Uranium enrichment seems to be the topic of the day today, with a collection of stories covering a rather frenzied reaction to two pieces of news dug up by a 7.30 report report. Firstly, that Australia had a “secret uranium enrichment program” in the 1970s and 1980s. Secondly, that a new company, with former researchers from that program, is in the early stages of feasibility assessment for a commercial enrichment plant in Australia.
Firstly, the “secret enrichment program” hasn’t been secret for a long time. Amongst other places, you can get an outline of the work in Rod Barton’s book The Weapons Detective, which was published a couple of years ago. Not to mention that, separately, Silex Systems invented their own enrichment system which may be the most efficient enrichment technology in the world – they recently sold the rights to General Electric and they’re currently building a test plant in the United States. More interesting, however, is the idea that somebody is actively considering building an enrichment plant in Australia. It’s impossible to judge, at this stage, the seriousness of this particular proposal, but given it’s unlikely to be the last it might be worth untangling some of the issues surrounding uranium enrichment in Australia.
Firstly, for who aren’t familiar with the technical details, I’ll try to give you the short, short version (but you can try the ever-helpful Wikipedia for the gory details in a reasonably accessible manner). natural uranium is made up of a mix of different types of uranium (isotopes, for those who remember their chemistry). Many elements exist in multiple isotopes, but for most things we use it doesn’t really make a difference which isotope is used as they behave very similarly. Uranium is a little different. Uranium-235, which makes up about 0.7% of natural uranium, can fairly straightforwardly undergo nuclear fission. Uranium-238, the other 99.3% can’t (unless other much more complicated things which I won’t go into here are done). To make fuel for most nuclear power plants, the concentration of uranium-235 has to be increased to between 3 and 5%. The concentration process – enrichment – is complicated and expensive because uranium-235 and 238 are both uranium; they behave virtually identically as far as the world of chemistry is concerned. The only thing readily available to exploit is the slight difference in mass.
The two main methods of doing enrichment take advantage of this. The first was gas diffusion, which forces gasified uranium through membranes, with the lighter, faster-travelling u-235 more likely to go through than the heavier u-238. This was developed during the Manhattan Project in WWII and is still in use in the USA and France, though the plants are scheduled to shut down within the next few years because it’s very costly and inefficient. The more efficient, modern technology, the one that ANSTO perfected back in the 1980s, is the gas centrifuge. It was originally developed by captured German scientists in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, brought to the west in the 1960s when they were allowed to leave, and continually improved since then. The new method developed by Silex involves shining lasers at the gasified uranium. To cut a long story short, at the right frequency, the laser will cause the uranium-235 and only the u-235 to become magnetic temporarily, at which point it can be collected with a magnet. It’s promising (at least according to Silex), but commercially unproven.
There is no compelling necessity to establish uranium enrichment in Australia to reduce shipping costs, even if a domestic nuclear power industry was established here. Nuclear fuel has so much energy in it per kilogram that the energy costs of shipping it around the world are miniscule compared to the energy you get from them, and miniscule compared to the costs of shipping fossil fuels. Australia doesn’t have any particularly compelling advantages over other Western countries as a location to enrich uranium, either. Most of the cost of centrifuge enrichment is in the costs of setting up the plant, and most of the key equipment would be imported from overseas anyway.
Furthermore, enrichment is only one part of the preparation of nuclear fuel; actually fabricating the enriched uranium into the physical form suitable for putting in a nuclear reactor – fabrication – is a specialized business and one fairly jealously guarded by the reactor manufacturers because they make much of their money from it. So the idea of Australia being a one-stop shop for nuclear fuel seems rather unlikely. Any plans for nuclear fuel leasing, as Tim Dunlop was talking about today, will still be an international project, cooperating with partners in the USA, Europe, and possibly Russia. Furthermore, enrichment might well be the most globally competitive part of the whole industry, as it is virtually a commodity. There’s no product differentiation – it’s purely a price-based market.
So there doesn’t seem to be any particularly compelling reason to get enthused about a domestic nuclear enrichment industry – but, I suppose, if somebody wants to put up the cash to build a plant, you’d want a good reason to stop them investing. The question, therefore, is: what risks does a uranium enrichment plant pose?
Firstly, the uranium enrichment process does not involve a nuclear reactor, and there is no risk of a Chernobyl-style accident. What it does involve is the creation of uranium hexafluoride, a rather nasty gas that, while not particularly radioactive, is chemically toxic if it were to be released into the environment. However, there are lots of chemically toxic gases processed safely in various industrial plants in Australia today; there’s nothing uniquely pernicious about uranium hexafluoride. Furthermore, in the normal processing of the plant you’re left with a substantial quantity of depleted uranium. This can be stored safely indefinitely in barrels (the USA has been doing it for 50 years without serious leakage), but, ultimately, needs to be disposed of. While, again, depleted uranium is a nasty heavy metal (its chemical properties are far more dangerous than its very low radioactivity), you have to remember that it was already present in the environment when when we mined it, and, indeed, there’s not insubstantial quantities naturally present in your average piece of soil. If you want to have a look at the US’s plan for handling their big stockpile of the stuff, see here.
Peter Beattie, in commenting on the proposal, raised concerns about the power consumption of such a facility. That’s also a bit of a furphy, to be honest. Old-style gas diffusion enrichment does use a lot of power, but centrifuges don’t use that much. Assuming power consumption equivalent to existing centrifuge plants, one centrifuge enrichment plant sufficient to supply the entire world’s enrichment demand – that is, supplying over 400 nuclear reactors that produce 16.5% of the world’s electricity – would use about 250 megawatts of power continuously. A new-build plant using the very latest technology would probably use a fair bit less. Any actual plant built in Australia would be a fraction of the size. By comparison, the aluminium smelter at Portland, supplying a small fraction of the world market, uses nearly three times that. As an alternative comparison, it’s about one-third the output of Kogan Creek in Queensland.
While the environmental issues are quite manageable, there remains one serious concern about a uranium enrichment plant that would need to be addressed – the foreign policy implications. The exact same plant used to enrich uranium to low levels for use in a power plant, can be used to enrich to the 80-90% needed to make a bomb – that’s why Iran’s plans to build its own enrichment facilities are causing so much concern, and that’s why existing enrichment plants have the IAEA watching them like hawks to make sure nobody’s enriching more than they’re supposed to. As Lyn Allison puts it:
“It seems to me that Australians are being swept into a nuclear fuel and possibly even a weapons cycle, with the people actually having no say,”
It’s also probably a large part of why Peter Garrett is “shocked” at the idea.
The concern is not so much that Australia is going to turn around and produce nuclear weapons – if we wanted to do that, now or in the future, could have done so on the quiet by simply dusting off the plans our scientists came up with more than 20 years ago (or for that matter building a Silex-style plant). It’s more about how, if Australia builds an enrichment plant, how much more difficult it will be to make an argument that other countries shouldn’t also be able to if they choose to do so. For that reason alone, I think Lyn Allison has a point. In the cold hard light of day, the environmental argument against such a plant is not compelling. But the foreign policy implications need to be thought through very carefully.
There’s another aspect to this besides the one Robert mentioned.
It’s the rationale behind the nuclear hype we’ve been clobbered with from the PM and just about everyone else on the Right side of politics.
The ultimate rationale for all this nuclear palava has never been to have a nuclear power industry. That’s so far ahead in time that the short term thinkers in the Liberal Party couldn’t possibly get their heads around such a concept.
The aim of the exercise is pure bait-and-switch. In arguing for a distant nuclear power industry, you also have to argue for enrichment programs and a disposal industry to be in place before one watt of power is generated from uranium.
Disposal and enrichment are much more short term propositions than generation. It really doesn’t matter whether we generate the actual electricity or not. We have to have enrichment and disposal before any of that “green power” crap can go ahead. There are enough “connected” entepreneurs lined up to enrich uranium and bury the waste (without needing to give a toss about power generation) to fill the Liberal Party donations box for decades to come.
While the anti-nuclear critics are worried about which suburb the reactors will be built in, the polluters and the enrichers will making a fortune out of “ancilliary” industries.
They don’t call it “enrichment” for nothing. To find out more about the great opportunities for Party patrons, write to:
J. Howard Esq.
c/o Kirribilli House Convention Centre,
KIRRIBILLI NSW 2061
Enrichment and breeding (involving plutonium) is about the only way to make nuclear power a long-term prospect (even if you are a fan), as according to an “Earth Audit” reported in New Scientist 2007-05-26 there are only about 20 years left (if the per-capita world use was at half of per-capita 2006 US use) or 60 years if consumption/production stays the same.
NS has locked off most of this rather scary article to subscriber-only , but I’ve reworked the graphics for some important minerals into a table here, and written about the implications for weapons-grade fissile material and conservation of existing U for research and medicine here.
That said, in my opinion Robert Merkel is absolutely spot on when he said
Now lets remember,the ABC. leader of the theme park approach to news and views may have known this stuff presented here.Even so,whatever this company deems as its potential,a scientist at Lucas Heights did not follow a request of the government of the day,and continued research and development whilst under the secrecy provisions,that, would disallow anyone to find out,or the scientist to disclose what he already knew.This to me is nothing short of the denial of a democratically elected government to assess and amend research in areas where the public interest…without knowledge felt some danger and unworthiness in the research.The fact the man was still on the payroll seems to have been missed.Therefore,if my reasoning has a soundness to it..this is both a contempt of government,and a rip-off of the taxpayer,and a failure to meet security matters under secrecy provisions.If the contention of democratically elected government means anything..he should of been in a court room sometime yesterday,or the grander days before.Once again,Labor isnt following through on its convictions[ideals] and neither are the various law enforcers.Scumbags aplenty!?
Aussie Bob, the point is that enrichment isn’t likely to be a goldmine. If I were Urenco and wanted to build a greenfields enrichment plant, I’d pick somewhere in the new EU states – Poland perhaps. Lower labor and electricity costs, lots of EU subsidies, and fewer political hassles considering that most of these countries already have nuclear power plants and want to keep them indefinitely.
It’s possible that skilled labor is cheaper in Australia than it is in the USA, making a plant here attractive for the American enrichment company, but I wouldn’t have thought that there was much in it.
As for a disposal industry, if Australia started the planning process for a nuclear plant tomorrow, we wouldn’t need a long-term disposal site until 2060 or so. The stuff is too hot (literally as well as metaphorically for the first few years, that’s why they have to keep it underwater) to bury for a considerable time after it comes out of the reactor.
I don’t actually have a problem with burying high-level nuclear waste in a properly constructed facility in Australia. But if anybody claims we need a waste disposal facility up and running before building our own nuclear plants they’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
Dave, I’m personally not too worried about uranium supplies.
The known world reserves just went up by a couple of years when BHP did a bit of drilling around Olympic Dam. Until the recent boom, nobody’s been seriously looking for uranium for a couple of decades. We don’t even bother to extract the uranium out of phosphate fertilizer because the arse dropped out of the market in the 1980s.
Furthermore, it doesn’t take into account increased use of reprocessing, reducing the amount we waste during the enrichment process, improved burnup and thermal efficiency from new reactors, using thorium as part of the fuel mix to extend supplies (something the Russians are trying right now in their existing reactors)…not to mention seawater uranium extraction and breeder reactors.
Not to mention that nuclear power’s cost is almost unaffected by the price of uranium, unlike, say, natural gas, where virtually all of the cost is the fuel. So we can live with very expensive uranium without the cost being unmanageable.
I find it difficult to understand why this subject of building nuclear power stations in Australia or enrichment processes even gets the time of day. I think,it is necessary as a function of good governance,that the government if it was really serious about this,is to find and support a safe way of using the existing stored isotopes medically and industrial ..to prove that storage isnt the only option,with all the attendant problems of that. Surely as a simple project in logic finding a way with this waste..must be high science invention innovation and socially acceptable..meet these criteria first..and maybe we will listen..because the problem is now with waste. As I look up back at the last post..live with very expensive uranium without the cost being unmanageable. Prescience no doubt!?
Call me cynical, but I think the uranium enrichment announcement is a political ploy designed to generate noise in the media and to shift attention away from the embarrassing situation over the use of Kirribilli House by the Liberal Party.
say you take atoms…& the friction…& the entropy (randomisation of patterns)…and the creation.
add DNA
Lex I: Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.
An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force. An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force.
N’
The Apocalypse.
is a thought
imagine
the ultimate attention seeker
wary of LIFE
unsure that
ALL THE MONEY
ALL THE POWER
IN THE WORLD
won’t be enough
the need to SURVIVE THE LAST WAVE
so…OVER…
POWERING
no trust
no belief
no
in anything ALIVE
after the ABSORB ing
and so the imagination, the music, the trees sway
for the PADRE
look inside…look inside…
as the wind blows
will you find love…
how lonely you must be…to know.
but can you reach out?
and give it all up?
to those
who created Santa
who now spins on the ice
w/her…or him
and feels confidence
as they breathe out…
that the music is the friend
in the
picture
that is LIFE
nasking…dedicated to Stacey, Apollo, Emi, Bronk, Si, Tony, Stalky, Paul G., Lorne, Gerry, Clyde, Paul, Gabby, Gerhart, Lilly, Sherlock, David, John, Carol, Rex, Biddy, John, Derick, John L., Seeker………..
Give em’ hell Kim!…;)
Robert, isn’t the concern about countries that set up _unsafeguarded_ enrichment facilities? An Australian facility would presumably be fully compliant with the IAEA: they could set up cameras in every corner, make no-notice inspections whenever they felt like, and demand an accounting for every gram that goes in and every gram that comes out. You can’t say the same about the Iranian centrifuges — which is the problem.
P.S. I don’t know what you’re on, nasking, but I’m sure Tony Abbott would not approve!
So long as enrichment is carried out by a private company and so long as the taxpayers aren’t expected to subsidise the operation in any way, including:
1. Indemnities against damage.
2. Subsidies or underwriting of insurance charges.
3. Storage of waste at public expense.
Then I’m in favour an enrichment industry.
Of course, if these stipulations were adhered to, it would be impossible to set up an enrichment industry.
So, if an enrichment industry is established, expect it to be a drain on public finance.
Paulus: the existing nuclear states aren’t too thrilled about the spread of enrichment technology full stop. Knowledge is permanent, safeguards can go away.
The canonical example for Australia – how would we feel if Indonesia set up an enrichment facility?
Katz: the only taxpayer costs from the Price-Anderson act in the USA has been less than $100 million for cleaning up government-owned military facilities. The payouts from Three Mile Island cost the taxpayer nothing. As far as waste goes, have a look at this document. Compared to the value of the product generated, the waste costs are pretty low.
Then let the business cover all of them.
The fact that the Price-Anderson Act hasn’t cost the US taxpayer a monte so far should give encouragement to private insurance firms to make a lazy profit on writing coverage.
Where are these astute private risk-takers?
*Cue Crickets*
Yes, and it is also framing the debate. Nuclear power cannot happen within 15 years in Australia, but while everyone is punching on about its merit, enrichment can sneak in under the radar.
Meanwhile, renewable energy and other low or zero emissions technology that is available right now is ignored or dismissed out of hand.
Big government, big business, you scratch my back etc. We are faced with a corrupt campaign of disinformation. Mushroom energy policy, feed them uranium and glow in the dark.
Katz, as far as disposal costs go I would agree with you.
Peterc: might I suggest you identify the pieces of disinformation (including those I presume you think I am contributing to) and name them one by one, rather than making emotive, non-specific claims about “glowing in the dark”.
The primary disinformation is that nuclear energy is a solution for our current and immediate climate change crisis. This includes Ian MacFarlane stating that “nuclear energy is essential for meeting Australia’s baseload requirements” (when it is not) and Ziggy Switzskovsky stating that “nuclear is clean and green, and that we can all adjust to a global temperature rise of 2 or 3 degrees” (when all the science tells us this will result in catastrophic results).
The other big lie is that nuclear is safe and that accidents can’t happen, when obviously they can, and the results can be catastrophic.
Then there is the minor detail of nuclear energy not being renewable, and there being no safe intergenerational means of disposing of the waste.
And what about the corporate names positioning themselves to swoop on taxpayers funds when Howard commissions more reports etc?
And what about the so called “nuclear debate” when all we hear is propaganda from the lips of Howard, MacFarlance, Turnbull etc. Do we have a referendum on whether the Australian people want nuclear – of course not – that would be real democracy. Why are renewables excluded from “the debate” and where is the commensurate funding for their R&D to match 500m for CCS and probably 1b for nuclear?
So in summary, the problem with nuclear is it is too expensive, would be far too late, and is too risky. In Australia it is just being used to wedge and distract.
So in summary, the problem with nuclear is it is too expensive, would be far too late, and is too risky.
Not necessarily: Thorium Reactor
also:
Thorium Blog
My opposition to uranium mining and nuke power plants isnt emotional,the words glow in the dark have no connotation as words to be anything like that,unless a event took place,and seeing we havent built too many nuke stations in Australia,I wonder if there is a real problem of… whose emotion!? It therefore, when it comes to Indonesia, not a problem for me to be opposed to a enrichment development,on the much simpler basis, if I was capable of persuading them, that other energy matters maybe worth waiting for. Sorry I sympathise with the glow in the dark expression, because it could be stated more definitively and comprehensively.One other objection I have here is the imported figures to support a claim,involving the use of an American research facility.This is I think is a failure of reasonableness,on the part of RM. essentially because it really does show the dominance of American ideas,whereas as a truth, none of this is as yet documentable to any standard in Australia as yet.So I dont know ,with me at least,RM. has made a point I am at all accepting. Which is sad I suppose.
Actually the more you look into Thorium the better it seems to get. No wonder there is a surge of interest in the process.
Not only is there a *lot* of thorium – Australia has heaps, but it is inherently much safer and produces just a fraction of the wastes of a regular reactor. Those wastes are also only dangerous for a much shorter period of time. The real clincher though is that most current waste – particularly plutonium – can be added to the reactor and used as fuel:
An extract But wait, there’s more: thorium has another remarkable property. Add plutonium to the mix –
or any other radioactive actinide – and the thorium fuel process will actually incinerate these
elements. That’s right: it will chew up old nuclear waste as part of the power-generation
process. It could not only generate power, but also act as a waste disposal plant for some of
humanity’s most heinous toxic waste.
This is especially significant when it comes to plutonium, which has proven very hard to
dispose of using conventional means.
Really?
Seems like more high tech R&D that won’t reduce any emissions under a 15 year time frame.
I will stick with my solar panels (13 tonnes C02 emissions saving over last 4 years) and wind power thanks. Distributed generation is more resilient, much less risky, and fits better with local community and distributed demographics. And it is 100% emissions and radiation free. No link to nuclear weapons cycle and terrorist threats either (be alert but not alarmed).
One day last year in Germany power from wind exceeded power from nuclear. France and Spain have had to cut their nuclear power generation in half due to lack of water to cool reactors. We are having the same problem here with lack of water for cooling coal fired power stations.
If you want real emissions reductions from solar panels, you better start praying for that high-tech R&D to deliver.
Furthermore, the communities where wind power is actually being built don’t like it at all.
As for the water thing, it’s a furphy. If you want to avoid using water in a thermal power plant, you can use a dry cooling tower. Or you can just accept that on the very hottest days you need to turn down your baseload plants a bit and use peaking plants to cover the excess. Nuclear plants can also be cooled by seawater – you can also do that with coal, but it affects the cost a lot more because the fuel transport costs are a lot higher.
Really?
Much development work is still required before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialised, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available.
Seems like more high tech R&D that won’t reduce any emissions under a 15 year time frame.
If you do a bit of investigating you will notice that there has been a huge surge in interest and new developments in just the last year or so. Commercial reactors using thorium are operational in India and Norway is building one also.
I’ve got nothing against solar but the only reason why it is so popular in say, Germany, is guaranteed repurchase of excess power at 5x retail rate (ie more like 8x wholesale). Solar current accounts for only a tiny fraction of 1% of energy use and will take many years before it even accounts for 1%.
I also disagree to a certain extent that distributed energy is necessarily better. Large scale solar farms would be much more efficient than thousands of home based systems. The whole history of the modern world has been specialization – I really don’t think the general public is interested in generating their own power, with all the maintance etc. hassles.
2 bottles of Chilean red & a couple of Strongbow w/ coffee & a Nurofen…a lethal mix obviously. Best not to over consume & type i’ve realised. Interestingly. i thought I was making sense. Scary. Still got a headache…groan.
I’ve been saying for years on various blogs that I was convinced this Government was going down the ‘enrichment’ path. Excellent work Robert, AB & others.
I’m sure there is a connection between the unrelenting attacks on the Aboriginal people (attempts to lease the land, drive them into fenced off communities & religious organisations – & creating ‘Moral Guardians’ by way of ‘moral panic’ stories who can influence voting practices – stripping their Elders & communities of decision-making processes) & using the Land for ‘dumping grounds’ for Nuke waste etc, for uranium etc. mining…perhaps setting up missile bases & testing areas…American bases perhaps…all away from the prying eyes of the ‘walkabout’ types & any others who are curious. Similar to what we see in the USA.
Also, part of the ‘encirclement of China’ plan…perhaps preparing for an Islamic/Christian standoff (Indonesia & Australia) similar to the India/Pakistan situation (Hindu/Islamic)….
& like Aussie Bob says, plenty of cash to be made in that weapon’s/enrichment/ancillary products cycle…& to line the Liberal’s War Chest.
“I really don’t think the general public is interested in generating their own power, with all the maintainence etc. hassles.”
hmmm… let’s see… PV rebate scheme generally taken up in every state faster than grants can be given and installed, number of homes using ‘green’ power from their supplier increasing, and polls all over the place suggesting people want the change (just concerned of cost).
and maintainence? once your PV system is installed just watch the current flow. and let the rain (when it eventually comes back) clean it. maybe 20-30 years down the track, you might decide to upgrade/replace.
I’m sure PeterC will tell us about all that “maintainence” he’s had to do…
Michael: buying green power is a zero-hassle option and not very costly option. Installing solar panels is not hassle-free, and is extremely costly, even with the government throwing money at it (which would have been much better spent buying green power from commercial providers).
Yes, there is a fraction of the population who will put solar panels on their roof because it’s the right thing to do. But as regular poster Tim has noted repeatedly, getting people to do anything out of the ordinary to help the environment is a hugely uphill battle.
Michael – you are talking about a tiny fraction of the population. And yeah, everyone *says* they would like to do something about it but that is way different to actually doing anything.
I still think I’d rather buy my power from the pros than try to generate it myself. Just like I no longer bother to fix my own car. Peoples lives are busy enough without a further complication. As I said – the whole history of the modern age is people doing what they do best and paying other people to do the other stuff. This trend is increasing – not reversing.
Same thing goes for water tanks btw.
I disagree Robert. Large scale energy systems are not necessarily more efficient than distributed ones. There are major transmission losses when power gets shunted over long distances from plants to consumers. Besides, we can have a mix of larger scale solar farms, wind farms, geothermal, biofuel production and distributed. Diversity is good and provides for baseload characteristics.
The general public is in fact quite interested in generating their own power. We had about 500 people visited our house yesterday (we had an open day) and there were many questions about our PV system – our solar installer was busy talking to people all day in the back yard about the specifics. I think people like it because it is tangible, carbon emission savings are measurable, and the technology is available right now. This is really taking off.
Maintenance & hassles? There are none. The only maintenance has been topping up the battery bank (which provides standby backup – most grid interactive systems don’t have batteries). The system is set and forget. The battery backup is less hassle – if the grid blacks or browns out we keep running off the grid automatically. The panels last for 20 years.
Regarding the “power company pros” – they can’t even read their own meters – and they often charge for “average power consumtion” over the entire year. My inverter tells my exactly how much total load our house uses – while the power company I am with says I am using “the Australian house average”. They are wrong, and not too professional about how they bill their customers. They are following up this “discrepancy” in their metering and billing system. Of course, the average consumer would be none the wiser to this sort of incompetence.
Regarding water – we have been self sufficient over 2002-2006 with virtually no tank or pump maintenance. Again, this is set and forget, and you can see how much you are using and collecting, and modify your behaviour accordingly. The water collected would have otherwise gone down the stormwater drain and into Port Phillip Bay, so we are maximising use of local natural resources. We topped up 3 times in ealy 2007 when the drought resulted in our tanks emptying. If every new home had 25,000 litres of storage (easily designed in during construction) then they could all be virtually self sufficient. Interestingly, a small pool holds 30,000 litres or more . . .
I think there is a trend away from big business interests and industrial food production. It is empowering to generate some of your own energy and contribute clean green peak power to the grid for others to use. It feels good.
Growing veges and fruit is also a great way to reduce living footprints and reduce “food miles”. A lot of industrial food production is unsustainable when you take into account planting, harvesting, processing, transport, wholesale, retail, packaging and consumer travel energy inputs. We don’t need to become totally self sufficient, but every bit of food you grow locally (lemons, tomatoes, apples etc) is food that has close to zero “food miles”. With peak oil upon us and prices rises for industrial goods looming, it will soon be much cheaper too.
I’m sorry to be blunt, but food miles are rubbish, PeterC. Compared to the energy you use to drive a couple of kilometres extra to the farmer’s market to buy them (or that the produce was transported in a small van rather than a B-double), the energy to ship stuff from continent to continent is negligible. I’m not claiming that the energy involved is trivial, by the way – merely that food miles are a terrible way of measuring it, and the answers are far less likely to come out in favour of small-scale, local, organic food than you might like to think.
I’m sorry to be blunt too – I think you are entirely missing the point. Industrial production and transport of food uses large amounts of fossil fuel. This is indisputable. Growing your own food uses virtually none. Londoners survived on food from vegetable patches during much of WWII.
Semantics of measurement is a peripheral issue.
Yes, that and food shipped to them at great peril by the Merchant Marine from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States and Argentina.
Getting your facts right is not peripheral.
I think there is a trend away from big business interests and industrial food production
I think you are mistaken. Again, when you take into account the personal effort required to grow your own food most people reject it out of hand. Maybe some token tomatoes but that’s about it. Hell, people are even *cooking* less – prefering to eat out and getting a pro to do it. The restaurant trade has grown enormously in the last 20 years or so – and will continue to do so.
Housing blocks are also getting smaller and more people are choosing to live closer into the city center ( probably for the great food ) and living in apartments. In New York I have heard that kitchens are now becoming a token area in many new apartments as everyone eats out.
Fact: the majority of London’s fruit and vegetables were grown locally in “victory gardens”, a practice that ceased soon after WWII. See WW2 People’s War – My War Years in London and Warwickshire and Wartime food.
Of course this was supplemented by other foodstuff (such as the editable variety of spam) shipped to the UK by the combined efforts of Australia, Canada, the US and others.
Fact: there is a movement towards utilising urban spaces for growing plants and foodstuffs. See Asian rooftop gardens and Green Roofs for Healthy Australian Cities for some examples.
Beijing has pledged to add 100,000 square meters of roof gardens every year from 2007-2010.
I think a mix of eating out, consuming some mass produced food and growing your own is fine. In the end it up to individuals to choose what works for them. The main point is that food grown in your own back yard has the lowest environmental/climate change footprint of the lot.
I don’t think that black and white thinking about such opportunities is very positive or helpful though.
Robert, I think you’ve missed the point here:
I don’t think anyone is talking about a high level disposal facility in Australia to take Australian waste. All the talk is about Australia playing a key role in the Global Nculear Energy Partnership, involving uranium mining and leasing – ie taking back the high level waste and storing it in outback Australia.
If you don’t think establishing a global nuclear waste repository in Australia is on the books, I encourage you to download the resolutions passed by the Liberal Party National Conference a few weeks ago and check out resolution number 24.
Whether or not you personally have a problem with that, it is a major decision that we need to be open about.
For the record, I think your analysis of the enrichment issue itself is spot on.
Agreed Tim. I was just making the point that any discussion (not in the abstract, as preparation), of large-scale high level waste dumps in Australia is going to be about other people’s waste, not ours.
There is also the waste from Lucas Heights to consider, but there really isn’t that much of it.
Fact: the majority of Britain’s, and London’s, population did not subsist on a diet of locally grown fruit and vegetables during World War II. Such food was supplemental to the meats and grains and eggs and vegetables produced in the British countryside and, crucially, (for one of the objectives of Germany’s U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic was to starve Britain into submission) on food transported by convoys across the Atlantic.
Fact: 100,000 square metres is one tenth of a square kilometre, or 10 hectares. Adding 40 hectares of roof-gardens to supplement Beijing’s vegetable supply is hardly going to put a dent in demand in that city of over 15 million people. And being a city with a harsh climate and at quite a northerly latitude Beijing may be great for growing cabbages (a Chinese winter staple) but there’s not much variety in what it can grow. Then there’s the fact that pork is a staple in the Chinese diet but not much evidence that the Beijing government is encouraging the setting up of pig-sties throughout the city, (even on roof-tops), to supplement food production.
Fact: A lot of the world’s population would starve to death without industrial food production and transport. http://www.apsnet.org/education/feature/FoodSecurity/
Fact: Since industrialisation in the 19th century the world has become increasing dependent on food, principally cereals, produced by industrialised agricultural methods and transported, often at great distances, to urban industrial centres. The efficiency of this has been known since the 18th century when Adam Smith observed that though Scotland could produce its own claret and burgundy, the grapes being grown in greenhouses, it would be more efficient for the Scots to import their claret from Portugal and produce something else in which they had a comparative advantage in production to pay for it. http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/adam_smith.html
Arguments about the economics of agricultural production and climate change which are ignorant of the basics of agriculture (eg that it would be cheaper for and more environmentally friendly for Europe to give up its domestic sugar based upon sugar beets, and import its sugar from tropical countries where sugar cane much more efficiently converts sunlight into sugar and that sugar production based on roof-gardens is not a viable alternative) and economics (eg; the unit costs, including fuel costs, of transporting bulk items by sea are bugger-all) are not very positive or helpful.
I will stick with my plans of a large vege patch in preference to consuming food from afar. Tomatoes I planted years ago tasted heaps better than the wooden ones you get in supermarkets, and our apples are sweet, juicy and tender compared to the floury ones that come from cool stores. Can’t grow bananas here so I guess I will have to keep eating the trucked in variety. If they fly them down I will stop eating them though. I don’t have any plans to put in wheat crop either.
Agricultural practices that consume large amounts of fossil fuel energy (well in excess of the energy value of the food) are clearly not sustainable in the long term. You are living in a fools paradise if you think they are. Just because much of the developed world is hooked on this doesn’t mean it has to (or can) continue in the long term.
In the end it comes down to individual choice and action – you can be either part of the solution or part of the problem.
Agricultural practices that consume large amounts of fossil fuel energy (well in excess of the energy value of the food) are clearly not sustainable in the long term. You are living in a fools paradise if you think they are. Just because much of the developed world is hooked on this doesn’t mean it has to (or can) continue in the long term.
Then you will *loathe* the following:
A couple of years ago we visited the big island of Hawaii – the one with the volcanoes. Up north we went to a restaurant and met a nice couple who happened to be cattle ranchers. Cattle ranching is a big industry on the island but I was quite amazed to learn that all cattle is – wait for it – air freighted, live, to the mainland US for slaughter!
I have been to the Big island too – it is a great place. The volcanoes are amazing and the lava flowing into the sea remarkable. I saw whales just of the coast and swam with turtles.
Yes, flying live cattle to the US mainland is quite extravagant. Maybe they get premium prices for “organic beef”?
For those who think shipping is low energy consuming and not important, this article suggests otherwise.
Thanks for that link. Does this mean that we should sending iron ore by air instead of by ship?
Yes, thanks for the link, Peterc. My moment of truth about ‘food miles’ came when I realised that the bananas that my wife buys at a farmers’ market were probably causing more CO2 than if we had been getting imports from The Philippines or Ecuador. The farmer throws them on the back of a truck and drives up the road from northern NSW every Saturday am.
If you look at this spaghetti chart (2000 figures), shipping doesn’t loom large. But if you add the categories ‘air travel’, ‘rail, ship and other’ plus ‘agriculture soils’ you’ve got 10%. If cuts of 80% or more are deemed necessary I think we are going to have to reconsider how we organise ourselves on the planet, especially with 9 billion people and, hopefully, convergent standards of living.
BTW, the firm Silex mentioned in the post has done well in terms of share price. Back in 2003 you could have snapped them up for 38c. Today they closed at $12.43. Not bad for an outfit that has yet to turn a profit! These opportunities always look brilliant in retrospect.
Brian: I did seriously consider putting some money into them when they were at about $3.
But, unless you’re a fund manager who invests in dozens of stocks, there’s no way you can possibly sanely invest in a startup technology company whose technology is so highly classified you can’t tell whether it’s any good.
And, to be honest, I suspect that still applies – if their technology was such a sure thing, why didn’t GE (to whom they’ve given an exclusive license) just buy them out?
Robert, these technology startups are tricky, I find. I invested in some in the 90s. Minor plays, regarded as speculative. I never did astonishingly well and in some, for example Looksmart, did astonishingly badly.
On a superficial view it still looks speculative without anywhere near the upside it has achieved in the past few years.
A false dilemma. Primary energy efficiency (tonne-km/MJ) of freight modes in decreasing order of energy efficiency are:
Coastal shipping 4.16
Rail (govt. and non-govt.) 3.62
Road (articulated truck only) 0.83
Domestic air freight 0.03
Source: Energy efficiency of Australian freight transport modes 1994/5, Patrick Moriarty, Monash University, December 2000.
Food grown in backyards and consumed in the dwelling requires no transport energy.
For goods and materials transportation, selecting the most efficient and appropriate form of transport will reduce carbon emissions.
For overseas transport sea is much better than air.
For interstate transport rail is much better than road
For urban transport rail is much better than road (but probably not convenient given the low coverage of the rail network). Cycling is the best.
We need large investments in improving rail and cycling transport options.
Ah, thank you for clearing that up. I see my error. We should be transporting our iron ore overseas by bicycle.
Greg M: Wasn’t it Adam Smith’s 50-year younger protege David Ricardo who introduced the concept of comparative advantage and used the efficiency of trading Scottish cloth for Portuguese wine as an example, not Adam Smith himself? I don’t trust your WWW link as authoritative, sorry (admittedly, mine’s only Wikipedia for now).
Great idea for it’s time, when capital was relatively immobile and environmental impact of transport was not an issue. Currently used to justify over-specialisation of economies, for instance by winding down of the manufacturing sector on the grounds that we don’t need to make anything if we can earn enough to import by playing landlord/share speculation/waitressing or whatever. Like many points of economic ideology, comparative advantage can be and has been pushed to the point of absurdity.
Andyc, the quotation is from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, 1776. As to you not trusting my source then I suggest that you go read the book. It is online. Look up Book 4, Chapter 2 http://www.adamsmith.org/smith/won-b4-c2.htm
You are correct though, about Ricardo. He demonstrated, as your Wiki article shows, that there can be comparative advantage for trade even where one party is superior to the other in production in all quarters, which goes beyond Smith’s point about countries having natural advantages which encourage them to specialise in trade.
The principles set out by Smith and Ricardo are no less relevant today than they were two centuries ago and indeed the mobility of capital and environmental issues give them increased relevance.
I made the point to Peterc above:
GregM, be all that as it may there is still an issue in how we produce and transport food if we are going to target deep cuts in GHG emissions. On the chart I linked to agriculture accounts for 13.5% of emissions. Shipping, negligible on that chart, is now thought to account for 5%. If we target cuts of 80% while the world population is growing to 9 billion it is obvious that we are going to have to minimise emissions in all sectors, I think.
I’d be pessimistic about pricing emissions and letting the market take care of it giving the required results.
Here is some more recent information on why nuclear won’t work.
Nuclear expansion is a pipe dream, says report
John Vidal, environment editor, Wednesday July 4, 2007, The Guardian
* Hope for new era of cheap, clean power is a ‘myth’
* Building more stations would increase terror risk
Peterc: there’s nothing new whatsoever in that report.
As I was pointing out today, 750,000 Chinese a year die from air pollution every year. So do roughly 300,000 Europeans. Much of that is due to pollution from coal-fired power stations. In that context, the risks of nuclear are piffling.
Peterc, if you read the actual report http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/pdf/toohottohandle.pdf (PDF)
you’ll see that
1.) It contains no economic analysis at all and
2.) it is not an analytical report but a polemic focusing on the risks of nuclear terrorism.
I don’t think anyone sees nuclear power as a substitute for other forms of power generation but as a complement. The security risks are real concerns but the report adds nothing to our knowledge about this.
Thanks for the report link. I don’t agree with your summation of the report as a “polemic”. The breakdown on current and planned reactors is of some interest, and I think the risk analysis is quite thorough – something that is left out of pro-nuclear reports which usually just say “modern nuclear is safe” without any substantiation.
– is an interesting conclusion.
And is this really going to happen? I think not.
It is also interesting to listen to all the Bush and Howard rhetoric about terrorism, then see them champion nuclear power which would create many more opportunities for terrorists to act (more material and more major targets)! I find this quite ironic. Of course their “war on terror” in Iraq is breeding many more terrorists (such as Iraqi doctors etc) but that is another story. . .
I don’t think nuclear needs to be part of the long term mix at all. Current nuclear stations can run until their end of life, and power production transitioned to renewable energy over time.