Power Hungry (62 page)

17
Gwyneth Cravens,
Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy
(New York: Knopf, 2008), 269.

18
Halimah Abdullah and Renee Schoof, “Boxer: EPA Should Regulate Coal-Fired Power Plant Waste,” McClatchy Newspapers, June 26, 2009,
http://www.thesunnews.com/1014/story/956439.html
.

19
Cravens,
Power to Save the World
, 269. For carbon data, see Energy Information Administration, “World Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Consumption and Flaring of Fossil Fuels, 1980–2006,” posted December 8, 2008,
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls
.

20
James Kanter, “In Finland, Nuclear Renaissance Runs Into Trouble,”
New York Times
, May 28, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html
.

21
Ibid.

22
Jim Forsyth, “San Antonio Sees Cost for New Tex Reactors Rising,” Reuters, October 27, 2009,
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssConsumerGoodsAndRetailNews/idUSN2726904520091027
.

23
NewEnergyFocus.com
, “Onshore Construction Begins for Sheringham Shoal Wind farm,” September 7, 2009,
http://www.newenergyfocus.com/do/ecco.py/view_item?listid=1&listcatid=32&listitemid=2978§ion=Wind
. See also Statoil, “Pioneering Wind Power at Sheringham Shoal,”
http://www.statoilhydro.com/en/TechnologyInnovation/NewEnergy/RenewablePowerProduction/Offshore/SheringhamShoal/Pages/default.aspx
.

24
Alex Kuffner, “National Grid Objects to Proposed Cost of Wind Power,”
Providence Journal
, November 19, 2009,
http://www.projo.com/business/content/GRID_DEEPWATER_DEAL_11-19-09_ROGGH5M_v38.3c1d2cb.html
.

25
Katherine Gregor, “Cool City: Solar Subtleties,”
Austin Chronicle
, March 6, 2009,
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid
:75 1802.

26
Christopher Calnan, “City Council Gives Austin Energy the Go-Ahead for Major Solar Project,”
Austin Business Journal
, March 5, 2009,
http://austin.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2009/03/02/daily49.html
.

27
Zac Anderson, “Solar Plant Set to Open, Even as Shadows Loom,” Herald
Tribune.com
, October 14, 2009,
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20091014/ARTICLE/910141033/2055/NEWS?Title=Solar-plant-set-to-open-even-as-shadows-loom
.

28
Energy Information Administration, “Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy Markets 2007,” April 2008,
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/pdf/subsidy08.pdf
, xvi.

29
Ibid.

30
Simon Lomax, “Nuclear Industry ‘Restart' Means More Loan Guarantees, Chu Says,” Bloomberg, October 27, 2009,
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=aR1MVERYEgAs
.

31
This is commonly called the Price-Anderson Act. For more, see Wikipedia, “Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
.

32
David Bradish, “Amory Lovins vs. Stewart Brand—Part Four,” NEI Nuclear Notes, November 16, 2009,
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2009/11/amory-lovins-vs-stewart-brand-part-four.html#links
.

33
Note that the total in this report includes petroleum liquids. The EIA's official statistics on electricity generation show that in 2007, natural gas total generation was 896.5 billion kilowatt-hours. See Energy Information Administration, “Net Generation by Energy Source by Type of Producer,”
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html
.

34
Recall that wind gets $23.37 per megawatt-hour, and gas gets $0.25. Gas generated 900 billion kilowatt-hours, and wind generated 31 billion kilowatt-hours.

35
Energy Information Administration, “Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy Markets 2007,” xviii.

1
Environmental Defense Fund, “Fact Sheet,” n.d.,
http://www.edf.org/documents/2978_FactSheet_aboutus.pdf
.

2
Fred Krupp speech at CERAWeek, Houston, Texas, February 12, 2009.

3
H. Josef Hebert, “Nuclear Waste Won't Be Going to Nevada's Yucca Mountain, Obama Official Says,” Associated Press, March 6, 2009,
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-nuke-yucca_frimar06,0,2557502.story
.

4
The Hill
, “Reid Vows to Block New Push for Yucca Mountain Nuke Site,” April 6, 2006,
http://hill6.thehill.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=59718
.

5
Hebert, “Nuclear Waste Won't Be Going to Nevada's Yucca Mountain.”

6
Republican Party, “2008 Republican Platform,”
http://platform.gop.com/2008Platform.pdf
, 32.

7
Democratic Party, “Renewing America's Promise: Democratic Party Platform, 2008,”
http://www.democrats.org/a/party/platform.html
, 47.

8
William Tucker,
Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey
(Savage, MD: Bartleby Press, 2008), 345, 352.

9
World Nuclear Association, “Waste Management in the Nuclear Fuel Cycle,” n.d.,
www.world-nuclear.org/info/info04.html
.

10
Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh, “The Nuclear Illusion,” Rocky Mountain Institute, May 27, 2008,
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E08=01_NuclearIllusion
.

11
Vaclav Smil,
Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 172.

12
Institute for 21
^st
Century Energy, “Revisiting America's Nuclear Waste Policy,” May 2009,
http://www.energyxxi.org/reports/Nuclear_Waste_Policy.pdf
, 2.

13
TED.com
, “Stewart Brand Proclaims 4 Environmental Heresies,” June 2009, video,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxwiVFgghE
.

14
USEC.com
, “Metagons to Megawatts,”
http://www.usec.com/megatonstomegawatts.htm
.

15
See
CEA.fr
, “What Is Transmutation?” n.d.,
http://www.cea.fr/var/cea/storage/static/gb/library/Clefs53/pdf-gb/ence-abf_53gb.pdf
.

16
Gwyneth Cravens,
Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy
(New York: Knopf, 2008), 265.

17
Swadesh Mahajan, interview with author, October 14, 2009.

18
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Transuranic Element,” n.d.,
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/transuranic-element.html
. For neptunium info, see
“Neptunium Facts: Chemical and Physical Properties,”
http://chemistry.about.com/od/elementfacts/a/neptunium.htm
.

19
Malcolm Browne, “Modern Alchemists Transmute Nuclear Waste,”
New York Times
, October 29, 1991,
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/29/science/modern-alchemists-transmute-nuclear-waste.html
.

20
Martin Avery Snyder and Harold Weitzner, “The Road to Endless Energy,” Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, December 12, 2008.

21
Hans A. Bethe, “The Fusion Hybrid,”
Physics Today
, May 1979, 50.

22
Ed Gerstner, “The Hybrid Returns,”
Nature
, July 2, 2009, 27.

23
U.S. Department of Energy, “Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,”
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/
.

1
Energy Information Administration, “Annual Energy Outlook 2009 with Projections to 2030,”
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity.html
.

2
Energy Information Administration, “Total Electric Power Industry Summary Statistics,”
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/tablees1b.html
.

3
Energy Information Administration, “Annual Energy Outlook 2009,” Figure 55,
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/excel/figure55_data.xls
.

4
CBS News, “Al Gore: Energy Crisis Can Be Fixed,” July 17, 2008,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/17/eveningnews/main4270123.shtml
.

5
The U.S. Navy doesn't publish actual output data. John Pike of Globalsecurity .org estimates output at about 50,000 horsepower, which equals 37.3 megawatts.

6
Robert Bryce, “Nukes Get Small,”
Energy Tribune
, July 16, 2008,
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=948
.

7
Ibid.

8
NuScale, “NuScale Fact Sheet,”
http://www.nuscalepower.com/nr-Press-Fact-Sheet-NuScale.php
.

9
Babcock.com
, “B&W Power Generation Group: Historic Milestones,” n.d.,
http://www.babcock.com/business_units/power_gen_group/facts_historic_milestones.html
.

10
Yahoo! Finance, “McDermott International, Inc.: Income Statement,”
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MDR&annual
.

11
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Design Certification Applications for New Reactors,”
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/design-cert.html
.

12
Richard A. Muller,
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 334.

13
Tim Dean, “New Age Nuclear,”
Cosmos
, April 2006,
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348/full
.

14
Mitch Jacoby, “Reintroducing Thorium,”
Chemical & Engineering News
, November 16, 2009,
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/email/html/8746sci2.html
.

15
Seth Grae, “Thorium,”
Chemical & Engineering News
, n.d. (copyright is 2003),
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/80th/thorium.html
.

16
Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume E-7, Document 298, “Indian Nuclear Developments and Their Likely Implications,” n.d. (period covered is 1969–1976),
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/e7txt/50225.htm
.

17
Scott DiSavino, “Interview: Lightbridge Sees Nuclear Power Future in Thorium,” December 11, 2009,
http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-44659520091211?sp=true
.

18
Lightbridge, “Corporate Overview,” n.d.,
http://www.Ltbridge.com/images/Thorium-Power-Ltd.-Information-Kit.pdf
.

19
For more on other reactor designs, including the very high temperature reactor and the sodium-cooled fast reactor, see
The Economist
, “Nuclear's Next Generation,” December 10, 2009,
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1
5048703.

20
International Energy Agency,
World Energy Outlook 2009
, 160.

21
Richard Rhodes and Denis Beller, “The Need for Nuclear Power,”
Foreign Affairs
, February 2000,
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull422/42204784350.pdf
, 50.

1
International Energy Agency,
World Energy Outlook 2008
, 178.

2
Ibid., 159.

3
First Solar, “First Solar Passes $1 Per Watt Industry Milestone,” February 24, 2009,
http://investor.firstsolar.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=201491&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1259614&highlight=
.

4
ESolar, “Our Solution,”
http://www.esolar.com/solution.html
.

5
Katie Howell, “Exxon Sinks $600M into Algae-Based Biofuels in Major Strategy Shift,”
New York Times
, July 14, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/07/14/14greenwire-exxon-sinks-600m-into-algae-based-biofuels-in-33562.html
.

6
Todd Woody, “Solar Power When the Sun Goes Down?”
New York Times
, November 3, 2009,
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/solar-power-when-the-sun-goes-down/
.

7
Todd Woody, “Dow Unveils Solar Shingles,”
New York Times
, October 7, 2009,
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/dow-unveils-solar-shingles/
.

8
Jim Ostroff, “Eight Innovations That Will Change Your Future,” Kiplinger Letter, December 9, 2009,
http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecast/archive/eight-innovations-that-will-change-your-future.html
.

9
Andrew Taylor, “Obama's Budget Cuts Take Aim at 121 Federal Programs,” Associated Press, May 8, 2009,
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/05/08/obamas_budget_cuts_take_aim_at_121_federal_programs/
.

10
Mother Jones
, “Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90–2/14/08),” n.d.,
http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline
.

11
Ibid.

12
Dafna Linzer, “Before Iraq War, US Ignored Work of UN Arms Inspectors, Panel Says,”
Washington Post
, April 4, 2005,
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002230005_intel04.html
.

13
International Atomic Energy Agency, “Transcripts of Interviews,” September 1, 2009,
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Transcripts/2009/bas010909.html
.

14
Time
, “10 Questions for Mohamed ElBaradei,” August 17, 2009,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1914983,00.html
.