Guest post by David Middleton
While I probably share some of the author’s views on nuclear power, I think we would have to start out by “talking honestly” about climate change…
Nuclear power
Climate change is an energy problem, so let’s talk honestly about nuclear
David Robert Grimes
Of all the hazards facing humankind, climate change is the single greatest threat we have ever faced. In a few short decades, we have altered the climate more than we ever thought possible and now, in the midst of the greatest heatwave recorded in decades in the hottest year on record, we are finally beginning to countenance the scale of problem before us.
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“Of all the hazards facing humankind, climate change is the single greatest threat we have ever faced.”
The sentence doesn’t even make sense.
- an expression of intention to inflict evil, injury, or damage
- one that threatens
- an indication of something impending: the sky held a threat of rain
Climate change doesn’t fit definitions 1 or 2 and it’s not really an “indication of something impending.” It’s an ongoing process. The greatest threats we have ever faced are in no particular order:
- Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany
- Attila the Hun
- Ghengis (jen-jis according to John Kerry) Khan
- Tamerlane
- Vladimir Lenin, Joe Stalin and the rest of the Soviet gang
These people literally did pose threats to humankind… At least to the humans who got in their way.
“Of all the hazards facing humankind”…
1: a game of chance like craps played with two dice
2: a source of danger hazards on the roadway
3a : the effect of unpredictable and unanalyzable forces in determining events : chance, risk the hazards involved in owning your own business
men and women danced together, women danced together, men danced together, as hazard had brought them together — Charles Dickens
b : a chance event : accident
looked like a fugitive, who had escaped from something in clothes caught up at hazard — Willa Cather
4 obsolete : stake 3a
5: a golf-course obstacle (such as a bunker or a pond)
Is “climate change” at or even near the top of the list of hazards facing humankind? Definition 2 seems to be appropriate: “a source of danger.”
Sources of danger to humankind:
- Asteroid/comet impacts/bolides
- Supervolcano eruptions
- Flood basalt events
- Pandemics
- Nuclear war
- Megaquakes & tsunamis
- Carrington events (coronal mass ejections)
- Gamma ray bursts
Does “climate change” really even make this list? When this interglacial stage comes to an end, climate change will be a genuine hazard, maybe even an existential threat.
However, today it’s really more of a risk management issue. Although “risk” implies that it can be clearly quantified. Dr. Judith Curry had a very thoughtful post on this issue back in January:
So what are the words that we should use to talk about the potential harm from human caused climate change? I think that the following phrases are appropriate:
- potential harm
- reasons for concern
- possible catastrophic impacts
I think that ‘threat’ is overly alarmist, since it implies imminent harm. ‘Risk’ is not overly alarmist, but it does imply that the harm is quantifiable and mitigable — which I have argued that it is not.
How do we deal with potential harm and possible catastrophic impacts? This puts us in the domain of decision making under deep uncertainty — a topic I have written about many times at CE.
Back to the Grauniad…
In a few short decades, we have altered the climate more than we ever thought possible…
Really?
Source: Kottek, M., J. Grieser, C. Beck, B. Rudolf, and F. Rubel, 2006: World Map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification updated. Meteorol. Z., 15, 259-263. DOI: 10.1127/0941-2948/2006/0130.
Back to the Grauniad:
…in the midst of the greatest heatwave recorded in decades in the hottest year on record…
I don’t think that Oxford is in Arizona, so I don’t get the heat wave connection.
Regarding “the hottest year on record” meme…
Globally, 2016 edged out 1998 by +0.02 C to become the warmest year in the 38-year satellite temperature record, according to Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Because the margin of error is about 0.10 C, this would technically be a statistical tie, with a higher probability that 2016 was warmer than 1998. The main difference was the extra warmth in the Northern Hemisphere in 2016 compared to 1998.
“The question is, does 2016’s record warmth mean anything scientifically?” Christy said. “I suppose the answer is, not really. Both 1998 and 2016 are anomalies, outliers, and in both cases we have an easily identifiable cause for that anomaly: A powerful El Niño Pacific Ocean warming event. While El Niños are natural climatic events, they also are transient. In the study of climate, we are more concerned with accurately identifying long-term temperature trends than we are with short-term spikes and dips, especially when those spikes and dips have easily identified natural causes.
The warming observed in the instrumental temperature record doesn’t significantly deviate from the pre-existing Holocene pattern of climate change…
Over the past 2,000 years, the average temperature of the northern hemisphere has exceeded natural variability* (+/-2 std dev) 3 times: The Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the modern warming. Humans didn’t cause at least two of the three and the current one only exceeds natural variability only by about 0.2 °C. And this is a maximum, because the instrumental data have much higher resolution than the proxy data.
*Natural variability does not imply that excursions from it are unnatural.
Taking the climate back through the rest of the Holocene, we can see that “the hottest year on record” might not be so hot…
Now that we’ve actually “talked honestly” about climate change, we can talk honestly about nuclear power. And Dr. Grimes does talk honestly about nuclear power:
Fears about nuclear energy run deep: the 1986 Chernobyl disaster remains a towering linchpin in anti-nuclear narratives, presented as an irrefutable case that nuclear energy is inherently unsafe. These claims are so profoundly entrenched that it is almost accepted as common knowledge that the Chernobyl disaster killed thousands.
Yet, as I’ve written here before, these claims do not stand up to scrutiny and persist in the face of report after report to the contrary. Years of subsequent investigation place the death toll of the disaster at approximately 43 people, with deleterious health effects failing to materialise at any appreciable rate. That this information is surprising to many is indicative of quite how polarised the discussion on such a vital topic has been.
Much of the reason for this is ideological – Greenpeace is but one organisation that has been criticised for releasing misleading anti-nuclear information, claiming that up to 200,000 deaths are attributable to Chernobyl. This figure has been roundly debunked, but predictably strikes fear into the public conscience, encouraging panic in place of reason.
The more recent 2011 Fukushima disaster has been become a similar focus for nuclear panic, despite the fact that no one has died nor is ever likely to from this event. The spectre of the plant looms so large in the public consciousness that we have seemingly forgotten that the cause of the meltdown was a massive tsunami that claimed about 16,000 lives, itself potentially exacerbated by climate change. There is a dark irony then in the fact that the ensuing kneejerk reaction led to the closure of Germany’s nuclear plants and their replacement with heavily polluting coal plants.
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Yet simply dismissing concerns about nuclear energy as unfounded is not productive, nor is it honest. Nuclear energy may be the most efficient and clean source we have, but it is complicated and like any energy source, it is not devoid of complications. Nuclear waste is one aspect of this – nuclear byproducts and legacy waste can remain radioactive for centuries, and have to be carefully stored and managed to avoid any potential contamination. And while the risk to human health is generally low to nonexistent, safely storing such materials is a challenging engineering problem and legitimate concern. These challenges are not insurmountable, but nor should they be glossed over.
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It’s nice that we can find agreement on a solution, even when we disagree about the problem we need to solve. Reminds me of a scene from The Outlaw Josey Wales...
As a geologist/geophysicist with 36 years experience in oil & gas exploration, I have no vested interest in coal, nuclear or wind power (except as a utility customer), yet I support all three of those energy sources (well, I support wind where it works) because I like to know that the lights will come on when I flip a switch and I like to pay less than $0.12/kWh for electricity. I also support natural gas from both sides of the equation. Hydroelectric and geothermal are also great, where they work.
Climate change is a land-use and environment destruction problem. Increasing and decreasing the heat by a couple degrees doesn’t change climate, just temperature.
Mark4asp
Mark, you questioned me on the nuclear not impacting on the environment.
I am telling you that it impacts on the environment even if there are no accidents…
I understand that here in Koeberg (South Africa), before nuclear, the fishermen would catch a lot of fish in the area. After Koeberg, they found no more fish. Now, from what I understand, the nuclear reactors need a lot of cooling and they simply take the water from the ocean. This increases the T of the water around the plant and apparently this is what chased away the fish.
This is one extra point against nuclear: apparently you need a lot more cooling water than a conventional gas operated plant, to cool the reactors. All this heat goes into the ocean. Guess what happens when the sun comes up? The extra heat in the water produces extra water vapor. Water vapor is a GH gas….
Henryp
Not all nuclear designs heat up the neighboring body of water. Some designs use cooling towers.
Not so sure about the fishing claim, where I live the fisherman congregate around the heated effluent from the Nuclear plant even in the winter, that’s where the fishermen congregate and the crabs are great.
For a large body of water I doubt that the water temperature is significantly increased except close to the effluent.
There are 400-odd nuclear power installations in the world. Some of these have more than one reactor Fukushima Daichi and Chernobyl both had four. Of these 400, two have suffered a catastrophic failure and at least one more has had a near-miss with an environmental disaster.
Consider that there are 400 planes of a given 4-engined type flying, and two are destroyed completely following an engine fire which reportedly could not be extinguished. A third barely manages to land intact following a similar incident. The examination of the third reveals that a loss of cooling caused the fire. However, this would have been a controllable situation had not the use of zirconium cladding on engine components made the fire impossible to extinguish with any normal fire suppressant system.
You are the head of the air accident investigation team. Question: Would you advise the government that it is not only quite OK for the remaining 397 too keep flying, but for more aircraft with the same engine type to be built?
If I were the investigator I would stop all nuclear as a next big incident is imminent.
Good comment.
Good call Henryp and Ian. There are so many disasters waiting to happen, to distract everyone with global warming is simply that – a distraction.
“henryp July 1, 2017 at 11:35 am
If I were the investigator I would stop all nuclear as a next big incident is imminent.
Good comment.”
Imminent? Like you know it will happen, coming etc, *THAT* use of the word imminent? Poor comment and based on poor information. Since Three Mile Island (Which never sold one watt of power commercially), how many serious nuclear disasters, of significance, to humans and local environment, have happened? I count ZERO!
BTW, there are Japanese moving back to the area.
“It’s supposedly safe until there is an accident, then it’s off the scale, so to speak. ”
One has to wonder if the author of this statement uses a seat belt when driving. Cars are safe until until you have an accident.
So we actually go to the trouble of designing reactors in the US to be safe even if there is an accident.
How we do this is public information.
I have always thought that the whole global warming thing was to manufacture consent to initiate nuclear power.
The idea of global warming goes back a long way, but the modern hysteria was started in the UK by Thatcher as a means to discredit the coal industry and its striking miners.
The surprising thing is that the Greens jumped on this bandwagon, and the likes of Greenpeace who had been campaigning against ‘dirty nuclear energy’ up to that point, suddenly started advocating nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. It couldn’t get more hypocritical; the guys doing this know perfectly well they are advocating long-term hazardous waste storage and the risk of an environmental catastrophe.
“Ian Macdonald July 2, 2017 at 1:44 am”
Global warming driven by by CO2 emissions from fossil fuels was proposed well before her. I don’t have time to find the video link.
Patrick MJD
There was a paper on the increase in carbonic acid by Svante Arrhenius more than 100 years ago and many still believe in the truth of it.
I looked at it to find that he looked predominantly at a closed box. Most scientists, like myself, have since seen [by experiment] that CO2 also cools the atmosphere by deflecting sunshine in the 1-2 and 4-5 um ranges.
Never mind certain bands in the UV which [‘s reflection] is how we currently can identify presence of CO2 on other planets.
Hopefully I can convince you that gas is so much better than nuclear simply because its plants are so much cheaper and simpler to build?
{we donot want too much degree of difficulty here in Africa due to a lack of experts}
Most warmunists seem to oppose nuclear power, delusionally believing that wind, solar, hydro, and other renewables can replace dispatchable base load sources.
David
Please elaborate on why you think nuclear is no. 1 on your list?
A bit late to this discussion, but once again a pro-nuclear piece on WUWT. One would think that eventually, the posters and commenters here would learn. Would learn that no nuclear technology has ever demonstrated cost-effectiveness. Learn that the best nuclear plants in the US cannot compete economically and either shut down, or are crying for handouts from government.
Learn that new nuclear plants such as those being built in the US at Vogtle in Georgia and Summers in South Carolina are billions over budget and many years behind schedule. Learn that the best the world has to offer, the twin EPR reactors being built in the UK at Hinkley Point C are admittedly the most expensive ever built, and the cost overruns have already begun.
One would think that the pro-nuclear contingent would read, with a sober and critical eye, the landmark 2011 paper by Professor Derek Abbot, “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?” Abbot, D., Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 99, No. 10, pp. 1611–1617, 2011.
Professor Abbot lists more than one dozen reasons why nuclear power can never be the long-term source of electricity.
1. Not enough plant sites (suitably far away from population, near cooling water, etc)
2. Land area required per plant
3. Embrittlement problem (metal alloy bombarded by radiation cannot be recycled, it is forever wasted)
4. Entropy problem
5. Nuclear waste disposal
6. Nuclear accident rate problem (more accidents as more reactors are built, and built in third-world countries)
7. Proliferation (of atomic-based weapons)
8. Energy of extraction (forever-increasing costs of mining dilute ores for uranium)
9. Uranium resource limits (more costly as cheap sources are exhausted)
10. Seawater extraction for uranium
11. Fast Breeder Reactors
12. Fusion Reactors (a pipe dream)
13. Materials Resources (materials of construction, lack of rare alloy metals)
Thus, even if the plants were economic, and they are not, they could never supply the planet’s electricity needs.
Further, the decommissioning problem is simply horrendous. With a world powered by nuclear plants, at least 2 or 3 new nuclear plants must be started up each day. More problematically, the world would retire and decommission an equal number of reactors, each day. Given that many years are required to decommission, there would be thousands upon thousands of simultaneous decommissioning projects, in perpetuity. Finding appropriate disposal sites for the radioactive remains of all those deactivated nuclear power plants will present quite a problem.
It is entirely useless to consider nuclear power as a long-term electrical power source.
Chutzpah! Most of the cost of nuclear is due to regulatory lawfare by the greens. As their goal is to stop nuclear, not make it “safe”, most of the expenses are useless.
Interesting statement there, Tom Halla. Please expand. What regulations do you see as problematic? Do you opposed any specific regulations that govern nuclear power in the US? If so, please name the regulations you consider superfluous. Then, explain how removing that particular requirement would not compromise safety, and how much the cost to construct would be reduced.
I have always wanted someone to give me such a list, but no one seems to have the list available.
Surely, there must be thousands of superfluous regulations that add billions of $ to the cost?
Which ones, exactly?
Thank you in advance.
Agree 100%
Storing waste is not really an engineering problem. We know how to do it. The unrealistic time frame for storing the waste is part of the problem. Nuclear waste is easy to handle and relatively safe if done right and we do it right. For the most part, distance is your friend. If you can keep people a few miles from it, you have little to worry about.
Thanks. Nice to read a sane view on this subject for a change.
Yes John. Most of those commenting here who are clever concluded that we do mot need more nuclear energy. Is that what you mean?