributed solar can actually destabilize a grid. It will work fine for normal days, but a few days of poor weather and no solar available and all of those “distributed” producers go dry at once.
For grid generation we need redundancy and over-capacity on demand. Intermittent and unreliable sources only work during normal operations but make everything go down the sh*tter when anything even half-bad happens.
I am for solar, but without any subsidies and without forcing any utilities to buy electricity from solar users. People who want solar need to install their own batteries.
At least in my neck of the woods it is not desirable to sell solar to the power company, they want peak power solar output, which they charge $1.00 per Kwh and give you even exchange off peak power which is worthy $ 0.12. That is outrageous.
So I charge batteries until they are full, then I heat water used for space heating.
I rarely have to run a diesel generator, but when I do the waste heat goes to the hydronic system. There is no sudden load to the grid unless the generator fails to start. I also have other generators, Gasoline and LP. Since a generator is rarely used it is cost effective.
John Kerry has been known as a flip flopper his entire career. He goes where the grift takes him.
Well “pushing for global increase” isn’t exactly the same as the US increasing Nukes by 300%. Although it wouldn’t take many new nukes to increase those our politicians have allowed to survive by 300%.
IIRC Sri Lanka has almost no foreign exchange, which was one reason for their energy disaster. Where will they get the money to pay the capital cost of a nuclear power plant?
Take a wild guess and hold your wallet tight
They will try to get us to pay for it. They probably have have made some sort of deal with the Biden Syndicate.
We would have been here decades ago if not for just a single movie.
Nuclear is nice but coal plants are the best sources for electrical generation. We should be building tons of coal-fired plants.
Nope
Yep.
If someone desires the strongest, most reliable, cheapest, simplest, and secure power there is, he builds coal-fired plants.
Coal has a lot of particulate emissions. Considering our oil and gas reserves, they better than coal.
Coal is better for electricity generation. Plants are simpler and the fuel is easier to handle, store, and deal with. Further, the US is absolutely awash with coal.
We should be building new coal plants by the boatload.
I disagree that coal is simpler.
The US is the Saudi Arabia of coal. Particulates can be captured, particularly when a new plant is being built instead of needing to retrofit an old plant.
As a retired Electrical Engineer I see Nuclear Power being a great solution to our power issues as is coal, but I do not see it happening. It will be tied up in the courts for too many years by environmental groups that will keep it useless. In both we can build the plants in a relative quick time, but the problem is that they get tied up in the courts and then the delays and the costs rise.
We also have major grid problems through out the country that has to be fixed so the power can be delivered. I also do not trust any of the Dems, like Kerry to suddenly change views when they never have.
Yep. Exactly this.
Politicians will campaign on having taken a reasonable stance on energy policy, and then gosh darn it, the courts and regulators will block it. And no one will be responsible or accountable.
This seems likely. On the other hand it may be more regional. The Southeast has gotten a couple of Nuke plants approved and built while other regions seem hell bent on closing them.
I know that there are still some issues with molten salt reactors. But they do look promising. No meltdown and runaway reactions.
I am also a retired EE, I worked in many fields, one of which was industrial controls. Plant downtime is very expensive, hundreds of thousands per hour. So we had redundancy , distributed systems to lower risk. Our power systems should be the same, less long haul for power is desirable.
Things that are obvious to us took them 30-40 years to figure out
Indeed. In 1989, Gov. Mario Cuomo of NY shut down brand new, finished, never used Shoreham nuclear power plant. In 2021, son, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of NY shut down Indian Point, with lots of years left.
And oh by the way, it’s come out recently that in their latest ‘temperature’ crap, a whole bunch of the temperature sensors NO LONGER EXIST, and yet they are still ‘recording’ yearly temperatures for them. Maybe as many as 20% of the climate sensors are completely fake data (I mean they’re ALL fake data because they ‘adjust’ them, but these are just 100% made up).
It’s a scam and a joke.
And the temperature sensors that actually do exist are placed in totally inappropriate locations. Like in parking lots w/asphalt surfaces or next to hot air outlets/vents etc.
Then there’s always the issue of climate activists (won’t call them scientists because they aren’t) “adjusting” the data that they do get so that it shows exactly what they want it to show.
Yeah, the surface temp data is isn’t clean it is corrupted by the location of the stations. A sensible target for Congress would be to direct funding for ID of locations for stations outside the influence of heat sinks and funding to relocate them with a directive to use the more reliable data from those new locations. Heck if Congress won’t then a consortium of philanthropists could fund the creation of an alternative set of stations in those locations to provide an alternative data set for comparison with ‘official’ data.
I agree with clintack. US commitment to nuclear will disappear after the 2024 elections if the democrats win.
I wonder how the pro-solar crowd will respond to this? Their view is that nuclear power is highly expensive, dangerous, and toxic, unlike solar panels, solar batteries, and EVs – just ignore all the toxic fire, spontaneous combustion, and reliance on hard to source rare earth minerals, mostly controlled by Beijing.
Grid level solar power production is not gonna work outside of the best few geographic locations: the Southeast Sun belt, the Southwest and CA. Even those locations face the same issue of reliable production and delivery of electricity on the days, weeks when less power can be generated; winter and cloudy days. IMO, point of use solar systems voluntarily installed on site are a better way to go.
Zero chance the US allows any of that tripled nuclear capacity on US soil. We’ve been decommissioning nuclear power plants for decades, and I see no regulatory changes on the horizon that will change that. It isn’t as if EPA cares who is president, they do whatever the heck they want since the bureaucrats with real power there can’t be fired. The President can fire the head honcho, but the rest of the bureaucracy is completely protected by civil service rules.
Fission is by far the best option we have. There are so many ways to do it and so many applications. Unlimited process heat for various industries, large and small scale energy production, medical treatments, ship propulsion, space propulsion. The waste matra is a distorted exaggeration as is the same for safety. Add to that the benefit to society of a generation of new nuclear engineers and scientists.
I hope the U.S. comes up with a permanent nuclear waste disposal plan sometime soon. Maybe we’ll just store it in temporary containers that never leak until they come up with something.