Ed. note: Nuclear Power is a much talked about technology in the current climate debate. Electricity veteran Ken Maize of Quad Report provides an update on three current nuclear issues: a new, mysterious NuScale power agreement; Plant Vogtle legal restitution; and the recommissioned 805-MW Palisades plant in Michigan.

NuScale’s Mystery Deal

NuScale Power has landed a deal with privately-owned blockchain data center developer Standard Power to provide two planned data centers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, 924-MW each, with electricity from arrays of NuScale’s 77-MW VOYGR small modular reactors, 12 for each data center. NuScale’s partner ENTRA1 Energy has the exclusive rights to develop, manage, own and operate energy production plants powered by NuScale’s SMRs.

NuScale (founded 2007) and ENTRA1 created an exclusive global partnership in 2022 to commercialize NuScale’s small modular reactors (SMRs). …

Ed Note: The erroneous, agenda-laden ExxonKnew narrative was again in evidence in last weekend’s WSJ News Exclusive, “Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change.” For other rebuttals involving the author, (see here).

“Exxon doesn’t ‘know’ anything. It’s a collection of people and just like any other organization with many people, there are many views and understandings on almost every topic imaginable. I worked with Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, and Libertarians.” – Glen Lyons, former employee (below)

A sober look at the “ExxonKnew” campaign reveals an anti-fossil-fuel agenda inspiring a myopic view of the company’s old investigations into carbon dioxide (CO2).

There are many corrections to this leaky narrative. First, note that the company assigned the CO2 studies to individuals with their own personal motivations and did not partake in studies on the offsets to CO2 (from sulfur dioxide) or the benefits of CO2 (plant growth and resiliency, global greening, warmer winters).…

“The predictable but inevitable intermittency of renewable energy had created a grid emergency that would not exist on a grid that operated without renewables…. natural gas peaker plants would have handled the load at peak demand, the riskiest time for a normally functioning grid.”

“Governor Greg Abbot should declare an energy emergency and call the Texas Legislature into special session and keep them there until they eliminate all Texas subsidies for renewable energy and force renewable generators to pay for the costs they have imposed on Texas consumers.”

As many renewable advocates like to point out, solar often provides good performance during periods of high temperature. Leaving aside for the moment the performance of solar compared to installed capacity, at 5 p.m. solar came close to its expected output of 12,636 MW.…

“… the UK Health and Safety Executive has defined safe CO₂ limits for the workplace. The limit for long-term exposure is 0.5% (5,000 ppm) but for shorter encounters it is 2% [20,000 ppm]. Anything over that figure is regarded as a risk to human health.”

Skeptical Science, advertised as “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism,” posted recently on the question: Is CO2 a pollutant? Interestingly, they made the point that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant in any sense of the word. Yes, very high concentrations in confined spaces (they provide an example) is deadly, but then so is water in a drowning. But water is not a pollutant either.

John Mason and BaerbelW [Baerbel Winkler] wrote:

If you look up the definition of pollution in a dictionary, you will soon realise it’s rather subjective.