As of January 20, 2009, the most powerful individual on Earth will be an ally in the fight against climate change. Like his statement on closing Gitmo, there’s a refreshing directness to it.
I couldn’t help but notice the explicit mention of nuclear energy, either 
It’s of course a hell of a long way from one nice little speech to the negotiation of a deal in Copenhagen. But it’s the best possible kind of start.
Good to see “clean coal” mentioned last, but I would have preferred it wasn’t mentioned at all. Give me nukes ahead of “clean coal” any day.
Maybe. But let’s not lose sight of the political pragmatism that shaped Obama’s energy policy. He was getting smashed all over the park by McCain on energy and terrorism, hence the promises to suck out more oil more ‘efficiently’.
Note the final para of the energy plan :
Talk about a sticking out like a sore thumb.
Of course, this will all come out in the wash ie. the shape of the Senate
There is more good news, Joe Romm is reporting that Obama’s transition team is recommending that the US reduce its emissions by 25-30% by 2020 and introduce an upstream cap-and-trade scheme with full auctioning. A 25-30% reduction is much better than the Obama-Biden election proposal of emissions at 1990 levels by 2020. A contraction and convergence agreement based on a 2050 convergence date would probably have a 30% 2020 reduction being consistent with 450 ppm while 1990 levels in 2020 being consistent with 550 ppm (depending on carbon cycle feedbacks of course).
The Age reports it as The message electrified more than 700 delegates from 22 countries gathered to debate strategies for cutting planet-warming pollution.
Warmed the cockles of me ‘art…..
But again, I think we’re seeing the Garnaut approach that you set up an easy target and *hope* people clamour for more in time. The 2020 pledge was only back to 1990 levels with no reduction beyond that. Given the imperative to make the biggest cuts ASAP this looks pretty unadventurous. But this is still gobsmacking that he’d make pledges like this on behalf of the land of the SUV.
Sorry Peter @ 3, I hadn’t seen your comment….
The proposal to sort out a bilateral agreement with China in preparation for Copenhagen is also fantastic. It reminds one, yet again, how much the world has been stalling on climate change while we’ve waited for the lame duck to shuffle off.
Note that the mention of nuclear energy came with the qualifier “safe”.
All those nuclear wonks should be made to go live in the nuclear wastelands of the US, Russia and France (yes France). The waste problem is already intractable, the US cannot even get its shit together to bury it in Yucca mountain. Nuclear power is the post modern wet dream of academics and business urgers who never studied any-thing about science except as part of a sales and marketing science degree or some such. Nuclear is just so fuken dumb.
Huggy
Huggy: The Hanford site, you mean? It’s not a wasteland. Heck, it’ll be declared a national park when they finish the cleanup.
Huggybunny, it’s exactly because I’ve taken some time to understand the science that I believe nuclear power is just as valid a power source as other low-carbon sources, and certainly far preferable to the new coal power plants that are still being built.
FWIW, did you realise that at current rate of industrial accidents involved in manufacturing and installing wind turbines, if we were to replace all nuclear installations with equivalent wind installations, there would actually be far more deaths and serious injuries?
And like James Lovelock and others, I’d happily have the world’s nuclear waste buried in my backyard (provided they use silent and invisible excavation equipment). It’s just not that dangerous in the scheme of things.
The abandoned mine shafts at broken Hill would be ideal for storing waste! Deep, dry, hard rock mine shafts in lead containing rock. The area is geologically stable.
Nuclear power makes no sense tho, takes 10-20 years to bring a pile on-line, with HUGE decommissioning costs.
Indeed – it’s a beautiful case study in the social construction scientific knowledge, Strong Programme style. The resistance efforts of local government in Colorado against the DoE rhetoric have been quite extraordinary over the past couple of decades.
At the end of the day, expertise is a product of the (legislative) systems it circulates in.
Nuclear might not be ‘not all that dangerous in the grand scheme of things’, but my objection to nuclear power is fairly straightforwardly political: to make it ‘safe’ requires creating (and hence supporting other related) regimes of control and policing that necessarily contradict basic freedoms.
Meanwhile…
dk.au – making things safe usually involves restricting freedoms – I’m not sure I understand why Nuclear power is fundamentally different. FWIW, I’m less than convinced that nuclear power makes a lot of sense for Australia, but we can’t afford to not even consider it as an option.
Massive time scales involved in disposal of High Level Waste; Also, other countries’ experiences with managing the stuff in a ‘transparent’ way
Well the long time scales are really the only thing that make managing nuclear waste tricky. But why should that mean that the necessary control and policing encroaches unacceptably on basic freedoms? FWIW, I’m with RM – nuclear waste should be buried under the sea, which is pretty much what Sweden do with it. It’s understandable why environmentalists and/or governments aren’t generally keen on that idea, given how much truly damaging stuff we do actually dump into the sea, but nuclear waste is one thing we can put there fairly safely.
dk: sometimes the soulless technocrats get it right, and the plucky locals wrong. Yucca Mountain is one of those times.
Jovial Monk;
As a nation supposedly committed to nuclear non-proliferation we should have always required that any uranium purchaser returns their waste here, which if anything would have made us a much more popular supplier. Australia has some of the most geologically stable landmass on the planet, some of it already irradiated, and an awful lot of unpopulated geography. We should, of course, charge mightily for the process, too, as noone else wants it anyway. It may be a nice change for the country to actually make money by filling in holes, too, instead of just creating them.
I really like the idea of Broken Hill as a nuclear storage location. So long as it is (as much as possible) not likely to interact with our groundwater, such as the Great Artesian Basin, which Broken Hill seems not to be near. And another advantage for BH is that it already has direct rail links with the Port of Melbourne, Westernport and Sydney, so u-waste transportation risks are minimised.
And it would be neat if we managed to direct revenue from it into a new Snowy type scheme: say nuclear fusion, or (even better) something like this, a space elevator, perhaps parked off WA, and with a string of solar power farms pumping in electricity 24/7/365. Just like Gerard O’Neill was talking about in the 70s in the High Frontier.
The timeframes are possibly comparable to those involved in ramping up fission power stations, the financing would also be comparable, yet the downstream costs would be far, far less. And we’d end up with a lifeboat or two, also.
with
Here are the lifeboats.
brettc: The idea is so bloody obvious that it makes the mind boggle…
So do we have a deal about not using the “p-word”?
Fmark, sorry about the “p-word”.
Thing is there is unlimited energy available in various rock and water formations all over the globe. No radioactive stuff, needs just off the shelf technology that has been around for 100 years.
Trouble is you can’t make bombs with it and it does not have the frisson of the dark glow of the backyard waste dump. So it does not excite the jaded academic.
Mark, no Yucca mountain is a classic example of, oops we got the engineering and science wrong. Oh and “what the hell we will all be dead and gone when the radioactivity appears in the nearby townships and cities via the aquifers”.
Huggy
Robert
http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/yuccaalt.html
Think you will find that the whole decision was political and the science was lost.
Huggy
Yes, there’s water there. Doesn’t matter. Still would have been perfectly safe, as would many other sites across the United States and the world.
“Thing is there is unlimited energy available in various rock and water formations all over the globe. No radioactive stuff.”
…you’re referring to? Not geothermal energy I assume, as that very much relies on “radioactive stuff”.
I think it’s important to recall that any plant, of any no/low carbon technology, deployed anywhere on the planet will help cut (or at least avoid the further increase) atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, etc. Hydro plants, wind farms, solar facilities, geothermal, nuclear plants, etc. should be deployed where it makes the most sense to do so. Nuclear would seem to fit best in countries already in possession of the relevant nuclear infrastructure.
However, Australia’s per-person emissions are quite high and it is difficult to argue that China, India etc. restrict their per-person emission levels at the expense of a standard of living we have enjoyed for many years now. I think this is the principal rub and why Australia – despite our low contribution to the problem – will be pressured to make real and very significant cuts in line with the larger bulk emitters.
There’s also stranded investment risk to consider and the need to keep the lights on by replacing older generation facilities with something satisfying the reliability criteria necessary to support all demand including heavy industry.
Objectively considering all constraints (many more than are listed above) points to nuclear power in Australia’s future.
The relevant goals go out to 2050 – 42 years from now. There is still a role for nuclear power to play, even if it takes some time to deploy the technology here.
The relevant goals go out to 2050 – 42 years from now. There is still a role for nuclear power to play, even if it takes some time to deopoy the technology here.
Wizofaus, the radioactivity to which you refer is basically the background left after Thorium decay in granite, it is now many orders of magnitude lower than the radioactivity of nuclear waste – barely above background level. In any event all the continents have large (huge?) resources of artesian hot water – it is not radioactive. If you get this weeks New Scientist (or is it forbidden over in CP Snow land) you will find an article on OTEC. The same techniques without the volume requirements (the Carnot efficiency of hot artesian is vastly better than OTEC)can be employed . Germany, for example has a resource large enough to supply the whole of Europe for 600 years or so.
This “radioactive geothermal” canard is just the usual wet wanking response from some of the hairy palmed greens. You can do better than that.
huggybunny, I’m aware of the difference – but the level of radioactivity from nuclear waste is quite manageable, and quite quickly decays to very safe levels within a few centuries anyway. And note that the total radioactivity from nuclear waste is a drop in the ocean of the radioactivity generated by all industries combined (especially mining) – it’s just that nuclear waste is much more concentrated, so needs special treatment.
But it’s simply not the case that there is “unlimited energy available in various rock and water formations all over the globe”.
Even allowing for your non-literal use of “unlimited”, the current state of technology seriously limits which geothermal resources can actually be used. Now I personally see no reason to believe that hot-rock geothermal technology won’t be perfected some time in the next decade or so, which would in principle enable Australia to get a significant fraction of its energy needs from such sources, but I don’t see how that makes it necessarily preferable to nuclear, unless we have very real reason to assume that the long term costs of geothermal energy will be significantly less than those of nuclear techology.
Personally I suspect that geothermal energy will probably turn out to be cheaper and more sustainable in the long run that nuclear energy, but that isn’t sufficient reason in itself to expressly rule out exploring nuclear energy as an option.
Wizofaus,
Last time I looked the decay time of plutonium – a component of “spent” nuclear fuel is about 200,000+ years. I guess that will be great legacy for the cockroaches when they take over.
Huggy
Alright, huggybunny, let’s replace all current nuclear installations with hundreds of enormous great hot-rock geothermal plants. Do you really think humanity’s long term future would be hugely safer, especially given we really don’t even really know what the risks involved with such technology are? (we have some idea – there is definitely a risk of toxic gas blow-outs, but very little data exists).
The other figure that we really just don’t know is the land-use requirements, but I’m willing to bet that to supply the equivalent amount of energy, much more land would need to be given over to geothermal plants than to nuclear power plants and accompanying uranium mines. Now if most of that land is relatively unhabited, and not particularly ecologically sensitive, that’s probably not a huge issue, but I’m not sure we know enough to say for sure.
Huggybunny: that is true. It also means that it’s not terribly radioactive.
You’re further assuming that the only radioactive materials in the environment are man-made, which is flat wrong. There’s a metric buttload of uranium and its decay products (including nasty things like radium) in rocks (and thus concrete, brick, and construction stone), water, air, and even in the food we eat. Yes, even the organic stuff.
Er Robert,
“Plutonium-239 is a very hazardous carcinogen which can also be used to make nuclear weapons. This combination of properties makes it one of the most dangerous substances. Plutonium-239, while present in only trace quantities in nature, has been made in large quantities in both military and commercial programs in the last 50 years. Other more radioactive carcinogens do exist, like radium-226, but unlike plutonium-239 cannot be used to make nuclear weapons, or are not available in quantity. Highly enriched uranium (HEU) can also be used to make nuclear weapons, but it is roughly one thousand times less radioactive than plutonium-239. The danger is aggravated by the fact that plutonium-239 is relatively difficult to detect once it is outside of secure, well-instrumented facilities, or once it has been incorporated into the body. http://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-3/puhealth.html
It is a component of “spent” fuel BTW
Huggy.
Yes, I know very well what plutonium-239 is.
Bury it 500 metres underground and it becomes rather difficult to steal. The IEER (who are a pressure group, not some disinterested party) are only half-right on radium and similar natural radioisotopes; there is a great deal of them in the environment, but it is only present in very tiny concentrations. But if you’re, say, a water molecule making your way to the surface from that depth, you’ll pass quite a lot of it in your travels.
In any case, the plutonium in spent reactor fuel is a mixture of Pu-239 and Pu-240. If you’re specifically trying to make a bomb, you run your nuclear reactor for short periods to maximise the proportion of Pu-239. If you’re trying to run your reactor efficiently, you leave it in there for the longest possible time, increasing the proportion of Pu-240 and making it much less suitable for bomb-making. It’s probably not impossible, but it’s very very difficult to make a bomb out of that mixture. If you have the tech to separate out the Pu-239 and Pu-240, the same tech can be used to enrich uranium and make a bomb anyway.
It seems very, very unlikely that a terrorist group will ever construct a nuclear weapon from scratch out of plutonium. No terrorist group has ever demonstrated anything approaching the resources and skills to do so (Aum Shinriyko came closest, but they couldn’t get the much easier task of making and deploying a relatively simple chemical weapon right). The only plausible way for them to make a nuke is to get access to a complete one (probably the biggest risk), or make one out of highly enriched uranium (next on the list, as there is still too much of it
lying around in too many locations).
I see the republicans have already started comparing Obama to hitler and his domestic police force (the irony being apparently that the non fascist thing to do is deploy the military against your own people) to the gestapo): http://representradio.com/shows/2008/represent-november-14/
Unbelievable.
I think that some of the more rabid at Catallaxy were running a similar line. The fax must have come through.
What a turkey!
http://www.americablog.com/2008/11/sarah-palin-pardons-turkey-while-others.html
And what “nuclear wastelands” might they be, in the real world? Lake Karachay, perhaps? You’ll need an example of more relevance to nuclear power, not merely the results of the USSR’s buildup of a stockpile of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons as quickly as possible during the Cold War.
“Academics and business urgers who never studied anything about science…?”
Well, at the very least, Robert and myself would certainly disagree with you on that.
Quite the opposite, in fact – essentially all the opposition that I see to nuclear energy comes from people who have got absolutely no idea about the science and technology and the reality of it.
It takes 3-5 years to construct a nuclear power plant. We have significant empirical experience across the world which confirms that. When the time frame is longer than that, what causes that? Political rubbish, NIMBYism, protests from so-called environmentalists, and spurious lawsuits and litigation by activists who try to stop it.
You sometimes hear chronological estimates of 10-15 years – but that’s 3-5 years to actually construct it, and n years of what can only be described as political bullshit.
Of course, you can build more than one at once.
How many years does it take, for example, to construct the 1200 or so typical wind turbines that are required to generate the same energy output in any given year as a nuclear power reactor?
Whenever these energy issues are discussed, we must be very careful to compare one kilowatt-hour from apples to one kilowatt-hour from oranges.
Nuclear energy doesn’t take away your freedoms. The Patriot Act wasn’t introduced to make nuclear energy in the US safe, nor was it required to do so.
There are many hundreds of commercial light-water-moderated nuclear power reactors in the world, and not one of them has ever hurt anybody. That is why I, for one, say nuclear power is safe. Direct empirical experience shows that nuclear power is safe.
It’s important to ask just how long such timescales are. All too often I’ve seen people that just seem to arbitrarily make up some long time scale when discussing nuclear waste – but let’s just ask one important and unambiguous question: what are the radionuclides involved, and what are their half-lives?
In practice, once you’ve separated the usable actinides fuels from the unburned uranium which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the used nuclear fuel, you’re left with highly radioactive fission products which constitute almost all of the radioactivity of such material, such as strontium-90 and caesium-137, which have half-lives of approximately 30 years. Not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, but 30 years.
What control and policing is actually necessary, and what basic freedoms does it encroach unacceptably upon?
Sweden are arguably the world leaders in well organized, well set up permanent deep geological of radioactive waste.
http://www.skb.se
Although they actually suffer from one of the same key flaws as the US does with Yucca Mountain – they actually think it’s a sensible idea to stick the whole used fuel assemblies from light-water reactors into the geological repository forever and waste them – that’s so wasteful and inefficient, and stupid, I think.
The radioactivity in question is the natural radioactivity of uranium, thorium, radium and potassium within the Earth – which is a significant contributor towards the heat inside the Earth.
Well, the half-life of plutonium-239 is about 240,000 years, but the half-life of plutonium-241 is only about 14 years. The half-life of plutonium-244 is something like 80 million years, going off the top of my head, which is why you can find it in nature – it hasn’t decayed away, it’s a primordial radionuclide, present since before the formation of the Earth.
Not to mention the release of radon from radiogenic hot-rock geothermal, as well as the accumulation of radium, polonium and other NORM on the pipes, in a way which is very similar to that sometimes seen in the natural gas industry with radioactive contamination.
As you know, Robert, Pu-239 is valuable, useful, potent fuel – it should not be declared “waste” and “wasted” 500 meters underground.