Nuclear power is not climate-effective, simply because of comparative costs and delays
This is a thorough analysis of the costs and time delays of nuclear power, as compared with those of energy efficiency and renewables. It does show that in the fight to stop climate change, the push for nuclear is a wasteful distraction.
My only problem with this argument is that it seems to imply that, apart from its exorbitant costs and delays, nuclear power might be effective. Not so!
Nuclear reactors make climate change worse, September 13, 2020 by beyondnuclearinternational
Being carbon-free does not establish climate-effectiveness, By Amory B. LovinsMost U.S. nuclear power plants cost more to run than they earn. Globally, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019 documents the nuclear enterprise’s slow-motion commercial collapse—dying of an incurable attack of market forces. Yet in America, strong views are held across the political spectrum on whether nuclear power is essential or merely helpful in protecting the Earth’s climate—and both those views are wrong. In fact, building new reactors, or operating most existing ones, makes climate change worse compared with spending the same money on more-climate-effective ways to deliver the same energy services. Those who state as fact that rejecting (more precisely, declining to bail out) nuclear energy would make carbon reduction much harder are in good company, but are mistaken. If you haven’t heard this view before, it’s not because it wasn’t published in reputable venues over several decades, but rather because the nuclear industry, which holds the microphone, is eager that you not hear it. Many otherwise sensible analysts and journalists have not properly reported this issue. Few political leaders understand it either. But by the end of this article, I hope you will. For the details and documentation behind this summary, please see pp. 228–256 of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019. A supporting paper provides simple worked examples of how to compare the “climate-effectiveness” of different ways to decarbonize the electricity system. Nuclear power’s potential role in the global climate challenge If the nuclear one-tenth of global electricity generation displaced an average mix of fossil-fueled generation and nothing else, it would offset 4% of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. So in an era of urgent climate concern, should nuclear power continue, shrink, or expand? In May 2020, a report by the International Energy Agency claimed that not sustaining and even expanding nuclear power would make climate solutions “drastically harder and more costly.” To check that claim, we must compare nuclear power with other potential climate solutions. Here I’ll use only two criteria—cost and speed—because if nuclear power has no business case or takes too long, we need not address its other merits or drawbacks. How should we compare different ways to provide electrical services in a carbon-constrained world? Our society built coal-fired power plants by counting cost but not carbon. Nuclear advocates defend their preference by counting carbon but not cost. But to protect the climate, we must save the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time, counting all three variables—carbon and cost and time. Costly options save less carbon per dollar than cheaper options. Slow options save less carbon per year than faster options. Thus even a low- or no-carbon option that is too costly or too slow will reduce and retard achievable climate protection. Being carbon-free does not establish climate-effectiveness. Since in reality money and time are both limited, our priorities in providing energy services must be informed by relative cost and speed. Lower cost saves more carbon per dollar. Faster deployment saves more carbon per year. We need both. Buying nuclear power displaces buying some mixture of fossil-fueled generation, renewable generation, and efficient use. Nuclear owners strive to beat coal and gas while their allies often disparage or suppress renewables. Yet most US nuclear plants are uneconomic just to run, so many are closing. To keep milking those old assets instead, their powerful owners seek and often get multi-billion-dollar bailouts from malleable state legislatures for about a tenth of the US nuclear fleet so far. Such replacement of market choices with political logrolling distorts prices, crowds out competitors, slows innovation, reduces transparency, rewards undue influence, introduces bias, picks winners, invites corruption, and even threatens to destroy the competitive regional power markets where renewables and efficiency win. Yet many political leaders think climate’s urgency demands every option, including preserving nuclear power at any cost. So what is that cost, construed in the narrowest economic terms? Costs of new nuclear power vs. competing options Costly options save less carbon per dollar than cheaper options. Slow options save less carbon per year than faster options. Thus even a low- or no-carbon option that is too costly or too slow will reduce and retard achievable climate protection. Being carbon-free does not establish climate-effectiveness. Since in reality money and time are both limited, our priorities in providing energy services must be informed by relative cost and speed. Lower cost saves more carbon per dollar. Faster deployment saves more carbon per year. We need both. Buying nuclear power displaces buying some mixture of fossil-fueled generation, renewable generation, and efficient use. Nuclear owners strive to beat coal and gas while their allies often disparage or suppress renewables. Yet most US nuclear plants are uneconomic just to run, so many are closing. To keep milking those old assets instead, their powerful owners seek and often get multi-billion-dollar bailouts from malleable state legislatures for about a tenth of the US nuclear fleet so far. Such replacement of market choices with political logrolling distorts prices, crowds out competitors, slows innovation, reduces transparency, rewards undue influence, introduces bias, picks winners, invites corruption, and even threatens to destroy the competitive regional power markets where renewables and efficiency win. Yet many political leaders think climate’s urgency demands every option, including preserving nuclear power at any cost. So what is that cost, construed in the narrowest economic terms? Costs of new nuclear power vs. competing options On 7 November 2019, the eminent 170-year-old financial house Lazard published its 13th annual snapshot of relative 2019-$ prices for different ways to generate a megawatt-hour of electricity. The analysis is authoritative though imperfect. ……. Lazard’s comparison between new electricity resources is stark:…… New nuclear plants will save many-fold less carbon per dollar than competing carbon-free resources, in proportion to their relative costs. And new reactors’ expected performance must be tempered by historical experience: of the 259 power reactors ordered in the US, by mid-2017 only 28 units or 11% had been built, were still competitive in their regional markets, and hadn’t suffered at least one outage lasting at least a year. Should existing nuclear plants keep operating? Today’s hot question, though, is not about new US reactors, which investors shun, but about the existing reactors, already averaging about a decade beyond their nominal original design life. Most now cost more to run—including major repairs that trend upward with age—than their output can earn. They also cost more just to run than providing the same services by building and operating new renewables, or by using electricity more efficiently. So let’s go step by step through an eyechart about nuclear operating costs—which exclude original construction and financing costs (all sunk and usually amortized), but include those costs that need not be paid if the plant is closed………….. closing a top-quartile-cost nuclear plant and buying efficiency instead, as utilities could volunteer or regulators require, would save considerably more carbon than continuing to run the nuclear plant. Some modern renewables too can now rival efficiency’s cost and could compete for that opportunity. Thus, while we close coal plants to save carbon directly, we should also close distressed nuclear plants and reinvest their large saved operating cost in cheaper options to save carbon indirectly. These two climate-protecting steps are not alternatives; they are complements. Replacing a closed nuclear plant with efficiency or renewables empirically takes only 1–3 years. If owners don’t give such advance notice—a common tactic to extort subsidies by making closure more disruptive—more natural gas might temporarily be burned, but then more than offset over the following years by the carbon-free substitutes. California’s biggest utility will therefore replace its well-running Diablo Canyon reactors with least-cost carbon-free resources to save money and carbon and to help the grid work better. To get these outcomes, we must track not just carbon but also money and time. Investing judiciously, not indiscriminately, saves the most carbon per dollar. What about per year? Which technologies are faster to deploy?……………. Global carbon-free electricity is now less than one-third nuclear. Counting also carbon-free production of non-electric energy—biofuels and modern renewable heat—nuclear power struggles to sustain less than one-fourth of the world’s carbon-free final energy use. Why pay more to revive it at the expense of faster and cheaper competitors? Sustaining uneconomic reactors would not only divert public funding from more climate-effective competitors but also constrain their sales and degrade the competitive markets where they thrive. Slowing and blocking the fastest and cheapest climate solutions harms climate protection. How high can US nuclear subsidies go? Meanwhile, back in the United States, the climate-effectiveness of continued nuclear operations is not discussed; the conversation focuses solely on carbon, not on cost or time. Indeed, the industry’s immense lobbying power has now hatched a brazen new way to make taxpayers or customers pay for existing nuclear plants and disadvantage their most potent supply-side competitor (modern renewable power), and reduce and retard climate protection while claiming to increase it. Rarely have so many been so deceived so thoroughly, for so long, at such cost.……..https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2020/09/13/nuclear-reactors-make-climate-change-worse/ |
|
American TV news covers wildfires, but mostly is careful not to mention climate change
Most wildfire coverage on American TV news fails to mention link to climate crisis
A media watchdog analysis found that just 15% of broadcast news segments over a September weekend made the connection to climate breakdown, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/11/american-tv-news-california-oregon-fires-climate-crisis Lois Beckett in Los Angeles and Maanvi Singh in San Francisco
Most news coverage of the wildfires raging in California, Washington and Oregon on American TV channels made no mention of the connection between the historic fires and climate crisis, according to a new analysis from Media Matters
Reviewing coverage aired over the 5-8 September holiday weekend, the progressive media watchdog group found that only 15% of corporate TV news segments on the fires mentioned the climate crisis. A separate analysis found that during the entire month of August only 4% of broadcast news wildfire coverage mentioned climate crisis.
Wildfires are raging in states across the American west, burning record acreage in California, Washington and Oregon. The wave of fires was first sparked and stoked by a spate of unusual weather in August, including rare lightning storms that hit parts of California that were vulnerable to fire because drought and heat had dried out vegetation. The fires came before low-elevation, coastal parts of the state reached peak fire season in the autumn when fierce offshore winds have driven the biggest fires in recent years.
The fires that hit Oregon in recent days were stoked by dry conditions and rare easterly winds.
Although untangling the weather conditions from climate crisis is complicated, it’s clear that overall, in recent years “fire risk is increasing dramatically because of climate change”, said Chris Field, who directs the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Global heating has given rise to drier, hotter conditions and more frequent, extreme droughts that have left the landscape tinder-dry and prone to explosive blazes.
Although California’s landscape has long been prone to fire, climate crisis has “put pressure on the entire system”, Field said, throwing it out of balance and giving rise to more extreme, catastrophic events. The current fires expanding with such explosive force have burned more acreage within a few weeks than what has burned in previous years.
A consensus of research has made clear that extreme heat and drought fueled by global heating has left the American west tinder-dry and especially vulnerable to runaway fires. A 2019 study found that from 1972 to 2018, California saw a five-fold increase in the areas that burned annually. Another study estimates that without human-caused climate crisis, the area that burned between 1984 and 2015 would have been half of what it actually was. And a research paper published last month suggests that the number of autumn days with “extreme fire weather” – when the risk of wildfires is extremely high – has more than doubled over the past two decades. “Our climate model analyses suggest that continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century,” the researchers write, “though a pathway consistent with the UN Paris commitments would substantially curb that increase.”
Climate crisis is not the only factor driving the barrage of blazes across the region. Ironically, a century of suppressing fires – extinguishing the natural, necessary fires in western forests and other wildlands to protect homes and timber – has led to an accumulation of fire-fueling vegetation. “A deficit of fire, concatenated with the effects of climate change have led us here,” said Don Hankins, a fire ecologist at California State University, Chico.
Media Matters singled out two TV news journalists who are regularly talking about the role of climate crisis: the CBS meteorologist and climate specialist Jeff Berardelli and NBC’s Al Roker.
The Media Matters analysis also noted that so far, 2020 has been the third year in a row during which corporate broadcast TV news discussed the impacts of climate crisis in fewer than 5% of wildfire segments.
Importance of the ocean’s biological carbon pump
|
$500 billion question: what’s the value of studying the ocean’s biological carbon pump? EurekAlert WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION, Research News 12 Sept 20, The ocean plays an invaluable role in capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, taking in somewhere between five to 12 gigatons (billion tons) annually. Due to limited research, scientists aren’t sure exactly how much carbon is captured and stored–or sequestered–by the ocean each year or how increasing CO2 emissions will affect this process in the future. A new paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) puts an economic value on the benefit of research to improve knowledge of the biological carbon pump and reduce the uncertainty of ocean carbon sequestration estimates. Using a climate economy model that factors in the social costs of carbon and reflects future damages expected as a consequence of a changing climate, lead author Di Jin of WHOI’s Marine Policy Center places the value of studying ocean carbon sequestration at $500 billion. “The paper lays out the connections between the benefit of scientific research and decision making,” says Jin. “By investing in science, you can narrow the range of uncertainty and improve a social cost-benefit assessment.” Better understanding of the ocean’s carbon sequestration capacity will lead to more accurate climate models, providing policymakers with the information they need to establish emissions targets and make plans for a changing climate, Jin adds. With co-authors Porter Hoagland and Ken Buesseler, Jin builds a case for a 20-year scientific research program to measure and model the ocean’s biological carbon pump, the process by which atmospheric carbon dioxide is transported to the deep ocean through the marine food web. The biological carbon pump is fueled by tiny plant-like organisms floating on the ocean surface called phytoplankton, which consume carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis. When the phytoplankton die or are eaten by larger organisms, the carbon-rich fragments and fecal matter sink deeper into the ocean, where they are eaten by other creatures or buried in seafloor sediments, which helps decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide and thus reduces global climate change. Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, a result of human activity such as burning fossil fuels, warms the planet by trapping heat from the sun and also dissolves into seawater, lowering the pH of the ocean, a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. A warmer, more acidic ocean could weaken the carbon pump, causing atmospheric temperatures to rise–or it could get stronger, with the opposite effect. ………. Key Takeaways * The ocean takes up an estimated five to 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year through a process known as the biological carbon pump. * More accurate estimates of the ocean’s capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere will lead to more accurate climate models which could improve carbon emissions policies. * The global economic benefit of studying the ocean’s biological pump is $500 billion, if the science leads to policy decisions that mitigate the effects of climate change. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/whoi-bq091020.php |
|
Climate change and the loss of sea otters
Loss of sea otters accelerating the effects of climate change, New research published in Science reveals that the influence of a key predator governs the pace of climate impacts on Alaskan reefs EurekAlert, BIGELOW LABORATORY FOR OCEAN SCIENCES , 13 Sept 20, The impacts of predator loss and climate change are combining to devastate living reefs that have defined Alaskan kelp forests for centuries, according to new research published in Science.
“We discovered that massive limestone reefs built by algae underpin the Aleutian Islands’ kelp forest ecosystem,” said Douglas Rasher, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the lead author of the study. “However, these long-lived reefs are now disappearing before our eyes, and we’re looking at a collapse likely on the order of decades rather than centuries.”
The coral-like reefs, built by the red alga Clathromorphum nereostratum, are being ground down by sea urchins. Sea urchins exploded in number after their predator, the Aleutian sea otter, became functionally extinct in the 1990’s. Without the urchins’ natural predator to keep them in check, urchins have transformed the seascape – first by mowing down the dense kelp forests, and now by turning their attention to the coralline algae that form the reef.
Clathromorphum produces a limestone skeleton that protects the organism from grazers and, over hundreds of years, forms a complex reef that nurtures a rich diversity of sea life. With kelp gone from the menu, urchins are now boring through the alga’s tough protective layer to eat the alga – a process that has become much easier due to climate change.
“Ocean warming and acidification are making it difficult for calcifying organisms to produce their shells, or in this case, the alga’s protective skeleton,” said Rasher, who led the international team of researchers that included coauthors Jim Estes from UC Santa Cruz and Bob Steneck from University of Maine. “This critical species has now become highly vulnerable to urchin grazing – right as urchin abundance is peaking. It’s a devasting combination.”………..
The results of the experiment confirmed that climate change has recently allowed urchins to breach the alga’s defenses, pushing this system beyond a critical tipping point.
“It’s well documented that humans are changing Earth’s ecosystems by altering the climate and by removing large predators, but scientists rarely study those processes together,” Rasher said. “If we had only studied the effects of climate change on Clathromorphum in the laboratory, we would have arrived at very different conclusions about the vulnerability and future of this species. Our study shows that we must view climate change through an ecological lens, or we’re likely to face many surprises in the coming years.”……..https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/blfo-los090420.php
Climate change causing major changes in Arctic insect communities
Climate change recasts the insect communities of the Arctic, EurekAlert, UNIVERSITY OF 
HELSINKI Research News 12 Sept 20, Through a unique research collaboration, researchers at the University of Helsinki have exposed major changes taking place in the insect communities of the Arctic. Their study reveals how climate change is affecting small but important predators of other insects, i.e. parasitoids.”Predators at the top of the food web give us a clue to what is happening to their prey species, too. These results increase our understanding of how global warming is changing nature. At the same time, they suggest new inroads for finding answers to big questions in the field of ecology,” says Professor Tomas Roslin from the University of Helsinki and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).
The researchers’ main discovery was that clear traces of climate change can already be seen in arctic insect communities.
“In areas where summers are rapidly warming, we find a higher proportion of cold-sensitive predators than we might expect based on the previous climate,” Roslin notes.
The study joined research teams working in Greenland, Canada, Russia, Norway, Finland and Iceland, which together compared regions where the climate has changed at different rates and in different ways in recent decades.
Parasitoids are fierce predators but sensitive to changes in climatic conditions
“The climate of the Arctic is currently changing about twice as fast as the global average. Therefore, the Arctic region provides an important laboratory when we try to understand the effects of climate change on nature,” says Tuomas Kankaanpää, lead author of the study and active at the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki.
“To distinguish the key consequences of climate change, we have focused on some of the most important predators in the Arctic, parasitoid wasps and flies. These parasitoids are predators whose larvae develop on or within a single host individual and usually kill it in the process. And now we have found that climate change is dramatically affecting the relative dominance of different types of parasitoids.”………..https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/uoh-ccr091020.php
“Event attribution science” assesses the big role of climate change in weather extremes
Wild weather this year shows growing impact of climate change, scientists say
‘Event attribution science’ assesses how big a role climate change plays in extreme weather events, https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/extreme-weather-climate-change-1.5718546 Thomson Reuters · Sep 10, 2020 The planet is showing signs it’s in peril. In recent weeks, the world has seen ferocious wildfires in the U.S. West, torrential rains in Africa, weirdly warm temperatures on the surface of tropical oceans, and record heat waves from California to the Siberian Arctic.
This spate of wild weather is consistent with climate change, scientists say, and the world can expect even more extreme weather and higher risks from natural disasters as global emissions of greenhouse gases continue.
“We are seeing the emergence of some signals that would have had almost no chance of happening without human-induced climate change,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at Swiss university ETH Zurich.
For decades, scientists have warned of such events — but have been wary of saying that a particular storm or heat wave was a direct result of climate change. That’s now changing.
Advances in a relatively new field known as “event attribution science” have enabled researchers to assess how big a role climate change might have played in a specific case.
In determining that link, scientists assess simulations of how weather systems might behave if humans had never started pumping carbon dioxide into the air, and compare that with what is happening today. They also factor in weather observations made over the last century or more.
“What seemed like an established truth that you cannot attribute a particular extreme weather event to climate change is less and less true,” Seneviratne told Reuters.
Feeling the heat
The clearest examples are found in the growing frequency and intensity of heat waves worldwide.
Scientists needed only days to identify climate change as the key culprit in this year’s record temperatures in Siberia, with extreme heat drying out forests and peat across the Russian tundra, leading to massive wildfires.
Climate change links have also been found in the simultaneous summer heat waves that hit Europe, Japan and North America in 2018. Studies found that the chances of these events happening together would have been near zero without the industrial-era rise in planet-warming carbon emissions.
“When it comes to heat waves, we see that climate change is an absolute game-changer,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who has helped to pioneer the field of attribution science.
As a heat wave hit the U.S. West Coast last month, Earth saw a new record high temperature of 54.4 Celsius (130 Fahrenheit) in Death Valley, which sits below sea level in California’s Mojave Desert. Weeks later, the region was still broiling, with the mercury soaring Sunday to a new record of 49 C for nearby Los Angeles County.
“It’s not so much that climate change is destabilizing historical weather patterns,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. “In many cases, it’s amplifying them.”
Hotter temperatures in turn sap the air of humidity and dry out forest and brush on land, creating perfect conditions for wildfires. In California, “the fires that we’re seeing are larger, and faster moving, and more intense than those you could have expected historically,” Swain said.
But attribution science has not explained everything. For example, researchers do not yet fully understand Europe’s heat waves.
“In Western Europe, the increase in heat waves is much stronger than the models predict, and we have no clue why,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, an attribution science expert at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.
Wind, rain and floods
As average global temperatures have risen by about 1 C since pre-industrial times, changes in the atmosphere and oceans are also leading to more intense storms.
Hurricanes overall are getting stronger and spinning slower, as they pick up energy from the heat in the oceans. Researchers at the University of Bristol in the west of England published a study last month that found that climate change could make extreme hurricane rainfall in the Caribbean five times more likely, without rapid cuts in emissions.
In the United States, warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico boosted Hurricane Laura to a category 4 storm in the last hours before it slammed into Louisiana with 240 kilometre per hour winds. Governor John Bel Edwards described it as the most powerful hurricane to strike the state, surpassing even Katrina in 2005.
Tropical cyclones spinning out from the Indian Ocean are showing similar patterns. The region has long been considered a hot spot for cyclones, with some of the deadliest storms in recent history churning through the Bay of Bengal before slamming into India or Bangladesh.
Exceptionally high surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, associated with climate change, helped Cyclone Amphan grow into a Category 5 storm in a record 18 hours before it tore into the Indian state of West Bengal in May, scientists say.
The following month, Cyclone Nisarga, initially forecast to be the first to batter Mumbai since 1948, made landfall 100 km south of the city, with winds gusting up to 120 kilometres per hour.
“Both of the cyclones were unprecedented,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. “If we go back to what led to these kinds of extreme events, what we see is that very warm ocean temperatures have played a major role.”
Those warm ocean temperatures are also likely contributing to extreme rainfall and flooding in China, which this summer suffered its most punishing flood season in three decades.
“The extreme rainfall events are going to become more extreme. That is something we feel pretty confident about,” said Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
Africa is feeling this now, following torrential rains and severe flooding. Tens of thousands have been left homeless by flooding from the Nile in Sudan. And in Senegal, more rain fell on a single day on Saturday than the country would usually see during three months of the rainy season, the government said.
“There’s a large and growing body of evidence that is telling us that human-caused climate change is affecting extreme events,” said James Kossin, a climate scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s very rare that this is happening in a helpful way.”
Unprecedented wildfires in three American states
Oregon fires put 500,000 under evacuation orders as US blazes kill 15
Unprecedented fire conditions burn more than 900,000 acres
Firefighting resources are stretched thin in three states Guardian, Jason Wilson in Portland, Maanvi Singh in Oakland and Sam Levin in Los Angeles Fri 11 Sep 2020 More than 500,000 people in Oregon were under evacuation orders on Thursday as unprecedented wildfires rage across the state, amounting to more than 10% of the population, authorities said.
Wildfires searing through the American west have killed at least 15 people, leveled entire neighborhoods and forced stretched firefighting crews to make tough decisions about where to deploy.
The situation is especially acute in Oregon where fire conditions not seen in three decades have fueled huge blazes that have killed at least three people, destroyed at least five towns and forced the evacuation of communities from the southern border to the Portland suburbs.
On Thursday night, Donald Trump approved an emergency declaration in the state, enabling federal assistance to bolster local efforts.
Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, said on Thursday that more than 900,000 acres have burned across the state in the last several days – nearly double the amount of land that usually burns in a typical year. “We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across the state,” Brown said……..,.
Firefighters on the west coast are tackling blazes across three states……
By Wednesday evening, that city was blanketed with smoke from fires burning around its forested south-eastern fringe, and in rural areas to the south-west.
The explosion of fires across the region were stoked by dry winds, and a record heatwave – and fueled by widespread drought, which dried out vegetation into kindling.
The early part of the week saw gusts of up to 50mph in western areas, downing trees and power lines in Portland and other cities. The rare weather, more characteristic of winter storms in the region, was accompanied by historically low relative humidity.
California, which has been battling a barrage of fires since August, has within the last few weeks seen the first, third, fourth, ninth, 10th and 18th-largest wildfires in state history, according to the National Weather Service.
Even in the midst of its dry, hot, windy fire season, California has experienced wildfires advancing with unprecedented speed and ferocity. Since the middle of August, fires in California have killed 12 people, destroyed more than 3,600 buildings, burned old growth redwoods, charred chaparral and forced evacuations in communities near the coast, in wine country north of San Francisco and along the Sierra Nevada. Authorities said the August Complex fire is now officially the largest fire on record in the state’s history, having scorched more than 736 sq miles (1,906 sq km).
In some areas of the San Francisco Bay Area and to the east in the Sacramento Valley, smoke blocked out so much sunlight on Wednesday that it dropped the temperature by 20 to 30 degrees over the previous day, according to the National Weather Service.
The US Forest Service, which had taken the unprecedented measure of closing eight national forests in southern California earlier in the week, ordered all 18 of its forests in the state closed Wednesday for public safety.
Sea level rise – a threat to nuclear power stations that is being ignored
For nuclear plants operating on thin margins, growing climate risks prompt tough choices Climate change creates a number of problems for nuclear power plants that some academics say the industry needs to address soon. UtilityDive, Matthew Bandyk@MatthewBandy- – 11 Sept 20′‘………..Sea Levels
Researchers are projecting that nuclear plants need to be concerned not just with water temperature, but also water levels, especially when severe weather events linked to climate change like hurricanes can cause the water level a plant was designed to handle to rise rapidly.
About 37 GW of nuclear power capacity face “higher exposure to flood risk,” according to the Moody’s report. These include plants along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, as well as inland plants located on rivers, like the Nebraska Public Power District’s Cooper plant on the Missouri River near the Omaha Public Power District’s now-retired Fort Calhoun plant, which was inundated with flood waters in 2011, forcing the plant to shut down for almost three years.
Over the long term, severe weather and rising sea levels could make the need to solve the puzzle of where to store spent fuel from reactors more urgent.
Due to the failure to develop a central waste repository like the long-stalled Yucca Mountain facility, much of the spent fuel is stored on-site in pools within the reactor that shield the potentially dangerous radiation from the discarded fuel assemblies, or, in the case of older spent fuel, stored in dry casks. Spent fuel pools must be actively cooled to avoid a scenario like the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
A 2020 academic journal article by Jordaan and other Johns Hopkins researchers looked at what would happen to spent fuel pool sites at U.S. nuclear plants if sea levels rose by six feet — as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has projected could happen over the next 80 years.
Seven plants would be at essentially the same level as coastal water, “meaning that the water will be encroaching on the plant with regularity,” the article said. One active plant — Turkey Point — and two decommissioned plant sites — Humboldt Bay in California and Crystal River in Florida — would “be partially or completely submerged by water” in this scenario. To avoid a Fukushima-like incident or the corrosion of dry casks, the article calls for “a long-term and comprehensive storage plan that is less vulnerable to climate change.”
As part of the regulatory response to Fukushima, U.S. nuclear plants updated their evaluations of the potential hazards they face based on their geographic locations, including floods. In some cases, those flood reevaluations have led to changes at some plants, such as new watertight barriers, according to Uhle.
There has been controversy both within and outside the NRC regarding whether the agency has done enough to ensure plants’ flooding protections are in line with the current estimated threats, which are in some cases far more severe than was thought when plants were initially licensed.
In early 2019, a divided NRC approved a rule incorporating “lessons learned” from Fukushima into regulatory requirements, but it did not contain provisions that would have required more extensive protections against the reevaluated hazards.
“Instead of requiring nuclear power plants to be prepared for the actual flooding and earthquake hazards that could occur at their sites, NRC will allow them to be prepared only for the old, outdated hazards typically calculated decades ago when the science of seismology and hydrology was far less advanced than it is today,” NRC Commissioner Jeff Baran said when explaining his objection to the majority’s decision.
The regulations the NRC stopped short of imposing would have forced plant operators to, in some cases, take flood mitigation steps beyond what the plant was originally designed to withstand, according to Ed Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was a strong critic of the commission’s move. For example, if a building containing critical safety equipment for a plant was built to stay above water in a flood, and new studies showed the potential water level was higher than previously thought, the NRC regulations would not require that building to be moved to a higher location, Lyman said.
“Even without additional concerns from climate change, the plants aren’t protected today,” he said……… https://www.utilitydive.com/news/for-nuclear-plants-operating-on-thin-margins-growing-climate-risks-prompt/584883/
Why climate change has the potential to cause more pandemics
Why climate change has the potential to cause more pandemics, AFR, Tom McIlroy, Political reporter, 
Sep 9, 2020,
Biosecurity leaders and Nobel prize winner Peter Doherty are lobbying the federal government to reduce the risk of animal-borne diseases caused by environmental degradation and climate change.
A group of former chief veterinary officers and senior government advisers have asked for renewed action to limit greenhouse gas emissions and have warned that a repeat of the COVID-19 pandemic could come about from the damage to natural ecosystems and increased contact between humans and animals carrying potentially deadly pathogens….. (subscribers only) https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/why-climate-change-has-the-potential-to-cause-more-pandemics-20200908-p55t
United in Science report: Climate Change has not stopped for COVID19
United in Science report: Climate Change has not stopped for COVID19 9 Sept 20
This is according to a new multi-agency report from leading science organizations, United in Science 2020. It highlights the increasing and irreversible impacts of climate change, which affects glaciers, oceans, nature, economies and human living conditions and is often felt through water-related hazards like drought or flooding. It also documents how COVID-19 has impeded our ability to monitor these changes through the global observing system.
Earth may temporarily pass dangerous 1.5℃ warming limit by 2024, major new report says
Earth may temporarily pass dangerous 1.5℃ warming limit by 2024, major new report says
Pep Canadell and Rob Jackson , 9 Sep 20.
The Paris climate agreement seeks to limit global warming to 1.5℃ this century. A new report by the World Meteorological Organisation warns this limit may be exceeded by 2024 – and the risk is growing.
Climate engineering: Modelling projections oversimplify risks
Climate engineering: Modelling projections oversimplify risks
Climate change is gaining prominence as a political and public priority. But many ambitious climate action plans foresee the use of climate engineering technologies whose risks are insufficiently understood. Researchers now describe how evolving modelling practices are trending towards ‘best-case’ projections. They warn that over-optimistic expectations of climate engineering may reinforce the inertia with which industry and politics have been addressing decarbonization.
Extreme weather events – Senegal and Nigeria
Senegal suburbs remain under water days after ‘exceptional rainfall’
Suburbs outside Dakar remained under water, three days after ‘exceptional rainfall’. In Keur Massar, a town just east of Dakar, cars were partly submerged while residents were seen walking knee deep in stagnant flood waters.
Farmland submerged as severe floods hit Nigeria
Farmlands were severely affected and thousands were displaced as severe rainfall caused flooding in Nigeria. An eyewitness captured a completely flooded rice farmland in Kebbi State where over 500,000 hectares were affected, according to local news reports. Kebbi is the country’s main rice-growing state, according to the Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria.
Endless summers, endless wildfires
Endless summers, endless wildfires, South Wind 8 September 2020,
If leaders can’t get their heads around the wildfire-climate link, we had better prepare for many more nasty summers “…………. Now, everything is merged into one, and greatly enlarged. In my youth the places I recall having summer fires were Australia, the western United States, and odd outbreaks in Latin America, Africa and Mediterranean countries. Now we hear of fires erupting in other northern lands, as far north as the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
Looking back at this year so far we could be forgiven for thinking the whole world is ablaze. Almost as soon as wildfires are extinguished on one continent they seem to be breaking out afresh on another one.
2020 began with Australia’s record-breaking Black Summer fires destroying millions of hectares of forest and capturing global attention. Within a couple of months fires had broken out in Ukraine, threatening the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant.
A month later, smouldering peat that had been primed by years of drying and warming began to spark vegetation fires in Siberia that would eventually number over 600, emitting more carbon in two months than any preceding year and producing a smoke cloud spanning an area bigger than Europe.
The Siberian fires were still burning in mid-August when forests in California erupted into flames, more than a month earlier than the start of a “normal” season in that part of the world and less than two years after its previous record-breaking year.
At the end of a relatively quiet Californian fire season, in 2019-20 Australia got the benefit of that state’s large water-bombing aircraft, one of which crashed in the Australian Alps killing its US crew. Now, with California suffering similar devastation, we are battling to respond to its desperate appeal for reciprocal help.
Add to all those the perennial fires accompanying rainforest clearing in Southeast Asia and Brazil. The Amazon Basin situation is dire. August-September is the land-clearers’ peak burning period, and this year, with legal constraints all but destroyed under president Jair Bolsonaro, the area burnt and smoke generated looks like being even worse than what triggered last year’s global alarm.
Last week saw release of the interim report of the inquiry into Australia’s natural disaster management, led by former air force chief Mark Binskin, which was set up by the Morrison government after the Black Summer fires.
As the Black Summer fires showed, the report said, “bushfire behaviour has become more extreme and less predictable. Catastrophic fire conditions may become more common, rendering traditional bushfire prediction models and firefighting techniques less effective.”
No close observer of climate change would be surprised by the coronavirus pandemic’s global progress and the response to it of many political and vested interests. Those interests might wish it were otherwise, but this contagion operates without any reference to the things they hold dear.
Climate change, too, doesn’t recognise human boundaries. We set it off, and by failing to curb carbon emissions, we ensured its impact would continue to grow. Yet Australian governments, ignoring dire warnings from disaster experts, continue to behave as if it doesn’t exist.
This summer may see something of a reprieve. Weather authorities anticipate a wettish spring for eastern Australia. A moist understory is less likely to kindle fire from dry lightning, which has plagued recent fire management in both hemispheres.
But hoping for good weather doesn’t replace what the experts keep saying: a fire plan that doesn’t acknowledge the overwhelming influence of climate change is no plan at all. If partisan politics and vested interests prevent us acting on this, we’d better get ready for many more summers from hell. http://southwind.com.au/2020/09/08/endless-summers-endless-wildfires/
1 This Month
Shut down the radiation-damaged Heysham nuclear reactors now
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
-
Archives
- November 2026 (3)
- October 2026 (302)
- September 2026 (339)
- August 2026 (330)
- July 2026 (355)
- June 2026 (287)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (267)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
