Open Thread 6

I’m on Twitter (ID= fran_b__ )

Lots of fun, using my Android. I’ve already got 160 “followers” (and I weed out spammers and obvious loonies)

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An analogy might be that if the water industry contributed x% to GDP (via the sum of value added approach) therefore GDP would still be (100-x)% if there were no water. Perhaps others can remember that discussion on energy.

But that would be such a stunningly stupid thing to claim for an economist that I can scarcely imagine him claiming it.

Energy, transport systems, communication systems — all these make human labour more productive so the net value of energy would be a lot more than 10% even if that was what the energy sector earned in terms of GDP.

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Some people seem to be showing an awareness of the importance of the cost of avoiding emissions. The Sydney Morning Herald carries this story today:

No project too little for climate change fund

Millions of dollars of NSW taxpayers’ money is being spent on tiny cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. One charity has received a grant to reduce emissions by just two tonnes over 10 years.

In another case, a family support group in Newcastle received $1400 to tint their windows to reduce electricity use and lower emissions by just two tonnes over the next 10 years.

..

A Liberal MP for Castle Hill, Michael Richardson, said he supported groups cutting their carbon footprint but not at any cost.

”This fund has been a monumental waste of taxpayers’ funds, given the need to cut millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide,” he said.

”Taxpayers want the Climate Change Fund to succeed, but that can only happen if the government achieves value for money. There isn’t a bottomless pit of funds to draw on.”

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This might be of some use:

Hidden Costs of Energy:
Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use

Click to access HiddenCosts.source.prod_affiliate.79.pdf

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Unfortunately, even if a 10-fold improvement in anode weight doesn’t give a 10-fold improvement in total weight per amp-hour capacity. At the 300 mAhr/g energy density of today’s graphite anodes, the anode is well under half the weight of the cell, so even if magically weighed nothing, overall capacity would less than double. This is still, potentially, a big deal, of course, as a 50% increase in capacity would be very welcome – but it moves the focus even more onto the major limiter of lithium cell performance, the weight of the cathode.

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Having now seen the full list of representative on the new federal government climate change roundtable via the link provided by Ms Perps above, my expectations of it coming up with anything helpful are definitely not high. Very long on activists, very short on people with the credentials to look critically at effective solutions.

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The discussions on John Quiggin’s web site, and other web sites has provoked the following thoughts:

There is a relatively small group of Australian’s who believe Australia will need to implement nuclear power if we want to make major cuts to emissions.

There is a much larger group of people who believe that a carbon tax or ETS will cause deep cut in our emissions.

There is also a large group, pretty much the same as the first group, who believe renewable energy can replace fossil fuels and provide the deep emissions cuts.

The nuclear supporters are totally unfunded. The renewable energy supporters are massively funded by the tax payer and have been for over two decades.

The business groups who want a carbon tax see financial advantage for their business (such as the gas industry and the renewable energy industry and researchers).

I am far from convinced that we are moving to develop good energy policy. I agree with Ziggy Switkowski’s post today on Climate Spectator.

http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/shamed-japans-energy-vision

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Greg,

Interesting. I didn’t pick up on the 28GW of solar. That would generate about 3 to 4GWy/y average power with little through the winter.

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I am expecting to be told to stop posting on John Quiggins web stite, so I wrote this summary of where we’d go to:

Since the anti-nukes are now calling for an end to any further debate on nuclear on the John Quiggin web site, let’s summarise what has been established:

1. Nuclear is by far the least cost, low emissions electricity generation technology.

2. If we want to make major cuts (say 60% to 90%) to CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and phase out most fossil fuel electricity generation by say 2040 or 2050, nuclear power will have to be the major player (probably the dominant technology).

3. If we want clean electricity to displace gas for heating and oil for land transport, as fast as possible, then we’ll need to make electricity as low cost as we can.

4. If we want the developing countries to adopt low emissions electricity and avoid, to the extent possible, going through the fossil fuel stage, then the developed countries will need to make clean electricity lower cost than coal. (we can do so; we just need to remove the irrational impediments that are preventing nuclear being lower cost than coal)

5. Nuclear power is about the safest of all the electricity generation technologies; it is some 10 to 100 times safer than coal generation

6. Nuclear power has by far the lowest environmental footprint: area required, mining area and volumes, shipping volumes, fresh water requirements compared with coal, fresh water for construction compared with solar (for concrete), materials mined, processed, manufactured, fabricated, constructed, decomissioned, disposed of and transported between all stages.

7. Once used nuclear fuel (or so called ‘nuclear waste’), is a trivial quantity and a trivial technical issue in comparison with the management of waste from fossil fuel power stations. Once used nuclear fuel should be stored for later use in Gen IV reactors when they are adopted some time in the future). We all recognise it is a highly emotive issue, thanks to the effective propoganda of the anti-nukes over the past 40 odd years.

more, but that will do for now.

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I’m posting the article below to get your (BNC collective) sincere advice. I’m not interested in high handed criticisms of this guy as “ignorant,” etc., even though he may be seriously mistaken.

The person who posts this article is convinced that uranium (yellowcake I think) is “the yellow rock that kills.”

To suggest that uranium tailings are not very toxic (radiotoxic) puts you in the category of the “government” and opposed to what “everybody and his grandma knows,” that U is highly carcinogenic.

This wastewater may indeed have been highly toxic, either due to high concentrations in water (chemical toxicity) or due to agents in the wastewater different from the uranium tailings. any ideas for how to persuade activists who associate nuclear with illnesses and who to boot do not trust (Hunter is an older Native American man), and for generally good reasons, the government?

From other posts, Hunter, basically, does not trust science, and of course, science has been distorted by “material interests” in all sorts of ways, but there’s not only a lot of good science out there, but those who convincingly show how science is distorted by “special interests” are themselves scientists or doing science.

at any rate, this anti nuke stance is so visceral that arguments to the effect that opposition to nukes means support for fossil fuels, with the tens of thousands of deaths that entails, with astronomical potential deaths.

Here is the post from Hunter Bear.

Our family was living on the Navajo Nation when this all around tragedy — the Church Rock Spill — occurred in the summer of 1979. The extremely negative effects of this continue, as is the case with all of those spawned by uranium development generally. Subsequently, a fine documentary film, “River That Harms,” was made about the Church Rock disaster by people we know — well worth getting if one is concerned about “the yellow rock that kills.” http://www.videoproject.com/riv-365-v.html [H]

Indian Country Today
Print this article

Uranium spill elicits traditional approach
Originally printed at http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/national/Uranium-spill-elicits-traditional-approach-105052044.html

By Carol Berry, Today correspondent
October 19, 2010

CHURCH ROCK, N.M. – About 10 miles north of this predominantly Navajo community, Highway 566 transects Red Water Pond Road, which is blocked at the entrance to an abandoned United Nuclear Corp. mine site from which nearly 1 million gallons of toxic wastewater spilled into the nearby Puerco River 31 years ago.

Residents of this high desert mesa country of northwestern New Mexico remember the event they have designated the Church Rock Uranium Tailings Spill, caused when a dam was breached at a UNC/General Electric uranium mill tailings disposal pond and toxic wastewater and 1,100 tons of radioactive tailings poured into the river, which flows through Gallup, N.M. and on to Holbrook and Winslow, Ariz.

People still remember, in part because of lingering illnesses they attribute to the spill, and they have looked with some hope at a unique process being conducted by Phil Bluehouse, a member of the Diné Haatali, or Navajo Medicine Men Association, who is a former federal agent and now a practitioner of the Navajo Peacemaking Method, which uses tradition and philosophy to address contemporary concerns.

Over recent months, the Red Water Pond Road Community Association has participated in monthly Bluehouse-facilitated comprehensive planning workshops with representatives from the national Environmental Protection Agency, Navajo EPA, and UNC/GE, said Garrett Brennan Stewart, Diné, an assistant to Bluehouse.

The method draws on Navajo culture and tradition “going back to our creation narratives, based on the experiences of our people. The narratives detail prehistory from the time of creation to emergence onto the earth itself, and then our history from emergence to the present day,” Bluehouse said, adding that going into too much detail about the method as used in the current workshops would be inappropriate and “too esoteric.”

Instead of fostering anti-healing divide-and-conquer strategies of the kind in the criminal justice system, Navajo traditional justice “is completely different – it involves the psychological, spiritual and biophysical,” and the process in peacemaking follows the strategies told in the old narratives because they carry the power to heal, he said.

Bluehouse was dissatisfied with the limitations of the criminal and civil justice systems and in 1990 moved into the peacemaking system. He left law enforcement because he felt the system was too political and was not functioning as it should.

“He (Bluehouse) is a retainer of knowledge – an elder. He is a naat’aanii, or leader,” Stewart said. “He articulates ancient teachings in post-modern English. It’s not so much nostalgia as it is depth psychology.”

To commemorate the spill, in July the community association, with the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, Doodá Desert Rock, and a citizens’ group from Grand Junction, Colo. heard an early-morning, traditional invocation and then walked along Red Pond Water Road, where a former miner recalled the day it happened.

“This spill happened about three months after the Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania nuclear generating station partial meltdown) event,” recalled Larry King, of Church Rock and a former worker at the UNC mine.

“That got more coverage than this. People got compensated quickly at Three Mile Island – around here, I don’t think anyone got compensated for anything, and that’s what we’re still addressing to our legislature, our elected officials – that we need long-term water and soil sampling done in this area, as well as health studies of people who live along the wash.”

King and others are talking at the workshop meetings about an agreement on methods to remove present mine waste, restore and remediate the land, and relocate residents along the rural Red Water Pond Road, which follows the periphery of the abandoned mine.

“The public meetings have not been without a fair share of tension,” Stewart said, particularly when a former UNC employee was challenged on his contention that contaminated mine waste had been dumped at off-UNC property sites and that EPA had not been notified. The charge culminated in a “short but heated exchange,” and the employee in question was to be excluded from a tour of the alleged dump site because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission felt his presence “posed a threat.”

While Bluehouse’s facilitated meetings may yield results about remediation and restoration, at present “the talks have become kind of muddled – both sides are not really seeing each others’ interests, and both sides don’t seem to want to come to an accord,” said Stewart, who felt the community group’s requests may not have been clearly stated.

At the same time, the federal stance on the potential health effects of the spill is “wild – everybody and his grandma knows this stuff causes so much harm, but they keep saying it isn’t carcinogenic,” he said.

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi’kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari’

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Palmer drought index pronostications:
http://climateprogress.org/2010/10/20/ncar-daidrought-under-global-warming-a-review/
How will Australia fare?

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@David B Benson, I looked askance at the NCAR projection of increasing drought for northern Australia, as this flies in the face of current runoff and soil moisture trends. However, apparently this is down to “increased evaporation is a major cause for the increased aridity”, apparently overriding the increased precipitation in northern Australia that is already evident, and also projected to increase.

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For those in doubt regarding climate models.

Epistemology of Climate Modeling
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=1924

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Bryan Lovell
Chanllenged by Carbon: The Oil Industry and Climate Change
Cambridge Univeristy Press

This petroleum geologist states that CCS is technically feasable and hints that it would be rather expense until well into the so-called learning curve.

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I’m a bit disappointed that the discussion thread on the Quiggins site seems to have been suddenly, abruptly closed down with no notice or explanation, and that further discussion of nuclear energy seems to be not welcome.

I’m also annoyed with the position of certain anti-nuclear posters over there, who are so dogmatic that they will even simply refuse to read any link or post which is hosted on the BNC site.

We’re talking about people who do not have a basic literacy in the science and technology relating to nuclear energy – specific arguments in defence of nuclear energy aren’t needed, but basic nuclear energy “literacy” is. And they’re so dogmatic that they refuse to go out and attempt to get that basic level of technical literacy.

If we look at the community of pro-nuclear people in the community, the regular commenters on BNC, I would estimate that only a minority of them have professional qualifications in physics or engineering, and very few if any have qualifications in nuclear engineering, since there is no nuclear engineering department at any Australian university.

My point is, everyone here has gone out there and put the effort in to teach themselves about nuclear energy.

Professor Brook, for example, is a climatologist, an ecologist – and yet Brook has gone out there and taken an interest in it, and taught himself the facts about the basic technology and science of nuclear energy. It’s not hard to do, and to be honest, if anti-nuclear activists expect to argue with us, it’s difficult to not tell them that I expect them to do the same.

It’s frustrating, sometimes.

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I gave up on the Quiggin ‘discussion’ a while ago. The antinuke protaganonists place no value on intellectual integrity, and you can’t avoid the conclusion they are being consciously dishonest, and incredibly immature and childish at the same time. I gave up mainly because I started feeling .. soiled.

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I interpret the thread shutdown as an exercise in damage control. Quiggin was starting to see how badly his anti-nuke attack dogs were being mauled after they made a series of particularly stupid gaffs, and this was not at all to his liking. In his introduction to the new ‘sandpit’ thread he specifically said “The nuclear v renewables debate is going along in its sandpit with plenty of sand being thrown and a good time had by all as far as I can see.” This isn’t the sort of thing yoy say if you’re about to close a thread off, surely. But shortly after that, Chris Warren tripped up after backpeddling on his LNT claims trying to pretend that he hadn’t meant things that he’d previously said, and got himself into an awful mess over the radwaste issue. He needed to be bailed out before he shot himself in the foot again.

I call this a victory.

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Greg Meyerson (and others how advocate a publicly owned or publically controlled electricity industry),

This article provides a good example of why governments should not own and operate large, critical industries like electricity, gas, petroleum or telecommunications.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/shield-protects-nbn-from-competition/story-e6frg6zo-1225941393812?from=public_rss

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John Newlands,

The point I was trying to make by linking the NBN article is that this is an example of what governments do when the lose the plot. That is the problem with allowing governments to run our critical infrastructure and destroying competition (as is the heavy hand of government in the NBN).

When governments run infrastructure it is nearly impossible to fix the problem. Ministers who are ignorant of the business are in control. They have little expertise for being at the head of a big and essential business. They have enormous egos and don’t know what they don’t know. They are driven by ideology and short term election cycles. If they become unpopulare the minister is changed by the business goes on. The new minister is no better. This can go on for decades. Add to this problem that unions can hold the industry to ransom (as has happened many time in the past and just recently when they prvented the NSW Labor government from privatising the NSW electricity industry).

The alternative is competition and private sector investment, ownership, operation and appropriate, light, government regulation. If a company is managed badly, the management is changed. If it vcontinues they are bought out or go bankrupt and another supply meets the demand. The private sector is much more responsive to changes in requirements, implementing new technologies and whatever it takes to maintain competitive advantage. That minimises costs over the long term and ensures security of supply over the long term. Public sector ownership cannot do that as well (over the long term). It could do it better once upon a time, but not any more (in the western democracies).

These posts are all part of my long standing plead with contributors to come together and work together to achieve what is most important – win broad support to bring least-cost clean electricity generation to Australia as soon as possible.

Our requirements should be defined by the outcome we are seeking.

We should not be trying to specify how it should be achieved.

However, of course, we need to make practical proposals (and options) as to how it can be achieved, but these should not detract from a focus on the required outcome.

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The nuclear sandpit thread’s open again. Professor Quiggin says it was closed automatically due to being an old thread, or some such bug.

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Scott,

Thanks for the link.

Slide 54 of 57 in the first link shows that the S-PRISM {prototype plant) should be half way through the Prototype Test phase, the fuel’s been loaded and it is approaching full power.

The Standard Plant should be nearing completion Detail Design certification.

So how is it doing compared with this schedule (from 2001).

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quokka,

I cannot believe the line you are taking on this. This sounds highly irresponsible. $43 billion is nearly half the total Federal government debt. To spend that without a proper cost benefit anaysis is highly irresponsible. We’ve had no end of wasteage from this government in three years. I cannot believe how anyone could stand up for this. No onder people are worried about what elest they will do (like CPRS Carbon tax and many other worries).

The department of Defenece si required to use Earned Value Performance Measurement on any defence procurement in excess of $100 million. NBN is $43 billion and there isn’t even a proper project plan. Unbelieveable. Totally indefencible.

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quokka,

you say:

I have a considerable experience in data communications and networking dealing with all sort of stuff

I respect that. And I respect a lot of the other knowledge you have and that makes your contributions on BNC and on Quiggins web site valuable and interesting.

But this point is not about data communications. The point is about the management of public finances.

And, yes, I repeat, we are being misled, scammed.

What the Oppostion and the parts of the media that are doing their job (proper investigative journalism) are trying to expose is that most of the $43 billion estimated cost of the NBN should be included in the Federal budget. It is not. That is a scam.

If the $43 billion was included in the Federal budget, the federal budget would be in deficit for many years longer than the Government is admitting. That is, our debt would keep rising for much longer and it wouldn’t be paid off for perhaps another decade beyond what the government is saying.

That is the point. That is why we are being scammed. What is happening is worse than what the Whitlam government did.

The relevance of this to policy on ETS and Carbon tax is that it demonstrates the government is incompetent, and cannot be trusted (due to either dishonesty or incompetence or a combination of these).

This contributes to the general feeling of distrust about the government’s and the Green’s plans for carbon taxes or ETS.

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Re radiometric map when you’re hot you’re hot. This article explains more http://www.ga.gov.au/ausgeonews/ausgeonews200512/uranium.jsp

We’re a bit like the monks perched on a rocky outcrop in the Irish Sea who starved because they wouldn’t eat fish.

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Cowan
I still don`t get it. Any research lab could proof them wrong/falsify the resultsof their experiments.
Instead they license their “technology” and aquire more capital.
Are private investors that stupid?

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Mark Duffett,

I understand Geoscience Australia is identifying uranium deposit targets at down to 400m depth in one place and 1000m depth in another using electromagnetic geophysics methods. Can you elaborate?

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