Greens want every possible intervention except one which “solves” their useful crisis
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
‘Drill Bit Dana’ has been at it again, trying to claim that we don’t “accept the science”, because we are ideologically opposed to their solution – massive government intervention.
There is just one problem with this argument – its an utter falsehood. The reason its a falsehood, is massive government intervention is not the only, or by any measure the best, route to reducing CO2 emissions. Most skeptics are supporters of power generation solutions which would, as a byproduct, significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
We have no reason to reject alarmist science, other than we think it is wrong.
Take the example of America. The USA has substantially reduced CO2 emissions over the last decade, because of fracking – the switch from coal to gas, even though energy use has gone up, has reduced the amount of carbon which is burned to produce that energy.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/02/us-co2-emissions-may-drop-to-1990-levels-this-year/
Of course, America’s coal producers are still mining as much coal as they ever did – and exporting it to Europe, whose disastrous policy failures have increased costs and CO2 emissions.
In the case of fracking, the reduction of CO2 emissions might have been incidental, but fracking has produced results. Surely when it comes to CO2, results are what count?
But the real elephant in the room, with regard to emissions reduction, is the nuclear option.
James Hansen likes nuclear power.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html
George Monbiot likes nuclear power. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
Anthony Watts likes nuclear power.
James Delingpole likes nuclear power.
Jo Nova likes nuclear power.
The Heartland Institute likes nuclear power.
http://blog.heartland.org/2013/11/global-warmings-mt-rushmore-wisely-embraces-nuclear-power/
So why isn’t nuclear power the main focus of everyone’s attention? Why do far too many alarmists persist with antagonising us, by pushing their absurd carbon taxes and government intervention, when they could be working with us? Why do alarmists keep trying to force us to accept solutions which we find utterly unacceptable, when there are obvious solutions which we could all embrace?
Perhaps some alarmists are worried about the risk of nuclear accidents – but, if climate change is as serious as they say, how can the risk of a nuclear meltdown or ten possibly compare to what alarmists claim is an imminent risk to the survival of all humanity?
Why do alarmists persist with pushing falsehoods about the motivation of their opponents, when they could, right now, be taking positive, substantial steps to promote policies which actually would reduce CO2 emissions?
What was the motivation of Phil Jones, Director of the CRU, when he wrote the following Climategate email:-
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0837094033.txt
“Britain seems to have found it’s Pat Michaels/Fred Singer/Bob Balling/ Dick Lindzen. Our population is only 25 % of yours so we only get 1 for every 4 you have. His name in case you should come across him is Piers Corbyn. … He’s not all bad as he doesn’t have much confidence in nuclear-power safety.”
Does Phil Jones really think that nuclear safety is more of an issue than global warming?
The easy answer to this dilemma is that most alarmists are being dishonest – that they don’t really believe CO2 is an important issue, that its simply a convenient excuse to push their political agenda. But surely they can’t all be bent? Monbiot seems sincere about embracing nuclear power. Hansen, and the authors of the open letter, seem sincere about promoting nuclear power. Are they really the only honest participants on the alarmist side of the debate? Surely this can’t be the case.
What am I missing?
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Greens are fundamentally opposed to anything that works.
Well the main reason in the UK Eric is the current proposal is the most expensive nuclear power station in the world. And with strike prices at £90 kw/h it’s barely cheaper than onshore wind at £95 kw/h. Compared to the current strike price of coal and gas at £50 mw/h it doesn’t seem such a bargain as going flat out for gas……But I’m speaking as someone who’s expected to pay for it of course, not as someone overly concerned about the differences between switching to gas, and building nuclear on CO2 emissions for no significant purpose.
I’d probably prefer Lockheed Martins T4 compact fusion to either, in the fullness of time.
First post from Roger Sowell directing us to the ~24 part series of posts on his blog where he explains how nuclear energy is too expensive without government help and is too dangerous and always has been and always will be despite the technology advances as the extreme risk and cost is inherent, will be showing up in:
3..
2..
1..
The right path is absurdly simple, stay with coal, oil and gas until it GENUINELY begins to reach peak supply, then switch to nuclear.
All the rest of these Heath Robinson solutions be damned, Unless there is a technological breakthrough – this is the only sensible course.
Most greens have been anti-nuclear for as long as they can remember, so to countenance an embarrassing about-face from a lifelong (and passionately held) position to ‘tackle climate change’ is anathema to their pride.
The other big problem isn’t so much that nuclear carries risks – historically it’s been ultra-safe. No, the risk they least want to face is that it will work too well – which at a stroke renders their anti-capitalist stance royally buggered.
More and more it’s obvious ‘Big Green’ is the chosen vehicle of global political restructuring. Look at this for a perfect example:
Guardian reader event: Naomi Klein
In her provocative new book Klein argues that radical political change is needed in the fight against climate change. She will be in conversation with columnist and writer Owen Jones
http://www.theguardian.com/reader-events/naomi-klein-guardian-reader-event
“The question arises: Were the decisions concerning this enormous funding for global warming research taken out of genuine concern that the climate is allegedly changing as a result of CO2 industrial emissions, or do some other undisclosed ideas stand behind this money, IPCC activity, Kyoto, and all the gruesome catastrophic propaganda the world is now exposed to? If this concern is genuine, then why do we not see a storm of enthusiastic environmentalists and United Nations officials demanding to replace all fossil-fuel plants with nuclear plants, which have zero emission of greenhouse gases, are environmentally friendly, more economical, and much safer for plant workers and much safer for the general population than other sources of energy?”
– Zbigniew Jaworowski
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2014/01/10/300-groups-urge-hansen-to-rethink-nuclear/
Environmentalists urge Hansen to rethink nuclear
300+ groups say: “It is simply not feasible for nuclear power to be a part of a sustainable, safe and affordable future for humankind.”
In the letter posted below, 311 U.S. and international environmental and clean energy groups say that, while they respect the climate change work of Dr. James Hansen and three of his academic colleagues, they take strong exception to the notion that nuclear power is the solution to global warming.
The joint letter was released January 8, in response to a November 3, 2013 statement from Dr. James Hansen and three of his academic world colleagues, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, and Tom Wigley, in which they voiced support for increased use of nuclear power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The statement, organized by the Civil Society Initute and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), urges Hansen and his colleagues to publicly debate the question of climate change and nuclear power.
Gentlemen,
Although we greatly respect your work on climate and lending it a much higher profile in public dialogue than would otherwise be the case, we read your letter of November 3, 2013 urging the environmental community to support nuclear power as a solution to climate change with concern. We respectfully disagree with your analysis that nuclear power can safely and affordably mitigate climate change.
Nuclear power is not a financially viable option. Since its inception it has required taxpayer subsidies and publically financed indemnity against accidents. New construction requires billions in public subsidies to attract private capital and, once under construction, severe cost overruns are all but inevitable. As for operational safety, the history of nuclear power plants in the US is fraught with near misses, as documented by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and creates another financial and safety quagmire – high-level nuclear waste. Internationally, we’ve experienced two catastrophic accidents for a technology deemed to be virtually ‘failsafe’.
As for “advanced” nuclear designs endorsed in your letter, they have been tried and failed or are mere blueprints without realistic hope, in the near term, if ever, to be commercialized. The promise and potential impact you lend breeder reactor technology in your letter is misplaced. Globally, $100 billion over sixty years have been squandered to bring the technology to commercialization without success. The liquid sodium-based cooling system is highly dangerous as proven in Japan and the US. And the technology has proven to be highly unreliable.
Equally detrimental in cost and environmental impact is reprocessing of nuclear waste. In France, the poster child for nuclear energy, reprocessing results in a marginal increase in energetic use of uranium while largely increasing the volume of all levels of radioactive waste. Indeed, the process generates large volumes of radioactive liquid waste annually that is dumped into the English Channel and has increased electric costs to consumers significantly. Not to mention the well-recognized proliferation risks of adopting a plutonium-based energy system.
We disagree with your assessment of renewable power and energy efficiency. They can and are being brought to scale globally. Moreover, they can be deployed much more quickly than nuclear power. For instance, in the US from 2002 to 2012 over 50,000 megawatts of wind were deployed. Not one megawatt of power from new nuclear reactors was deployed, despite subsidies estimated to be worth more than the value of the power new reactors would have produced. Similarly, it took 40 years globally to deploy 50,000 megawatts of solar PV and, recently, only 2 ½ years to deploy an equal amount. By some estimates, another 100,000 MW will be built by the end of 2015. Already, renewables and distributed power have overtaken nuclear power in terms of megawatt hour generation worldwide.
The fact of the matter is, many Wall Street analysts predict that solar PV and wind will have reached grid parity by the end of the decade. Wind in certain parts of the Midwest is already cheaper than natural gas on the wholesale level. Energy efficiency continues to outperform all technologies on a cost basis. While the cost of these technologies continues to decline and enjoy further technological advancement, the cost of nuclear power continues to increase and construction timeframes remain excessive. And we emphasize again that no technological breakthrough to reduce its costs or enhance its operation will occur in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, due to the glacial pace of deployment, the absence of any possibility of strategic technological breakthroughs, and the necessity, as you correctly say, of mitigating climate risks in the near term, nuclear technology is ill-suited to provide any real impact on greenhouse gas emissions in that timeframe. On the contrary, the technologies perfectly positioned now, due to their cost and level of commercialization, to attain decisive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the near term are renewable, energy efficiency, distributed power, demand response, and storage technologies.
Instead of embracing nuclear power, we request that you join us in supporting an electric grid dominated by energy efficiency, renewable, distributed power and storage technologies. We ask you to join us in supporting the phase-out of nuclear power as Germany and other countries are pursuing.
It is simply not feasible for nuclear power to be a part of a sustainable, safe and affordable future for humankind.
We would be pleased to meet with you directly to further discuss these issues, to bring the relevant research on renewable energy and grid integration to a dialog with you. Again, we thank you for your service and contribution to our country’s understanding about climate change.
The energy choices we make going forward must also take into account the financial, air and water impacts and public health and safety. There are alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear power and we welcome a chance to a dialog and debate with each of you.
For the full list of signatories, see: http://www.nirs.org/climate/background/hansenletter1614.pdf
See much more here: http://climateandcapitalism.com/category/nuclear/
“Well the main reason in the UK Eric is the current proposal is the most expensive nuclear power station in the world. And with strike prices at £90 kw/h …”
That’s the price for a first-of-a-kind plant. What’s the cost for an n-th-of-a-kind plant?
From Eric’s post …
“Of course, America’s coal producers are still mining as much coal as they ever did – and exporting it to Europe, whose disastrous policy failures have increased costs and CO2 emissions.”
Unfortunately, this just isn’t true. I follow some coal companies, and they are in the dumper. For example, one coal company I follow is Alpha Natural Resources.
“Coal miner Alpha Natural’s quarterly loss widens”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coal-miner-alpha-naturals-quarterly-110637487.html
“1,100 layoffs planned at Alpha coal mines in W.Va.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/07/31/1100-layoffs-planned-at-alpha-coal-mines-in-wva/13428945/
Since West Virginia is a blue state, one silver lining might be that they finally start voting for conservatives or libertarians.
I blame Jean-Jacques Rousseau for all this nonsense. Rousseau argued that the progression of the sciences and arts causes the corruption of virtue and morality. Modern Greens still believe this.
Pointing out to them that the Mongol hordes that ravished Europe 1,000 years ago didn’t have art, science OR virtue and morality falls on deaf ears. “Got to get ourselves back to The Garden, man.”
Rousseau has been dead for roughly 250 years now, but that’s obviously not long enough.
The nuclear power people know, and that has had problems was designed and built in the 1960s. The public discussion about nuclear power today is like trying to deal with people who think TV is a big monsterous wooden box in the living room that gets 11 channels of black and white programming in analog and has crappy monophonic sound. That’s old nuclear power and nobody wants more of that. Modern modular reactors can’t melt down. Believe it or not, we’ve made progress over 60 years. How to you explain a 60 inch HD flat screen TV with 7.1 surround sound to someone from 1968? The problem is we don’t have much to show people yet. but modular reactors are planned to be built soon in GA, and TN.
http://www.energy.gov/articles/energy-department-announces-new-investment-innovative-small-modular-reactor
Here are the actual coal production figures. It only has Q1 for 2014, but you can see the trend.
http://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t1p01p1.pdf
“I’d probably prefer Lockheed Martins T4 compact fusion to either”
Well, who wouldn’t prefer fusion over any other energy producing power source? Sadly I think fusion is still a pipe dream. I had a friend who worked on fusion at Oak Ridge for the last 25 years of his career. He used to say the joke was that, regardless of when you asked, practical fusion power was always ’20 years away’.
The work at National Ignition Facility (Lawrence Livermore National Labs) on a practical fusion generation also bears watching.
OT, but too stupid not to post.
I saw an actual TV commercial (at first thought it was a parody)
“THE ARCTIC IS MELTING”
“POLAR BEARS ARE DROWNING”
[illustrated by bears bobbing their heads above holes in the ice”]
Seriously .. the URL helpbears.org is legit – from the “Center for Biological Diversity”
God give me the strength to resist the temptation to press the “Like” button.
I bet Hansen and Monbiot are only pro-nuclear as a tactic to try and kill off coal and gas. Once someone actually tries to build a nuclear power plant relatively quickly, they will mobilize their fanatical green drones and oppose it.
The greenies suffer from what is known as the BANANA Syndrome:
Build
Absolutely
Nothing
Anywhere
Near
Anything
If nuclear power was really as good as the advocates claim (i.e. cheap, safe, reliable, etc), then
1 Why has nuclear power achieved only 11 percent of world power production, after more than 5 decades of competition?
2 Why do small islands have zero nuclear power plants, but burn expensive oil or diesel resulting in power prices of 25 to 35 cents per kWh?
3 Why do nuclear utilities never, ever, ask for a rate decrease when they build a nuclear plant?
4 Why did France install nuclear plants to provide 85 percent of the country’s power, and no other country in the world followed their lead?
5 Why does France have higher electricity prices than does the US, even with France heavily subsidizing their electricity industry?
6 Why does nuclear power in the US require heavy subsidies from government – and almost total indemnity from costs of a massive radiation disaster?
7 Why are nuclear plants shutting down in the US, with owners saying they are losing money?
8 Why are there so many near-misses on meltdowns in US plants, on average every 3 weeks?
9 Why were there three serious meltdowns worldwide in just a bit more than 30 years? (Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island)
10 Why are new reactor technologies being researched and developed?
Despite all its drawbacks, nuclear power plants continue to be built in many countries, but it is because natural gas exporters (Russia) charge as much for natural gas as for oil, on a Btu-equivalent basis. When directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is widespread worldwide, as it is in the US, natural gas prices will decline and nuclear will be uneconomic everywhere.
More at http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-30.html
In addition, Professor Derek Abbott asserts that nuclear power is simply not possible as a long-term solution for electrical energy. His 15 reasons are sound. It is time for the world to abandon nuclear energy and pursue the truly safe, clean, economic, renewable resources of wind, solar, and ocean energies.
see .http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/nuclear-power-highly-impractical-for.html
I am always puzzled that the greens insist that we use unperfected wind and solar technologies right now by claiming that they are advancing technologies that will improve but reject the idea that nuclear or carbon-based fuel technologies can be improved.
Nuclear power in the hands of the power companies is dangerous. Anyone who advocates this ignores this danger. The advocates of nuclear power pretend that such danger does not exist, safer than our highways blah blah. And are we now to shift our point of view on CO2 and join with the global warmers on screeching about its evils.
All at the prompting of the nuclear power crowd and for their pockets?
“The statement, organized by the Civil Society Initute and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), urges Hansen and his colleagues to publicly debate the question of climate change and nuclear power.”
“Nuclear power is not a financially viable option.”
What they left out:
“Mostly because we’ve spent most of the last 60 years making it as expensive as possible due to extreme ‘environmental’ restrictions that make no sense with modern designs.”
Rather than focusing on our differences, a push could be made to focus on a solution that is commonly accepted, nuclear power.
From the article:
“But the real elephant in the room, with regard to emissions reduction, is the nuclear option.
James Hansen likes nuclear power.
George Monbiot likes nuclear power.
Anthony Watts likes nuclear power.
James Delingpole likes nuclear power.
Jo Nova likes nuclear power.
The Heartland Institute likes nuclear power.”
I can have philosophical differences with someone and still support a common solution that is agreeable to all parties involved. I don’t care why someone would want nuclear power, just a long as the end game would be to have more available..
How about a test case? Some greens don’t like nuclear because of the concerns on safety and with the environment, as related to contaminating water that is used to cool the reactor. But choose a state like Nevada for a Thorium plant. No cooling water is needed. Plenty of remote locations to place a Thorium plant away from population centers. Close enough for power transmission to Nevada residents, and also California. Place it between Las Vegas and the California border. Use it to power the bright lights of Las Vegas and the excess for California. When it’s a success, the Cali residents will be clamoring for the cheap, safe Thorium alternative. No government $$$ needed, there would be enough private capital to build such a facility. We just need the NRC to approve it and have them block the wacky greens from laying challenge after challenge to the plant.
A win-win for all….
“Most skeptics are supporters of power generation solutions which would, as a byproduct, significantly reduce CO2 emissions.” That doesn’t go far enough. Power sources that most skeptics support have reduced CO2 emissions vastly more than all the power sources greens support.
NuScale is still in the small nuclear modular reactor effort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power
@ur momisugly mpainter
You are full of BS. Show us the data proving nuclear is more dangerous than driving a car.