Political fight begins over bill to rescue Pennsylvania nuclear industry - Polidicks

https://whyy.org/articles/political-fight-begins-over-bill-to-rescue-pennsylvania-nuclear-industry/ The two plants that are planning to close (Beaver Valley and Three Mile Island) generate 2600MW of carbon free electricity. PA's entire wind capacity is 1400MW. Closing these plants will let natural gas take over PA and set the state back 30 years in terms of decarbonization progress. If anyone is from PA on here please contact your state reps to the PA general assembly, I already sent emails to mine.

More fission, less combustion!

More fission, less emission?

Is there any reason they’re closing? I know Three Mile Island is already infamous for almost becoming a national incident on the scale of Fukushima. And that was in 1979. Judging by that alone, I think these sites are probably very old and ages behind what modern nuclear plants can do. What we should be doing is working to replace them, but our current politicians seem all too happy to dump nuclear power for something a bit more carcinogenic…

While I don't like government subsidies, it's atrocious the subsidies don't simply work on how much CO2 free energy is made, letting wind turbines and solar panels out compete nuclear.

If it worked like that then nuclear would be even further ahead of solar/wind since it’s also carbon free.

Government subsidies and investments quite literally gave us the entire tech and aviation field; The fed gives a large helping hand to manufacturing in general. Things get done on their own but the fed likes to speed things up every now and then in an effort to dominate a market for the hope of doing good for its country and people. This is how governments operate to keep an edge over other governments.

The main reason TMI is shutting down is because the plant has been having financial issues and hasn't been able to get a good contract, so it been producing power that's not being used and upkeep is getting more expensive due to its age.

Not sure what you're going on about. That's sort of the point?

TMI wasn't nearly on the scale of Fukushima, there was little/no significant radiation release from TMI, and it ultimately wasn't a significant event beyond prompting stronger safety policies and practices for the industry (and these days Nuclear is arguably one of, if not THE industry that places safety at the forefront). Fukushima also is significantly overblown because of irrational fearmongering over radioactive releases that have ultimately been significantly contained, and the only casualties associated are from the botched evacuation of the surrounding area and the tsunami itself. Hell, even the incident itself is a case of massive natural disasters causing mayhem in the case of the earthquake and tsunami flooding causing the backup generators to fail. The only truly horrific nuclear accident in history has been Chernobyl, and that's literally all because the Soviets mismanaged the project to hell and back, the personnel working there PURPSOSEFULLY DISABLED SECURITY SYSTEMS to conduct a shitty and ill-informed test, and that RBMK reactors are a really, really bad design. Like, that accident can be summed up in a nutshell as Soviet idiocy made clear.

You can blame the entire last 10 years of anti nuclear sentiment on the Coal and Oil lobby. They fund "Grass roots" groups, and environmentalist groups to demonize nuclear power. The grass roots groups are legit, in the sense that they want Greener options, but they're idiots in the sense that they're unaware they can often be funded by the Kochs and pushing anti nuclear messages. Wind can never over take Oil and Coal, so people like the Kochs aren't worried about it, and will happily allow it to exist, because it will only ever play second fiddle to the Oil and Gas industry. We need nuclear. Now.

Fukushima had also the problem of ignoring security reports warning of such possibilities since almost the very start of their construction, plus some extra irregularities that only came out after the accident. In the end, almost all the nuclear incidents comes down from incompetency and / or corruption. The fact that building reactors takes forever and their cost have skyrocketed doesn't help as well. While huge developments have been made to store energy from solar and wind ( and their costs are starting to go down ), there's still the issue of having to upgrade the power lines as many aren't prepared to receive any excess power that a building doesn't consume ( and you can be sure the electrical lobbies aren't going to allow self production ). Generation IV reactors should be focused overall on the Breeder type, as they are able to "recycle" the nuclear waste ( and keep researching about the possibility of extract the uranium from the sea, that would be even a bigger hit as it would transform Nuclear energy into a true renewable one ).