March 28, 2008
Won't Meet Emissions Targets, Unless
With present policies Australia has no chance of reducing our C02 emissions by anywhere near 80 per cent by the year 2050. Before I explain why, I should say that I am a greenhouse sceptic taking the view that it is very unlikely that CO2 is having a major effect on changing climate. However, due to the extreme consequences of a potential large rise in temperature, I believe it is prudent to take reasonable and sensible measures to reduce C02 emissions.
Australia has got its head in the sand on two major issues that make the task of meeting our commitments virtually impossible. These are (a) we have a rapidly growing population and (b) we have no technology at hand today to achieve the targets except nuclear power which the government refuses to consider.
Read the complete article by Peter Ridd here http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7158&page=1
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July 11, 2006
What Will Power Tomorrow?
Last night Australian current affairs program Four Corners ran a story titled ‘Peak oil?’.
It began with the proposition that we might run out of oil soon and that this could be catastrophic, but then went on to outline a range of alternatives. The program reminded me of all the useful comments in the thread following my blog post of March 8 ‘We will never run out of oil: Philip Burgess’.
Four Corners even quoted Brian Fisher from ABARE suggesting that we could liquefy coal at US$40 a barrel which is cheaper than oil from the ground now at US$70 a barrel. Of course, while it might be affordable, liquefying coal will generate lots of greenhouse gases.
I wonder how many greenhouse gases the other potential options will generate including solar, biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel including from algae), hydrogen fuel cells, CNG (natural gas/methane), oil from tar sands, oil from shale … What else could be used to power cars, trucks and tractors?
Give Sweden is confident it's economy can become ‘independent of oil’ by 2020 I am confident the rest of the world will also manage beyond peak oil. The Swedes propose to run their cars on ethanol and generate electricity from ‘rivers and nuclear’.
Just today new environment group the Australian Environment Foundation [1] put out a media release stating that our energy future will be "volatile and unpredictable" and called for a “significant expansion of the federal government’s inquiry into nuclear energy, as the current review will not produce a sufficiently accurate or useful comparison between the various energy generating options.”
It's fair to conclude that there will be a worldwide transition from oil to something else, but we don’t know how rough or smooth that transition might be, nor how imminent.
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[1] I’m a director of the AEF.
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June 05, 2006
Reflections on World Environment Day 2006
It's World Environment Day and I woke to hear Australia's MInister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer talking up the possibility of the Australian Government building a nuclear power station to run a water desalination plant for Adelaide.
Adelaide is the capital of the driest state on this driest of continents. South Australia has plenty of uranium. Nuclear power is greenhouse neutral. Much of the water for Adelaide has been traditionally piped a couple of hundred kilomtres from the Murray River. It would all seem like a rather sensible idea me, but it is radical and of course the very conservative Australian Labor Party has already condemned it (click here for the response from Kevin Rudd on ABC Online).
Interestingly British Labor PM Tony Blair is talking about the possibility of a second generation of nuclear power stations for the UK, when Australia doesn't yet have a single nuclear power station. And while the USA gets something like 20 percent of its water from desalination, desalination is also a novel idea for Australia.
My friend Phil Sawyer proposed both a desalination plant for Adelaide and a nuclear power station in his documentary 'In Flinders Wake' released in 2002 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the voyage of Matthew Fliners. It was shown on SBS TV about the same time.
[Phil at the launch, photograph from the ABC SA website]
Phil has been a supporter of new environment group the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) which was launched exactly a year ago in Tenterfield. The group has been fairly quiet over the last year, but there will be a big get together for the first Australian Environment Foundation AGM and conference on 23rd and 24th September at Rydges, Southbank in Brisbane. Mark that date in your diaries. Chances are Phil and copies of his video will also be there.
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April 26, 2006
20 Years Since Chernobyl
Twenty years ago, on 26th April 1986, there was a disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. There was no containment building and a plume of radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the eastern United States resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people. It is regarded as the worst accident in the history of nuclear power.
There is, however, on going dispute about how many actually died as a result of the disaster. Michael Crichton puts the figure at just 56, blog post here. Greenpeace claim the death toll was a lot higher. There is some discussion at Wikipedia:
"A 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed 56 direct deaths; 47 accident workers and 9 children with thyroid cancer, and estimated that as many as 9,000 people, among the approximately 6.6 million, will ultimately die from some form of cancer (one of the induced diseases). For its part, Greenpeace estimates a total death toll of 93,000 but cite in their report “The most recently published figures indicate that in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine alone the accident could have resulted in an estimated 200,000 additional deaths in the period between 1990 and 2004.”
In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the disaster a WHO report entitled 'Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident' was produced, to read the overview click here.
Following are some excerpts:
"In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident. While a large number of these cancers resulted from radiation following the accident, intense medical monitoring for thyroid disease among the affected population has also resulted in the detection of thyroid cancers at a sub-clinical level, and so contributed to the overall increase in thyroid cancer numbers. Fortunately, even in children with advanced tumours, treatment has been highly effective and the general prognosis for young patients is good. However, they will need to take drugs for the rest of their lives to replace the loss of thyroid function. Further, there needs to be more study to evaluate the prognosis for children, especially those with distant metastases. It is expected that the increased incidence of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl will continue for many years, although the long-term magnitude of the risk is difficult to quantify.... While scientists have conducted studies to determine whether cancers in many other organs may have been caused by radiation, reviews by the WHO Expert Group revealed no evidence of increased cancer risks, apart from thyroid cancer, that can clearly be attributed to radiation from Chernobyl. Aside from the recent finding on leukaemia risk among Chernobyl liquidators, reports indicate a small increase in the incidence of pre-menopausal breast cancer in the most contaminated areas, which appear to be related to radiation dose. Both of these findings, however, need confirmation in well-designed epidemiological studies. The absence of demonstrated increases in cancer risk – apart from thyroid cancer – is not proof that no increase has occurred. Based on the experience of atomic bomb survivors, a small increase in the risk of cancer is expected, even at the low to moderate doses received. Such an increase, however, is expected to be difficult to identify.
... Given the low radiation doses received by most people exposed to the Chernobyl accident, no effects on fertility, numbers of stillbirths, adverse pregnancy outcomes or delivery complications have been demonstrated nor are there expected to be any. A modest but steady increase in reported congenital malformations in both contaminated and uncontaminated areas of Belarus appears related to improved reporting and not to radiation exposure."
So it would seem the number of people that died as a direct result of the accident has probably been grossly overstated and may be as low as 56. There has been an increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer particularly in individuals under 18 years of age at the time of exposure to the radiation. The thyroid cancer has proven manageable but not curable.
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March 07, 2006
India Short of Uranium: PM Singh
Australia's Prime Minister John Howard has been visiting India and was on All India Radio with Prime Minister Singh. The interview was short and focused on Australian uranium.
JOURNALIST: Sir, I am from All India Radio. I have a question for both the Prime Ministers. What are both of your expectations from this visit?PRIME MINSTER SINGH:
India and Australia are members of the Commonwealth. We are two English-speaking countries. We have a large Indian community in Australia. We have nearly 30,000 students studying there. Our trade is expanding very rapidly. This is a unique opportunity for me and the Prime Minister to review the progress we have made in working together and explore new options so that our two countries can cooperate more intensively and diversely.PRIME MINISTER HOWARD:
This is a wonderful moment in the history of the relationship between the two countries to consolidate what we have achieved in the past and have in common but also to explore a lot of new fields. India's economic growth, her influence, is very significant. India is now the fourth-largest economy in the world and in a short distance of time may in fact become the third. Its growth rate is very significant. We have a lot in common. We have the shared history and the shared love of certain sports that you're very familiar with. All of those things bind us together and both the Prime Minister and I believe very strongly that now is the right time to achieve what you might call a quantum leap in the relationship.JOURNALIST:
Dr Singh, are you hoping to buy Australian uranium?PRIME MINISTER SINGH:
We would like to trade with Australia in all areas and we are short of uranium. We would very much like Australia to sell uranium to India.JOURNALIST:
Would you like a deal on uranium done while Prime Minister Howard is here?PRIME MINISTER SINGH:
Well I will discuss all relevant issues.JOURNALIST:
Are you hopeful of Mr Howard acceding to your request for Australian uranium?PRIME MINISTER SINGH:
We will discuss all these issues.PRIME MINISTER HOWARD:
I think we will talk about them and we'll talk about them against the background of the policies and the needs of the two countries. Thank you.
In a speech to a business luncheon in New Delhi, the Australian Prime Minister said:
"Energy of course plays a critical role in our economic relationship and I know in your minds will be the agreement signed between the United States and India only three days ago regarding the nuclear industry. This will be an issue to be discussed between myself and the Indian Prime Minister later today and I will be interested to hear more about that arrangement and I will be interested to hear the views that the Prime Minister may wish to put to me in relation to it.Australia supplies 25 per cent of India's gold market, and Australian coal is used in more than 50 per cent of the steel that is produced in India. And with the large global increase in demand for energy, the international market for some resources - such as LNG - is extremely tight and I am encouraged that people from both India and Australia are working on these issues and I note that the leader of the Australian delegation Mr Charles Goode of Woodside is with us today and his knowledge of those matters is very, very impressive indeed.
The establishment of the Australia-India Joint Working Group on Energy and Minerals will be an important vehicle to address these issues. I am very pleased that this afternoon I will witness, with the Prime Minister, the signing of an Australia-India Trade and Economic Framework Agreement and this will provide an important basis for the facilitation and the future development of the trade and economic relationship and it will encourage closer strategic cooperation in many of the key economic sectors."
While India would like to buy Australian uranium, Australia currently won't sell to countries that are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that includes India and Israel.
But I get the impression something is going to change?
Interestingly the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognises 'the right' of the US, Britain, France, China and Russia - all permanent members of the UN Security Council - to have nuclear weapons but stops other countries from having nuclear weapons.
Posted by jennifer at 06:34 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
October 26, 2005
Galarrwuy Yunupingu Says Yes to Nuclear Waste
The Northern Territory Chief Minister, Clare Martin, has said she will fight "tooth and nail" the building of even a small nuclear waste facility in the Territory.
Australia produces nuclear waste at Lucus Heights., where the Sydney facility undertakes nuclear-related research including for diagnosing and treating cancer, Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis.
The preferred site for storing the waste from Lucas Height, which is apparently a Federal Government responsibility, is Woomera, but the South Australian government has said "no".
The Northern Territory looks set to end up with the waste facility because the Commonwealth can force it on a Territory.
I have previously written that former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and researcher Geoff Hudson have both endorsed the Australian outback/the Northern Territory as a good place to store not only Sydney's waste, but the world's nuclear waste.
I was facinated to read today that an Aboriginal leader is now backing the concept of at least a small nuclear waste facility in the Territory.
According to ABC Online, Galarrwuy Yunupingu says he would be happy to consider a waste dump on his tribal land.
Mr Yunupingu said a [nuclear] dump on Gumatj Land could mean sealed roads, infrastructure and long-term benefits to Aboriginal people as well an oncology unit for Darwin's Hospital.
He says the dump is an issue of national importance, with over 400,000 Australians receiving radioactive medical treatment each year.
He says Chief Minister Clare Martin should admit that a dump could be safely built in the Territory.
..........
I lived for the first few years of my life (1963-1971) at a place called Coomalie Creek just 'around the corner' from the first big uranium mine in Australia at Rum Jungle. The mine site has since been reabilitated and looks like this, View image (100kbs).
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October 10, 2005
Australia: Best Place on Earth for Nuclear Waste
After Bob Hawke suggested we should take the world's nuclear waste, I agreed.
Geoff Hudson gives six good reasons why at Ockham's Razor:
One. The site should be well away from any fault line. Storage sites would not be recommended for Japan, the San Andreas Fault, New Zealand or Indonesia. We should choose a country sitting in the middle of a large and stable tectonic plate.
Two. The site should be dry. Water can corrode metals given enough time, and time it will have. We want a site in a desert. This will also eliminate the risk of fire. Without vegetation you cannot have large naturally occurring fires which could destroy the safety systems you would want.
Three. The site should be well away from the sea. Preferably 100 kilometres inland. We have not seen tsunamis get 10km inland in recent history, but we need to think in terms of thousands of years, rather than hundreds.
The human risk to a repository of radioactive waste is more difficult to manage. One clear risk is the use of the waste by terrorists. Their objective would be to make a dirty bomb: conventional explosives mixed with radioactive waste. If this achieved the same effect as Chernobyl, but in London, New York or Paris, the consequences would be catastrophic. Imagine if the recent bombs in London had been radioactive. Mass evacuation, transport shutdown, businesses stopped. The effects would dominate the city and be felt as far away as Australia. In fact, this is the main threat which nuclear waste poses to Australians. Not to health or the environment, but to our economy. It might not cause a depression but it could come close. To prevent this, we need to impose further requirements on the site:
Four. The site should be very sparsely inhabited. If there are no people there, then there will be no infrastructure to support the people or the movement of people, so the chance that terrorists will get to the site and be able to remove waste from it will be limited.
Five. The site should be on an island, so a ship is needed to get the waste to a place where it could not do a lot of damage.
Six. The country governing the site must maintain the safety systems at the repository. It should have a stable government, preferably one with no history of civil war. The people in the country should be well educated and technologically advanced enough to know the risks of nuclear radiation, so that the protection of the site is preserved over changes in government.
Is there a place on earth which satisfies these six criteria?
The United States fails on three counts. The Yucca Mountain site, the intended US waste repository, is only 145 kilometres from Las Vegas and has three fault lines below it and volcanos nearby.
Japan, another heavy user of nuclear power, is also out. The whole country is on the geologically active Pacific Rim.
Europe has very few places where the population density is low, and equally fewer which are dry.
There are places in Africa which have few people and which are dry, but the continent is famous for civil unrest.
To my mind, the clear winner in this contest is Australia.
Posted by jennifer at 07:04 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
August 05, 2005
Uranium Mining, but Not Croc Hunting
The NT government has conceded the Federal government has ultimate power of approval over new uranium mines - making the NT ban on new mines ineffective. And according to today's Financial Review, this concession could result in new uranium exports of $12 billion with strong demand for uranium coming from China, Europe and Russia.
While crocodile hunting may never be worth very much relative to uranium mining, it is interesting that the NT government has a plan for limited and regulated safari hunting of crocodiles, but in this instance can't get federal government approval. Federal government approval is apparently needed in order to be able to export "the products of the safari hunts", see
http://www.nt.gov.au/ocm/media_releases/2005/07%20July/20050713_ScrymgourCrocSafaris.pdf .
UPDATE 4PM
Uranium miners are confused at
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200508/s1431171.htm and
Queensland stand by opposition to uranium mining at
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200508/s1431258.htm
Posted by jennifer at 02:02 PM | Comments (2)
June 06, 2005
Nuclear & Forest Update, & a Request
1. Nuclear - update
Some outrage followed Bob Carr's suggestion we should debate nuclear power as an energy option.
The Australian today has a piece by Amanda Hodge that includes:
"It's an attempt to make the argument a coal versus nuclear debate to soften people's resistance to another coal-fired power station, when the debate should be about coal versus renewable options," one observer says. Clive Hamilton from the Australia Institute agrees. As executive director of the independent think tank, Hamilton is a keen observer of social and environmental public policy and says Carr's record on the environment is mixed. While he has gained significant ground on the traditional "green" environmental issues, such as forests and national parks, he has had little success on the "brown" issues: industrial environmental concerns, such as air pollution and climate change.
The Australian also has an opinion piece on the virtues of nuclear energy by Leslie Kemeny with the comment that:
For many countries the reliability, safety, economy and greenhouse gas-free operation of nuclear plants has made nuclear energy inevitable. Unfortunately for Australia, which supplies 13 countries with uranium fuel, the technology has not been properly considered.The paradox of a nation endowed with more than 40 per cent of the world's economically recoverable uranium fuel but which strenuously resists its use in its domestic energy policies bemuses the global community. This is especially true of countries such as France and Japan, who manage to minimise their own greenhouse emissions through the use of Australian uranium.
And also an opinion piece by Bill Kininmonth that begins:
AS Australia develops policies for its diverse energy resources there is a need to ensure that the policies are based on sound economics, technologies and science.Unfortunately, it is representation of the science of climate change where there is most uncertainty, including a fair degree of misrepresentation.
2. Pilliga-Goonoo - Update
According to Farm Online:
The NSW Government has offered timber mills in north-western NSW access to a further 15,000 hectares of high quality cypress forest. This is a result of protests against its decision to lock up 350,000 ha of the Brigalow Belt South Bioregion.I wrote about these forests, and environmentalism as a faith, for Online Opinion for World Environment Day. My piece included the comment:
We live in a secular society and value evidence. Yet it is the naive and romantic concept of nature that very often underpins public policy decision making on environmental issues in Australia. For example, when the NSW government announced a ban on logging in the Pilliga-Goonoo forests it described the decision as achieving "permanent conservation" of these iconic forests. In reality without active management there can be no conservation of these forests. The forests are less than 150-years-old and have grown-up with a timber industry that has tended the cypress and Eucalyptus creating tall trees and also habitat for iconic species such as koalas and barking owls.
3. Information Request
Jennifer, I need information on the transpiration rate of native grass and the depth that native grass would draw water from. Regards Gary
Posted by jennifer at 10:54 AM | Comments (8)
June 03, 2005
Bob Carr Calls for Debate on Nuclear
According to ABC Online, New South Wales Premier Bob Carr has called for a debate on the benefits and risks of nuclear power as an alternative energy source.
"The world's got to debate whether uranium-derived power is more dangerous than coal," he said.
"Coal is looking very dangerous - there ought to be a debate."
Mr Carr says a new energy source needs to be found because alternative power sources such as wind, solar and hydrogen are not yet viable options.
"You could have a wind farm across all of outback New South Wales," he said. "It'd kill every kookaburra but it wouldn't provide the base-load [power] we need."
Posted by jennifer at 03:38 AM | Comments (27)
May 06, 2005
If Another 5 Years of Tony Blair, And
The big news this morning is that exit polls suggest Tony Blair will be re-elected to lead Britain for another 5 years. What does this mean for the environment?
Blair clearly cares about the environment and is concerned by what he sees as a situation of general and accelerating deterioration in the global environment. He has spoken about the need to "bring the environment, economic development and social justice together" and is particularly concerned about climate change.
During the election the Greens made much of the possibility that a future Labour government would commit Britain to a "nuclear future".
The UK apparently has 14 'ageing' nuclear power stations and Blair has not ruled out the possibility of a new generation of nuclear power stations on the basis that nuclear power is almost 'carbon neutral' and would help Britain meet its Kyoto targets.
ALSO TODAY (sent in from blog readers) ...
Greenpeace in Court:
This week, opening statements were heard in Alaskan District Court in a case that charges Greenpeace with violating environmental law. Greenpeace is charged with criminal negligence by failing to have the proper oil spill response paperwork during an anti-logging campaign.
Global Dimming:
Today's New York Times has an article about global dimming: "I think what could have happened is the dimming between the 1960's and 1980's counteracted the greenhouse effect," Dr. Wild said. "When the dimming faded, the effects of the greenhouse gases became more evident. There is no masking by the dimming any more."
A reader of this blog sent the link with the comment, "Actually, it is a clear contradiction, showing that nature (the Sun), not rising CO2, is responsible for Hansen's 'energy imbalance'."
Posted by jennifer at 11:15 AM | Comments (6)
April 17, 2005
Greenpeace wants nuclear waste sent to Australia
I remember attending People for Nuclear Disarmament rallies in the early 1980s. We held placards and chanted - mostly against nuclear weapons testing at Muroroa Atoll by the French.
Twenty years later there has been no nuclear war. France now uses its nuclear technology to generate 80 percent of its electricity. France also specializes in reprocessing nuclear waste including spent nuclear fuel rods from Sydney's Lucas Heights.
Lucus Heights is the base for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). ANSTO is undertaking a diverse range of nuclear-related research including developing radiopharmaceuticals and techniques for diagnosing and treating cancer, Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis.
Last Wednesday Greenpeace was successful in having a French Court of Appeal rule against the French company that processes ANSTO's nuclear waste.
At issues is whether the company COGEMA, which has long specialized in reprocessing nuclear waste, has its paper work in order.
Greenpeace is hoping that the ruling could mean the nuclear waste from ANSTO has to be returned to Australia.
Why would Greenpeace want nuclear waste returned to Australia? I guess it could potentially be seen as a great publicity stunt.
Greenpeace is currently actively campaigning against nuclear power, reprocessing and waste dumping.
There are about 440 commercial nuclear power reactors operating in 31 countries supplying 17 per cent of the world's electricity. 56 countries operate a total of 284 research reactors along the lines of Lucas Heights. 220 reactors power ships and submarines.
Posted by jennifer at 08:18 PM | Comments (2)