Assemblyman DeVore E-Newsletter - September 22

This came to my work email on Saturday. I try not to check my work email on Saturdays, so I didn't get this until today. I know...old news...but it's still very interesting.

On September 17, the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial entitled, “The renewable energy future,” praising wind and solar power as the answer to California’s energy needs. The editorial dismissed nuclear power in one sentence: “…neither coal nor nuclear power is a practical solution to global warming…”

The editorial oversold the potential of wind and solar, for example, the writers predicted, “…costs for solar systems could be cut in half within the next three years.” We’ve been hearing that for decades now, yet photovoltaic (PV) solar continues to generate power that costs 35 to 45 cents to produce per kilowatt-hour, about ten times that of coal or nuclear.

An article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, September 21 entitled, “The Silicon Shake-Up” stated that the cost of solar installations actually rose 20 percent from mid-2004 to mid-2006 and have declined 10 percent since then. This cost pressure is due to the fact that silicon for PV has to compete with silicon for computer chips.

The Times piece also contained this highly misleading statement about the proposed 4,500 megawatts of wind farms in Tehachapi generating, “…the equivalent of two nuclear power plants the size of San Onofre, or enough to power 2.9 million homes.” This statement is glaringly false as it confuses the capacity of the wind farms to produce power with the reliability of the wind farms to produce “dispatchable” power; that is, power when it is needed. When the wind does not blow, the power has to be made up somewhere, and that somewhere in California is with expensive natural gas peaker plants that have to be maintained and ready to go at a moment’s notice when the wind dies out. In reality, the Tehachapi wind farms will likely produce at most about one-third of their rated capacity over time.

Rather than dismiss nuclear power, the Times should have taken another look. Nuclear power produces the most amount of energy for the least amount of lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of any source of energy – even wind and solar. Furthermore, reprocessing spent fuel, as the French have been doing for decades, eliminates long term storage challenges by using up plutonium to make electricity.

The West now has now compiled a 2,000-reactor year record of safety while the French have solved the spent nuclear fuel storage issue. Widespread concern over global warming has made it time to reconsider nuclear power.

Chuck DeVore
California State Assemblyman, 70th District
www.ChuckDeVore.com