Larry Caldwell
Super Member
Nuclear will never provide most of the energy, but hydro has a limited service life. Grand Coulee is already over halfway through its design lifetime and will eventually come down. They built it across one of the great rivers of the world. They are talking about removing two dams on the Snake, out of 20.How long before there's pressure to remove some of those hydro dams if/when nukes provide most of the electricity? Read somewhere recently that there's a movement to remove some of the dams on the Snake river in Washington to try to bring the salmon population back.
Hydro supplies about 29 gw in the PNW, and wind provides another 11 gw. You would have to build a lot of nuke plants to catch up, since there is currently only one reactor in operation in the entire region.
Our entire power generation capacity has to be rebuilt every 50 years, and there is no sense in just duplicating projects from half a century ago. We can do better. Some of those projects, like the dams on the lower Snake, have proven to be bad ideas.