Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Gore: Current nuclear power technology is "clunky, fragile and extremely expensive"

SealionOfNeutrality comments on Hi Reddit, this is Al Gore and I’m in Los Angeles talking about the cost of carbon. AMA!
[Q] What's your opinion on using nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels in the future?

AlGore Former Vice President
I have mixed feelings. The present generation of [nuclear power] technology is clunky, fragile and extremely expensive. Price increases are continuing -- even as PV and Wind (not to mention new efficiency technologies for "demand destruction") continue to plummet in price. Within seven years, more than 85% of the world's people will live in areas where renewable electricity is equal to or cheaper than electricity from either fossil or nuclear energy! (The market projections for cell phone deployment were also wrong for the same reasons the projections for PV and Wind have been way way wrong...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gore is talking his own book.

Ben said...

While the Kyoto protocol targeted a reduction 0f 2 billion tons of CO2 for the period from 2008 to 2011, the reduction of chlorofluorocarbon and halon (both are greenhouse gases) actually reached through the Montreal protocol is equivalent to between 10 and 12 billion tons of CO2."

Prof. Thomas Peter, Head of Dep. of Environmental Systems Science
Deputy Head of Inst. Atmospheric and Climate Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

So it seems that the objectives of the Kyoto protocol are largely fulfilled, not by reducing CO2 emissions but by reducing CFCs.
Obviously mono-causal contemplations in climate science lead to partial blindness.

Article (in German): http://blogs.ethz.ch/klimablog/2013/10/08/schutz-der-ozonschicht-internationales-umweltrecht-mit-biss-auch-fur-das-klima/#comment-93718

Note the impressive reduction in greenhouse gases in the graphs at the bottom of the article. CFC reduction dwarfs whatever a reduction in CO2 could achieve.
Also look at the coincidence between warming hiatus and CFC reductions. Causal relationship?