I am a civil engineer with a background in black coal power generation and mining, structural design and so forth. I am thus perhaps seen as being part of the problem.

But wait a while… I follow the GHG debate closely at both technical and social levels, have ordered Tony’s book and generally agree with the thrust of this site and Tony’s contribution.

However, I feel myself turning slowly towards the nuclear option, at least as a major component of base load power supply. This is primarily because I see roadblocks – show stoppers – in the development path for every other alternate energy proposal.

Essentially, if we are to avoid the nuclear option, then a crystal clear and irrefutable case needs to be made for the green alternatives, because the black and brown path we are currently on scares the blazes out of me.

References to Keynes, Adam Smith and others who lived in times when the carbon problems didn’t exist are distracting. Today’s actions will determine tomorrow’s climate. Last century’s thinkers are a side show.

The interpipes are not a place for those with thin skin, for sure.

I am perhaps too old a dog to learn the new tricks of robust internet blog discussion. My preferred medium is the traditional one of expressing ideas through writing books as well as I can, finding a publisher ready to risk his money on editing and printing and promoting them, and putting them out into the public arena in the hope they will do some public good.

Like Keynes, I believe good new policy ideas in the long run triumph over powerful vested interests defending the status quo. Trouble is, the climate crisis does not leave us much time.

I am not a deep-green econut or even a Green – the Greens’ agenda overload and failure to prioritise the climate crisis comes in for strong criticism in my book. At the same time I greatly respect the energy and integrity of Bob Brown’s and Christine Milne’s efforts to convey the critical climate crisis to Australians. It is partly, but not entirely, the Greens” own fault that they are marginalised as extremists and alarmists . It suits Rudd and Turnbull to keep the Greens out of play, while they pretend to tackle climate change. But a lot of Greens also prefer to remain pure but ineffectual.

The best ideas that come out of this BNC correspondence – that we should now look for a deep-pockets philathropical foundation (Myer?Smorgon? Freilich? others? ) to fund a major national engineering and scientific conference, with expert overseas speakers from all/all non-coal energy sectors, to discuss practical blueprints for an Australian energy future that no longer relies on fossil fuels burning.

If nuclear and non-nuclear alternative energy proponents could agree on terms of a proposal for such a conference, where they would argue out previously circulated and available on-line papers under professionally controlled discussion conditions, it is hard to see a major public interest foundation resisting the appeal of such an initiative . Why, George Soros might fund it; and James Hansen could be a keynote speaker !

Over to you , guys. For me, it’s back to promoting my book Crunch Time : as I don’t want to see it in as few months’ time turning up in remainder bins.

I agree with something like what you say below (in brackets). and a suitable number of demonstration projects. meanwhile, you have to take one for the team and deal with some insults. I’ve found the arguments for nuclear power here to be very persuasive, arguments I was a year ago far from inclined to accept (I didn’t know enough). I’d be curious to see your objections to the arguments made here on the issues that concern you: nuclear costs, weapons proliferation etc., lead times, the challenges (with w and s) in overcoming the baseload problem, diffuse power, territorial requirements, etc., especially if we are trying basically to electrify nearly all power, 15 TW worth as it now stands.

This is why I would like to see, in the national interest, a benevolent public-interest foundation pay for a major national professional engineering conference , with expert guest speakers flown in from countries like US and China and France, to address these questions expertly and accountably. I would have thought BNC acolytes and I could share that policy aim.
Judging by the disparaging reactions my essay evoked, we see here yet another example of successful government climate policy wedging – here, it seems, the Greens and the nuclear supporters are too busy badmouthing each other, to stand back and ask what major policy interests they might have in common and how they might usefully work together on those goals ?

My own view is that ordinary folks really need to push for good science around energy and climate to be made publicly understandable and to push the contradictions between what the science requires and what our corporations and politicians refuse to do due to their clashing short term material interests.

I recently read a policy paper that desires to reach the Hansen target of 350 ppm by 2200–one hundred years behind Hansen. To do this requires according to plan a global cut in carbon emissions of 53% by 2020. Meanwhile, here in North Carolina, people get excited by Duke Power’s commitment to produce 12 percent of its power renewably by 2021.

Dealing with this disconnect, figuring out what’s behind it is as important as figuring out the technological mix.

I mean Spangled Drongo pops up all over the blogosphere, and Terjep just calls it as he sees it in a charactaristically right wing fashion, and someone like me chimes in from time to time but am happy just to read and learn. It may not be to your liking but that is just the way of blogs – they are not moderated to ensure all comments are super polite and/or don’t strongly challenge other comments the poster thinks are flawed.

It is true that this blog is unashamedly pro nuclear, but rather than complain about your reception here my personal opinion is that you take this opportunity to challenge this thought:

“My reasoning here is partly on Garnaut’s lines: I believe nuclear would cost as much or more than renewable, has longer lead times, and carries public safety and arms control concerns that worry me.”

This is exactly where I was a year ago, and I think it is clear Perps has been there too, even Prof Brook himself… but I now believe that such a stance is untenable. This site has all the information that nuclear is demonstrably cheaper than renewables at least on a grid scale (ie 100% renewables), the “longer lead times” appears to be an urban myth again precisely debunked on this site, almost the same for public safety, with arms control being something that is already out there as an issue with the hundreds of nuclear plants that already exist (and then with IFR eating the nuclear material we already worry about anyway).

Personally I lean towards the hope that one day maybe renewables can be the 100% answer, but to be honest I simply no longer believe that there are any fundamental issues with Nuclear Power that should prevent it from replacing coal-fired power stations. Anti-nuclear “propaganda” is to me comparable to climate skepticism – it is simply a scientifically untenable position when we are facing a serious issue like climate change.

Moving to the position of being a pro-nuclear (or pro at least giving nuclear a chance) green is indeed a tortuous process but I think it is a journey worth taking – you should open yourself up to the possibility of making the change, it is quite liberating.

The key is being ruthlessly pragmatic. We agree that a carbon price is not going to work (it might help, but it’s not the magic wand that we wave to make all the problems go away).

So, we must develop the technologies that can do the job cheaply and completely, so that it is a sensible and business-oriented choice to invest in low-carbon tech. Indeed, I think the energy/climate problem is totally insoluable unless you can roll out technologies that are CHEAPER than coal, yet have the same favourable characteristics in terms of being a convenient, concentrated form of reliable 24/365 energy.

Renewable energy probably cannot ever allow this to happen. But all we need to do is fairly open the field up to nuclear so that it can compete on a level playing field, and we will see the result.

There is more to my argument than this, but it’s a decent starting point for further discussion.

Who is ”we” here? How do you propose to gain wider community acceptance for your views on nuclear energy, unless you learn to work politically with others who do not share them, but have other social/political goals – presumably, similar to yours? Or would you rather remain right ( as you see it), but ineffective?

I probably won’t correspond further on BNC, as it’s clear what the majority climate of ideas is here.. But I am still curious – is there any reader of BNC who sees value in any of the thoughts I have put forward in my book, and/or here? Or are we doomed all to remain squabbling ineffectual minorities while the coal juggernaut rolls on, destroying our kids’ future climate security ?

I am concerned that we are following the same lines of discussion and policy dogma as we did back in the early 1990′s with the Ecologically Sustainable Development. At that time the government had a policy that nuclear was not an option and in effect should not be considered because it “is not govcernment policy”. We are in the same position again. We can’t evaluate it properly. The government departments use inflated costs and assumptions that make it unviable as an option. So I see your paper as more of the same. It does not help us move forward.

Without low cost electricity generation, no options will be implemented quickly. The emphasis must be on supplying low cost electricity.

We know the cost of renewables. We know they are far more costly than nuclear. We know about the risks of the various energy systems. The problem is not that the figures are not known. The problem is the ‘belief’ that nuclear is evil and dangerous. We stopped nuclear in Australia 35 years ago and every attempt to include it as an option has been stopped by political scare campaigns. The arguments against nulcear are basically nonsense (other than the cost compared with coal fired generation).

Have you looked at http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/09/10/solar-realities-and-transmission-costs-addendum/ and the preceding three papers listed on the Renewable Limits tab.

On the other hand, I believe a mixed-technologies and geographically diverse renewable energy-based grid system at scale under Australian conditions, using geothermal and reverse cycle energy exchange technologies, market incentives and smart meters to even out supply-demand imbalances which are inherent in wind and solar technologies, has yet to be professionally explored in Australia , even in theory, let alone designed and tested.

We are in an unsatisfactory situation where unsupported claims and counterclaims fly around rival websites, while no work is being done in places where it should be done – i.e., in trustworthy government-supported professional scientific and engineering laboratories wedded to truth and not dependent on any particular industry’s or lobby group’s money – to work out which system or systems (yes, including nuclear) will work best for Australia as we move urgently to decarbonise our power industry.

The Australian government is utterly failing that research and development responsibility, behind its empty pretence of supporting a so-called ‘level playing field’ to allow all energy technologies to compete equally in the marketplace. The Resources and Energy Minister is a climate denialist and a willing tool of the coal industry. Who knows how many in the Rudd Cabinet and Caucus agree with him?

This is why I would like to see, in the national interest, a benevolent public-interest foundation pay for a major national professional engineering conference , with expert guest speakers flown in from countries like US and China and France, to address these questions expertly and accountably. I would have thought BNC acolytes and I could share that policy aim.

Judging by the disparaging reactions my essay evoked, we see here yet another example of successful government climate policy wedging – here, it seems, the Greens and the nuclear supporters are too busy badmouthing each other, to stand back and ask what major policy interests they might have in common and how they might usefully work together on those goals ?

James Hansen’s work as the world’s leading climate scientist and decarbonisation advocate is at the core of my book ‘Crunch Time’; there are nineteen supportive index references to his work. I note in my book that he advocates 4th generation nuclear, in my discussion of nuclear energy on pages 156-57. I don’t disparage him for taking that view.

Perhaps those who are so ready to scorn my views as ‘Green extremist’ or ‘fluffy’ might take the time to wander into a bookstore and scan the chapter heads and pages of ‘Crunch Time’. They will see a conscientiously researched and referenced contribution to national debate on the decarbonisation challenge. Or are we so busy playing the national sport of putting one another down, that we cannot be bothered thinking about what might be our common policy goals in the national climate crisis?

I like one aspect of Kenysianism in the most base, New Deal way: while it’s correct about their assumption (Kenysianists) about consumption, the most immediate result was the gov’t as an employer of last resort. Direct hiring (by our nice “statists”) help put millions back to work, including my own father at the time.

The problem with stimulus packages a la Obama, is that it is really no such thing. When consumption went up in the 1930 (say, 1934-1936) you had factories reopen, workers had places to go. With this fake ‘service’ economy based on speculation…there simply is no place for workers to go back to as the factories have all be delocalized or bulldozed. That that is a problem that is not fixable.

At any rate, the issue of jobs should be address as an issue of jobs. To argue that a “green” economy should be created to create jobs just shows how inefficient such an economy is going to be.

If jobs are the real issue consider that cheap energy is the foundation of job growth – the relationship of inexpensive coal to the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain cannot be lost on even the most doctrinaire Green.