At the energy crossroads
While we’re looking at climate change, Friday’s The Guardian runs the most sensible and informed assessment of the pros and cons of nuclear power as a solution to climate change I’ve yet read.
In a column titled Take the clean, green alternative over macho nuclear rod-waving, Polly Toynbee writes:
What should be the ground rules for this review? Global warming is more dangerous than any other threat. Its progress is certain, its deadly effect already striking down the weakest. A few Chernobyls would do nothing like the damage caused by melting ice caps, flood and drought. Let’s all agree on that, right? Nuclear power with low CO2 emissions is better than doing nothing.
But she then goes on to demonstrate that, nevertheless, green energy options are no more expensive than nuclear when comparing the headline cost figures and are probably cheaper if the true cost of things like decommissioning are factored in:
Here’s another hard fact: the government has had to give the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority £56bn to clean up after existing nuclear plants. That wasted cash is more than enough to provide as much renewable energy as we could use, by anyone’s sums.
The nuclear power debate is cranking up in Britain and Toynbee’s column is an excellent primer on the critical junction they are now at. Climate change requires a massive new investment in some sort of non-carbon energy source. It will either be nuclear or a diverse range of green technology:
The Severn estuary could provide enough tidal power per unit price as three nuclear power stations. Onshore wind is cheaper again, but its beautiful turbines distress a countryside lobby that tolerates hideous pylons and forgets the thousands of windmills in every landscape a couple of centuries ago. Clean technology using biomass in coal-powered stations could become CO2 emission negative, eating more CO2 in growing fuel than is produced in burning it.
The decision the Brits make will have an effect here because if they go green, the economy of scale will soon bring the costs of those technologies down to where NZ can afford them more easily.
Cos, while Britain may be big enough to have a choice at all, New Zealand can’t take the nuclear option for a practical implementation reason, let alone the safety, environmental and moral reasons more often heard. As Jeanette explained in the ODT last year:
The main reason nuclear power would specifically not work in New Zealand is that nuclear plants generate single, large ‘bundles’ of energy. They are not subdivided into several units like our Huntly power station, where if one unit goes down the others keep operating.
New Zealand’s electricity system has to be able to back up its largest unit in case it goes out of service and these reserve turbines must be already spinning at the cut-off point if blackouts are to be avoided. Nuclear shutdowns, and they happen frequently, would remove 1200 megawatts without warning, compared at a large gas station of 400MW or 250MW at one of the four Huntly units. A single nuclear plant would thus risk security of supply because the NZ system cannot provide instant back up at any reasonable cost.
November 27th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
Polly Toynbee has done her homework. I hope that MPs both in the UK and NZ have done theirs.
I remember as a young engineering student making a tour of Harwell and standing on top of a nuclear reactor. We were all bright eyed and bushy tailed with little real understanding of the dangers and even of the economics: it was all “free power� to us in those days. Unfortunately there are people around who still think in those terms.
I’ve also been interested in the history of the traditional windmill (who can tell us what a “wallower� is and what wood is traditionally used for gear teeth?)
I look forward to the full development of THAT technology.
November 27th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
I simply have to point this out:
“nuclear power, if it is maintained, will still only prevent 10% of the rise in our CO2 emissions because electricity represents a relatively small part of our total energy use.”
Yet, at the same time, a Greenie will support projects that reduce far less CO2 emissions.
November 27th, 2005 at 5:18 pm
In the UK, nuclear provides 22% of the electricity. Phasing it out would increase CO2 emissions by less than 10%. The Brits have managed to increase their transport emissions alone by more than that since 1990 - but there’s no talk of putting restrictions on cars/lorries/etc. So there’s obviously more to this push for new nukes than meets the eye.
The UK has very low building standards (for their climate) and have relied upon cheap North Sea gas to improve the comfort of their homes rather than mandating better insulation and building standards.
My hunch - follow the money.
Now that the UK sector of the North Sea has peaked, Britain will become a net importer of oil again this year. Also UK gas prices have hit records levels amidst fears of shortages this winter, with supplies cut off to industry to keep homes warm.
How long before Britain becomes the “sick man” of Europe once again ?
November 27th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
In addition to what fastbike says, it is obvious from observing the spin that is floating around the UK media that Blair has already decided in favour of more nuclear plants. The government there is about to launch its second energy review in 3 years, with no sign that the last one was a failure. Blair is always useless at standing up to large well-funded lobbies such as the nuclear lobby and has also shown himself to be more than willing to saddle future generations with large costs in order to avoid politically difficult decisions in the present. The massive increase in spending at Aldermaston shows that he has also clearly approved a new generation of nuclear weapons. But that’s another story for another day…
November 28th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
mW is milliwatt, one thousandth of a watt. MW is megawatt, one million Watts: both letters are capitals. You may say “but we all know what it means from the context” but I think it’s important that the Greens can get maths and science points right.
November 28th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
But does this mean that ocean levels will rise to a maximum level anyway - these two statements standout from the Reuters articles.
1) Ocean levels were rising at 0.4mm per year prior to the start of the industrial revolution.
2) We believe the ice sheet was not around all the time. It was only around during cool snaps of the climate.
Therefore, we were already heading to a warmer period in earth history where if man had not also contributed oceans will still be rising and the polar caps will be melting naturally.
This leads to a bit of a problem - if this occurs naturally do we also attempt to reverse nature’s normal cycle and what is causing this natural warmer climate change effect.
November 28th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
OliverBendix: point taken, correction made.
November 28th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
A wallower is one of the gears in the chain from sails to grindstone, at right angles to the sail’s axle. Since a photo is worth a thousand words, here are two photos that pretty much explain it…
http://www.fostersmill.co.uk/wallower.htm
http://www.goldenwindmill.org/wallower/wallower.html
type of wood: hornbeam?
November 28th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
From the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4476058.stm
No choice over nuclear - Beckett
Nuclear power may have to be embraced in a bid to combat climate change even though it is not a “sustainable” energy source, Margaret Beckett has admitted.
The environment secretary said she was very reluctant to build new nuclear power stations, but that she had “accepted that it could happen”.
But Mrs Beckett said any investment in nuclear must not be at the expense of renewable energy sources.
———————————————
Looks like they’re already “educating the public” on the “inevitability” of more nuclear, eh?
November 29th, 2005 at 1:08 am
I find it interesting that the “no choice but to go nuclear ” people never seem to even think of investigating ways of reducing power consumption.
November 29th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
I used to be a vehement opposer of Nuclear Power until someone pointed my to information about the “Integrated Feeder Reactor” (IFR).
IFR type reactors offer great advantages over conventional reactors:
1) They can consume low-grade uranium (getting rid of the need to produce weapons grade uranium as fuel)
2) They can consume weapons-grade plutonium (a great way to get rid of our nukes)
3) They can consume most of the transuranic (long-lived radioactive materials) waste produced by other reactors
4) They are much more efficient at getting the energy out of the original Uranium (current reactors only out 3% of the potential energy in Uranium)
5) It is much more difficult (read near impossible) to extract weapons-grade plutonium from the process
6) They have passive safety - if the core overheats, the reaction stops by itself.
I’m not sure why the Clinton administration shut down the IFR project, but many countries including France, Japan and China are looking at restarting this line of research.
For more info, see:
http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/ifr.html
November 29th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
Choice for Great Britain is different from choice here.
They have the population density and land use problems of the fully developed and overpopulated continent. Their crunch from peak oil will be a lot harsher and steeper than is likely to happen here. In other words, a necessity may indeed be in the cards FOR THEM. Should’ve done something about conservation and insulation and all the other things we all preach here sooner? Sure…. but they didn’t.
Duncan
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/wastes.html
It isn’t a bad concept but it isn’t necessary here. We have a really really big Fusion plant located about 150 Million Kilometers from here that actually provides everything we need… if we are careful. It can’t do the same for the UK or France or the USA or China unless they change far more than we, but WE can do this without straining too hard.
For us to go nuke we’d have to have a pair. We’d have to locate them close enough together so that the redundant power feeds into the grid would be acceptably small and we’d STILL have to work out the nuclear waste issue to our satisfaction. The reduction in size of the problem is promising, but the burning and reprocessing of the “waste” isn’t as well documented as I would like.
If we could do it all ourselves, perhaps with ore from Oz, I’d be personally unopposed to development, and it WOULD be good to have the necessary knowledge and technology locally. If we just decide to buy someone elses product I’m not so enthusiastic.
The Green party has a principle regarding nukes, and that doesn’t NEED to be abandoned for us to prosper, so I am not going to argue for it. No nukes here is just fine, thank you.
November 29th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
Yes, I, too, am hopeful that NZ can do without Nukes. We should have enough capacity with geo-thermal, wind, and hydro, along with some drastic energy-belt-tightening, that we should be able to weather a ‘Peak Oil’ storm.
But if any new nuke plants are built elsewhere, I hope they consider this safer and cleaner version of nuclear reactor.
I hope our government can get on with implementing some sort of solar water heating incentive scheme to accelerate the use of solar power.
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Check out this spoof of the Genesis pukeko ad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i12qJ-Nejgk