Advanced fission and fusion technologies for sustainable nuclear energy

Posted on 4 June 2013 by Barry Brook

Last week, the Australian Academy of Science held their annual meeting in Canberra, and the final day’s event was focused on energy technology. The symposium was called “Power to the people: the science behind the debate“. I was invited as one of the speakers, to discuss next-generation nuclear power technologies and their role in decarbonising our fossil-focused economy.

The description of my talk, as it appeared in the programme, is as follows:

Title: Advanced fission and fusion technologies for sustainable nuclear energy

Abstract: Next-generation nuclear energy – including advanced fission reactors, fusion-fission hybrids and pure hydrogen-fusion designs  – offers a means to produce vast quantities of zero-carbon and reliable electricity and process heat. For fission, new designs that are now ready for commercial demonstration can take advantage of the superior physical properties of plutonium in a fast neutron spectrum to convert essentially all of the mined uranium into useful fissile material and abundant electricity.

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) and similar ‘Generation IV designs’ can change in a fundamental way the outlook for global energy on the necessary massive scale. These resource extension properties multiply the amount of usable fuel by a factor of over a hundred, allowing demand to be met for many centuries with fuel already at hand, by a technology that is known today, and whose properties are largely established. Demonstrating a credible and acceptable way to safely recycle used nuclear fuel will also clear a socially acceptable pathway for nuclear fission to be a major low-carbon and sustainable energy source for this century.

For fusion, there are exciting medium- to long-term prospects, based on work now being done on the International Thermonuclear Reactor Experiment (ITER) and on hybrid fusion-fission designs that use molten-salt coolants and use thorium and hydrogen isotopes as fuel.

Replacement of fossil fuels is urgently needed to sustain global society whilst mitigating environmental impacts, and sustainable forms of nuclear energy offer a realistic and effective way of achieving this goal.

Bio: Barry Brook is a Professor and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute, where he holds the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change. He has published three books, over 200 refereed scientific papers, and regularly writes popular articles for the media. His awards include the 2006 Australian Academy of Science Fenner Medal and the 2010 Community Science Educator of the Year. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of extinction, analysis of energy systems for carbon mitigation, and simulation models of the synergies of human impacts on the biosphere.

Here is the HD recording of my talk – recorded professionally by the Academy, which includes many close ups of my slides. The talk runs for 28 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions. I trust you will find it useful, and be sure to pass on the link so that others can watch it and be more informed – and entertained!

There were a wide range of talks presented, generally of high quality, and many of which were also recorded. The full video cast can be viewed here. Below is the programme:

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Filed under: Future, Nuclear, Scenarios | 6 Comments »

100 Per Cent Renewables Study Needs a Makeover

Posted on 2 May 2013 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Martin Nicholson. Martin studied mathematics, engineering and electrical sciences at Cambridge University in the UK and graduated with a Masters degree in 1974. He published a peer-reviewed book on low-carbon energy systems in 2012: The Power Makers’ Challenge: and the need for Fission Energy

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In late April 2013, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) released its draft report titled 100 Per Cent Renewables Study – Draft Modelling Outcomes. The study was commissioned by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) to explore future scenarios for the National Electricity Market (NEM) fuelled entirely by renewable resources.

AEMO provided scenarios for a 100 per cent renewable electricity supply at 2030 and 2050 along with the generation plant and the major transmission networks required to support each scenario. The study included estimated capital cost requirements for each scenario and an indicative estimate of the impact on customer energy prices.

AEMO found that a 100 per cent renewable system is likely to require much higher capacity reserves than a conventional power system. They estimated that the generation nameplate capacity could need to be over twice the maximum customer demand.

Assuming the reason for commissioning the report was to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from electricity generation, it is disappointing that the DCCEE didn’t also request that nuclear power be included along with the renewable resources.

According to AEMO, to convert the NEM to a 100 per cent renewable system will cost at least $219 to $332 billion. This is excluding significant costs for the land (which could be as much as 5,000 sq kms) and augmentation of the distribution network. This is starting to sound worse than the recent high-speed train proposal from Melbourne to Brisbane.

Example of supply and demand in a winter week (scenario 2 in 2050)

According to the Australian Energy Regulator, the current NEM has an installed capacity of 46 GW made up of 26 GW of coal plants, 9 GW of gas, 8 GW of hydro and just over 2 GW of wind.

The following analysis is partly based on a paper I will present at a conference in July this year.

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, Renewables, Scenarios | 3 Comments »

Energy Policy – substance wins over style

Posted on 4 February 2013 by Barry Brook

There’s a gradual, but a rising tide of rational, enviro-progressive scientists out there who are committed to solving some of the world’s biggest problems. Many of these problems involve touchy subjects, including ways to reduce poverty while improving or maintaining high standards of living elsewhere, the means for ‘sustainable’ electricity generation, and how to limit the human population’s over-consumption and over-production.

Inevitably, however, many well-intentioned, but grossly misinformed environmentalists (‘enviro-conservatives’?) object to technical solutions based on emotional or ideological grounds alone. As self-professed enviro-progressives (but also scientists who base decisions on evidence, logic and balancing trade-offs as part of our everyday work), we hope to reduce this backlash by providing the data and analyses needed to make the best and most coherent decisions about our future.

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Reference paper:

Hong, S., Bradshaw, C.J.A. & Brook, B.W. (2013) Evaluating options for the future energy mix of Japan after the Fukushima nuclear crisis. Energy Policy, doi: 10.1016/j.enpol.2013.01.002

On 14 September 2012, Japan’s government announced a nuclear-free policy to phase out its nuclear power generation by 2040. Of course, electricity demand would have to be supplied by both renewable energy and fossil fuels to respond the public unwillingness for nuclear power.

But is this most environmentally sound, safest and economically rational aim? In a new paper we’ve just had published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Policy, we set out to test Japan’s intentions the best way we know – using empirical data and robust scenario modelling.

Before the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan produced 25% of its total electricity consumption from nuclear power, 63% from fossil fuels (mostly coal and liquefied natural gas), and 10% from renewables (including hydro). Originally, the Japanese government had planned to increase nuclear power up to 45% of supply, and include new renewables builds, to combine to make major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and meet or exceed their Kyoto targets. However, the original plan could reduce emissions by the energy sector from 1122 Mt CO2e in 2010 to < 720 Mt CO2e by 2030 (< 70% of 1990 emission levels).

After the accident, the National Policy Unit in Japan hinted that the original plan was likely to be scrapped in favour of a new scenario, whereby the nuclear target was to be reduced to somewhere between 0–35% and the renewables target increased to 20–30%. These new plans, obviously, will not be able to meet the original emission reduction targets (Cyranoski, 2012; Normile, 2012). Our paper examines the implications of these different energy mixes.

Why do many people think ‘an anti-nuclear policy’ is environmentally friendly or sustainable?

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables, Scenarios | 1 Comment »

The Case for Near-term Commercial Demonstration of the Integral Fast Reactor

Posted on 23 October 2012 by Barry Brook

I’m currently in Dubai at the 2012 World Energy Forum, as part of a delegation from the Science Council for Global Initiatives. Tomorrow (24 Oct) we will run symposium on “New Nuclear”, which will be chaired by Tom Blees and feature talks from Dr Eric Loewen (GE), Dr Alexander Bychkov (IAEA), Dr Evgeny Velikhov (Kurchatov Institute) and me (Dr Barry Brook, University of Adelaide). I will also chair a session later in the afternoon on “Vision for a Sustainable Future”, just before the closing address.

Tom and Nicole Blees of SCGI stand in front of the World Trade Centre in Dubai, during the World Energy Forum, Oct 2012. The sign behind them makes for some interesting reading…

In preparation for this meeting and as a result of a focussed conference at University of California Berkeley in early October, a white paper on the Integral Fast Reactor was prepared by Tom and me, on behalf of SCGI, and has garnered signatories from 8 key countries, including prominent people not attending the Berkeley meeting, such as climatologist  Jim Hansen. The white paper is given below.

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The Case for Near-term Commercial Demonstration of the Integral Fast Reactor

Demonstrating a credible and acceptable way to safely recycle used nuclear fuel will clear a socially acceptable pathway for nuclear fission to be a major low-carbon energy source for this century. We advocate a hastened timetable for commercial demonstration of Generation IV nuclear technology, via construction of a prototype reactor (the PRISM design, based on the Integral Fast Reactor project) and a 100t/year pyroprocessing facility to convert and recycle fuel.

1. Synopsis

We propose an accelerated timeframe for realizing the sustainable nuclear energy goals of the Generation IV reactor systems. A whole–system evaluation by an international group of nuclear and energy experts, assembled by The Science Council for Global Initiatives, reached a consensus on the synergistic design choices: (a) a well-proven pool-type sodium-cooled fast reactor; (b) metal fuel, and (c) recycling using pyroprocessing, enabling the transmutation of actinides. Alternative technology options for the coolant, fuel type and recycling system, while sometimes possessing individually attractive features, are hard-pressed to be combined into a sufficiently competitive overall system. A reactor design that embodies these key features, the General Electric-Hitachi 311 MWe PRISM [1] (based on the Integral Fast Reactor [IFR] concept developed by Argonne National Laboratory [2]), is ready for a commercial-prototype demonstration. We advocate a two-pronged approach for completion by 2020 or earlier: (i) a detailed design and demonstration of a 100 t/year pyroprocessing facility for conversion of spent oxide fuel from light-water reactors [3] into metal fuel for fast reactors; and (ii) construction of a PRISM fast reactor as a commercial-scale demonstration plant. Ideally, this could be achieved via an international collaboration. Once demonstrated, this prototype would provide an international test facility for any concept improvements. It is expected to achieve significant advances in reactor safety, reliability, fuel resource sustainability, management of long-term waste, improved proliferation resistance, and economics.

2. Context

When contemplating the daunting energy challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century in a world beyond fossil fuels, there are generally two schools of thought [4].

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, IFR FaD, Nuclear | 6 Comments »

Is Japan’s nuclear-free pathway an environmentally friendly choice?

Posted on 5 October 2012 by Barry Brook

The Fukushima crisis sparked protests and prompted a move away from nuclear energy for Japan

Below is an essay I co-wrote with one of my current Ph.D. students, Sanghuyn Hong. In it, we take a critical look at the current national energy policy of Japan, and highlight the unfortunate implications of a strategy that preferences fossil fuels over nuclear energy.

San, in the first year of his studies, is from South Korea, and is researching current and future energy policies in South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Read or leave your comment the original article here.

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On 14 September 2012, the Japanese Government considered a new policy that excited many self-proclaimed environmentalists and anti-nuclear power protesters. Following intense political wrangling, they proposed phasing out the use of nuclear power in Japan by 2040, replacing it with renewable energy (and fossil fuels). This decision, if carried through, has important environmental and financial implications that may come as a surprise to many.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident on 11 Mar 2011, caused by an earthquake-triggered tsunami, consigned the established Japanese electricity-generation plan to the dustbin. Along with it went Japan’s Kyoto-protocol commitments for greenhouse-gas mitigation.

Originally, the Japanese government had planned to increase nuclear power to 45% and renewables (including hydro) to 20% by the year 2030, up from 26% and 10% respectively in 2010. After the accident, the National Policy Unit in Japan hinted that the original plan was likely to be scrapped in favour of a new scenario, whereby the nuclear target was to be reduced to somewhere between 0–35% and the renewables target increased to 20–30%. Even with an increased share of renewables, the shift away from nuclear under any of the proposed scenarios will lead to greater use of fossil fuels.

To compare the proposed options fairly, we argue that it makes sense take a holistic view of their relative sustainability. To do this, we need to account for a range of environmental and socio-economic factors, including greenhouse-gas emissions, water consumption, land transformation, health and safety issues, and cost of electricity. One should use an evidence-based auditing method like multi-criteria decision-making analysis (MCDMA), which is transparent and relatively objective.

Our recent research (currently submitted to the journal Energy) uses MCDMA to show that even when the negative consequences of using nuclear power are properly factored in (and costs assigned to waste management, accident consequences, and so on), those scenarios with reduced nuclear power result in a less sustainable future in Japan.

In particular, the greenhouse-gas emissions of the nuclear-free scenario can reach up to about 430 kg per megawatt hour. By comparison, in the 35% nuclear-power scenario, it is only 267 kg per megawatt hour, in spite of the higher renewable energy share of the former. Except for the differing nuclear capacity, in all scenarios the ratio of coal to gas power had the largest influence on greenhouse-gas emissions.

Unfortunately, a high dependency on renewables without ongoing support for nuclear in Japan cannot cut the electricity generation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions unless some currently undeveloped alternative forms of cheap, large-scale energy storage are deployed in the future.

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 2 Comments »

What volume of synthetic hydrocarbon fuels can we generate in the future?

Posted on 30 April 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Chris Uhlik. Dr Uhlik did a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford 1979–1990. He worked at Toyota in Japan, built robot controllers, cellular telephone systems, internet routers, and now does engineering management at Google. Among his 8 years of projects as an engineering director at Google, he counts engineering recruiting, Toolbar, Software QA, Software Security, GMail, Video, BookSearch, StreetView, AerialImaging, and research activities in Artificial Intelligence and Education. He has directly managed about 500 engineers at Google and indirectly over 2000 employees. His interests include nuclear power, photosynthesis, technology evolution, artificial intelligence, ecosystems, and education.

(Ed Note: Chris has written previously on BNC on calculating the cost of ending global warming)

In a hypothetical carbon-neutral future, we can still use liquid hydrocarbon fuels if they are synthesized from non-fossil carbon sources. This analysis looks at how much carbon we use today and which of those uses can be readily substituted by electricity and synthetic fuels.

I’ll use numbers for the United States as economic and energy use data are well published by various government agencies such as the National Laboratories and the Energy Information Administration.

Flows of fossil carbon in the US Economy: (Please forgive the excess precision)

Coal: 9.08e11 kg/year which I estimate to be about 64e12 moles/carbon/year

Petroleum: 19,498,000 bbl/day, (incidentally I was surprised to learn that only 46% of this ends up in motor fuel)

Natural Gas: 7.4e11 m^3/year produced + 1.1e11 m^3 cuft/year imported

Cement: 2.5e9 Mg clinker/year worldwide of which I estimate 24% is used in the United States (by ratio of USA GDP/world GDP)

This amounts to a fossil carbon flux of about 170 x 10^12 moles of fossil carbon being extracted and released to the atmosphere each year in the United States.

To what uses is it put?

  • Electricity generation (coal and gas fired thermal plants)
  • Automobiles and light trucks (light transportation)
  • Highway trucks and rail trains (heavy transportation)
  • Ships
  • Airplanes
  • Heating oil
  • Steel production
  • Cement production
  • Fertilizer production
  • Residential and Commercial gas
  • Industrial gas
  • other materials

By combing a variety of sources and making educated guesses, I break it down like this:

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The future of Brave New Climate

Posted on 26 April 2012 by Barry Brook

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.  ― Lao Tzu

The Brave New Climate (BNC) blog has seen many changes in its almost 4 years of existence. I’d like to think of this as an evolutionary process — underpinned by a natural selection of ideas and advocacy based on what I think is important and workable, framed in the context of identifying viable options for global climate change mitigation. As the quote above emphasizes, this flows naturally from a progress of thought and effort.

A few years ago I announced a shift in focus on the website, in the post ‘A necessary interlude‘. Now things on BNC are changing again.

In summary, the motivation for the new changes are: (i) time limitations, (ii) audience outreach and (iii) freedom and flexibility. I’ll first explain what is going to happen, and then elaborate a little on the justification.

1. A BNC Discussion Forum has been established. This will, hereafter, be the main place for comments.

2. A new website – KnowMoreFearLess.com [KMFL] — will be launched (currently locked and under development). This will be focused on public education on nuclear power for greenhouse gas mitigation.

3. The Front Page of the bravenewclimate.com website will become a semi-static PORTAL page. This will include fixed links to the BNC Discussion Forum (see 1), the BNC archives (after some further indexing and re-organisation of this page), KMFL, and also provide a summary (with links) to the latest BNC blog post.

4. The flow of BNC blog postings will be less frequent and more opportunistic — rather than regular and scheduled (the historic rate was a post every 3-5 days).

The BNC twitter feed (microblogging) will not change in character or frequency — mostly consisting of up-to-date links to articles on climate change and low-carbon energy.

Okay, now some explanation on these changes.

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Filed under: Future, Hot News | 32 Comments »

The Nuclear Energy Solution

Posted on 12 April 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Bill Sacks and Greg Meyerson. Bill is a physicist and a radiologist, and wrote Lessons about nuclear energy from the Japanese quake and tsunami about a  month into the Fukushima crisis. Greg is an English professor with specialization in critical theory. Both are based in the U.S. For further details about the authors, see the Endnote to this post.

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NUCLEAR ENERGY: THE ONLY SOLUTION TO THE ENERGY PROBLEM AND GLOBAL WARMING  By Bill Sacks and Greg Meyerson

The following is a brief rationale and outline of a much longer essay that is also available on bravenewclimate.com (CLICK HERE to download the printable PDF, 58 pages).

This essay unifies four critical contentions that the authors cannot find combined in any other of the many sources on nuclear energy.  Our four contentions are 1) fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) are now the main source of global warming; 2) they must be completely replaced with clean energy sources, chiefly nuclear energy since the inherent physical properties of wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal severely limit their use; 3) radiation at the dose ranges encountered in nature, as well as by the public in nuclear accidents, actually promotes, rather than destroys, health; and 4) the profit system presents an inherent obstacle to achieving the goal of clean, sustainable energy.

The authors hold the opinion that all four of these aspects are inseparable, and that a general understanding of all is necessary if any progress is to be made in solving the problems of inaccessibility of adequate electricity for much of humanity and anthropogenic global warming that is nearing tipping points that threaten to make self-amplifying and irreversible changes.  No one of these four, in our view, can be safely put aside as a distraction from some “main” point.

Recognition that the earth is warming and that human activity, rather than natural cycles, is now responsible is only the beginning of this solution — a necessary but not sufficient condition.  Similarly broad general understanding of the severe inherent limitations of all clean alternatives to nuclear energy is needed to hasten the building of nuclear plants world over, and to end the wasteful efforts to scale up wind and solar particularly, that profit a few but at the expense of rich governmental subsidies and higher energy costs that further restrict access to electricity.

Furthermore if nuclear energy is to gain the respect and advocacy of the public, the exaggerated fears of radiation have to be brought under rational control, which requires first that governmental regulatory agencies around the world be forced to admit that they have been basing their restrictions on an obsolete relic of the Cold War — one that falsely claims that all radiation is harmful to our health regardless of how low the dose, known as the linear-no-threshold (LNT) assumption.  However, the science of biological effects of ionizing radiation overwhelmingly points to an evolved response that protects against any harm from low levels of radiation, known as the hormetic effect, or hormesis, a very general biological response to all sorts of chemical and physical agents.

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 68 Comments »

Feeding 10 billion in 2050′s sauna (Part III)

Posted on 21 December 2011 by Barry Brook

What future for agriculture on a hotter planet?

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions on a hotter planet (Part II)

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Welcome to Part III of my still presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050.

I spent the first two parts of this series looking at global authorities like the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation) with its predictive obsession and its policy associate IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute) with its meat obsession. Writing in a similarly obsessed country with far more cattle than people, I felt compelled to add a special section on protein and to also quantify the place of meat, particularly sheep and cattle meat, on the world food stage. Cattle are a major player in climate change, biodiversity loss and general environmental destruction but both they and sheep are globally irrelevant to food security. But worse than being irrelevant, their net contribution may well be negative. Here are some of the negative impacts:

  1. Reductions in the productivity of the land that produces real food. These reductions are via physical soil damage, consumption of crop residues which protect the soil, the deliberate burning of areas that are croppable to maintain them as pasture.
  2. Fouling water. Lack of clean water is the second biggest cause of malnutrition.
  3. Acting as disease generators. I mentioned Cryptosporidium in the last post, but livestock are also major generators of novel rotavirus strains. Rotavirus kills a million children annually, with vaccination not always available in the developing world. We don’t need new strains.
  4. The direct sickening and killing of children and women via the use of animal dung as a fuel.
  5. The reduction in the global food supply by making feed production more profitable than food production. The last impact doesn’t always apply to sheep and cattle but is more general. People with the perspicacity to easily recognise this problem in the context of biofuels are almost universally blind to its existence elsewhere.

Today, in the last of the series, I want to look some standout scientific work that breaks the predictive meat obsessed mould. This is work by Jonathan Foley and Navin Ramankutty and a sizeable group of associated researchers. I’ll call this the “FR” work, but keep in mind that there are many other researchers involved.

This work breaks the mold because it isn’t concerned with mere prediction, like that of the FAO. Nor is it obsessed with meat as a food but rather it recognises meat’s central role in reducing global food Calories.

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, Impacts | 52 Comments »

Feeding 10 billion on a hotter planet (Part II)

Posted on 4 December 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions in 2050′s sauna (Part I)

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Welcome to Part II of my presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050. Before concluding where we left off with the analysis of the foods which the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) thinks are globally important, we need a short prologue on protein.

Protein prologue

Any suggestion based on Calorie counts that the net contribution of beef or other meats to global food security may be trifling or even negative brings instant feedback about protein. The presumption is that it is adequate protein, particularly animal protein, which is the key requirement for beating malnutrition. This is inevitable for two reasons: first, the absence of medical malnutrition literature from the best seller list, and second, we have all spent our entire lifetime swimming in meat industry propaganda … much of it focused on protein.

We need some historical perspective on protein.

There’s nothing quite like being the first, and protein can lay good claim to being the first critical nutrient discovered in the early days of modern chemistry. Nitrogen is protein’s key chemical component and one of the first to be accurately measured. Consequently, quite precise measurements of protein utilisation in people have been around for almost 200 years.

Early investigators fed dogs pure sugar diets and watched them die. Absence of protein was the explanation they eventually settled on. What else could it have been? In 1815, vitamins (in any measurable sense) were well beyond the knowledge horizon, so there was really only one candidate. By 1842, protein was pronounced the only true nutrient and the sole provider of energy to the muscles. It mattered not that measurements on prison work gangs showed no differences in protein utilisation on rest days and hard treadmill days. The history of protein spin is a picturesque tale of arrogant opinionated people holding fast to beliefs in the face of overwhelming data. Not everyone was fooled. US Yale University researchers in 1907 took athletes and halved their protein intake during a mammoth 5 month piece of live-in research. Over the 5 months, far from fading away, the subjects got stronger by 35%. The protein myth charged on regardless, pushed by the then head of the US Agriculture Department who thought (seriously) that when people could choose food without regard for cost or availability, they would choose an optimal diet. i.e., the rich must know best.

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Strange bedfellows? Techno-fixes and conservation

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Barry Brook

I have a new paper out in the peer-reviewed journal Biological Conservation that will be of interest to BNC readers.

It is called “Strange bedfellows? Techno-fixes to solve the big conservation issues in southern Asia“, by Barry W. Brook & Corey J.A. Bradshaw. Here are some details:

Abstract

The conservation challenges facing mega-biodiverse South and Southeast Asia in the 21st century are enormous. For millennia, much of the habitat of these regions was only lightly modified by human endeavour, yet now it is experiencing rampant deforestation, logging, biofuel cropping, invasive species expansion, and the synergies of climate change, drought, fire and sea-level rise. Although small-scale conservation management might assist some species and habitats, the broader sweep of problems requires big thinking and some radical solutions. Given the long expected lead times between progressive economic development and stabilization of human population size and consumption rates, we argue that ‘technological fixes’ cannot be ignored if we are to address social and fiscal drivers of environmental degradation and associated species extinctions in rapidly developing regions like southern Asia.

The pursuit of cheap and abundant ‘clean’ energy from an economically rational mix of nuclear power, geothermal, solar, wind, and hydrogen-derivative ‘synfuels’, is fundamental to this goal. This will permit pathways of high-tech economic development that include intensified (high energy-input) agriculture over small land areas, full recycling of material goods, a transition from fossil-fuel use for transport and electricity generation, a rejection of tropical biofuels that require vast areas of arable land for production, and a viable alternative to the damming of major waterways like the Mekong, Murum and northern tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers for hydroelectricity. Rational approaches that work at large scales must be used to deal with the ultimate, rather than just proximate, drivers of biodiversity loss in the rapidly developing regions of southern Asia.

Filed under: Future, Hot News, Impacts, Policy | 9 Comments »

Depressing climate-related trends – but who gets it?

Posted on 6 November 2011 by Barry Brook

I saw two particularly depressing trend lines this week. Both were confronting enough to make me stop, sit back and just contemplate. It was not as though these came as a great surprise — I’d been following these data for years. But for some reason, the seriousness of them really struck home like never before.

The first was a report on Arctic sea ice volume. Here is the graph that shocked me:

It shows the minimum northern hemisphere sea ice volume yearly from 1979 to 2011, and a simple time-series forecast based on a fit of the exponential-decline model. You can read about the details here: PIOMAS September 2011 (volume record lower still), where various related charts are also shown. One can argue about the precision of the projection line, but the general fit is remarkably robust and, on this basis, it is reasonable to conclude that unless some remarkable turn around occurs, the Arctic summer ice volume will be near-zero by 2020. (more…)

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Hot News, Nuclear | 121 Comments »

Low intensity geoengineering – microbubbles and microspheres

Posted on 8 October 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest post by John Morgan. John runs R&D programmes at a Sydney startup company. He has a PhD in physical chemistry, and research experience in chemical engineering in the US and at CSIRO. He is a regular commenter on BNC.

A 9-page printable PDF version of this post can be downloaded here.

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Crazy talk

Geoengineering is crazy. The sheer scale of the aspiration speaks of hubris. Terraforming the planet by pulling down billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, or pushing millions of tonnes of plastic up into orbit is absurd. The material intensities and costs are ridiculous.

And yet, with no deep cuts in emissions in evidence, with atmospheric CO2 at 390 parts per million and climbing at a rate of about 2 ppm a year, our “safe” working level of 350 ppm is rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror even as we’re pushing the pedal harder to the floor. We do a lot of crazy things.

But what if there was a geoengineering approach that used no materials, almost no energy, works at sea level, with cheap technology we could start deploying at scale today?

That’s exactly what Russell Seitz at Harvard is proposing. In this post I want to look at his idea of increasing the reflectivity of the oceans with tiny microbubbles, It’s a fascinating, low impact concept, though not without some challenges. So I’ll also propose a different means to the same end that addresses these issues, and of course has some of its own. Then we can talk about how crazy it all is.

Bright Water

In a remarkable paper published just over a year ago – which I highly recommend reading – Seitz proposed injecting microbubbles of air into seawater, effectively creating an “inverse cloud”. Sunlight is scattered back into space from these bubbles. This concept has no material inputs, bubble sparging equipment is cheap and low power, and could be installed on ships already travelling the worlds waterways.

We don’t need to launch giant lenses into space or build giant balloon tethered pipelines to the stratosphere. We have a much more down to earth delivery system already in place, in the form of more than 10 000 ships at sea, 1300 working oil rigs and many thousands of retired platforms (3500 in the Gulf of Mexico alone) not to mention islands and suitable coastlines.

It’s the little bubbles of nothing that make it really something

The appeal of this technique comes from the fact that you only need very small bubbles to scatter light. Leveraging the cube law relationship for volume gives you a lot of scattering power if you can make really small bubbles. The air from a single 1 cm bubble, could fill a trillion 1 μm bubbles.

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The Azimuth Project

Posted on 23 September 2011 by Barry Brook

In the news recently, there was discussion of using helium balloons for geoengineering, as a method for dispersing aerosols or cloud-nucleation droplets into the atmosphere. (The proposal was critiqued here by George Monbiot). This idea is just the latest in growing field of science-based speculation on active climate system intervention, some of which has been discussed previously on BNC. However, this website, being a blog and discussion site, cannot hope to serve as comprehensive resource for technical evaluations. That is where The Azimuth Project looks to be extremely useful.

The website, a wiki of sorts, was established in late 2010 by mathematical physicist Dr John Baez, and is already a massive compendium (John also runs a blog). The motivation and goal is summarised as follows:

Welcome to the Azimuth Project!

The Azimuth Project is an international collaboration to create a focal point for scientists and engineers interested in saving the planet. Our goal is to make clearly presented, accurate information on the relevant issues easy to find, and to help people work together on our common problems.

Saving the planet

“Saving the planet” may sound pompous. But the very health of the planet is in peril because of the actions of humankind. Whether it is global warming, mass extinction, peak oil, or other problems, we need to be prepared on many fronts for an uncertain future.

Our goal is not to replace or compete with existing sources of information, but to provide a bird’s-eye view of the information that already exists. We want to make it easy for any scientist or engineer to understand the whole problem and understand specialist literature in many subjects outside their particular domain of expertise.

More explanation of the goals of the project, and how you can help out, is given here. There is also a discussion forum. I’d encourage you — especially if you’re technically inclined — to check it out.

I’ve already found The Azimuth Project resource to be highly useful. For instance, regular BNC commenter and SCGI member Graham Cowan (who promotes the idea of boron-fuelled vehicles), has often talked about enhanced weathering as a potentially effective way to draw down CO2 that is already airborne (as opposed to capturing it at source, or intervening in other ways to cool the planet). After reading the AP page on the idea, I have a much better understanding of what he’s driving at. There are similarly useful pages on everything from peak oil (and peak uranium) to sea level rise, to solar breeders, to me (!).

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Filed under: Future | 37 Comments »

Why population policy will not solve climate change

Posted on 19 September 2011 by Barry Brook

I have given lots of talks on climate change over the last few years. In these presentations, I typically focus on explaining the basis of the anthropogenic climate change problem, how it sits in the context of other human and natural changes, and then, how greenhouse gas emissions could be mitigated with the elimination of fossil fuels and substitution with low-carbon replacement technologies such as nuclear fission, renewables of various flavours, energy efficiency, and so on. When question time follows, I regularly get people standing up and saying something along the following lines:

It is all very well to focus on energy technology, and even to  mention behavioural changes, but the real problem — the elephant in the room that you’ve ignored — is the size of the human population. No one seems to want to talk about that! About population policy. If we concentrated seriously on ways to reduce population pressure, many other issues would be far easier to solve.

On the face of it, it is hard to disagree with such statements. The human population has growth exponentially from ~650 million in the year 1700 AD to almost 7 billion today. When coupled to our increasing economic expansion and concomitant rising demand for natural resources, this rapid expansion of the human enterprise has put a huge burden on the environment and demands an accelerating depletion of fossil fuels and various high-grade ores, etc. (the Anthropocence Epoch).  Obviously, to avoid exhaustion of accessible natural resources, degradation of ecosystems and to counter the need to seek increasingly low-grade mineral resources, large-scale recycling and sustainable use of biotic systems will need to be widely adopted. Of this there is little room for doubt.

So, the huge size of the present-day human population is clearly a major reason why we face so many mounting environmental problems. But does it also follow that population control via various policies is the answer – the best solution — to solving these global problems? It might surprise you to learn that I say NO (at least over meaningful time scales). But, it will take some time to explain why — to work through the nuances, assumptions, sensitivities and global versus region story. So, I’ll explain why I’ve reached this conclusion, and, as always, invite feedback!

Below, I outline some of the basic tools required to come up with some reasonable answers. A huge amount of relevant data on this topic (human demography) is available from the United Nations Population Division, the Human Life-Table Database, the Human Mortality Database, and the U.S. Census Bureau. That data and statistics I cite in these posts come from these sources.

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Policy | 60 Comments »

What is your energy philosophy?

Posted on 31 August 2011 by Barry Brook

People seem to like to infer motives. (Perhaps it’s an inherent evolutionary trait, allowing anticipation of your prey’s or predator’s next move?) I find that a lot of people get me wrong about my position on energy and sustainability — often deliberately so, I suspect. So here’s a post to clarify my position, and allow you to let others know about your philosophy (in the comments below).

Consider this a personal view, but one I would justify as being informed by extensive reading, talking and thinking. It doesn’t mean I’m right, just that I’ve made the effort to properly contemplate. I think that’s all you can ask of anyone — you, or the people you’re debating!

General philosophy: Anthropogenic climate change is a very urgent problem — probably the most serious one now facing humanity. We must solve it: there is no choice here and hiding our heads in the denial sandpit is pointless. We must also deal with other issues of global sustainability, especially clearance and degradation of tropical landscapes, overfishing, fragmentation of natural habitats within urban-agricultural areas, and chronic pollution from fossil fuel combustion. Most of these problems have common solutions, centred on the need for abundant clean and sustainable energy (not less), ‘techno-fixes’, stabilisation of population, provision of viable economic and agricultural systems, and a functioning, realistic and pragmatic society. We need to use all practical, cost-effective and timely options at our disposal.

Climate change: Human activity, via the burning of fossil fuels and also through agricultural and forestry changes, is almost exclusively (>95 %) responsible for the substantial global warming witness in the last 3-5 decades (+0.5C). It is also mostly (>70%) responsible for the warming since 1910 (+0.8C in the last 100 years). The most likely trajectory for the next 40 years (through to 2050) is an additional +1.2C (to +2C compared to pre-industrial), and a further +3C by 2100. There is some (low) probability that feedbacks in the climate system will double the 2100 estimate (or more) — much as I’d like to, I cannot dismiss this possibility. Sea level rise by 2100 will be > 1 m, and will continue for centuries thereafter (probably >10 m by 2300). Some of this may be avoidable, but I doubt it — especially the +1.2C warming between now and 2050 and the ongoing sea level rise. We’re just too far committed to a fossil-fuel-intensive pathway now and for the next few decades, and it will take substantial time to ‘turn the ship around’. There is plenty of hurt on the way — we can adapt to some of it, but many impacts will be difficult to ameliorate.

Peak fossil fuels: We are depleting accessible supplies of coal, oil and gas substantially, and peak global production of traditional sources will almost certainly arrive within the next few decades — probably sooner rather than later (although locally, they will continue to be abundant, e.g. coal in Australia). This will increase extraction and processing costs, which will in turn spur increasing exploitation of unconventional supplies, including underground gasified coal, coal seam methane, fracked shale gas, tar sands and Arctic hydrocarbons. It may be that demand will outstrip supply by about 2030, after which there will be an increasingly compelling reason to manufacture synthetic fuels such as ammonia, methanol and (I hope), serious investigation of boron as an energy carrier. Carbon prices will accelerate this decision. Peak fossil fuels will not, in and of itself, lead to significant greenhouse gas abatement this century. Too little, too late.

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Filed under: Future, Nuclear, Renewables | 189 Comments »

Why pro-nuclear environmentalism has failed when anti-nuclear has succeeded – and how to change this

Posted on 9 July 2011 by Barry Brook

…means No Chance of halting climate change

With George Monbiot on the debating warpath against Greenpeace and in support of nuclear power as a serious mechanism for tackling climate change, and Mark Lynas’ new book on planetary boundaries and techno-fixes, “The God Species“, now out (despite some weird problems on the launch day), it really is time for environmentalists to get serious about starting (and sustaining) a pro-nuclear movement. Not just arguments of logic, science and engineering and not just appeals for people to ‘do the numbers and figure it out’ (although these are still important) — no, we need a real ‘can do, must do‘ movement. What do I mean, and how do we achieve this? I’ll let my friend Ben Heard explain, in the brilliant guest post below (which is also up on DecarboniseSA.com).

p.S. I’m reading The God Species right now (it’s excellent) — will do a review in due course.

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Why pro-nuclear has failed when anti-nuclear has succeeded

Guest Post by Ben Heard. Ben is Director of Adelaide-based advisory firm ThinkClimate Consulting, a Masters graduate of Monash University in Corporate Environmental Sustainability, and a member of the TIA Environmental and Sustainability Action Committee. After several years with major consulting firms, Ben founded ThinkClimate and has since assisted a range of government, private and not-for profit organisations to measure, manage and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and move towards more sustainable operations. Ben publishes regular articles aimed at challenging thinking and perceptions related to climate change and sustainable energy at decarbonisesa.com.

There is no point denying it. The anti-nuclear movement in Australia has been remarkably effective. Combined with abundant cheap coal, Australia’s anti –nuclear movement has kept us the only one of the world’s top 16 economies not to employ nuclear power. It made people like me grow up anti-nuclear without ever really being asked to think about it. The result is some of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world; in South Australia around 720g CO2-e/kWh (which is one of the lowest levels in the country I might add. NSW, Victoria and Queensland are all much higher), compared to a mere 90g CO2-e/kWh in nuclear dominated France.

Meanwhile, the pro-nuclear position has, to my observation, failed to ever really gain much traction, and has evidently failed to deliver change. This is said with all respect to the many smart and passionate people who have worked on the issue for much longer than I.

Why has the anti-nuclear movement succeeded? It is easy and tempting to write-off its success to dishonourable actions from the leadership of the movement which:

  • Lies
  • Distorts information
  • Grants itself the luxury of being single-issue, and ignores the rest of the world’s problems when they don’t suit them
  • Uses fear-mongering freely and to great effect
  • Never, ever feels obliged to correct the record when their fear-mongering is subsequently shown to be completely false

Um…then how are you holding the sign?

While these points and things like it are arguably true (I have certainly encountered all of the above myself), it grants the anti-nuclear movement all the power by taking the focus off the shortcomings of the pro-nuclear approach.  It’s also clear that we can challenge these things when the opportunities arise, but we can’t change them. This makes it all largely beside the point.

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, Nuclear | 135 Comments »

Open Thread 16

Posted on 7 June 2011 by Barry Brook

The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason. So get up on your soap box! The standard commenting rules of courtesy apply, and at the very least your chat should relate to the general content of this blog.

The sort of things that belong on this thread include general enquiries, soapbox philosophy, meandering trains of argument that move dynamically from one point of contention to another, and so on — as long as the comments adhere to the broad BNC themes of sustainable energy, climate change mitigation and policy, energy security, climate impacts, etc.

You can also find this thread by clicking on the Open Thread category on the cascading menu under the “Home” tab.

Note 1: For reference, the last general open thread (from 16 April 2011) was here.

Note 2: I’m currently inordinately busy (but also having a lot of fun!) at the Equinox Summit: Energy 2030 in Waterloo, Canada. Once I get a chance to draw breath, I’ll post more about the summit on BNC. But we’re currently working intense 14 hour days (I’m not kidding), so I’ve not got much physical or mental energy left in me by the time I get back to my hotel room at night!

However, if you want to follow some of the events, the Canadian television station TVO is covering the whole summit. I was on a panel session yesterday (Benchmarking our Energy Future: see the video here), which also featured four really interesting short animated videos on energy; I will also be part of a 1-hour episode of Steve Paikin’s The Agenda on Friday night (Canadian time — but also available on the TVO website — more details to follow).

More on the WGSI Equinox Summit: Energy 2030 in the next blog post.

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Future, Hot News | 593 Comments »

Critique of MIT future of nuclear fuel cycle study

Posted on 31 May 2011 by Barry Brook

MIT (energy initiative) recently released a controversial and well-publicized report on the future of the nuclear fuel cycle. In it, they argue that there is sufficient uranium to allow ongoing deployment of water-cooled reactors for many decades; they recommend that no far-reaching decision be made yet on the ultimate disposal of the ‘spent’ nuclear fuel so produced and suggest that research on technical solutions can be ongoing over this period, with no particular urgency.

Below, on behalf of the members of the Science Council for Global Initiatives, I present a critique of this report which focuses on its core arguments — and their inherent weaknesses.

A printable 6-page PDF version of the critique can be downloaded here.

————————

Critique of “The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study (2011)”

Developed by the Science Council for Global Initiatives, led by Dr. Yoon I. Chang (Contact: tomsciencecouncil@gmail.com)

1. The Study recommendations on actions to deal with spent nuclear fuel and waste do not recognize the importance of the technological options to reduce the radiological toxicity, which could have great impact on waste management.

One of the main Study recommendations is:

Planning for long term interim storage of spent fuel – on the scale of a century – should be an integral part of nuclear fuel cycle design.

This recommendation is based on an implicit assumption that spent nuclear fuel is a de-facto waste form destined for ultimate disposal, and that it would take a long time to develop repositories. The Study ponders whether the spent nuclear fuel is a resource or a waste. Since the Study speculates on a large supply of low-price uranium that will continue to meet rising demand for many decades, the value of spent fuel as a resource is diminished. However, there is another dimension to this equation. The actinides contained in the spent fuel are potentially a valuable resource. They are also a long-term radiological risk, and thus must be managed accordingly. The radiological toxicity of the LWR spent fuel constituents is presented in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Radiological toxicity of LWR spent fuel constituents as a function of time

Radiological toxicity here is a relative measure of the cancer risk if ingested or inhaled, which we have normalized to that of the original natural uranium ore. As mined, the ore contains uranium along with decay products that have accumulated by its (very slow) decay over millennia. Normalization to the natural uranium ore from which the spent fuel originated is a useful but somewhat arbitrary relative standard. If the radiological toxicity drops below the natural uranium ore level we would be disposing of nuclear wastes that had no greater hazard than the uranium found naturally. The point at which the radiological toxicity curve crosses the natural uranium line then can be defined (at least loosely) as an effective lifetime of the waste components.

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Filed under: Future, Nuclear, Policy | 154 Comments »

Nuclear power and climate change – what now?

Posted on 28 May 2011 by Barry Brook

I’m currently on a 3-week trip to North America, and will be returning to Australia in mid-June. At the end of my travels I’ll be attending an energy futures conference in Waterloo, Canada (and will write more about that in an upcoming blog). But at present, I’m in Davis, California, and have been visiting Tom Blees. So it’s appropriate that I present a guest post from Tom, which was originally published in Meteorological Technology International magazine in May 2011. You can download the printable PDF version here.

Guest Post by Tom Blees. Tom an advanced energy systems consultant from Davis, California, and author of Prescription for the Planet – The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises. Tom is also the president of the Science Council for Global Initiatives , an international think tank of distinguished scientists dedicated to creating an environmentally sound energy-rich future for the entire human race. Previous guest posts on BNC include: Unnatural Gas, Danish fairy tales – what can we learn? and Germany – crunched by the numbers.

The nuclear power plant debacle in Japan in the wake of the recent earthquake and tsunami has complicated what already was a contentious question: Should we look to nuclear power as a major component in solving the climate change problem? The situation at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan is getting more manageable by the day, though the ultimate repair and cleanup will be a long-term project. The 24-hour news cycle has feasted on the public’s dread of radiation, relegating the deaths of tens of thousands in the earthquake and tsunami to almost a footnote on American cable news shows. Anti-nuclear crusaders have been trotted out with little regard for their qualifications, some resurrecting long-debunked tales of deaths and injuries at Three Mile Island (where nobody was even hurt, much less killed).

The predicted nuclear renaissance may founder temporarily in some countries because of these events, but the lessons that will be learned from Japan’s accident won’t stop the growth of nuclear power in the long run. It will only make future plants safer. Despite the dire warnings of doomsayers, nuclear power plants being built today are far safer than those at Fukushima, and the Generation IV reactors to come will be even better. The aged power plants at Fukushima that would likely have survived the tsunami intact if not for the woefully misjudged placement of their backup power supplies had been running as long as forty years, and were designed half a century ago.

A Toshiba engineer describes features of the "4S" (super-safe, small and simple) nuclear battery - a sodium-cooled fast reactor with metal fuel, based on the IFR concept

Nuclear Technology Moves On

How’s that laptop working that your daddy bought you back in 1960? One might well pose that question to those who now advocate the wholesale abandonment of nuclear power based on the accident in Japan, for technology—nuclear and otherwise—has not been standing still. The fact is that our energy options are limited, and those that can provide baseload electricity (24/7 on demand) without carbon emissions are more limited still. Except for geothermal power opportunities accessible in just a few places in the world, hydroelectric power and nuclear power are just about the only two choices. Hydro, of course, while not as geographically limited as geothermal, nevertheless is circumscribed by both topography and politics. (On that latter point, it’s ironic that the Sierra Club used to be pro-nuclear until the early Seventies, seeing nuclear power as the way to obviate the building of dams. Since their complete reversal of that position they have been anti-nuclear crusaders—who still hate dams.)

Whatever one believes about the causes of climate change, there is no denying that glaciers around the world are receding at an alarming rate. Billions of people depend on such glaciers for their water supplies. We have already seen cases of civil strife and even warfare caused or exacerbated by competition over water supplies. Yet these are trifling spats when one considers that the approaching demographic avalanche will require us to supply about three billion more people with all the water they need within just four decades.

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, IFR FaD, Nuclear | 128 Comments »

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