nuclear-news

The fallacy of recommending nuclear power as a solution to climate change

More Nuclear Energy Is Not The Solution To Our Climate Crisis http://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/11/19/nuclear-energy-climate-change-philip-warburg, November 19, 2018 Philip Warburg 

Faced with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, some environmental leaders are all too ready to toss a lifeline to aging, uneconomic nuclear power plants. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), long venerated as America’s most rigorous nuclear watchdog group, joined this chorus in early November.

The UCS report, “The Nuclear Dilemma,” proposes that we single out “safe” but financially ailing nuclear plants and subsidize their operations, so that they might remain open — thus avoiding additional carbon emissions from coal or natural gas plants that might replace them. America gets about 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, but only 17 of the 99 reactors that generate this power are unprofitable, according to UCS. Those reactors account for just 3 percent of overall U.S. power generation, though UCS says the share of unprofitable nuclear plants could grow in future years if the price of natural gas drops or the costs of maintaining older nuclear facilities rise.

What do we gain by breathing some extra life into these plants? Proponents say “zero-carbon emissions.” That’s if we choose to ignore the emissions associated with mining and processing uranium, building nuclear power stations, managing nuclear waste, and — on those rare but horrific occasions — dealing with the consequences of a major nuclear disaster.

Bailing out old, financially shaky nuclear plants is a short-sighted response to a huge challenge that requires much bigger, much more transformative thinking. Instead, we ought to invest big in our leading zero-carbon alternatives — solar and wind — which offer far cheaper electricity and, unlike nuclear, have life-cycle costs that have steadily dropped over the past several years.

Setting aside the questionable economics of boosting the bottom lines of unprofitable power plants, how would we determine if a nuclear plant is “safe”?

The UCS recommends that we rely upon the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s five-tier performance matrix, and offer financial support only to plants that have earned the NRC’s highest rating. In 2002, the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ottawa County, Ohio, enjoyed that rating, but in March of that year, its reactor vessel — which contains the nuclear reactor coolant and shrouded reactor core — was found to be a fraction of an inch away from a potentially catastrophic rupture. Years of undetected corrosion had worn a football-sized hole in the vessel wall.

If the vessel had ruptured, the plant’s backup water pump (which was known to be impaired) would not have been able to re-flood the reactor vessel, an essential step in stabilizing the reactor core. In a recent interview, UCS scientist Dave Lochbaum, a seasoned reactor engineer, told me he remembers telling residents near Davis Besse: “You can stop buying lottery tickets. Your luck has been used up.”

Hundreds of thousands of people in Central Europe and Japan didn’t fare so well in the nuclear safety lottery.

Following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, some 350,000 people were evacuatedfrom parts of Ukraine and Belarus, and to this day 1,000 square miles of territory remain off-bounds to human habitation. In Japan, some 100,000 people had still not returned home five years after the March 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Utterly different circumstances precipitated these two nuclear disasters, as well as the earlier meltdown at Three Mile Island, but all three proved the statistician’s axiom that rare events do happen.

And then there’s the question of security at nuclear plants.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, word got out that unnamed nuclear plants were on al-Qaida’s list of potential terror targets. This was particularly alarming to people living near the Pilgrim power station in Plymouth, Massachusetts, situated on the flight path of the hijacked planes departing from Logan Airport.

Suicide air attacks were one concern post-9/11; saboteurs carrying rocket-propelled grenades and other portable weapons were another. To help plant operators prepare for potential threats, the NRC increased the frequency of “force-on-force” mock confrontations with plant infiltrators. It also required plant personnel to be trained in the use of portable pumps, generators and other devices that could fill in for safety equipment knocked out by sabotage.

Yet, at Pilgrim, this added training didn’t engender lasting vigilance.

Diane Turco, executive director of the volunteer watchdog group Cape Downwinders, brought attention to gaping holes in Pilgrim’s plant security when she and another activist visited the plant unannounced in 2014. She explained to me how they walked by an empty guardhouse, down the plant’s interior roadway, and into the access control building, where they observed employees punching in their security codes. No one stopped them, questioned them or searched for weapons. In 2012, a member of the same group, Paul Rifkin, circled Pilgrim in a friend’s helicopter and took detailed aerial photos of the plant.  He encountered no response from plant security, the FAA or the U.S. armed forces.

To be sure, Pilgrim is not on the NRC’s list of star performers. Burdened by a backlog of operational problems, it will be shutting down next spring. That said, the security deficits plaguing this plant are, to some degree, a warning about the broader vulnerability of nuclear plants.

We need to cut carbon emissions drastically if we are to have any hope of avoiding the very worst of climate change. Were there no better low-carbon electricity choices, groups like UCS might be on the right track in calling for a bailout of financially strapped nuclear plants. But we do have safer, more economically viable options.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory projects that renewable energy, combined with a more flexible electric system, would be “more than adequate to supply 80 percent of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050, while meeting demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.” Keeping our least- profitable nuclear plants online is a distraction from meeting — or exceeding — this goal.

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November 19, 2018 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

Climate changes multiplying hazards, and the limits to ‘top down’ solutions

Mind-blowing’: Hazards to multiply and accumulate with climate change, https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/climate-change/mind-blowing-hazards-to-multiply-and-accumulate-with-climate-change-20181119-p50gx7.html, By Peter Hannam

20 November 2018 — Humanity is already enduring cumulative effects from climate change and damages will continue to mount along with carbon emissions, a new study has found. Tropical coastal regions will be the most exposed to multiple hazards.

The research – which involved analysis of 3280 research papers and was published on Tuesday by Nature Climate Change – identified 467 pathways that populations were already being hit by a warmer climate. Those impacts will likely increase and intensify unless aggressive efforts are taken to curb greenhouse gas pollution.

“We never stopped being surprised by how many impacts had already happened to us,” said Camilo Mora, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii and lead author of the paper. (An interactive can be seen here.)

“It was also mind-blowing that we just refuse to wake up about how serious this is,” he said.

Examples of impacts cited ranged from famine deaths triggered by droughts and the increased spread of diseases in a warming world, to worsening heavy metal contamination in lakes after wild fires and a poor Russian wheat harvest amid heatwaves in 2010 that led to a doubling of world prices for the commodity.

The tendency towards more extreme weather includes accelerated evaporation rates as temperatures rise, worsening droughts and contributing to more severe wildfires – a combination currently being played out in California, Professor Mora said.

Similarly, with the atmosphere holding about 7 per cent more moisture for each degree of warming, the potential for more intense rain events increases.

About 20-40 per cent of the rainfall from the record wet Hurricane Harvey that soaked Houston in 2017 has been attributed to climate change, Professor Mora said.

Coastal regions were already being exposed to overlapping hazards from both the land and the ocean, making them particularly vulnerable locations now and in the future.

If carbon emissions continued to rise unabated at their current rate, tropical coastal areas such as in Southeast Asia could face as many as six climate hazards concurrently, the paper said.

While societies often relied on top-down approaches to dealing with emissions, the result was often a fragile policy set-up.

November 19, 2018 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment