NRG Abandons Project for 2 Reactors in Texas

NRG Abandons Project for 2 Reactors in Texas

www.nytimes.com

By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: April 19, 2011

"The company planning the largest nuclear project in the United States, two giant reactors in South Texas, announced on Tuesday that it was giving up and writing off its investment of $331 million after uncertainties created by the accident in Japan."

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.reuters.com
online.wsj.com

Wow...The Japanese nuclear disaster continues to effect nuclear operations all over the world.....

More from the article:

"It is the second of the four to die; Calvert Cliffs 3, in Maryland, seems unlikely at this point, because Constellation Energy could not reach financial terms with the Energy Department. The department has granted a conditional loan guarantee to one project in Georgia and may give another to a project in South Carolina."

and:

The South Texas Project “may have been on the fence already, and Fukushima pushed it over,” Mr. Zielinski said.

Tom Smith, an organizer in Austin with Public Citizen and a longtime campaigner against the project, cited higher construction costs and uncertainty after the Fukushima accident.

“The wheels are starting to fall off the nuclear renaissance,” he said.

I agree. It's like we have had this sleeping giant with tremendous power all these years, and we are just now realizing/discovering that the giant can sometimes be very dangerous when he wakes up in a bad mood.....





www.nytimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Sweet hopefully they will turn to the Dutch and their new Fusion reactors. I hope in my lifetime we see an ending to this Nuclear madness.

reply to post by Shirak


Like hte Germans - going to burn thousands of tons mor oil annually to replace thir nukes..??

how many peole has Fukushima killed with all the radiation it released so far? Approximately 0 isn't it?

As opposed to all the people killed in coal mine and oil well disasters in 1 year - says 2010 - I can think of 58 in coal mines off hand - 29 in each of hte USA & New Zealand, and 11 in the Gulf of Mexico.

the "nuclear madness" is the radiation released in coal ash that no-one thinks about, the pollution of skies and waters with millions of tons of crap each year that is poisoniing everything everywhere.

But apparently that's acceptable, whereas miniscule casualties from nuclear reactors that stubornly refuse to blow up are not, and it's a good idea to burn more fossil fuels to replace nukes that don't kill anyone??

reply to post by Aloysius the Gaul

You actually make some great points. However, it is possible to scrub the emissions from burning coal and some facilities do this. Then you have the scrubbed radioactivity, in addition to the radioactive coal ash, so we still have a lot of radioactive waste from burning coal.

But despite the lack of fatalities so far, Fukushima has the same rating as Chernobyl and the death estimates from Chernobyl vary wildly. The cumulative effect of exposure over a long period of time is an issue. Another issue is the rendering of significant areas of the earth as uninhabitable. If Fukushima has a full meltdown, large portions of Japan may be uninhabitable and they just don't have that much land to spare, it's a smallish country. Nobody's evacuating Tokyo due to coal issues.

I suspected that new nuclear projects underway would lose momentum because of Fukushima, and it's happening. I guess it wasn't that hard to predict. The Three mile Island incident effectively shut down all construction of new nuclear power facilities, and it wasn't even as bad.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


The mere fact that no-one can accurately count deaths due to Chernobyl shows how warped our sense of risk is in regard to radiation.

chances are there have been some - but since no-one has managed to "improve" on the 4000 or so "expected" extra cancer cases it seems unlikely that it's going to be any more than 4000 - and in fact of course most of those cases will not be fatal so it's almsot certainly a lot less than 4000, despite scaremongering reports of "thousands" based on nothing except fear.

how many people die from the effects of pollution released by burning hydrocarbons for electricity in a year?

Arguing that "modern technology" allows coal to be burned with much less pollution is exactly the same argumetn that "modern technology" allows much safer reactors to be built.

Remember these reactors did NOT fail spectacularly - and were built in the 1970's so can only be 1960's technology at best - the latest designs have passive cooling to eliminatedthe problem that these ones experienced with cooling systems.

modern anti-pollution technology can reduce the effects of burnign coal - but even carbon storage represents a risk that is arguably as great as nuclear reactors, and considerably greater than storage of nuclear waste -



this the scenario in this table could never happen??

Think again - en.wikipedia.org...

and meanwhile the seas keep rising.......