If the near total collapse of the Texas energy grid on the morning of February 15th demonstrates anything, it proves the importance of reliable energy production. In short, federal and statepolicies that pick winners and losers among clean energy sources steered both public funding and private investment away from reliable sources. Hopefully, policymakers will learn their lesson from the events in Texas and wake up to the reality that energy security requires a diversity of reliable sources; chief among them is nuclear power.
While the cold snap froze wind turbines and forced many thermal plants offline, nuclear energy production remained remarkably reliable. In fact, reports show that only one half of a single two-reactor facility was forced offline by the cold. What’s more, this outage was an oddity among nuclear plants and was the direct result of bad management and lack of preparation. The outage at the South Texas Nuclear Power Station -- one of Texas’ four nuclear plants -- accounted for a mere 1,280 of the nearly 30,000 lost megawatts of production that left the state less than five minutes from a catastrophic failure.
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