"Did Tesla just kill nuclear power?"

Arnie Gundersen speaking to an audience at Illinois Sierra Club, April 30, 2015 (photo credit: NEIS).As conveyed in a Nuclear Energy Information Service media release, and a Forbes blog by Jeff McMahon, the question posed by Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds Energy Education comes as Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity fame unveiled very cost competitive household-, small business-, and utility-scale battery systems that promise to outcompete nuclear power, and lead to the expansion of renewable sources of electricity like wind power and solar photovoltaics.

Gundersen, who serves as Beyond Nuclear's expert witness in several old and new reactor proceedings, debated Argonne National Lab's chief of nuclear engineering at an event held at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

Gundersen rebuffed challenges about renewables' intermittency by stating “We all know that the wind doesn’t blow consistently and the sun doesn’t shine every day,” he said, “but the nuclear industry would have you believe that humankind is smart enough to develop techniques to store nuclear waste for a quarter of a million years, but at the same time human kind is so dumb we can’t figure out a way to store solar electricity overnight. To me that doesn’t make sense.”