The Quote of the day from Tom Gilmore, who is the President and CEO of the TVA in a New York Times opinion piece:
The Tennessee Valley Authority has operated nuclear plants for three decades, but our program was hindered, as many energy providers were, by safety concerns and a public backlash against nuclear generation in the 1980s.
Our response, however, was not to abandon nuclear energy. Instead, we revamped our program and adopted a more conservative, disciplined approach to both operations and construction. In a departure from the 1970s, when we were building 17 nuclear units at once, today we allow only one unit to be in any single stage of development at a time.
We believe that nuclear power, developed properly, is not only a promising option, but the best available. Our forecasts for the region’s energy demands by the end of the decade show we will need more base-load electricity — or continuous minimum power — something nuclear plants excel at providing…
Nevertheless, critics have rightly asked, why not simply bypass nuclear power and rely on more wind, solar, gas and energy efficiency? In fact, the T.V.A. is adding power from all of those sources in record amounts. But none can produce sufficiently large volumes of base-load electricity as consistently and affordably as nuclear power can.
Tweet Posted in: Quote of the Day, Sustainable Development | No Comments»
