4h52m43s15f Utilities are Not Trying To Save Nuclear -  Pilgrim Nuclear Station - TR2016a
Channel: Thorium Remix
Date: 15/05/2017

http://ThoriumRemix.com/ With me today I have Jigar Shah, who was the president of Generate Capital. He was the founder of SunEdison.

Jigar Shah:
I'm not here to suggest that solar power should be powering the world, but I think both nuclear and solar and all these other zero carbon fuels can be scaled up to meet the challenge. I have figured out how to get this right in solar, and how to actually win the war. The nuclear guys haven't. They're just saying- if we just put the facts out people will finally believe us. This is a political battle! And i'm happy to bring my lessons learned from the solar industry to nuclear industry, but I think that this notion- that we have a functioning nuclear power industry, that has the ability to play the game- is fanciful. There is a fairly straightforward way to save all those plants. But the nuclear industry have to actually pursue it. The guys who own Pilgrim aren't even trying to save this. It's everyone who doesn't own Pilgrim in the nuclear industry saying, "Oh wouldn't it be nice to save Pilgrim?"

Rod Adams:
Most of the people that you hear are not "the nuclear industry", they are people who are in favor of nuclear technologies. And I know that I don't garner many friends within the industry when I say this, but Entergy is perfectly happy to shut down Pilgrim, and so our Entergy's friends because they all perceive that right now there's an oversupply of electricity. They'll shut down their nuclear plants and people go- So how can they do that? And then of course the answer is, all of them have decommissioning funds already put aside. So they'll come out looking fine on their balance sheet, and they'll drive the price of electricity up for all the rest of their generating plants.