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In a previous post (part 1), I described some media reactions to my recent Energy paper (on how carbon pricing changes the relative competitiveness of low-carbon baseload generating technologies). The section of the media I covered in that post is often considered to be ‘progressive’ and environmentally focussed — and yet, their reactions to our […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 4 Comments »
Guest post by Dr Gene Preston. Gene has had a long career as a power system engineer, performing generation planning, transmission planning, and distribution planning for Austin Energy. He is currently doing transmission studies for wind developers. He wrote all his own modeling software including the current network model used to perform his consulting studies. His […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 52 Comments »
It’s been fascinating to watch the media reaction to our Energy paper on how carbon pricing changes the relative competitiveness of low-carbon baseload generating technologies. It has certainly stirred a lot of interest, and the timing was admittedly celestial, because two other reports on electricity costs and technology options (an ATSE and EPRI report) were […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 112 Comments »
Yesterday, The Australian newspaper published an Op Ed piece by Nicholson, Biegler & Brook, entitled Emission reductions are not blowin’ in the wind, which discusses our recent paper in Energy. The print (dead tree) version of the article even had the graph shown here included! However, the editor had to cut down our original version […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 31 Comments »
This is a press release to accompany a new peer-reviewed paper by Martin Nicholson, Tom Biegler and me (Barry Brook), published online this week in the journal Energy. In subsequents BNC post, I will look at how the media has reacted so far to the story (the good, the bad and the ugly), and also […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Hot news in climate science, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 94 Comments »
Guest Post by Dr Tom M. L. Wigley. Tom is a a senior scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and former Director of the CRU. He is an adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide. For his list of papers and citations, click here (his h-index […]
Filed under: Climate change Q&A, Emissions reduction | 81 Comments »
Below are two climate change book reviews by me; I hope you find them as interesting as I did. I’ve provided an Amazon link to one and a Book Depository link to another — because I’m not out to promote any particular online bookstore (although I tend to find the latter cheapest, and as to […]
Filed under: Climate change Q&A, Ecological impacts, Emissions reduction | 24 Comments »
I note that there has been some interesting discussion here on costs of electricity, especial the comparative value of fossil fuels versus nuclear (and renewables). This is a point I will revisit from a number of perspectives over the next few months, because I agree with commenters like Arthur Dent, Peter Lang and DV82XL that […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 259 Comments »
Back in September, I visited UNSW in Sydney and debated Mark Diesendorf on nuclear and solar power. It was a useful night, with quite a few Sydney-based BNC readers attending. I was pleased with the outcome — I just hope the audio becomes available at some point. Now this “Brain Food” event comes to Melbourne. […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 95 Comments »
The nuclear scenario I describe here requires around 10,000 GWe of nuclear capacity by 2060, to replace most of our current fossil fuel use. (For further justification of this 10 TW target, read this TCASE post.) My next step is to look critically as some of the critical underpinning assumptions — uranium supply and build […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy, Scenario Analysis | 185 Comments »
Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy (TCASE) is a series of posts I’ve built up over the last year on BNC (and continue to add to). This has also branched off into a live seminar series (described in detail in this post), hosted by the Royal Institution of Australia (RiAus), and has proven to be very […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy, TCASE Series | 9 Comments »
Want to know more about the Integral Fast Reactor technology from the comfort of your lounge room chair? Then these two fascinating videos, recently transcoded and uploaded by Steve Kirsch to the “ifr.blp.tv” website, are for you. You can watch online, or download in .MP4 format (choose the format and then the download link below) […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, IFR Facts and Discussion, Nuclear Energy | 32 Comments »
There has been a lot of hype recently about the “Travelling Wave Reactor” (TWR), thanks largely to a very popular TED talk given recently by none other than Microsoft founder and multi-billionaire Bill Gates. In the 20 min talk, he describes the urgent need for cheap, abundant, low-CO2 energy, if we are to successfully mitigate […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 30 Comments »
When I was in Idaho Falls in August 2010, one of the places I visited was the Experimental Breeder Reactor I. It’s now a publicly accessible U.S. National Historic Landmark, and has some incredible experimental X-39 atomic aircraft engines sitting out the front (see little inset photo). I’ll talk more about this visit in a […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 37 Comments »
When I was at UNSW yesterday — prior to my debate with Mark Diesendorf — I met up with Ted Trainer, author of ‘Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society“. We had a great chat, and I think I even inched him a little towards IFRs (ever the optimist). Anyway, Ted asked me to post […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Renewable planet | 64 Comments »
Open Thread 5 has spooled off the BNC front page, so it’s time for new one. 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, […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Open Thread | 655 Comments »
About 1 year ago, I posted on BNC two important pieces by Peter Lang – “Does wind power reduce carbon emissions?” and a follow-up reply. Together, these stirred up considerable discussion (about 500 comments to date) and raised important questions about the ability of wind-energy to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels, when natural gas usage for […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Renewable planet | 129 Comments »
Given the flurry of heated discussion on the topic of ‘peak oil‘ on another BNC post, I invited one of the protagonists, Dave Lankshear (a.k.a. “Eclipse Now” — see here for his blog), to write up a summary piece which described his position on the topic. This is given below, and should provide a good […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Future shock | 151 Comments »
Download the printable 13-page PDF (includes appendix) here. By Peter Lang. Peter is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on a wide range of energy projects throughout the world, including managing energy R&D and providing policy advice for government and opposition. His experience includes: coal, oil, gas, hydro, geothermal, nuclear power plants, […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Renewable planet | 228 Comments »
I’m about to hit the road once again, this time to take the great American road trip for 13 hours, from Sacremento to Idaho Falls, with Tom Blees, leaving bright and early tomorrow morning. Today I had a fantastic visit to UC Berkeley and the lab of Prof Per Peterson, and will have lots more […]
Filed under: Emissions reduction, Future shock, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 26 Comments »
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