TM, ®, Copyright © 2010 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
- (october 2015)
The Biggest Ecological Disaster of the 21th Century.
Collapsing oil prices and the Fukushima disaster have dealt a mortal blow
to the nuclear energy industry. More and more countries are announcing plans
to phase out nuclear power plants and switch to mostly renewable energy
(solar, wind, etc).
Worldwide, 37 nuclear power plants have been shut down.
The notable exception is China, that plans to triple
its production of nuclear energy in the next 5 years.
Modern nuclear power plants are still way more efficient than gas-fueled
and oil-fueled power plants; and renewables would be more expensive than
all of these without government subsidies.
The economic equation would lean even more towards nuclear energy if carbon
emission were taxed like they should be.
Renewables are low-carbon sources of energy but they require vast areas,
and it is debatable whereas windmills and solar panels are really low carbon
emitters since they have to be built by the billions in polluting
factories (and their debris, including a lot of electronic waste,
will be around for a long time when they are replaced by newer models).
Germany pledged to replace all of its nuclear power plants with renewable
sources of energy but instead it has dramatically increased the amount of
energy produced by coal-fueled plants, causing an increse in carbon emissions.
The truth is that public opinion prefers to cause climate change than to risk
a nuclear disaster like Fukushima's.
Shamelessly, Barack Obama's "Clean Power Plan" ignores the easy solution to
clean energy: subsidize the construction of new nuclear plants. Modern nuclear
power plants can be extremely efficient while emitting zero carbon.
The USA is heading in the same direction as Germany: higher carbon emissions.
Given that most countries have learned to save on energy consumption, and
therefore would potentially be lowering their carbon emissions, the
demise of nuclear power plants could become the main cause of the global
increase in carbon emissions.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2015 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
2014 articles
|
