Al Gore-Renewable energy by 2018: What is he smoking?

[slaphead]

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Because Japan Steelworks is currently the only company that can make the huge forgings required for a containment dome, and they are currently backlogged and can only handle half of the orders they’ve already got. It’s a serious bottleneck in nuclear development.

[/QUOTE]

Indeed, but that’s only because so many people are insisting on one-piece forgings (and surely it’s for a containment vessel, not the containment dome?). From that very link:

Another alternative is to turn back the technological clock and weld together two smaller forgings, …
That technique was used over the past 40 years in the U.S. and France and is still applied in China.

In a hypothetical Great Nuke Building Boom this is just one of the many safety standards that would need to be relaxed. Just how far standards would need to be dropped in order to let e.g. the US build 400 plants in a decade I don’t know - probably a lot further than anyone would be comfortable with.

[tagos]

In all this worship of the almighty free market I take it we are all cool with repealing the Indemnification Act that is an open public subsidy of the industry?

The Act establishes a no fault insurance-type system in which the first $10 billion is industry-funded as described in the Act (any claims above the $10 billion would be covered by the federal government).

And private industry will cover all the security costs and all the costs of dealing with the waste issue and decommissioning?

And the hundreds of billions in the Leiberman/Warner Bill will be shown the back of our hand?

The leaders of six national environmental and public interest groups warned today that the impending Lieberman-Warner climate change bill could contain at least $544 billion in taxpayer subsidies for nuclear energy. This would represent the biggest federal handout in history for the nuclear industry, already the most heavily subsidized energy sector over the past 50 years.

The Lieberman-Warner bill is expected to be on the Senate floor in early June. According to an analysis conducted by Friends of the Earth, the bill contains close to half a trillion dollars that can be accessed by the nuclear energy industry under a vaguely entitled category for “zero and low carbon energy technologies.” Nuclear is the only energy industry that could fall under this category that does not have a specific carve elsewhere; funding for renewable energy is identified separately in the bill.

Wouldn’t want subsidies distorting the market now would we?