Saturday, December 4, 2010

Jacksonville: 40 years ahead of its time

This is a hoot.
Russia plans to build a fleet of floating nuclear power plants and use them in its Arctic regions.
Even better: the venture is called OPK.
The local media, with its 15 minute attention span, wouldn't know it but in the early 1970s, Jacksonville was going to be the home of a company called OPS. It planned to build floating nuclear power plants.
The ambitious venture failed because it over-reached in its proposed contract with the Jacksonville Electric Authority to buy plants. Had it succeeded, it would have meant 12,000 new jobs here -- dwarfing the 1,000 hailed by the lame duck mayor recently.
It also was a victim of the anti-nuclear crazies, who helped ensure the continued massive use of oil and coal by heaping on regulations that made the cost of nuclear power too high.
One interesting side effect of this clean power is that a plant could be towed to an area such as Israel, which is experiencing water shortages, and used to power a huge desalinization plant.

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