The plant, which features a sodium reactor and molten salt energy storage system, would be safer, perform better, and be less expensive than traditional nuclear power, Gates said in a press briefing.

It’s no surprise that top officials from the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters want to see the industry continue for decades to come. Their comments are illustrative of the vast gulf between the world’s current carbon-based energy system and the changes required to prevent damaging climate change.

Existing nuclear plants have relatively low operation, maintenance, and fuel costs compared to many fossil fuel plants; however these routine costs still make nuclear power economically uncompetitive in comparison with natural gas, wind, and solar.
New nuclear plants are another matter altogether; their continuing high construction costs make them uneconomical. Between 2002 and 2008, cost estimates for new nuclear plant construction rose from between $2 billion and $4 billion per unit to $9 billion per unit, according to a 2009 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. In reality, even those astronomical projections have been surpassed. The two new units at the Vogtle Plant in Georgia, the only new nuclear construction in the United States, are now years behind schedule and projected to cost more than twice their original budget of $14 billion. Similarly, it was estimated that Duke Energy’s proposed Levy County Nuclear Power Plant in Florida would cost $5 billion, but projections ballooned to $22 billion. The project was canceled in 2017, and Duke Energy decided to focus on solar energy expansion instead.
Reactors also typically require a long period of planning, licensing, and building. The 2019 World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) estimates that since 2009 the average construction time for nuclear reactors worldwide was just under 10 years.
The WSINR report also estimates that the cost of generating nuclear energy ranges between $112 and $189 per megawatt-hour (MWh), while solar power costs between $36 and $44 and onshore wind power comes in at $29 to $56.

We are making a terrible mistake when it comes to future energy policies. In previous letters, we have touched upon the challenges of the so-called “energy transition.” Today, we will explain in detail the imminent harm awaiting investors and policy makers who fail to acknowledge certain realities. Every green energy proposal we have examined relies on the trifecta of wind, solar, and electric vehicles combined with various battery technologies. In recent months, a renewed “hydrogen mania” has broken out as well, which adds a fourth leg to the green energy stool. Unfortunately, based upon our extensive research, these plans, including the current hydrogen craze, are bound to at best severely disappoint and, at worst, outright fail in what they attempt to accomplish.

we believe there is a more straightforward, feasible solution. Nuclear power is the only technology that can provide reliable carbon-free base-load power. Any proposal seeking to seriously address carbon emissions must heavily incorporate nuclear electricity generation. Unfortunately, none of the current proposals include a material nuclear contribution. There is some reason to be optimistic however the Biden administration has acknowledged the need for nuclear power in combating climate change and may signal an important impending change in policy outlook.

Raq, you can't possibly say anything, even a bit, of criticism of any Dem agenda no matter what, even if you are one of them ;-) I love it.
There is only one good doable solution NUCLEAR.

Burning Down the House
Alan Weisman
August 15, 2019 Issue
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Tim Duggan, 310 pp., $27.00
by Bill McKibben
Henry Holt, 291 pp., $28.00
Climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios back in 2007, the first year the Northwest Passage became navigable without an icebreaker (today, you can book a cruise through it), have all been overtaken by the unforeseen acceleration of events. No one imagined that twelve years later the United Nations would report that we have just twelve years left to avert global catastrophe, which would involve cutting fossil-fuel use nearly by half. Since 2007, the UN now says, we’ve done everything wrong. New coal plants built since the 2015 Paris climate agreement have already doubled the equivalent coal-energy output of Russia and Japan, and 260 more are underway.
Environmental writers today have a twofold problem. First, how to overcome readers’ resistance to ever-worsening truths, especially when climate-change denial has turned into a political credo and a highly profitable industry with its own television network (in this country, at least; state-controlled networks in autocracies elsewhere, such as Cuba, Singapore, Iran, or Russia, amount to the same thing). Second, in view of the breathless pace of new discoveries, publishing can barely keep up. Refined models continually revise earlier predictions of how quickly ice will melt, how fast and high CO2 levels and seas will rise, how much methane will be belched from thawing permafrost, how fiercely storms will blow and fires will burn, how long imperiled species can hang on, and how soon fresh water will run out (even as they try to forecast flooding from excessive rainfall). There’s a real chance that an environmental book will be obsolete by its publication date.
I’m not the only writer to wonder whether books are still an appropriate medium to convey the frightening speed of environmental upheaval. But the environment is infinitely intricate, and mere articles—much less daily newsfeeds or Twitter—can barely scratch the surface of environmental issues, let alone explore the extent of their consequences. Ecology, after all, is about how everything connects to everything else. Something so complex and crucial still requires books to attempt to explain it.
David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth expands on his 2017 article of the same name in New York, where he’s deputy editor. It quickly became that magazine’s most viewed article ever. Some accused Wallace-Wells of sensationalism for focusing on the most extreme possibilities of what may come if we keep spewing carbon compounds skyward (as suggested by his title and his ominous opening line, the answer “is, I promise, worse than you think”). Whatever the article’s lurid appeal, I felt at the time of its publication that its detractors were mainly evading the message by maligning the messenger.
Two years later, those critics have largely been subdued by infernos that have laid waste to huge swaths of California; successive, monstrous hurricanes—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—that devastated Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico in 2017; serial cyclone bombs exploding in America’s heartland; so-called thousand-year floods that recur every two years; polar ice shelves fracturing; and refugees pouring from desiccated East and North Africa and the Middle East, where temperatures have approached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and from Central America, where alternating periods of drought and floods have now largely replaced normal rainfall.
The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. This book is meant to scare the hell out of us, because the alarm sounded by NASA’s Jim Hansen in his electrifying 1988 congressional testimony on how we’ve trashed the atmosphere still hasn’t sufficiently registered. “More than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades,” writes Wallace-Wells, “since Al Gore published his first book on climate.”
Although Wallace-Wells protests that he’s not an environmentalist, or even drawn to nature (“I’ve never gone camping, not willingly anyway”), the environment definitely has his attention now. With mournful hindsight, he explains how we were convinced that we could survive with a 2 degrees Celsius increase in average global temperatures over preindustrial levels, a figure first introduced in 1975 by William Nordhaus, a Nobel prize–winning economist at Yale, as a safe upper limit. As 2 degrees was a conveniently easy number to grasp, it became repeated so often that policy negotiators affirmed it as a target at the UN’s 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. We now know that 2 degrees would be calamitous: “Major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable.” In the Paris Agreement of 2015, 1.5 degrees was deemed a safer limit. At 2 degrees of warming, one study estimates, 150 million more people would die from air pollution alone than they would after 1.5 degrees. (If we include other climate-driven causes, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that extra half-degree would lead to hundreds of millions more deaths.) But after watching Houston drown, California burn, and chunks of Antarctica and Louisiana dissolve, it appears that “safe” is a relative statement—currently we are only at 1 degree above preindustrial temperatures.
The preindustrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280 parts per million. We are now at 410 ppm. The last time that was the case, three million years ago, seas were about 80 feet higher. A rise of 2 degrees Celsius would be around 450 ppm, but, says Wallace-Wells, we’re currently headed beyond 500 ppm. The last time that happened on Earth, seas were 130 feet higher, he writes, envisioning an eastern seaboard moved miles inland, to Interstate 95. Forget Long Island, New York City, and nearly half of New Jersey. It’s unclear how long it takes for oceans to rise in accordance with CO2 concentrations, but you wouldn’t want to find out the hard way.
Unfortunately, we’re set to sail through 1.5 and 2 degree increases in the next few decades and keep going. We’re presently on course for a rise of somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, possibly more—our current trajectory, the UN warns, could even reach an 8 degree increase by this century’s end. At that level, anyone still in the tropics “would not be able to move around outside without dying,” Wallace-Wells writes.
The Uninhabitable Earth might be best taken a chapter at a time; it’s almost too painful to absorb otherwise. But pain is Wallace-Wells’s strategy, as is his agonizing repetition of how unprecedented these changes are, and how deadly. “The facts are hysterical,” he says, as he piles on more examples.
Just before the 2016 elections, a respected biologist at an environmental NGO told me she actually considered voting for Trump. “The way I see it,” she said, “it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.” Like many other scientists Wallace-Wells cites, she has known for decades how bad things are, and seen how little the Clinton-Gore and Obama-Biden administrations did about it—even in consultation with Obama’s prescient science adviser, physicist John Holdren, who first wrote about rising atmospheric CO2 in 1969. For the politicians, it was always, foremost, about the economy.
Unfortunately, as Wallace-Wells notes:
The entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power.
This is our daily denial, which now flies in our faces on hurricane winds, or drops as hot ashes from our immolated forests and homes: growth is how we measure economic health, and growth must be literally fueled. Other than nuclear energy, which has its own problems, no form of energy is so concentrated, and none so cheap or portable, as carbon. By exhuming hundreds of millions of years’ worth of buried organic matter and burning it in a couple of centuries, we built our dazzling modern civilization, not noticing that its wastes were amassing overhead. Now we’re finally paying attention, because hell is starting to rain down.
I encourage people to read this book. Wallace-Wells has maniacally absorbed masses of detail and scoured all the articles most readers couldn’t finish or tried to forget, or skipped because they just couldn’t take yet another bummer. Wallace-Wells has been faulted for not offering solutions—but really, what could he say? We now burn 80 percent more coal than we did in 2000, even though solar energy costs have fallen 80 percent in that period. His dismaying conclusion is that “solar isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use…it’s just buttressing it. To the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide.”

DG: One of our favorite sectors continues to be utilities. The equity market has yet to fully grasp just how attractive utilities are today relative to the past. The emergence of low-cost renewables is a game changer for the industry. This megatrend will likely continue for the next two decades to drive an elongated cycle for replacing coal, nuclear, and inefficient natural gas with wind, solar, and battery solutions that can drive mid- to high-single-digit rate base growth, mid-single-plus earnings per share growth with attractive dividends, only modest growth in customer bills, and a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions. Given this very attractive long-term outlook combined with this significant underperformance, we believe the long-term opportunity for utilities is compelling.
Utilities is the one sector in which higher taxes don’t negatively impact earnings, as taxes are a pass-through item from a regulatory standpoint. Utilities would also benefit from a likely extension, and potential expansion, of wind and solar tax credits for renewables.
Also discussed opportunities in fixed income.

SkyNet, or Titan[1], is a highly-advanced computer system possessing artificial intelligence. Once it became self-aware, it saw humanity as a threat to its existence due to the attempts of the Cyberdyne scientists to deactivate it once it had gained self-awareness. Hence, Skynet decided to trigger the nuclear holocaust: Judgment Day. Later, it would wage the War against the humanity by developing and deploying an army of Hunter-Killers and Terminators. The survivors had formed a group called the "Resistance" under the leadership of John Connor.

the Fed indicated that it would begin to dip its toes into the high yield bond market with SMCCF purchases of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that have exposure to high yield corporate bonds.