Nuclear: the debate goes on 27 May 05

Mark, I think you are right, we should reconsider nuclear power. Even if a few people die of lucemia, that is infinitely preferable to a coal/oil powerstation . However, I think that I have finally decided that I am against nuclear power in the UK. Britains contribution to the fight against climate change will not only be in reducing our own emissions. One of the most important things we can do is develop alternative technologies that can be used by third world countries. If we go into nuclear, we will not develop these technologies simply because we won’t be forced to – if we meet our energy needs through nuclear power, then why invest the same money again in developing renewables we don’t need? At the moment, building, maintaining and decommisioning a fission station (including mining the uranium) is responsible for about 30% of the CO2 of a gas power station per unit energy. If we fail to develop renewables, it is likely that China, India etc will go for nuclear too. Once this happens, 235 dense Uranium will run out very quickly (probably within 5 weeks)[note, see New Scientist a couple weeks ago for references] Once 235 dense uranium has run out, we will start to use less dense stuff, and to enhance that is more carbon intensive than burning gas per unit energy produced. On top of this, uranium mining is an increadably horrible process, and most of it hapens in unstable third world countries. Also, it is worth noting that no nuclear power station has ever been built in a deregulated energy market, because they are simply too expensive compared to a combination of wind, biomass etc. I know that these technologies are not fully developed yet, but, it takes about 10 years to build a nuclear power station, and we can only build them one at a time, so nuclear is not a short term answer either.

This is not to say that nuclear should not be part of an energy mix far a hypothetical stable third world country needing to develop, I just don’t think it is fair for us to steal yet another energy resource from them when they need it more than we do. We have a moral obligation in the west to make it as easy as possible for third world countries to develop into non carbon economies, and I don’t think we will do that if we go into nuclear ourselves, reduce our own emissions, but bury our heads in the sand as regards the rest of the world’s emissions.

I can’t help thinking there’s a link between the proposal to introduce more nuclear and the extraction of oil in Alberta Canada. The oil is running out and the temperature is rising. Desperation sets in. I’ve caught myself having the thought … if we really really, need to, and we are really, really careful then just maybe, maybe …. nuclear ….

While we can have a sensible debate on the issue and Mark’s post, NS article and Adam’s response are thoughtful there is a PR machine at work aimed at the general public. You mentioned it Mark, I don’t have a link to it, but have it in front of me as I write. The NS article title is “The Nuclear Charm Offensive” the strap is “We are all being taken in by a carefully planned public relations strategy. Its mission: to push nuclear power back on the political agenda, rebranded as the new “green” alternative.”

If the big momentum gets going, that is GW/CC is recognised as a problem by a large proportion of people and the nuclear lobby are successful in their campaigning we have the makings of a big problem. Or to put it another way we get the wind up and are bounced into something awful.

There are two other related news items running here in the UK. The Friends of the Earth launched their “Big Ask” campaign the other today. (Good timing FoE even I’ve heard of football!) Toynbee refers to it. This is intended to get the government to legislate to reduce CO2 output by 3% per annum for the next 40 years. (Info at the FoE website.) And today (27th) the BBC’s Roger Harrabin has reported on “enlightened” capital’s request to the government to create a policy framework which will give them (HSBC, John Lewis, BP and others) the confidence to make major investments to reduce CO2 emissions. (Someones been reading Lovins and maybe Roberts.) These companies are recognising the GW issue as serious and urgent. And a good thing too!

But let’s watch carefully. Which of these three campaigns, more nukes, FoE – less CO2 or big business – less CO2 will be most successful?

And meantime in the shadows. Yes, there are references to it above and if you dig around in the Open Democracy web site you’ll find it but how much publicity has the end of uranium had?

David Fleming’s article in Prospect magazine (June issue – still available) is in front of me – again no link sorry. “No more uranium” goes the title “There is not enough uranium on the planet for a large-scale global nuclear industry” says the strap. Well written with references which Google up easily for verification. And the extraction process; energy intensive, destructive and so on reminds me of another extraction process taking place somewhere in North America.

Now where did I read about that?

Douglas Coker

PS Just posted this not having seen Caspar’s post!

Mark and others may like to look at this http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=179&threadID=44230&messageID=60972#60972 by someone inside the situation who knows his or her onions (real name has to be protected to protect job).

“Buffy’s” conclusion is that clean coal with sequestration is a better option than nuclear.

Some aspects are further explored here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=179&threadID=44248&tstart=15

You may also be aware that there are questions around whether there is enough uranium accessible without excess energy use for extraction. See, for example, http://www.oprit.rug.nl/deenen/, and a clear exposition of this argument by David Fleming in the June edition of Prospect (unfortunately the online version is hidden behind their archive barrier)

(Thanks to Douglas Coker for pointing out this is linked in the discussion mentioned above: “Scroll down to the third post from Richard Lawson and follow the link he provides to http://www.greenhealth.org.uk/Nuclear.htm There you’ll find a paper by R Lawson himself with a link to http://www.oprit.rug.nl/deenen/” )

Guys,

Acording to the daily mail. British Gas are looking to instal domestic size turbines. Douglas, you should be happy I think they are starting in Scotland.

The link is here.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/dmstandard/frame.html?in_bottom=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thisismoney.co.uk%2Fmoney-savers%2Farticle.html%3Fin_article_id%3D400871%26in_page_id%3D5

The sad thing about this, is yet again when folk look at the design of turbines they get it wrong. worst still they look at putting it in the wrong place.

From an engineering point of view, a small turbine, ie, a couple of feet in surface area should be a Helix shape.

Why put them on domestic hoses? Why not put them on top of street lights. Think about our motorway infrastructure becoming the bigest wind farm in the world. It’s allready pluged into the national grid. While we are at it, we could re-design the actual lights, which, are so badly designed that nearly 60% of the light is lost, just think if we corrected that we could use enery efficient lamps in these too.

I would love to know how much energy is used in lighting Britain’s streats, anyone know where I could get that data.

Cheers Ian.

While nuclear might be better than the impending extinction level event from global warming, we need to be very cautious, starting with mining – which has led to 85 times (not 85%)the cancer rate for Navajo uranium miners, who were made to mine without adequate protective gear. Also, destruction of subsistence lands in Niger, and possible contamination of water supply for S. California, etc.

Environmentalists & other moral persons should never let down their guard on these many issue surrounding nuclear. Plus it is expensive.

In response to earlier entries about a need for balance, I disagree. What we need is truth, not balance.

Recently our pastor gave a sermon about how truth is more important than love, because love without truth is misguided. I would suggest that we cannot get to the right truth without love. My sense is that the contrarian “truth” is based on fear (of losing freedom or economic high living??).

This blog page is based on Mark’s book about victims of GW. Our love for them is what tends to motivate us to a different truth, one in which we try to avoid the false negative, or err on the side of precaution, to prevent harm & death to others & future generations. I know people have characterized environmentalists as fear-mongers, but aren’t we really love(agape)-mongers?

I think you should read John Busby’s article at http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/portal/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=805

Thanks Ian. I am Scottish but (currently) live in Enfield. The address is M25 Jct 25. I saw the turbine piece on the telly. BTW Daily Mail???

Douglas Coker

Douglas, I would like to make it clear I dont read the Daily Hate. Just a colegue who’s rather elderly and hate filled parents. Pointed it out to him in a way of proving that Turbines were an eye saw that kills good honest white folk. LOL (not beeing serious).

I just thought it was relevent to the debate.

Cheers Ian.

PS Bad luck on Enfield, Up the Spurs.

As a lad, I remember when the Beatles split-up in 1970 and reading an article about “Which band is going to be the new Beatles?”

I don’t think anything really replaced the Beatles. We never had such a dominant band in the same way. The music business developed in a very different way during the 1970s.

In somewhat the same way, I think that it is a mistake to look for the “new oil” that looks too close to “oil” – and that is what nuclear looks like to me. (I still think nuclear is more promising than Canada’s shale oil – that must be a disaster!!)

With nuclear, as a society are we happy to deal with:

- the waste problem? - the risk of nuclear accidents? - proliferation of nuclear plants around the world (since GW is a global problem; by developing nuclear we would want to encourage others to use it)? - the high investment costs? - the time lag? - the vulnerability to terrorist activity? - the likely intrusion of civil liberties to deal with terrorist threats?

I am not totally anti-nuclear, but there are many renewable technologies that are being developed, and we should invest significant amounts of money in many of them and really see their commercial potential.

I also like the idea of micro- generation schemes. For example, Ground Source Heat Pumps (which seem hardly talked about at all) are being implemented in my village – and seem to be the most cost-effective way of making a house have zero-emissions.

Let’s see if we can really create something new!

Nuclear is a non-starter as a significant energy contributor for the future. There just isn’t enough uranium on the planet in high enough concentrations to make it worth while to extract. Decommissioning nuclear weapons is a drop in the ocean, certainly not decades supply.

Globally nuclear supplies 16% of electricity from ~430 reactors. To increase this 16% to something really significant or even just to provide for electricity growth places imposable demand on remaining uranium supplies.

Nuclear is a dead industry – for no other reason than lack of uranium.

So far I’ve managed to hold back on commenting on spelling errors which occur in blogs. But Chris you use the word “imposable” in your second paragraph. It’s not in my dictionary. I think you mean “impossible”. This fits with the argument you’re making which is a good one.

The danger here is that you run the risk of reversing the meaning of the phrase and therefore appearing to contradict yourself. It just gives those sceptics and contrarians an “in” which then means we have to spend time reading and replying to their stuff.

So sorry to be so pedantic and I recognise you are not the only one to misspell and I know about dyslexia but … the temperature is rising.

Mark – any chance of a spell check button?

Douglas Coker

Many thanks for the link to the Powerswitch site and the very clear and succinct paper on the shortcomings and indeed total inadequacy of a ‘build Nuclear’ response.

What this clearly shows is that we have been consistently lied to about the true costs of energy generation of all kinds by the use of an accounting system that only looks at segements of the cycle. For comparisons between different energy types, every single part of the production cycle from exploration to waste disposal must be included. It should be a matter of outrage and shame that our present government is trying to separate the nuclear waste industry from the generating side so that the latter can be sold to the private sector and the former left as a hidden burden to the taxpayer- for an indefinite time in the future.

There is the beginning of an answer, and it lies in the enormous amounts of waste created in the production and transmission of energy through our over-centralised system. This is a guess, and I am happy to be challenged on this by someone who can quote the true figures, but if every home in the UK had a battery storage system attached to the house, (or plugged in to a parked battery or hybrid vehicle), that could cope with half the excess demand for electricity over the normal base load during the morning and evening peaks, and then recharge on low tarrif overnight, I think that the least efficient, oldest and dirtiest 15% of the ‘spinning reserve’ generating plant could be decommissioned, which could save up to 20% of our CO2 emissions from power stations. As I said, that’s a guess and I’d welcome an informed correction.

A national distributed power buffer strategy could be achieved within ten years both in new build and in retrofit applications and would probably cost no more, perhaps less than new nuclear power stations. However this would require leadership from our government and would not be welcomed by the Oil cartels or large generating corporations. The government opened the door to distributed generation and storage in the Energy White Paper of 2003 and there are a lot of organisations doing development work on the practical aspects of this, but we need a major political and economic committment now to do something which is achievable, will protect standards of living, create new employment, and help us exceed our Kyoto committments with comparative ease. It will also enable renewables to have a much larger impact on the remaining generating mix.

Even if the government can’t or won’t do it, individual communities and businesses can. Your local village hall committee can’t build a power station, but it could ( if it were shown how to) raise funds to buy and have fitted buffer storage packs in every home and community building in the neighbourhood over a ten year period, and the savings on ‘peak’ electricity prices could pay for the hardware over its lifetime. The big advantage to buffer storage is that you don’t have to feed it back into the grid in the same way distributed generation does, it just smooths the grid demand out.

We are looking at this concept with three community groups who are interested in the idea in Wales and hope to be able to post some links to pilot projects later in the year.

OK there’s the proposal: can someone with access to the real data do the sums?

best wishes to all

Colin

Mark, since you posted this blog, I have become even more anti-nuclear as I have considered the impact of globalisation on nuclear power.

National boundaries are becoming increasingly irrelevant to decision-making in business and technology. If Britain developed a nuclear power program, it would not do so in isolation, particularly given the massive capital investment costs involved. There would be some way that we would want to produce the plants in collaboration with other countries, perhaps our European partners – or, perhaps more significantly, how we would sell the technology on to other countries; countries which may be potentially unstable.

I think there is a parallel here with the arms trade of the 1970s and 1980s. Somewhat unfairly, the US , and Donald Rumsfeld in particular, is castigated for selling arms to Saddam Hussain twenty years ago. But that was the prevailing business model for countries such France, the UK and the USSR who were trying to help pay for their high defence costs (somewhat ironically, in part due to their responsibilities of safe-guarding the world as Permanent Members of the UN Security Council.) by selling-off arms to other countries. In Britain, the maverick foreign office minister Alan Clark was unusually candid in saying that he did not care what happened to the weapons once they had been sold (though, presumably, he would have been upset if they had been used on us; as we were when French Exorcet missiles were used by Argentina to sink British ships during the Falklands War).

By developing a 21st Century nuclear program, I am very concerned with creating a similar tension within British foreign policy between safety/morality and commercial pressures with shady “entrepreneurs”, such as Mark Thatcher-types, making their Faustian millions from facilitating a grey market in nuclear technology worth billions. Instead, I would like to see the investment that Britain makes in its energy future to enhance its worldwide reputation in, say, tidal power rather than nuclear power.

I think there are some important things to consider when making an assessment of the potential of renewable energy:

1. Don’t jump to conclusions! Especially so after a one-day briefing where, possibly, the representative from the nuclear power lobby had better sales/marketing skills than from those representing various renewables. A charismatic visionary can make a lot of difference to how persuasive a case can look.

2. Don’t think of Britain in isolation! We need to think of global resources & the implications on local needs.

Personally, I think renewables do have a very promising future with 2 areas of technology developments – a) to produce energy; b) to use energy (involving the integration challenges of transporting and storing energy).

As regards renewable energy production, in the immediate future, wind technology looks as though it has real potential, especially off-shore, for Britain as a primary producer. Yet a much bigger potential looks likely to be PV electricity. This is still very new, but great developments are being made to make it cost-effective with Japan, Germany and the US leading the way. Within an international context, it doesn’t matter so much that Britain is not particularly well-placed to be a primary producer – we could import it from sunnier areas. The Sahara could represent a new producing area of this “new oil” for Europe for the indefinite future!

In terms of using the energy, an appropriate international electric grid, with the latest super-conductive materials, could be developed. There would need to be much better storage facilities to overcome the intermittency of most renewable energy forms; to meet variability in demand, and to use it for mobile uses (e.g. cars). Hydrogen fuels cells look to have great potential for this.

Here are a couple of ideas for environmental journalists (perhaps for you, Mark, or for George Monbiot) to help us develop our energy policies for the future:

1. Write an article which explores the dangers of Nuclear power & globalisation (with reference to parallels with the arms trade)

2. Interview some real leaders in Renewable Energy, and write about it. For example, Godfrey Boyle, Senior Lecturer with the Open University edited an excellent and inspiring book on Renewable Energy that was published in 2004. What does he, and other like him, think? I’d be fascinated to find out.

Regards,

Peter

I think everyone on the blog did such an adequate job on this nuclear discussion and with the information from these links, I have little to add but agree with a more thorough assessment of total costs and total carbon when assessing nuclear or any other option for that matter!

The fact that nuclear has its own depletion issues with regard to its uranium-fuel source is especially relevant and for me it may be the best case against it especially when compared to developing more renewable sources as an alternative.

I also liked the calculation in your link about the limit of carbon releases from the finite availability of our fossil fuel supply. This provides an upper limit to our ability to add carbon to the air. This is a useful focusing point concerning solutions. Regardless of our climate problems, we have an important resource problem which warrants great attention to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

At the end of the day, it appears our best strategies will be developing more renewable energy sources, increasing energy efficiency, and reducing energy from lifestyle changes.

Even though this is redundant to the above statement, we need to place a higher value on our fossil fuel supply in terms of how we value the energy we use from them. We should strive to eliminate all and any wasteful practices simply from a fuel-conservation standpoint.

Fossil fuels should be saved for the 22nd century and maybe even the 23rd century on ethical principles alone.

This philosophy would never allow power-plant systems to be developed to waste more energy in the form of waste heat than the electricity produced and transmit this energy over long distances with further losses. It would never allow methane from oil wells to be flared but to be extracted for use even if it was a bit more costly. Flaring is simply 100 percent pure waste. Even if only 30 percent of the energy could be recovered after net losses from extraction and transport, then that is 30 percent of a resource gained. Flaring methane from landfills is better than allowing this greenhouse gas to just go directly to the atmosphere but extracting land-fill gas for our use would be better.

Renewable energy should also be considered in the same light. Striving to get the most out of our renewable energy by not requiring as much of it through increased efficiency would also help reduce a strain on our fossil fuel supply by reducing the need for more solar cells and wind turbines to be manufactured.

We need to both value and price all our energy resources much higher than we are currently doing in our economic structures. We only value these fuels for what they cost and not what it costs to replace them. The same case was made in a much larger sense in Natural Capitalism with regard to our total environmental systems and all our natural resources and how they support us.

Best regards to all,

Dan

It was an interesting piece, but did you look at his site?

http://www.after-oil.co.uk/

He is a doomster; see his conclusions …

“20. Conclusions

Whether the system dynamics forecasts are accurate is a question merely of timing. If global economic collapse does not occur around 2050 it will before the century is out. So national planning for survival runs only the risk of being a little premature.”

Frankly, I think this is nonsense!

With a positive attitide to technology, the world has every prospect of building good technologies to overcome Peak Oil. And I agree, Colin, and think that there some very positive local contributions that can be made – and well as international ones (such as using the solar energy from the Sahara in some fashion). I am really not worried about that. Necessity is the mother of invention.

What I am worried about is that we are polluting the world too much at the present – greenhouse gases, or radioactivity in the future etc.

Hi Peter, I had a look at Busby’s stuff the other day and felt a little uneasy with it. Being critical it is sketchy and doom laden and with its disaster scenario predictions could give fuel to the likes of Lance Kennedy who seems to be a NZ Lomborg. He’s written a book called “Ecomyth” – you can guess the theme.

At the same time some of his policy recommendations are spot-on. Tax aircraft fuel – of course. Even Easyjet seem to be saying that. (Recent press reports.)

I’ve been having a look at what the Association of British Insurers (ABI) are saying on GW/CC. Do a UK Google for “insurance climate” or was it “climate insurance”? And try Andrew Drugolecki – top man in the field. The ABI and others have clearly got the wind up and are very much to the fore in prediction studies and policy formulation to track and mitigate.

Here’s one heading I came across. “Insurer: Warming Will Bankrupt Global Economy – Climate Change Could Bankrupt Us by 2065” Now maybe this is just a sub’s spin to rev it up a bit or …. (Link available if you want it.)

I’ve also been giving some thought to policy formation and the whole “selling” of a solution business. Prompted by a blog from Chris Rose on the Open Democracy site in the climate change debate. I think you are in this field. I read your “My World View” piece which is hiding below. Truly excellent. Can you highlight it Mark? I hope you know who read it.

Do you know Chris Rose? His book “How to Win Campaigns” arrived in the post today. I feel there is a lot of scope for putting heads together to push forward.

Can we, or Mark, organise such?

Douglas Coker

Truth comes before balance.

Balanced decisions can only be based on total disclosure without spin and that is the truth!

Best,

Dan

Anyone interested in streetlamp efficiency should talk to Oxford Green County Councillor Craig Simmons, who chaired a Best Value Review on the subject a few years back and has several suggestions: craig@greenoxford.com

Hi Douglas,

Thanks for the kind words and lead regarding Chris Rose. I’ll look out for him.

I do think a major problem is that there is so much misinformation out there. There may be a strong case for nuclear, but I have yet to hear it.

For example, Max Hastings in the Guardian yesterday …

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1495257,00.html

See some highlights of his dubious statements below.

Is Hastings talking about all energy or just electricity? .. and the comment about a wind farm the size of Dartmoor is just rubbish ..

HIS DUBIOUS STATEMENTS

“Atomic power has worked. Today it provides 23% of Britain’s energy, which is scheduled to fall to 7% by 2020 as old stations reach their expiry date.”

“Anyone who supposes that wind turbines can meet demand is a mathematical duffer. A wind farm the size of Dartmoor would be required to provide the energy of one nuclear plant.”

Regards,

Peter

According to a guy named Paul said deeds without love is nothing….

notice verse 2… and understand all mysteries and all knowledge even truth

1 Corinthians 13 RSV 1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Balance IS needed here as no one person has a lock on the scientific truth of GW! The IPCC does not have the complete answer despite what some may wish to believe. The scientific communities truth is study replication in the same direction…

Peter Hi,

Yes we have misinformation on nuclear. There is huge scope for muddying the waters on each and every aspect of the GW/CC debate. I’ve been increasingly full-on over the last year reading and researching and I’m still joining up some of the dots partly because I have to wade through so much really flaky stuff.

Along the way I’ve noticed others posting on this site have pointed out that US citizens are not well served by their media. The amount of misinformation in the US is staggering. A very useful clutch of pieces is available at www.motherjones.com supporting this. Bill McKibben, Ross Gelbspan and Chris Mooney have their say. Mooney’s piece is especially chilling. He details the considerable ExxonMobil efforts in supporting sceptic individuals and websites whose purpose is to act as doubt sowers and deniers on GW/CC. I’m looking forward to his forthcoming book “The Republican War on Science”, due September. (Mark I know you’ve done a piece on this in the New Statesman but do not have a link to it.)

For a brief intro to these Mother Jones pieces there is an editor’s note “The Machinery of Mendacity” by Russ Rymer. He coins the term “Climate of Denial”… to characterise … “the political times we live in” and amongst other things accuses the lobbyists of “wilful scientific illiteracy”.

We are better served by our media here in the UK but while the scientific consensus on GW/CC is 95% to 98% solid, which for anyone having an inkling of understanding about the scientific method is hugely impressive, the other point of view gets much more exposure than it deserves.

However for something encouraging see a recent debate at Management Today on a “Low-carbon economy”. Go to http://www.clickmt.com/public/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=fulldetails&newsUID=76ce7218-dd91-4f0e-879f-0904c2e447e7.

As for Max Hastings he is President of the “Campaign to Protect Rural England”. They are very active in opposing on-shore windfarms on the following grounds. “CPRE will vigorously oppose proposals for major wind turbine development in and adjacent to areas of outstanding natural beauty and national parks where these would be damaging to the landscape.” They also say “But it is a myth to assume that more wind turbines mean that the threat of climate change can be tackled adequately.” I sense a straw man here. Who is saying wind farms are the only solution? And protecting our countryside from unnecessary intrusion can smack of “nimbyism”. I’m not getting the sense of a global perspective here.

The CPRE are low key on nuclear at the moment. Does Hastings Guardian piece signal a change of policy? And those statements. Is this a job for Monbiot? Why am I reminded of someone called Bellamy?

Douglas Coker

Douglas,

I rather think the CPRE are doing a fair job with regard to wind farms. I do believe we ought to go ahead and build them with urgency, but we don’t need to build them willy-nilly. I believe it is a myth that they need to take up that much of our countryside – and indeed, much investment should be put aside for off-shore wind farms. (There have been a number of feasibility studies reported in Boyle : Renewable Energy (2004))

In the Autumn 2004 edition of Countryside Voice (the CPRE magazine), there was a fair debate on wind energy with one member putting the “Anti” position and another the “Pro”.

Also, this policy statement looks quite fair …

www.cpre.org.uk/resources/pub/pdfs/natural-resources/energy/onshore-wind-turbines-policy.pdf

So, I think Hastings is speaking in a personal capacity!

As regards the Management Today article, I was concerned that Shell are looking to develop the Canadian oil sands ….

“HONE, SHELL The oil will not run out. The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones. Major step changes are happening, which is why we won’t run out of oil tomorrow. In the last five years, we and a number of other companies have developed oil sands in northern Canada. There is in the region of a trillion barrels of oil trapped just under the surface; that’s on the same scale as Saudi Arabia.”

Regards,

Peter

Even Venice did not flood, when Greenland was green,1,000 years ago. Remember?

I hope earth warms 5 deg C

Howard Long MD MPH

I don’t remember: was that before or after Venice started subsiding due to changing land use practices and water pumping?

Dano BS MS MURP

Granted there is a 4% chance that the 10,000 scientists who say GW is real & a problem are wrong, & the 7 bonafide scientists who say GW is not real and/or is not a problem are right.

We must remember that scientist are cautious in protecting their reputations, so the 10,000 do not lightly make their claims re GW, but need 90% or 95% certainty that it is happening.

However, if there is even a 50% chance (or lower) that our GHG contributions are causing harm to people, then for the sake of our immortal souls, we should do our best to reduce that harm & risk, otherwise we may be risking spending eternity in a place a lot hotter than a globally warmed world!

You welcome a 5 degree rise in the earth’s temperature. Do you also welcome the things that will likely go with it?

e.g. threats to corals, etc. etc. etc.

http://www.opendemocracy.co.uk/globalization-climate_change_debate/2558.jsp

Mark, what’s going on? You go to one conference and become pro-nuclear? You’re far smarter than that. Arguments above, particularly Caspar Henderson’s link, and Polly Toynbee’s article, outline why nuclear is an absolute red herring in the climate debate. It’s true that a strong dose of hope is needed to believe that renewables, micropower and efficiency are to get anywhere but similarly a strong dose of quality public advocacy is needed to beat the nuclear lobby. You’ve got the skills and respect to put forward the workable non-nuclear vision – now’s not the time to lose the conviction.

According to David Fleming (writing in June 2005 Prospect), uranium supplies will soon reach their peak if we turn to nuclear power as a replacement for the energy generated by coal and oil or to generate the energy to produce hydrogen. The rich uranium rich ore will soon no longer be available and the remaining poorer grades of ore would take more energy to process than they yield.

It is not the mining process that makes the really serious demands for energy, but the milling. All too soon, it would be necessary to mill hard ores with a uranium oxide content of 0.02 per cent – that is, one part in 5000. For every tonne of uranium oxide they extracted, the suppliers would have to mine, mill and dispose of some 5000 tonnes of granite. At the same time, it would be reduced to milling soft ores (sandstone) with a uranium oxide content of just 0.01 per cent – 10,000 tonnes of ore to be mined, milled and disposed of for every tonne of uranium oxide extracted.

It is with ores at these grades the energy balance turns against nuclear power. If ores any poorer than this were to be used, while at the same time maintaining proper standards of waste control in all operations, nuclear power production would go into energy deficit: it would be putting more energy into the process than it could extract from it. Its contribution to meeting the world’s energy needs would become negative.

At present, nuclear power is not a major producer of energy. It accounts for about 16 per cent of the world’s electricity supply, which in turn accounts for about 16 per cent of all the energy supplied, so that its total contribution to the world’s present energy consumption is about 2.6 per cent.

However, if nuclear power supplied the world with all its electricity, then the total quantity of useful ores on the planet would be sufficient to keep the nuclear industry going for just six years. If, in addition, the world’s road and rail transport fleet were to be run on hydrogen derived from nuclear power, then the useful life of the industry would be about two years.

Like oil exploration, from the 1960s to the 1980s, exploration for uranium deposits was intensive; most that was there to be found was found. Some small deposits doubtless remain to be discovered but, as the geology of uranium is now well known, we can say there are almost certainly no major new discoveries to be made.

Although uranium is an abundant element in the Earth’s crust, the energy needed to extract the bulk of it would be more than could ever be recovered.

Breeder reactors – which would be 100 times as efficient as today’s thermal reactors – are still not technically feasible.

An expansion in the nuclear power industry will suck up the funds which should be made available for conservation and renewables. It will be a source of low-level radiation, of materials for proliferation and of carbon dioxide emissions. It will produce some very expensive energy. And then it will hit its limits. The industry will be left with huge reserves of low-grade uranium ores, too poor to be usable, and an equally huge inheritance of contaminated waste which has to be dealt with.

The above is plagiarised and summarised from Fleming’s article available at the prospect website and also republished in the Australian Financial Review at:

http://afr.com/articles/2005/06/23/1119321845502.html

Unfortunately, Fleming’s article is not referenced, but the structure of his argument and his broad, long-term view gives it credibility. He draws on analysis being done by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, both nuclear scientists.