Holier than thou - Aussie Catholics join the debate

Two Australian Catholic social services and justice groups [not generally known for their technical insight, but I'm in a forgiving mood] have put out a report opposed to nuclear power. Nothing new - the same unjustified [from the perspective of risk, among others] 'concerns' about safety and waste management are there [despite no data on any impact on real people in recent history] as are the false claims of high cost etc. In fact, I'd swear I've read some of the paragraphs before - verbatim. My guess is that this 'report' was to come out about a week or more ago to influence voters, but got stalled in the review process. Since they put in all the work, why not issue it now?

However, Prof. Camilleri and friends had better be careful, because the Pope has fully endorsed nuclear power in the name of the Church. And just last month the Church affirmed this view by issuing comments about nuclear power's global expansion. I'm assuming that, as one of the wealthiest institutions on earth, the Holy See has access to considerably more resources than our friends above. However, I'm also confident that the former are within earshot of considerably more nonsensical anti-nuclear babble.

Any Catholics out there care to comment? What's in store for a Catholic who contradicts the Pope in open literature? Are we talking eternal damnation, a few millennia in purgatory or perhaps just a stern look and a slap on the wrist from Sister Mary-Margaret?

Independence needed for emissions trading

Professor Ross Garnaut, Australian State and Territory equivalent to Sir Nicholas Stern, made some interesting points, referenced in this Sydney Morning Herald report. One in particular caught my eye.

[H]e dismissed the suggestion that Australia should slow its rate of economic growth to immediately reduce emissions.

"When you have lower economic growth you start to get a lot of pressure to get economic activity going at any cost. I think it would be more difficult [to reduce emissions] in that situation than the current one," he said.

It would be better to use Australia's wealth to break the link between economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions.

Nuclear Power is one currently available means to help sever the aforementioned link. It's certainly a major player in several significant, green economies around the world.

In the report Professor Garnaut stresses the importance of keeping any carbon/emissions trading body protected from political pressure. A big ask from my perspective but a MUST nonetheless.

Kevin Rudd - Names Minister(s)?

Kevin Rudd has named Peter Garrett minister of the environment, but appointed a second minister, Sen. Penny Wong, to take responsibility for climate change.

More from this report from the Canadian Press.

The reporter sees this as a rebuke for Garrett and I can't seem to find much on Sen. Wong beyond that she is a South Australian [one of our more pro-U export States] and has a history that includes mining union work.

In this report from AFP, Sen. Wong is said to have responsibility for negotiations such as Kyoto and those occurring at the upcoming meeting in Bali. The report lists other cabinet appointments as well.

Australia - UN Turns up the heat

Jacob Saulwick filed this report in the Sydney Morning Herald. Emphasis is mine.

IF EVERY person on Earth created as much pollution as the average Australian, we would need another six planets to cope, a United Nations' report says.

It [The Human Development Report, released yesterday] lashes the argument - advanced by Labor and Liberal parties at the election - that there is no point for rich countries to set reduction targets if big emitters in the developing world do not set them.

The report argues that, per person, rich countries remain the biggest emitters, and it is unfair [I would say unethical and immoral] for the developing world to pay the costs of emissions generated by the developed world's growth.

It is an excellent report and highlights the current goal of, not 60, but 80% reduction in emission by 2050 as well as reductions by 30% by 2020. Not only has Australia had a late start, but we are losing ground.

The report also suggests the economic impact will be 60% worse than just recently predicted in the Stern Review.

I couldn't have put it any better myself, but anyone who is current with this blog knows I certainly have been trying.

Of course nuclear power could help solve this dilemma - with huge power capability, 24/7/365 52 [tip o' the hat to Joffan] reliability, demonstrated safety performance and competitive costs. It's not likely that many could be built here before 2020, but then again, at that point, assuming we meet an already aggressive international goal - we've still got another 50% to go!!

No time to waste.

Emissions - An indicator of interest

Tom Tarpey in Canada forwarded a report from Globeandmail.com providing examples of the conservation paradox. Basically what it details [through numerous US examples] is the tendency of consumers to reap the benefits of efficiency improvement by buying bigger automobiles, larger homes, more AC units, etc. so that the net effect on energy consumption is nil [actually energy consumption, and emissions along with it, have continually risen].

Closer to home in Mosman - 'Australia's wealthiest suburb', Monsters and Critics reports a reluctance to give up the posh life in the name of emissions reductions.

The Wilderness Society and Greenpeace are already Rudd-bashing about Labor's [in]ability to tackle Australia's emissions dilemma [3 days into his term, whoa]. I do not give much technical credit to these organisations. Their quantification of the nuclear pro-con balance sheet for example is, to be polite, VERY misleading as well as technically wrong. However, I'll include their comments to provide a general 'feel' for domestic climate change opinions.

'Both major parties have credibility problems on climate change because of their failure to commit to the sort of deep cuts to greenhouse emissions in the next decade that are necessary to help prevent dangerous climate change,' Wilderness Society national campaign director Alex Marr said.

Greenpeace Australia climate change campaigner Steven Campbell notes that even with a target of 20 per cent, there will be no overall reduction in the amount of electricity generated by burning coal.

'If we have a renewables sector growing alongside an ever- expanding coal sector, we won't stop climate change,' Campbell said.

Interested parties should monitor total Australian emissions. Currently, just due to power production, Australia cranks out 226,000,000 US tons [204,982,000 metric tons] of CO2 per year. Per their website, CARMA plans to update the data quarterly.

Election 2007 - Rudd, good for nuclear in Australia?

Was it a mandate on the environment? On nuclear power in Australia?

Before you answer that, consider the following:

Now that the election is over and done. Labor has a formidable task – to demonstrate their energy related rhetoric prior to and during the campaign can be put into practice. Since nuclear is – ‘they’ say – too expensive, too risky and takes too long, can we expect that within a very few years, Australian emissions linked to climate change will noticeably plummet through some other technologies? I certainly ‘hope’ so – and furthermore I would like to ‘hope’ it can be done without nuclear, but I’m not so sure – when one examines the maths involved – we should pin our collective future on ‘hope’. Because in reality, as a nation, we can’t manage to stop building new CO2 belching plants, let alone shut down any existing ones.

Efficiency improvements, wind farms, solar, tidal, geothermal are great. I’ve always been in favour of them [with nuclear, not in lieu of] and believe they will have a significantly increasing role in the future of energy generation in Australia and elsewhere. This opinion is supported by expert organisations around the world.

But, because NO single country - not ONE mind you - on this diverse world of ours has demonstrated the ability of any technology other than hydro or nuclear to reliably displace significant fossil power generation, I believe we must keep nuclear on the table until we can demonstrate our ability to meet emission reduction targets in some other way. [By demonstrate, I mean something more than a theoretical analysis from the deep, dark depths of academia.]

Labor’s victory is, in a way, good for the development of Australian energy policy. There’s not much of the nation, states, etc. that Labor does not now control. The political alignment should be nearly ideal. There should be no barriers to fully implement the most green of green energy policies. I really do expect a full on effort to cut emissions, including efficiency improvements, renewables, etc. This will either be successful, or [and I expect the more likely] provide an opportunity for the nation to learn the realities associated with the costs and capabilities of available non-nuclear, solutions to Australia’s emissions related challenges.

Otherwise we will remain an embarrassment to the world.

UPDATE: A similar view from World Nuclear News

Media and Nuclear Power

From a review of Gwyneth Cravens' book Power to Save the World on the New York Times Freakonomics blog: Do Not Read This If You Are Anti-Nuclear Energy.

Mrs. Cravens sent an Email to the blog author, adding the below information, explaing how the media is responsible for what her colleague Rip Anderson refers to as the profound 'second-hand ignorance' among the genreal public with respect to nuclear technology:

In the book (p.184) there is a graph based on a study by Bernard Cohen, Prof. Emeritus, U. of Pittsburgh, about stories by the New York Times of different types of accidents between 1974-78 (prior to Three Mile Island). He compared their frequency with the annual fatalities caused by these accidents. Cohen writes:

On an average, there were 120 entries per year on motor vehicle accidents, which kill 50,000 Americans each year; 50 entries per year on industrial accidents, which kill 12,000; and 20 entries per year on asphyxiation accidents, which kill 4,500; note that for these the number of entries, which represents roughly the amount of newspaper coverage, is approximately proportional to the death toll they cause. But for accidents involving radiation, there were something like 200 entries per year, in spite of there not having been a single fatality from a radiation accident for over a decade.

Another problem, especially in TV coverage, was use of inflammatory language. We often heard about “deadly radiation” or “lethal radioactivity,” referring to a hazard that hadn’t claimed a single victim for over a decade, and had caused less than five deaths in American history. But we never heard about “lethal electricity,” although 1,200 Americans were dying each year from electrocution; or about “lethal natural gas,” which was killing 500 annually with asphyxiation accidents. (Bernard Cohen, “The Nuclear Energy Option,” pp. 58-59.)

Again, I'll say she's definately done her homework.

Nuclear's Future in Europe

The European Commission has announced plans to speed up energy technology developments including Generation IV reactors. Meanwhile, a cross-party group of 56 members of the European Parliament have signed a declaration calling for nuclear to be maintained and developed in the European Union.

More information from World Nuclear News.

Kogan Creek, the reality of Australian energy policy

Despite the compact florescent bulbs in the shops and homes of Australia; Chinchilla, in Peter Beattie's, Kevin Rudd's and now Anna Bligh's Queensland, is about to become home to the Kogan Creek power station with the following statistics from the CS Energy and CARMA websites:

Generation capacity: 750 MW (about the same as a medium size nuclear power station, or maybe about 300* large wind turbines). Kogan will be the largest single generating unit in Australia!!

*[NOTE: To actually 'produce' the equivalent of a 750 MW coal station, one would require approximately 1,250 large [2 MW] wind turbines to account for the fact that the wind doesn't always blow as well as the limitations of existing storage technology].

Cost: $1.2 billion

Anticipated commissioning date: late 2007. Construction and commissioning timeline has been about three and a half years.

Anticipated operation: 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, devouring coal at a whopping rate of 2.8 million t/yr [or nearly 7,700 t/day].

CO2 emissions: 4,339,799 tons [imperial] per year

This one station will INCREASE Australian emissions from electricity generation by nearly 2%.

CARMA's big Greens

I am enjoying the new CARMA database that I recently discovered and posted just a few days ago. Apparently I'm not the only one, database access all but stooped the day of its official launch. That's great news, and the development team has done well to quickly restore performance.

Just one of the MANY interesting data slices - for me - is an examination of the 'big greens', those [typically developed, or otherwise quite large] countries that generate a significant quantity of energy without significant emissions.

Countries sorted by MWh energy [generated]

1. France - No surprise, the first on the list, generates 565 Million MWh of energy using 75.9% nuclear, 9.16% hydro and 1.76% other renewables. Energy carbon intensity: 162.

2. Brazil - generates 423 Million MWh of energy using 2.34% nuclear, 84.73% hydro and 5.36% other renewables. Energy carbon intensity: 113.

[By the way, Australia fits in here on the list at 195 million MWh, just ahead of Sweden. We are the world's 18th largest electric energy producer, but we are not even in the top 50 by population. Our energy carbon intensity? 2,318.]

3. Sweden - generates 170 Million MWh of energy using 40.32% nuclear, 42.35% hydro and 3.38% other renewables. Energy carbon intensity: 41.

4. Norway - generates 137 Million MWh of energy using 0% nuclear, 98.82% hydro and 0.77% other renewables. Energy carbon intensity: 3.

5. Switzerland - generates 55.8 Million MWh of energy using 39.43% nuclear, 55.76% hydro and 0.38% other renewables. Energy carbon intensity: 11.

This again demonstrates what many have been saying for some time. The only credible, demonstrated technologies capable of displacing fossil generation on the scale required to significantly reduce the relevant emissions are hydro and nuclear.

We can also see what a significant outlier Australia is when it comes to emissions per-capita or even emissions per unit GDP. We are on shaky ground at best.