nuclear-news

Sir David Attenborough to speak for the people at UN climate summit

Sir David Attenborough to speak for the people at UN climate summit https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/21/sir-david-attenborough-to-speak-for-the-people-at-un-climate-summit

November 22, 2018 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

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

Habitable areas of our planet are shrinking – as climate change exacerbates extreme weather

Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out across the globe—slowly at first, and then much faster. But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth.

some of the world is becoming too hot for humans.

As some people flee humidity and rising sea levels, others will be forced to relocate in order to find enough water to survive.

escaping the wreckage is, almost certainly, a fantasy. Even if astronauts did cross the thirty-four million miles to Mars, they’d need to go underground to survive there. To what end?

“People think if we fuck up here on Earth we can always go to Mars or the stars,” “It’s pernicious.”

How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet, New Yorker, by Bill McKibben November 18, 2018 With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts …

“……For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and climate-induced disasters.”

Scientists have warned for decades that climate change would lead to extreme weather. Shortly before the I.P.C.C. report was published, Hurricane Michael, the strongest hurricane ever to hit the Florida Panhandle, inflicted thirty billion dollars’ worth of material damage and killed forty-five people. President Trump, who has argued that global warming is “a total, and very expensive, hoax,” visited Florida to survey the wreckage, but told reporters that the storm had not caused him to rethink his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords. He expressed no interest in the I.P. C.C. report beyond asking “who drew it.” (The answer is ninety-one researchers from forty countries.) He later claimed that his “natural instinct” for science made him confident that the climate would soon “change back.” A month later, Trump blamed the fires in California on “gross mismanagement of forests.

 ……….As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature Climate Change, the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will “extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”

The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But already, even in the most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because of the proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease which have come with the hot weather; we have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jellyfish, which thrive as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the water.

The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.

Climate change,” like “urban sprawl” or “gun violence,” has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it. But exactly what we’ve been up to should fill us with awe. During the past two hundred years, we have burned immense quantities of coal and gas and oil—in car motors, basement furnaces, power plants, steel mills—and, as we have done so, carbon atoms have combined with oxygen atoms in the air to produce carbon dioxide. This, along with other gases like methane, has trapped heat that would otherwise have radiated back out to space. ……..

When I say the world has begun to shrink, this is what I mean. Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out across the globe—slowly at first, and then much faster. But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth. Sometimes our retreat will be hasty and violent; the effort to evacuate the blazing California towns along narrow roads was so chaotic that many people died in their cars. But most of the pullback will be slower, starting along the world’s coastlines. Each year, another twenty-four thousand people abandon Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta as crop fields are polluted with salt. As sea ice melts along the Alaskan coast, there is nothing to protect towns, cities, and native villages from the waves. In Mexico Beach, Florida, which was all but eradicated by Hurricane Michael, a resident told the Washington Post, “The older people can’t rebuild; it’s too late in their lives. Who is going to be left? Who is going to care?” ………

According to a study from the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre last summer, the damage caused by rising sea levels will cost the world as much as fourteen trillion dollars a year by 2100, if the U.N. targets aren’t met. “Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the world’s non-urban shorelines in the not very distant future,” Orrin Pilkey, an expert on sea levels at Duke University, wrote in his book “Retreat from a Rising Sea.” “We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.” ………

some of the world is becoming too hot for humans.  ……….

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, increased heat and humidity have reduced the amount of work people can do outdoors by ten per cent, a figure that is predicted to double by 2050. About a decade ago, Australian and American researchers, setting out to determine the highest survivable so-called “wet-bulb” temperature, concluded that when temperatures passed thirty-five degrees Celsius (ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity was higher than ninety per cent, even in “well-ventilated shaded conditions,” sweating slows down, and humans can survive only “for a few hours, the exact length of time being determined by individual physiology.”

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, increased heat and humidity have reduced the amount of work people can do outdoors by ten per cent, a figure that is predicted to double by 2050. About a decade ago, Australian and American researchers, setting out to determine the highest survivable so-called “wet-bulb” temperature, concluded that when temperatures passed thirty-five degrees Celsius (ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity was higher than ninety per cent, even in “well-ventilated shaded conditions,” sweating slows down, and humans can survive only “for a few hours, the exact length of time being determined by individual physiology.” ………

As some people flee humidity and rising sea levels, others will be forced to relocate in order to find enough water to survive. In late 2017, a study led by Manoj Joshi, of the University of East Anglia, found that, by 2050, if temperatures rise by two degrees a quarter of the earth will experience serious drought and desertification. The early signs are clear: 

………We’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie beneath most of the world’s breadbaskets …

…….All this has played out more or less as scientists warned, albeit faster. What has defied expectations is the slowness of the response. 

………..Exxon’s behavior is shocking, but not entirely surprising. Philip Morris lied about the effects of cigarette smoking before the government stood up to Big Tobacco. The mystery that historians will have to unravel is what went so wrong in our governance and our culture that we have done, essentially, nothing to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry.

There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them.

Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book, said that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything.” Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message, broadening the efforts that Exxon-funded groups like the Global Climate Coalition spearheaded in  the late nineteen eighties…….

Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are among the billionaires who have spent some of their fortunes on space travel—a last-ditch effort to expand the human zone of habitability. In November, 2016, Stephen Hawking gave humanity a deadline of a thousand years to leave Earth. Six months later, he revised the timetable to a century. In June, 2017, he told an audience that “spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.” He continued, “Earth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive.”

But escaping the wreckage is, almost certainly, a fantasy. Even if astronauts did cross the thirty-four million miles to Mars, they’d need to go underground to survive there. To what end? The multimillion-dollar attempts at building a “biosphere” in the Southwestern desert in 1991 ended in abject failure. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of a trilogy of novels about the colonization of Mars, recently called such projects a “moral hazard.” “People think if we fuck up here on Earth we can always go to Mars or the stars,” he said. “It’s pernicious.”

The dream of interplanetary colonization also distracts us from acknowledging the unbearable beauty of the planet we already inhabit.  …….https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet?mbid=nl_Daily%20111718&CNDID=53818310&utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20111718&utm_content=&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=Daily%20111718&hasha=8c9f4

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