What is your energy philosophy?

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 […]

Open Thread 18

The previous Open Thread has gone past 550 comments, so it’s time for a fresh palette. 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 […]

Risk perception – of fans and fission reactors

Guest Post by Craig Schumacher. Craig has been commenting on nuclear power themed websites for about five years and has published his own blog, Channelling the Strong Force, since 2008. He formed the nuclear power advocacy organisation, Nucleus 92 Inc., in 2009. He is a regular commenter on this and other pro-nuclear sites under the […]

Nuclear risk insurance

Guest Post by Luke Weston. Luke is a Melbourne-based physicist and occasional freelance electronic engineer, with a strong interest in educating the community about nuclear energy and related issues. It is often said by the anti-nuclearists that the commercial nuclear energy industry “can’t get insurance” against the risks of nuclear or radiological accidents, or that it […]

TCASE 14: Assessment of electricity generation costs

In the previous TCASE post, I considered how various low-carbon energy technologies meet the following criteria: commercial readiness, scalability, dispatchability, fuel constraints, load access, storage requirements, capacity factor and emissions intensity. Here I consider the next issue: cost of deployment, based on expert consensus. The primary data again come from the work I had published in 2011 […]

TCASE 13: Assessment of suitability of technologies for carbon dioxide mitigation

The problem of replacing our dependence on fossil fuels is complex. In Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy (TCASE) #12, a checklist was provided to allow assessment of energy transition plans. The sort of questions listed in TCASE 12 are critical for evaluating the feasibility of future scenarios, like the ones from the recent IPCC report […]

A critique of the 2011 IPCC Report on Renewable Energy

The following is a detailed guest post by Dr Ted Trainer, University of NSW (http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/). In it, he provides the most detailed critique I’ve yet seen of the recent IPCC renewable energy scenarios report. Now, I don’t agree with everything Ted says — in particular the conclusion that the only feasible alternative to large-scale renewables is “The […]

Hansen warns not to drink sustainable energy Kool-Aid

Regular readers of BNC would know that I’m hardly the only climate change researcher to recommend serious deployment of nuclear energy to displace fossil fuels. (Although I’m often portrayed as an isolated [and presumably therefore ignorant?] voice on this point). One very prominent example of a colleague in arms is my fellow SCGI member, Dr […]

Carbon smoke and mirrors – the reality of emissions reduction plans

When it comes to energy and carbon emissions reduction, the devil is always in the detail. So too with Australia’s plans to cut its emissions by five per cent below year 2000 levels by 2020. But first, let’s look at the big picture. Why we need to do this As a scientist who researches the impacts […]

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