As Cuomo Plans Shut Down of Indian Point Nuclear Plant, Experts Fail to Grasp Value of Solar and Efficiency for NY City. By Stephen Lacey on July 14, 2011 at 5:03 pm "As Cuomo Plans Shut Down of Indian Point Nuclear Plant, Experts Fail to Grasp Value of Solar and Efficiency for NY City" New York may soon decommission the four-decade-old Indian Point nuclear plant, a deteriorating 2-GW power station that supplies 25% of New York City’s electricity.
Some experts claim that closing the plant could de-stabilize supply, thus requiring a time-consuming build-out of centralized power plants and new transmission that will drive up rates. The reality, however, is quite different. The NY Times reported on the predicament yesterday: Talk about a lack of imagination. New York has limited transmission capacity, making it more difficult and expensive to transport electricity into the city. And so we come to one of the most valuable on-site electrical resources, solar PV. John Farrell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance explains: These prices are well within reach. Leif Erik Knutsen July 14 at 5:34pm Alia’a Siren Ariel Russ. Nuclear Risk and Fear, from Hiroshima to Fukushima. Next month will see the publication of “The Rise of Nuclear Fear,” a fresh look at the history of perceptions of nuclear risk by the physicist and historian Spencer Weart, who builds this book on his 1988 work “Nuclear Fear: A History of Images.”
Weart is best known to Dot Earth regulars as the author of the essential guide to 100 years of research pointing to a human influence on climate, “The Discovery of Global Warming” (here’s my 2003 review of that book for The Times). With the world turning its focus to Japan on the anniversary this weekend of the great earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Honshu island and wrecked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex there, I invited Weart to muse on the consequences, which have been far more economic and psychological than radiological. Here’s Spencer Weart’s “Your Dot” essay on the roots of nuclear fear, and its resurgence after the ravaging of the Fukushima plant: Japan's horror reveals how thin is the edge we live on | Bill McKibben. It's scary to watch the video from Japan, and not just because of the frightening explosions at the Fukushima plant or the unstoppable surge of tsunami-wash through the streets.
It's almost as unnerving to see the aftermath – the square miles of rubble, with boats piled on cars; the completely bare supermarket shelves. Because the one thing we've never really imagined is going to the supermarket and finding it empty. What the events reveal is the thinness of the margin on which modernity lives. There's not a country in the world more modern and civilised than Japan; its building codes and engineering prowess kept its great buildings from collapsing when the much milder quake in Haiti last year flattened everything.
But clearly it's not enough. We're steadily narrowing the margin. Those changes steadily eat away at that safety margin. There have always been natural disasters, and there always will be. We can try to deal with this in two ways. Dan Kahan - Google+ - Checking in on the "white male effect" for risk perception … Checking in on the "white male effect" for risk perception Dan Kahan Posted on Sunday, October 7, 2012 at 10:30PM I read a couple of interesting studies of risk and the “white male effect” recently, one by McCright and Dunlap published (advance on-line) in the Journal of Risk Research and another in working paper form by Julie Nelson, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The “white male effect” (WME) refers to the observed tendency of white males to be less concerned with all manner of risk than are women and minorities.
The phenomenon was first observed (and the term coined) in a study by Flynn, Slovic & Mertz in 1994 and has been poked and prodded by risk-perception researchers ever since. WME was the focus of one early Cultural Cognition Project study. The design and hypotheses of the CCP study reflected the surmise that WME was in fact a product of “identity protective cognition.” Actually, she pretty much demolishes this claim. Cool papers, cool topic! References. No Indian Point + No Fracking = More Coal Burning? If You Love Wind (and Solar)... If you love wind power (and solar power), you’d better at least like transmission. This was originally recited to me as kind of an energy-wonk joke. But it’s no laughing matter, as my colleague Matt Wald points out in an article today on new evidence that the country’s grid is already stretched to the limit and unlikely to be able to handle bigger, intermittent pulses of electricity from wind turbines and big solar-power arrays.
(Earlier coverage of wind-energy issues.) Here’s the lede: WASHINGTON — Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation’s electrical grid, an industry report says. President-elect Barack Obama has repeatedly discussed the need to upgrade the grid. The Energy Challenge - Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid’s Limits - Series. All Things Nuclear - Insights on Science and Security.