This is in the UK Daily mail today, and it’s like sacrilege to the greens to have one of ther own say this:
This sums it up, he writes:
Our environment and energy problems are solvable — but can be tackled effectively only with pragmatism, rather than ideological wishful thinking. And the litmus test for that may well be the issue of nuclear power.
h/t to Barry Woods
Repeat after me…
“Through research, I found that much of what I believed about environmental issues had little, if any, basis in science.” – Mark Lynas
You guys are missing the forest for the trees.
This is not about nuclear. This is not about CO2.
This is about people admitting that greens are lying zealots. Hmm if they lie and exaggerate on this topic, perhaps they are not to be trusted elsewhere?? Big story in that respect.
You mustn’t believe the lies of the Green idiots. And I should know – I was one
From the author of “Six Degrees” this is indeed a big surprise. He is thinking and is able to see some of the errors of his radical warming buddies. Is it possible that he can also be persuaded to give up his belief that carbon dioxide is warming up the world? It is not as Ferenc Miskolczi’s study or IR absorption by the atmosphere shows. And it is not because satellites cannot see this warming as I have demonstrated. He can learn about it by reading the book “What Warming?” available on Amazon.
There are a lot of aging BWR reactors dotting the globe that have been granted extended leases far beyond thier design lifetimes, plus all the spent fuel rods still containing 95% UO2 lying about in pools of water waiting for an accident to come along and spread the joy. These 2 problems have to be dealt with, else there are going to be a lot more Chernobyls and Fukushimas. Anybody who has worked at an aging Industrial Facility knows how bad it can get. Stuff breaks all the time.
If you examine past activist efforts like man-made cancer and anti-nuclear, you find that the typical cycle comes to an end when (a) past stalwarts start converting and (b) the public does not see the predicted change or harm.
But don’t rest, because there is a wide societal group that moves from one discontent to another. Thus, the remnants of man-made cancer campaigns moved to chemophobia and infiltrated gardening with the silly organic variety. The nuclear people stuck a bit more to the same theme but the options became narrower until about all that was left was radwaste storage and tall tales of Chernobyl. Some of them went on to the bandwagons of solar and wind power where they remain as bloody ignorant nuisances.
In my younger days we used to control them better because industry did much more research in-house and so we were willing and able to squash silly propositions before they took hold. After I retired the vigilance seemed to drop and the number of activists getting the ears of policy makers increased. It’s time to start moving the research back from academia, where there are too many impossible dreams. We need again to have big teams like IBM Thomas Watson, 3M, Lockheed Skunk Works – that type of structure that is dedicated to either delivering the goods or dying.
Sera says:
July 4, 2011 at 3:36 am
And no sooner than this story praising French nuclear, guess what?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/04/french-nuclear-power-plant-explosion-safety-fears
Bad timing, or what? FYI- I am all for nuclear power plants, and have lived near them all of my life (Miami, Savannah)
This is the grauniad lying through their teeth to provoke a backlash. You should believe NOTHING you read in the UK press and certainly not the grauniad.
In france, it is obligatoire to report ALL incidents in their nucléaire central even if it is that the tap drips. There have been no incidents classed as major for many years.
I note that Germany has killed more people with its organic bean sprouts than with its nuclear plants, many times over. So what do we ban? The nuke plants of course… Doh.
Notwithstanding Latimer Elder’s excellent points re sinners repenting, I took the trouble to go out and buy a Daily Mail today and read the print version carefully. Lynas has NOT repented or recanted or renounced anything Green except the ridiculous Green aversion to nuclear energy. According to Lynas, everything else in the Greens’ playbook is real and earnest and based on ‘the science’ is in and unquestionable. He has a considerable way to travel on his Damascene road yet!
Nuclear is nuts.
As I’ve written before, if nuclear power is such a be-all and end-all for power generation, why then are there no medium-sized islands with a nuclear power plant as their sole source of power? By medium-sized, I mean population of roughly 1 million. Most islanders must pay very high prices for electric power, typically 25 cents per kWh or higher.
see http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/nuclear-plants-on-islands-nutty-idea.html
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues of operating safety and long-term safe-guarding of deadly radioactive nuclear waste, nuclear power plants cost far too much to ever consider.
Even the loony state of California has determined that nuclear power plants are the most expensive form of reliable, base-load power (see link). Note that peaking power plants are more expensive than nuclear, as indicated by the three entries for Simple Cycle power plants. Also, the costs shown in the link for constructing and operating new nuclear power plants are far too low.
http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/levelized_costs.html
If Greens want reliable, affordable power, they should build natural gas fired plants and coal fired plants. The alternative, and I encourage all Greens to strive to accomplish this, is to develop a cost-effective and reliable means of time-shifting the power produced from wind and solar. There are many systems for grid-scale energy storage, but none are yet cost-effective. The exception is pumped storage hydro-electric, but that is not available in sufficient quantity. Some of the energy storage means include batteries, capacitors, high-speed flywheels, underground compressed air storage, phase-change systems such as molten salt, and hot oil storage.
Forget the nuclear fusion nonsense. The only safe nuclear fusion reactor is the sun, conveniently located a good distance away. Nuclear fusion is simply a means for some people to obtain research grants for further study. Good work, if you can get it.
This being the Fourth of July holiday here in the States, I won’t be around to follow this thread and the comments until tomorrow. It promises to be an interesting discussion, though, as nuclear topics on WUWT always are.
onion says: ” And Lynas’ endorsement – someone who has demonstrated spectacular failure of judgement in the past – should not be cause for celebration. It should strike fear into any supporter of nuclear power.”
Precisely.
Michael Schaefer says:
July 4, 2011 at 4:34 am
Quote from the article:
“Surprisingly, nuclear power may be be more environmentally friendly than many types of renewable energy…”
Nope. Desastrously false. Ask the now-homeless people who lived near the Fukushima nuclear plant at times of the Tsunami. They would exchange their experience with nuclear power for a host of wind turbines at the horizon every day.
Think – then talk.
How many deaths at fukushima?
Think then type
Interesting, in that when this “CO2 thing” all began, the opinion that it was just a reverse ploy to get the oil companies out of oil because there is so much of it and other “fossil fuels”,i.e., glut, and into control of nuclear power came up between friends. Of course, it was ridiculed by the majority and labeled conspiracy theory. Seems the minority may have been on the right track — especially when you add in all the recent drilling mishaps, plant explosions and and gas line spills that have cropped up almost overnight. Naturally you are to believe they are all coincidental, and who knows maybe they are, but shouldn’t the negative events be balanced by some positive ones if it’s random? Don’t oil companies maintain their investments?
I am going to admit, I am obviously not very educated about this, as you all are, but the only thing that worries me is the waste…what do we do with it? (I mean I know what we do with it, but…) And then there was the sunami in Japan, that was scary. There was also just a big wild fire in N. Mexico, that came within (100’s of?) yards of the nuclear plant…it’s a little scary. I wked – off and on – at Palo Verde Nuclear Plant for about 10 years, it is a very safe place, the safest environment I’ve ever worked in, because everyone has to be screened, educated, and soooo careful. It is the things that are out of our control that scare me about nuclear power. God Bless everyone. Happy 4th of July to those of us in the US 🙂
What I am waiting for is someone like Schmidt to do a “drunk rant” along the lines of a Dudley Moore in the movie “Arthur” (1981) or Dean Martin anytime in which he babbles on about how much he loved his heat-transfer/radiation computer model of Gaia and was so believed that someday it would yield some connection to a natural process in the world, if only those horrid “Deniers” had been patient for another few decades. /sarc
Then someone like Mann could do something similar about how he felt bad that his high flying career was based on nothing more than finding correlations between two sets of numbers that shared no physical connection whatsoever but he could not give up the good life until he found that all his thoughts had become about correlations between two sets of numbers whose names looked good together. /sarc
This is the second such story from Mark Lynas. What I suspect he is doing, like Judith Curry at Climate Etc., is building himself a lifeboat. I suspect he can see that the good ship CAGW is very likely to sink. Those like the Royal Society, and the American Physical Society, who have nailed their colors to the mast, will go down with the ship. But if you have a lifeboat handy, then with very little effort, you can get into it, and row safely to shore. Just say, and support, a few things against CAGW here and there, and lo and behold, a lovely little lifeboat. In the meanwhile, he can still go on supporting the hoax of CAGW.
The ever sceptic in me, especially with Govn’t and media “announcements” like this, suggests this is a diversionary statement. This reminds me of the “Trojon Rabbit” from Monty Python, they forgot to put soldiers in it. Meaning empty!
I’m not really sure I understand how going nuclear will get them ‘off the oil hook’, unless oil is used for power generation. I guess there are some diesel powered generators that can be replaced, but I’m sure there aren’t many. Windmills and solar panels are little more than oversized science projects, so nuclear makes sense. But I don’t think nuclear power generation will make much difference in oil consumption.
In the full article, Lynas writes:
“Also, as much as Greens are enthusiastic about solar electricity, in cloudy countries such as ours it is extremely inefficient and expensive.”
The man has finally been able to get his mind around some of the facts of his environment that have been staring him in the face for decades. Britain is way far North. The north of Scotland is just a stone’s throw from the Arctic Circle. And, yes, Britain is cloudy. Because of these facts, if you covered your entire British cottage with solar panels you might be able to bring a teapot to boil on a good sunny day. Big parts of the US suffer a similar problem. Anyone ever spent a year in Michigan, say in Ann Arbor or East Lansing? The sky goes gray November 1 and stays that way until May 1.
In Central Florida, a solar system that is designed to provide energy for a water heater works beautifully March through November. At other times, showers are cold. Did I mention that this system has an electric boost? I am told that I can add a second electric boost to cover November through March.
People who move from the middle or upper midwest to Florida experience for a few years what is best described as rapture of the sun. In other words, if you are an American and have not lived in a place like Florida, you have no idea what sunlight is. Yet even here solar power is an iffy proposition. In addition, there is no evidence whatsoever that the solar system reduces electricity bills.
Les Johnson says:
July 4, 2011 at 3:21 am
….the watermelons are responsible for much of the world’s problems…..not solving them, but causing them.
You mention a few problems they’ve caused, Les, but there’s also Brent Spar and their campaign to ban chlorine followed by the Peruvian cholera deaths aided and abetted by the EPA. What a record to savor.
Michael Schaefer says: July 4, 2011 at 4:34 am
Quote from the article: “Surprisingly, nuclear power may be be more environmentally friendly than many types of renewable energy…”
Nope. Desastrously false. Ask the now-homeless people who lived near the Fukushima nuclear plant at times of the Tsunami. They would exchange their experience with nuclear power for a host of wind turbines at the horizon every day.
Think – then talk.
Admirable advice, thinking first.
The ‘now-homeless’ people who lived near the plant are dead, drowned or crushed by the 5-story wall of water that obliterated their homes and 20,000 of their neighbors. They’d be quite dead with wind turbines, too.
Japan’s over-response to the Fukushima leaks is understandable, much like our hysteria over TMI, which did no more than trash a couple hundred millions worth of equipment. It was the kind of story folks who get their global warming data from Katie Couric find exciting, though.
“banjo says:
July 4, 2011 at 8:13 am”
Miniscule compared to say, road deaths.
P. Solar says:
July 4, 2011 at 4:11 am
orkneylad says:
July 4, 2011 at 5:12 am
A conspiracy theory should a least be credible.
Michael Schaefer says:
July 4, 2011 at 4:34 am
What gives you the authority to speak for the Japanese people? How arrogant to use the earthquake and tsunami, and their suffering to further your own agenda. Disgusting.
At 4:11 AM on 4 July, we find P. Solar taking issue with my earlier post about The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear (Petr Beckmann, 1976) and the ability to think RATIONALLY about nuclear fission, writing:
I could admonish this schmuck to read the frickin’ book (which provides a very robust assessment of the actual relative risks associated with all then-prevailing modalities of power generation, including the potential for those creaking, abysmally inefficient un-recyclable bat-manglers so beloved of the “renewables” confused wool), but fuhgeddaboudit. This isn’t being written for the benefit of people like P. Solar.
What makes nuclear fission relatively more costly than other options available to the industrialized world has nothing to do with the technology of the hardware or of the nuclear fuel cycle (including the disposition of spent fuel elements). It’s the ‘viro application of lawfare in the civil context.
In the real free market, enterprises have to be conducted with the best possible efficient use of resources in order to make it worthwhile for people to put those resources into a particular project. Those resources broadly divide into the categories of “land, labor, and capital.” The most liquid of these is capital, and its importance is well-recognized.
Capital – real capital, not the unbacked inflationary Keynesian counterfeit crap issued by governments in schemes like “Quantitative Easing” – represents deferred spending by real human beings, creating liquid potential purchasing power which the owners are willing to lend (directly, or more commonly by way of their agents, who aggregate that spending power in various kinds of operations) in return for the prospect of profit.
One of the reasons why the free market system is called “capitalist” is that the employment of capital to achieve the creation of material goods and services is the key element. The first industrial revolution couldn’t have happened without increasingly efficient systems of employing capital. The land (natural resources) and labor have always been there. It took capital to get the machinery going.
This is one of the reasons why “greens” and other ‘viros are commonly called “Watermelons” (“green on the outside, red to the core”). They hate the free market, and every semblance thereof.
Departing Austrian Economics 101, let’s return to the ‘viro Luddite sons-of-indiscriminate-parentage waging “lawfare” against the nuclear fission industry.
In order to build with any prospect of economic efficiency, the nuclear power entrepreneurs not only have to take care of the “land” and “labor” factors (which they do quite well) but they’ve got to get “capital.” Like everybody else in the free market economy, they have to borrow on the basis of a projected time scale. Planning any start-up comes with an estimation of how long it will be before the activity will begin bringing in the profits required to pay back the costs of initiation and operation, and then the profits start coming in.
Profits provide the incentive to do the job in the first place. Our “Watermelon” greens also hate the concept of profits.
Because most nuclear power plants are built by people working together as incorporated entities (“corporations”), they not only have to get almost all their funding out in the open but also inform their stockholders and other investors about how they plan to accomplish what they’re doing. This information enables the ‘viro bastiches to “read” the entrepreneurs’ timeline and then to use government regulations and government courts to very effectively impose both direct legal costs (able shysters don’t come cheaply) and even more expensive delays on the construction of these power plants.
Because capital borrowed has to be repaid, and additional time means additional interest charges which impose a penalty cost that increases greatly with every unplanned delay, ‘viro “lawfare” is a form of sabotage.
This “Watermelon” NIMBY/BANANA sabotage is what actually pushes up the costs associated with nuclear fission in these United States. When people like P. Solar maunder about how “Nuke has never been economic without subsidy in one form or another,” the reference is to government thugs forbearing to go along with some (never all) of the ‘viro Luddite “lawfare” tactics so viciously effective in making the monetary expense of construction so damned high that profits aren’t possible.
If that’s a “subsidy,” then my personal refusal to look up “P. Solar,” put my thumbs around his neck, and start squeezing down on his windpipe until he quits wriggling constitutes cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Industrial civilization requires electrical power generation to survive and to meet future needs. Nuclear fission represents the single safest and – absent “lawfare” – most economical method currently available to the Western nations of meeting that requirement.
As for coal…. Hoo, boy. Is there anybody reading here who doesn’t know that coal-fired power plants release into the environment (just in the form of Thorium radioisotopes in the massive amounts of ash that have to be dealt with) far more radiation per megawatt-hour of electricity generated than does any pressurized water uranium fuel cycle reactor in operation in these United States?
I suppose you don’t have to be stupid to be a ‘viro….
No, I take that back. You do.
British family sues for 2.5 MM GBP over being forced to move due to wind farm noise: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/8615569/Noisy-wind-farm-drove-couple-out-of-their-home.html