NUCLEAR MUSINGS ctd…..
One reader of my last
blog wrote to me directly rather than commenting on the blogsite. I think the
ensuing email conversation could be of wider interest.
After posting my safety and cost concerns in
regard to nuclear power it was pointed out to me that:
…total deaths in the coal industry
are in excess of 250,000,total deaths in the hydro industry in excess of
250,000, while total deaths from nuclear energy are less than 100. Your figure
for "external costs" is sheer invention. And sheer nonsense.
To which I replied:
Coal deaths: all due to power stations? Similarly hydro: all due to generating
stations?
My guess is mostly
upstream of either – like mining and dam building (though coal can also be
nasty downstream). Similarly, looking at upstream deaths of nuclear power
stations, produced these sources within 5 minutes of Google search:
in the light of which the
figure of 100 deaths for nuclear seems low by several orders of magnitude,
which alone would also make the ‘external costs’ I quoted (from sources listed)
probably too low.
Not to mention the
downstream aftermaths and their costs.
But then I’m no expert,
only a learning pundit of the very skeptical sort in relation to anything.
Coal deaths largely due to
mining. Hydro largely dam bursts. I checked the Wikipedia piece -- it
mentions risks of radon (now much reduced), but no indication of numbers that I
could see.
Wikipedia was
one of thousands of search results which I could not immediately follow up on,
but the other sources I quoted are more illuminating of uranium sourcing
aftermaths.
The problem with radiation illnesses and deaths is very similar to the
asbestos problem with which I was closely involved during an earlier post I
held: it took over thirty years to acknowledge the link between source
and delayed deaths, and taking action. At least one could remove asbestos
as it is an inert material, harmless once encapsulated. Tons of radioactive waste with half lives up
to 2 million years just can’t be safely transported or stored, leaving unknown
numbers of lingering deaths and genetic radiation damage over many generations
unresolved.
My money remains on Clean Energy a la Hermann Scheer as the preferable
option. Seen on a world scale, it’s already the only option, if for water
reasons alone (3.2 litres for every nuclear kWh…).
Not sure what Hermann Scheer had in
mind, but currently available intermittent renewables contribute little or nothing
(the inefficiencies of spinning reserve back-up eat up any contribution from
renewable sources). Cheers.
Regarding your view on intermittent renewables:
It depends how and by whom it’s done. I have visited the town of Morbach
four years ago where they quite happily live for the most part from municipally
owned renewables. Worth a visit (app.3 hours’ drive from Ostend), one of
the early and most successful implementations of CivicEnergy, or 100% Energy
Autonomy, as referred to elsewhere. In Germany and Austria alone there
are about 800+ municipalities that are partly or close to achieving 100%
Energy Autonomy (from smallest village to cities like Munich or whole regions,
like Burgenland). ‘CivicEnergy’ as a concept is introduced in my little
‘Ecotown’ eBook (a subset of my Sustainability Primer). A worldwide
inventory of 100% energy autonomy is available at http://www.go100percent.org/cms/index.php?id=3
(go 100% Map). My cheers go in that direction.
Thanks, but I still don't get
it. Civic Energy is a nice name, but what does it mean? How do they
generate it?
Let me take that one by one:
First, Clean
Energy definition enclosed with an assessment of its importance by Thomas
Friedman, followed by my definition of CivicEnergy:
With CleanEnergy more specifically,
with combinations of PV, wind, biomass (organic waste and forestry sources –
the latter most pronounced in the Austrian wood pellet industry), and hydro,
depending on local conditions. Biomass, producing methane driving generators
for electricity, and pellets driving CHP plants producing elt. power as well as
heat for e.g. district heating or pellet drying, or other local commercial or industrial
heat requirements; in short, with a combination of any locally available clean
energy sources.
Why?
Although you didn’t ask that: to provide cheapest possible energy locally
produced, and to earn money for the community by selling surplus production; no
money for energy is being paid to others
but kept in the community for civil infrastructure, education, commerce,
industry, sport, recreation and not to forget: employment creation.
Two illustrations also
enclosed may illustrate this: Osterholz press release, and Wildpoldsried,
a village of 2553 inhabitants [2008], with their energy consumption of 6.391MWh
in comparison to their generation of 20,543MWh – obviously a profitable
business for the whole municipality. A more detailed description can be found
at http://wakeup-world.com/2012/07/03/german-town-produces-321-more-energy-than-it-needs/
.
For the larger picture I would like to quote:
“Decentralization
in this sense serves to balance society's living standards. Imagine
a region with a population of 1 million, all of whom are currently supplied
with energy by centralized providers. In Germany, current per capita energy
costs (excluding plant investment) are around €2,500 per annum. This includes
all direct and indirect energy costs, i.e. power, heat and fuel, as well as
the energy costs represented in every consumer commodity and service. This represents
a total of €2.5 billion per annum flowing out of this region's local economy.
With the complete transition to power supply based on local renewables,
this €2.5 billion would remain in the local economy. This is the equivalent
of an economic development program of the same magnitude — on
an annual basis, with no bureaucratic effort and distributed amongst the whole
population! No government could ever afford to fund a development program
of this size. It says much about the energy economists who, focused
on energy-efficiency irrespective of its source and continuing to stare exclusively
at kilowatt hour prices, fail to see this connection.”
Quote from
Hermann Scheer’s The Energy Imperative
[a MustRead
as is
Diamandis’ Abundance
To stay with German and Austrian conditions, every
village/town/city has an elected mayor by age-old traditions. Of the 800+
communities following the Morbach, Osterholz and Wildpoldsried examples I
mentioned here, in most cases the impetus of switching to CivicEnergy is driven
by mayors, but local cooperatives (including community based cooperative banks)
are also amongst the instigators. CivicEnergy following this methodology
provides not only direct democratic approval for their mayors in what is
basically a win-win situation, but also re-election and possible larger political
stature based on proven competences while leaving a thriving community for
their successors. (e.g. Morbach). Which is why my cheers remain
going in this direction.
Keeping in mind that things Green are not necessarily Clean,
nor are Renewables necessary civilised or Civic.
… now I start to get the picture. But
the "clean" options you mention are (apart from hydro) incapable of
making any significant contribution neither to energy generation, nor to
emissions reductions. They are just the old story of pointless gesture
politics, green posturing, and money wasted.
I was rather astounded by your second
sentence because I'm sure you know that, looking globally, before this century
has little more than half way passed, the end of 19th century steam
engines, even with the fanciest hi-tech cookers up front, has to face 21st
century reality when there is just no alternative but to switch to clean
renewables – if for no other reason than I described in my little punditry Peak
What? essay in Alt-energy Magazine [http://altenergymag.com/emagazine/2012/08/peak-what/1963].
But I, too, ‘start to get the picture’. That picture appears to me like the proposition that all
of us plebs must function as the paying helots of the monopolistic energy
behemoths, if not even in the fashion of state energy monopoly.
David Cameron proclaimed
in 2009 (before becoming UK Prime Minster after the 2010 election):
"We
need a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power. From the state to
citizens; from the Government to Parliament; from Whitehall to communities;
from Brussels to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to
democracy" [The Times, 30/05/2009]
- tenets which are equally
relevant in the energy field. No such luck, of course, on any of the
subjects mentioned, least of all energy.
Your remarks about clean
options also remind me of Lord Kelvin’s pronouncement that heavier than air
flight is absolutely impossible, and we know what happened to that. Similarly,
CivicEnergy is already ‘flying’ healthily in all shapes and sizes in over a
million places, and growing, and preparing for the inevitable general
realisation that only ground-up CivicEnergy can make the required contribution
to the world’s energy needs which no monopolistic top-down helotism could, or
needs to, or should supply together with a claim to state enforced uniqueness.
A little more of punditry in the form of three enclosed slides may
illustrate my point.
Sorry,
Mike, but you're just plain wrong. Wind farms do not achieve significant
reductions in emissions, nor in consumption of fossil fuel energy. They
threaten the stability of the grid -- now even Ofgem is warning of blackouts by
2015. See http://www.thegwpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Hughes-Windpower.pdf.
You can't "switch to clean renewables" because
they don't deliver any significant net contribution to energy generation.
And they are so expensive that they undermine our economy, and drive energy
intensive industries abroad.
We are mortgaging our children and pauperising our
grandchildren for the sake of pointless political gestures, driven by hysteria
over "Man Made Global Warming" that just isn't there.
I’m wrong, you say – well, that wouldn't be the
first time even though I try to avoid or correct that.
At least we agree on one thing: the
man-made-global-warming hysteria appears to amount to the biggest political and
intellectual fraud ever. So why worry whether windfarms reduce emissions
(by which I assume you mean CO2) or not? What other emissions could there
possibly be? Of course they don’t reduce the consumption of fossils fuels
if you don’t build any. Makes me wonder why the UK is therefore paying to
build wind farms in Ireland in order to import electricity from there? Electricity from onshore wind power is, of
course, to be had for less than half the costs of offshore wind, but why leave
UK mainland for it? And since when does wind, or any other CleanEnergy,
threaten the stability of the grid? Makes me wonder how Australians and
several continental countries manage to connect close to thousand CivicEnergy
municipalities in addition to tens of thousands of household small scale PV
installations to their grids? Reasons must to be inflexible grids rather
than CleanEnergy inputs. I am, of course, member of GWPF and follow their
publications and events. But the quoted examples of matter-of-fact successful cohabitation of GW-size power
installations and Clean and CivicEnergy providers on the same grid appear to me
to disprove OFGEM or anyone else saying it can’t be done: it is done as a
matter of routine elsewhere. Fact.
Clean and CivicEnergy providers, however, already
make significant and growing contributions to energy generation. If they
didn’t, why would Austria, Belgium Germany, Italy, the Philippines, Sweden,
Switzerland and likely also Japan shortly, have decided to abandon nuclear and
fossil fuels as energy sources? Surely not because they all wish to
‘undermine their economies’ and return to the Stone Age. Fact.
So yes, if the facts change, I’ll change my mind
from favouring CleanEnergy, especially in the form of CivicEnergy, as the best
(if not the only possible and lasting) practice and forward strategy to provide
the world’s energy, prosperity and happiness.
And here is what started it all: http://www.lmhdesign.co.uk/planet.php
My continuing learning curve in arriving at this conviction is visible on my blogsite since 2009 and in some of my articles quoted there (all open for comments), and in my eBooks.
And here is what started it all: http://www.lmhdesign.co.uk/planet.php
My continuing learning curve in arriving at this conviction is visible on my blogsite since 2009 and in some of my articles quoted there (all open for comments), and in my eBooks.
Link:
>
Die Sonne bringt es an den Tag <
A few relevant links of the many
arriving here just in the last few days may be of interest:
And for the swift moves of Japan:
and for all of the world:
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