The federal government is selling off its commercial Candu reactor division, Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt announced on Thursday.

Raitt said the government has invited investors to submit proposals.

Drawing a line through recent funding announcements by the Federal energy bureaucracy I infer that their thinking is
1) geothermal baseload has to work, if not
2) gas fired baseload is the alternative.
Notice if this gels with future announcements.

There are so many cleaner, more sustainable and renewable energy resources becoming increasingly available that it might seem that simply making them more efficient, less expensive and more available will go a long way to solving our exacerbation of the climate change phenomenon. Sadly there is still a great mismatch between the reasonable potential of these energy options and the reality of our energy demands. If we are to react quickly enough to avoid arriving at a predicted level of exposure to global warming, then our manufacture of energy in a clean way needs rise exponentially. We should encourage and help finance any and all moderately promising alternative energy production means.

Of course, it is all horrifically expensive and entails huge infrastructure work and considerable economic restructuring. We could have large windmills dotting the countryside, more prolific than ‘Paterson’s curse’ and we would still be shy of the energy needs for a modern, developed country. We could have solar panels covering untold hectares of land reasonably close to centres of consumption and we would still be well short of the present needs and usage of electric power in Australia. But we have alternative.

We own a third of the world’s uranium which we are exporting far and wide. In that we don’t want people using our uranium for nuclear weapons, I presume that after a bunch of x-ray machines and the like, we are anticipating that our customers will use our uranium for nuclear power stations. It seems to me passing strange that we so vociferously won’t agree to have our own clean and enduring energy based on nuclear power generation. I anticipate the outcry that nuclear materials are horribly unclean. Of course they are if their care in operation and custody overall is deficient but if you look after that side of it then in a climate change sense there is hardly a cleaner energy resource.

We should note that if there wasn’t a climate change issue then we could burn our own coal till the cows come home and we wouldn’t need to consider the large step to nuclear energy. I think for many decades to come there will still be markets for our coal all over the world to countries which have no choice but to rely on carbon-based energy—they will not be able to afford nor manage a nuclear energy infrastructure. But if we continue to burn our coal prolifically then it seems to me we haven’t taken climate change seriously. We are a rich and technologically advanced nation, sitting in a geologically stable continent, so surely we can expect to build and operate safe nuclear power stations. While in the context of the climate change debate, I am most definitely a layperson, in practical terms only nuclear power offers a realistic and relatively short-term alternative to carbon-based energy in the quantities and areas where Australians need it. The greatest favour we can do for our less wealthy neighbours is to get our own energy structure right. Windmills in Tuvalu won’t do it!

This brings up the point that the ‘nuclear industry’, so called, is not really a monolithic entity standing on its own in competition withthe rest of the energy sector. Most of the firms which deal therein have much larger interests in the fossil fuel sector.

Which sector do you suppose they make the most money from?

We cannot count on ‘the nuclear industry’ (such as it is) to support the push to expanded nuclear power which is vitally necessary to the future. These corporate concerns are too compromised to do it effectively. It’s going to have to be a grassroots mass movement.

But as I pointed out above, energy groups such as the German RWE are both NPP AND fossil fuel!

If I had to guess, I’d say that the anti-nuke organisations already existed, and just needed to be supported whenever necessary. The AGW deniers on the other hand are far more likely to be directly established through sponsored think tanks.

This may well not be correct, but I cannot for the life of me see why fossil fuel interests would not conclude that their interest are best served by using proxy commenters in the public debate.

My earlier remarks refer to those, who by every other indication, have both the intellect and the education to see the truth. For example in the case of Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, both those people had to have examined the raw data before they chose to distort it by their wild estimates. It’s impossible that they were not acutely aware of exactly what they were doing.

Nor is it a coincidence that Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen is the secretary of the Dutch Association of the Club of Rome, an organization that has predicted that economic growth can not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources.

In both debates, that of nuclear an that climate, there is a legitimate question of cui bono that leads back to fossil fuels, the sector that stands to loose the most. Given the history of that industry, it is hardly a stretch or a paranoid delusion to suggest that they are at work here. Their lobbies are certainly a huge presence in Copenhagen at the moment, and I doubt that they are there to encourage restrictions on their products.

1. This is an Anglosphere blog whose contributors were likely not living within range of the east wind from the Ukraine in 1986. The effect of that accident on German-language attitudes (countries: FRG, A, CH) on NPPs cannot be underestimated. Non-German speakers on this blog are at liberty to research that impact on a total population of ca. 100m.

The allegation supported by most/all on this blog that deaths in Ukraine/Belarus as from 1986 were minimal is met by the Greenpeace study citing clinical reports from Belarus/Russian doctors and in Russian only, another example of the effect of language barriers. IAEO does not take kindly to original E. European data in Russian, after all. Belarus children with thyroid cancer are hosted in the town of Bad Homburg near Frankfurt annually, a PR-intensive fact not likely to be removed by e.g. DV82XL insisting on double-blind medical studies to prove that Chernobyl caused such cancer, as implied perhaps on his website.

2. FRG has 17 NPPs running. The multi-year bureacratic malfeasance/secrecy common to NPP regimes is thus not conducive to citizens in FRG, CH or A starting to believe that their own Gen II NPPs are much safer than Chernobyl was/is. It does not appear useful to book this problem under mere “politics”, as Tom Blees appears to do on another thread. This is because no pro-NPP decision (bloggers rejoice, Berlusconi has just stated he wants to build 4 NPPs in Italy) is ever neutral with respect to the powerful/powerless in a society.

Pro-nukes can count on enhanced status, power, wealth for them and theirs as their preferred energy policy is adopted.

3. Fin Times (UK) carried on 10.12 an interview with the CEO of the German energy group RWE, which along with German energy group EON will decide by the northern spring of 2010 on using Areva’s EPR or Toshiba’s AP 1000 or a blend, for the 4-6 pending UK NPPs to be built as from 2013.

The RWE CEO is Jürgen Grossmann. RWE 2008 power plant capacity was 13.9% NPP but 55.3% coal. However, RWE, the biggest CO2 emitter in the EU, also has a renewables subsidiary called RWE Innogy. On the one hand, Grossmann is trying to get NPP lifespans lengthened in Germany; on the other, he says: “The anti-coal position in Europe is unsustainable on a global scale….what good does it do if we single out coal as the devil’s tool and the world still bets on it?”

Hence here we have a “not all my eggs in the NPP basket” power player. Is he thus conspiring against himself and colluding with himself to subvert NPPs with coal? has he taken bribes out of his left pocket and put them into his right? He also warns about the difficulty of turning RWE ( “behemoth of coal”) around.

Concluding, the German renewables camp lumps fossil and atomic together in its public language as “die Fossile-Atomaren”, this presumably accurately reflecting the fact that e.g. RWE does not bet on one horse.

In some instances no-doubt the payoff is material, but we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the psychological payoff. Some of these anti-nukers and AGW deniers have invested their entire lives, identity and self worth in these campaigns.

To admit they are wrong would be (or they feel would be) the equivalent of admitting all their efforts have come to naught, all the beliefs upon which they have built their life are false, and consequently, their life has been a waste.

A hard pill to swallow I think.

The rhetoric of both camps is similar because they both face identical problems with identical solutions. The problem is they are demonstrably wrong, and a full logical appraisal of the subjects would convince any reasonable person of this. The solution is to short circuit all attempts at such an appraisal by producing a rival body of literature designed to appear credible to the general public although a person knowlegeable in the field could see the faults, and to simultaneously employ every class of false argument known to humanity to obscure and complicate all discussion. They must do this… there is no other choice when promoting a falsehood. Only the subject matter changes.

This makes it sound like I’m arguing against collusion between anti-nukes, AGW deniers and the fossil fuel industries, but there’s no doubt that those industries have a lot to lose in the current public energy and climate debates, and are likely aware of potential and/or actual allies in the public arena.

Thus, given the quality of the arguments presented by the leaders in those camps that oppose nuclear and deny AGW, I am forced to draw the conclusion they have been bought.

It seems utterly improbable that this could happen without the facts emerging.

Occams razor surely applies. Doesn’t it seem more likely that both amongst the deniers and the anti-nukes, that cultural matters are driving their preferences?

I do not invoke the over-used term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but it is difficult not to in this case. The facts supporting AGW and the facts supporting nuclear energy are just too clear to anyone that takes the time to examine them in any detail. While individuals can be forgiven it they do not have the tools to do this, that cannot be extended to those who claim an education in the sciences. Thus, given the quality of the arguments presented by the leaders in those camps that oppose nuclear and deny AGW, I am forced to draw the conclusion they have been bought.

That study has been widely discredited by various authors and institutions. For example, using assumptions from this study, the Rössing Uranium Mine, in Namibia, processing 125 ppm ore, would require 69 PJ/year to operate – seven times more than total electricity consumption actually measured, and 1.1 times more than total energy consumption of the whole country. Similar ridiculous estimates of just about every other variable makes any conclusions pure fantasy.

Nevertheless despite those large discrepancies with reality and many rebuttals, the paper has become a staple argument for many anti-nuclear organizations. But the reality is that at this time the price of uranium is just too low for any but the easiest deposits to be worked. Higher prices will see the estimated reserve numbers jump up, guaranteed.