Media

As Americans experience record-breaking heat waves, floods, and wildfires this August, solutions to climate change are advancing, and getting introduced in the U.S. Congress. But do Americans understand the connection between energy, pollution, and climate? Which energy sources do they support?

ecoAmerica’s American Climate Perspectives Survey found year-over-year shifts in awareness and attitudes on key energy sources. The results show fairly accurate understanding and support for wind and solar energies, accurate understanding and low support for oil and coal energies, misconceptions of nuclear and natural gas energies, waning support for gas, and rising support for both existing nuclear energy and new nuclear technologies.

“Decarbonization will require deployment of low-carbon technologies, but analysts have struggled to quantify which ones could be deployed in practice—especially where technologies have faced public opposition,” according to a new paper in Energy Policy.

This paper looks at how public opinion can affect deployment of low-carbon energies, and nuclear power in particular.

In the paper, the authors attempt “to disentangle public opposition due to the dread of nuclear power from opposition stemming from its actuarial risk.”

Terrestrial Energy is leading advanced reactor developers to market with its game-changing IMSR® design.

The IMSR® is being developed at Terrestrial Energy as an SMR with an output of 190 [195] MWe of electrical production. The use of a graphite moderator and a highly thermalized neutron spectrum gives multiple advantages for standard operations. The IMSR® also offers future fuel flexibility including the ability to utilize spent LWR fuel without reprocessing but by conversion to fluoride in a dry process.

EPRI’s findings suggest that for advanced nuclear to be deployed extensively in the US, new policies, innovation in technologies that significantly lower costs, and/or innovation in business models and markets to enable supplemental revenue streams, would be needed.

Read the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Advanced Reactors Information System (ARIS) status report on Terrestrial Energy’s IMSR®.

Article in the journal Sustainability posits that timely deployment of advanced nuclear like the IMSR®—”perfectly capable of providing all the energy humanity needs for centuries”—could be the silver bullet needed for achieving aggressive Paris climate targets.

Peer-reviewed article in the journal Energies finds that had the rate of commercial nuclear deployment in the late-1960s to 1970s been maintained to the present day, nuclear power could now be around 10 percent of its current cost and could have substituted for 69,000 to 186,000 TWh of coal and gas generation—thereby avoiding up to 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 emissions.

Read the Energy For Humanity publication that cites Terrestrial Energy’s IMSR® as “one of the promising molten salt-based reactor designs currently in development.”

Dr. Ben Heard and others publish in the journal Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews their analysis of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems and find that 24 academic studies published to-date provide no convincing evidence that basic feasibility criteria can be met.