Since I’ve been incautious enough to mention the N-word in the previous post, I’ll open another sandpit specifically devoted to discussions of the merits, and otherwise, of nuclear power. Any mention of this topic on other threads will be deleted and will risk bans or restrictions on the offender
Update Since it’s still going, I’ve moved it up, which should reopen comments
John Quiggin 
@BilB
Lee Rhiannon has done the best work here. See her information at:
http://nonewcoal.greens.org.au/coal/speeches
Particularly the Reports.
Subsidies and carbon price simply do not mix. The taxpayer and consumer ends up with the bill and the coal industry rolls on regardless. We need specific industry policy.
@jquiggin
I certainly endorse that. For the record, I don’t disagree that most of the really low-cost CO2-abatement will be in energy efficiency and energy usage avoidance. The trouble is that as these measures are adopted, each new efficiency or EUA measure becomes less cheap per unit of abatement, and of course, there’s only a quite limited amount of this you can do. Ultimately, the bulk of our power isn’t in any meaningful sense discretionary.
In schedule feasibility terms too, energy efficiency and EUA are not alternatives to clean energy, but adjuncts. If we are going to cut emissions savagely, we need both to run side-by-side, especially since we don’t and can’t exactly know at the outset how successful both measures will be.
@Salient Green
No, it’s because of the very high subsidies.
This is one of the great scams associated with most domestic installations of solar cells. They do not normally set you up so that you can disconnect from the grid.
So you’re NOT really interested in price. It can be a little hard following your argument when it’s different in different places.
Chris Oneill
This
“No, it’s because of the very high subsidies”
is assumption on your part. Subsidies help but that is not the only reason why people have been installing PV. And
“This is one of the great scams”
Few people would be under the impression that they can disconnect from the grid without modification. Quite the contrary, most systems sold are integral with the accounting system of the grid. Self sufficiency does not mean isolation.
There is no automatic connection that renewables are more expensive than nuclear in delivered energy price. Wild claim on your part, and under many circumstances demonstrably false.
@jquiggin
Of course, even with off-peak pricing, off-peak hot water is more expensive than gas and should be got rid of now in a lot of cases anyway, e.g. in Melbourne. This is a big opportunity to reduce GHG emissions from this particular energy consumption by perhaps 85%. The Federal government has a rebate for this but I guess this change is not being promoted enough.
@BilB
OK, some people don’t give a damn about cost. But we’re not going to get very far with just those people.
That’s what you say.
I know that, but that’s not the same as what people think before they find out about it.
If you put this meaning on it, then a solar installation is still dependent on the grid to provide “storage”. So it’s only self-sufficient to some degree.
Where did I say that?
Wild claim on your part that I made a wild claim.
Chris O’Neill @ 3, PV is subsidised because it “is elegant, simple, clean, quite sustainable, low maintenance and very long lasting.” Ditto what BilB said about other reasons for installing PV.
Only small installations are heavily subsidised, not large ones and there are many Megawatt arrays in use and planned around the world.
Chris Warren @ 50, completely agree with you on population control, as well as the need to change the politics from Corporate Socialism to Democratic Socialism.
Hmm we got a solar array or 3 at the Monarto Zoo, in order for the zoo to be grid-neutral.
Go solar!
Chris Oneill,
If it has not already begun, in future developers will offer houses prefitted with solar panels. In this way the cost of the installation is included in the building finance and is payed off over time along with the building. The savings in running costs for the building will improve the income position for the property owner. The downstream effect of this will influence property values. For people who have obtained their solar installation by this method the cost of their electricity is effectively free.
Eventually, to sell a property at a top market price the property will need to be fitted with an reasonable quantity of solar panels. They say that swimming pools are real estate neutral, but as world energy prices increase solar panels on houses will be a sought after asset.
@Salient Green
As I said, we’re not going to get very far with enormous subsidies for a cottage industry, regardless of the political justification for those subsidies.
What Megawatt arrays are not subsidized?
Chris O’Neill, I didn’t say Megwatt arrays are not subsidised, I said only small installations are heavily subsidised.
Now how about giving up the nitpicking and answer my big question about whether you think it likely that nuclear could be in the mix in 10 years time given equal assistance to all non-fossil technologies.
Hey Donald, watcha doing at the zoo if I may be nosy?
@BilB
So you don’t expect solar cells to become cheap. You’d better take that up with Salient Green and probably a lot of other people. He expects solar cells to become cheaper with time. If he’s right then your comment about solar cells’ effect on property value in the future is probably completely wrong.
Chris Oneill,
Wrong conclusion again, Chris. Gosh!
As with all things, as the core component through volume production becomes less expensive, more features are added to maintain a stable turnover. So as panels drop to $1 per watt storage will be added, efficiencies will increase and the per system output will increase, household management systems will be added, and then, who knows , maybe a built in christmas light display will become as standard feature.
Chris, you seem to have zero lateral thinking ability which shows in how you have trouble extending ideas and projecting into the future. I read somewhere that this is a symptom of the “glass half empty” mindset and relates to a fear of going beyond that which is known.
@Salient Green
OK, where are Megawatt arrays that are not heavily subsidized?
Pretty unlikely. The vast majority of new generation will be gas with some wind and a bit of solar, i.e. no long term solution. Hopefully photovoltaics will become economic where their output is fully utilized in which case there will be far more demand for them and and hopefully that will motivate a lower cost per unit of output and thus make them economic even when not fully utilized.
But that point is still some time off and even if solar cells became cheap, there is still a lot of demand for electricity for six months of the year at times when solar cells produce nothing. Electricity supply when the Sun is low or down will become more expensive with a shift towards a high dependency on gas. Perhaps ironically, cheap solar cells will make wind less economic because its output will be less valuable during the day. Wind will not supply more than 40% of energy at night for a long time, if ever.
@BilB
And why, pray tell, didn’t you mention the Christmas lights before, not that Christmas lights are going to add tens of thousands to a property’s value. Just looks like goal-post shifting to me. So now your position is that the solar cells themselves won’t add much value. Pretty tedious going through all your positions.
In your case I’d call it lateral goal-post-positioning ability.
People are drawn to the LED light features on any product, so the Christmas lights could be an important feature when the cost of 10 kw of rooftop generating capacity for the average house is a ho-hum $10,000 and saves $3000 a year in grid energy. Although that is some years off, this is the point at which the whole Nuclear thing falls in a screaming heap, or rather, never gets off the ground. Too expensive, too dirty, too late.
Goal posts? As a product designer I am constantly coping with the pace of change. But, you, as an old guy sitting in your rocking chair on the porch with your IBM 5110 or you AT on the table beside you, blogging away you probably don’t get to experience much of this. So the exciting technology of your day, Nuclear Power, is still the best thing you have ever seen. At least that is how I am picturing you, so far.
Monato Zoo gets about a 5% return on its solar panels. This isn’t enough to make people with a eye on the bottom line invest in them. However, the return would be roughly 7% in a town like Moree in NSW, and the return would be massive in a remote community that gets its electricity from diesel generators. If Monato decided to build a similar capacity system today the the return would be better as prices are cheaper than when Monato began construction. If spot prices are paid for electricity then the return on PV should be considerably better. I don’t know how much better, but I suspect that larger point of use PV systems could now pay for themselves in sunnier areas.
Ronald B,
Our GenIIPV system is perfect for situations like your Monato Zoo as it provides both electricity and air conditioning (hot and cold) in equal amounts (as well as water heating). So you don’t have to waste electricity from panels (in the conventional PV format) on space or water heating, you get to use most of it on running computers, fridges, cleaning machinery, cooking (but cooking is best done with gas if there is a lot of it as in catering), exhaust fans, battery charging, etc. I had a look at the Monato website and the architectural theme is very appealing. GenIIPV fits into that style very well. As it is a little way off yet I am saying this so that you know that there is a solution coming along for that class of need.
@BilB
You should have been a real estate agent. Hilarious.
@Salient Green
Unfortunately I wasn’t at the zoo, but saw it on the free-to-air TV – “Media Mike” Rann was in a piece where they displayed two reasonable large solar panel arrays mounted on their own frames ie not on a roof.
For a few technical details on the grid-neutral solar power system at Monarto Zoo (in South Australia, the best state to be in) see this article, and for a picture of the panels see here.
That is a very respectable installation, Donald, and an investment that they will thankfull for and proud of for many years.
Another zoo (of bible-ites) is also going solar….
http://blog.algore.com/2010/10/the_first_carbon_neutral_state.html
@Donald Oats
This shows once again that renewables enthusiasts see a few trees and not the forest. I suggest that the zoo’s panels are just another amusement and not a serious energy solution. A kind of silicon duckbilled platypus to gawp at. From another link I infer that peak output may be about 75 kw. However the zoo visitors will drive out from Adelaide in cars with 100 kw hydrocarbon fuelled motors. I see no reference to battery storage for overnight and cloudy weather. Could they annul the electricity bill if the feed-in tariff was only a sensible 20c per kilowatt-hour? What happens if carbon tax on petrol reduces the number of paying visitors?
Better still a large chunk of Adelaide should relocate to Monarto as proposed by Don Dunstan years ago. They could draw even more water from the Murray to save expense on the costly desal plant on the coast. BTW I was with some Adelaide people in a sparsely populated high rainfall part of Australia yesterday. Ooh we wouldn’t want to live here they exclaimed. Adelaide people seem to want it all… upstream irrigators to go out of business and absurdly generous subsidies on contraptions that make tiny amounts of power.
And this is one example of how France is disposing of its nuclear waste: ship it to a storage space in Germany – Gorleben.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/chernobyl-on-wheels-grinds-to-halt-in-france-20101106-17i6t.html
What about Gorleben?
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomm%C3%BClllager_Gorleben
I couldn’t find anything else in English. But there are many articles, including from reputable newspapers, on the problems with Gorleben written in German. Perhaps Fran Barlow will kindly translate some of them.
@Ernestine Gross
Meanwhile, Australia with all its subsidized solar cells generates more CO2 than France even though France has three times as many people. Solar cells may generate electricity more cheaply when storage is not used one day, but until then Nero is fiddling while Rome burns. That’s the choice we have made, keep burning until solar cells are cheap enough. Until then, burn like there’s no tomorrow.
@Chris O’Neill
I suppose you can’t read German and therefore don’t know about the problems with the nuclear storage in Germany, known as Gorleben.
But note, the French citizens, as distinct from the powers that might be, aren’t at all happy with the absence of a satisfactory nuclear waste disposal solution. Except for some regions north and north-east of Paris, the country has a lot of sunshine and, in the mountains there are hydro-electric plants.
Don’t dramatise with stuff like “Nero is fiddling while Rome burns”. The objective is not to replace one environmental problem with another one – because it looks like the cheapest solution. The problem is to reduce ghg gasses at a rate advised by scientists (ie people other than you – I say this because you couldn’t answer a simple question I asked you on another thread). I’ve reduced my electricity consumption by over 10% without changing my lifestyle. What is your score?
Ernestine,
France is wanting to ship their nuclear rubbish here to Australia. This waste “facility” that the ALP and Libs together are trying to slam home is to be the start of a massive problem. They are trying to justify this by saying that the spent fuel rods contain Australian Uranium. So much for France’s “clean energy”. And this all despite France having reprocessing facilities.
Curiously enough, Ernestine, this very subject is in the news this morning with 100 tonnes of nuclear rubbish from France (I think) being swept under the rug in Germany and making headlines in the process.
This
“The objective is not to replace one environmental problem with another one”
is the statement of the month.
@Ernestine Gross
Where did I say that was completely without problems and why do you ignore the facts I was talking about?
Spare me the red herrings.
There is no comparison between the problem of nuclear waste and the problem of CO2 released into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. It would be more accurate to compare releasing CO2 into the atmosphere with spreading nuclear waste through the entire atmosphere.
@Chris O’Neill
Oh for goodness sake – we already have a long history of problems caused by nuclear not the least of which, which is well known and well documented is weapons proliferation….and why oh why if it is sustainable and environmentally “friendly” should Australia be thinking of being a nuclear waste dump for France or anywhere else (let France have its own waste – are we mad?)…and why is Europe so ticked off with France shipping its own nuclear waste far from its borders in highly radioactive train shipments.
Some of the people in this thread hang on to pro nuclear ideas way beyond all sense. Irrational and especially with comments like Chris’s above..
“There is no comparison between the problem of nuclear waste and the problem of CO2 released into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning.”
Utter nonsense. There is a comparison. Its replacing one dirty dangerous fuel with another because pro nukers wont countenance consideration oif anything else.
@Chris O’Neill
You are getting it all wrong. France is producing 100 times more nuclear waste than Australia even though it has only 3 times as many people.
It also has more tritium leakage from nuclear sites into ground water.
@Chris O’Neill
I disagree as spreading nuclear hazmat in the same concentrations as Co2 through the atmosphere would cost far life years than the CO2. That said the more general point stands.
In extremis, the nuclear hazmat is confined to a trivial portion of the Earth’s surface and may remain a trivial hazard for 300-1000 years post sequestration. For all practical purpose the “long tail” of CO2 is forever or until someone can find a cheap and easy way of removing it permanently from the flux and that of course is going to disturb ecosystem services on a global scale during all of that time. There’s simply no comparison in risk and uncertainty between the two. We have no basis for declaring the maximum level of harm associated with the CO2 pulse, but we can be very confident about the harm associated with nuclear hazmat, and more, there are technical means of addressing it at acceptable cost.
Fran, lets expand that cutism “hazmat” to its proper form so every one knows what it refers to, “hazardous material”. ie dangerous material.
Secondly exposure to atmospheric levels of CO2 will kill no-one. Exposure to even background levels of nuclear radioaction can and does kill, with the extra kick being that it is usually too difficult to prove the point of contamination. So people die without ever knowing why.
The guiding principle with all of these contaminations, including CO2, should be that no person has the moral right to make commitments beyond their own life time.
So for a government to engage in activity that requires future generations to maintain the waste products, to no benefit to themselves, should be a criminal act. With Nuclear products, as well as fossil fuels, we are beyond the period of naivity. Everyone knows what they are doing and what the consequences are, so there is no excuse for creating material (energy wastes, war materials) that will require diligent management by people who had no say in that material’s formation or received no benefit from its presence. And it is certainly not the right of anyone living to presume that future generations will want to operate the machinery that we develop today.
Point of case would be the possibility of nuclear fusion power surpassing nuclear fission power. If in 20 years time cheap nuclear fusion energy became a reality leaving present day fission reactors an unwanted incumberance, then all of the fissionable material being created today would become a huge unwanted burden left upon the shoulders of future generations.
@Alice
Utter nonsense. There is no comparison. How can you compare the massive, permanent damage from global warming and ocean acidification with whatever damage there might be from radioactive material sitting in a deserted salt pan minding its own business. There is no comparison.
@Chris Warren
Now I know what matters to you. CO2 matters naught compared with anti-nuclear ideology.
@BilB
That’s obviously not accepted though because approximately 100% of politicians are involved in making commitments that are likely to reach beyond their lifetimes, for good or ill. Does anyone think that Senator Conroy will be around when the NBN is decommisioned? What about the PostMaster General who laid down the copper? Is he around now? The architects of the Snowy? The framers of the constitution?
On your “guiding principle” everything would be done for the short-term.
This is simply wrong. They do get a benefit. They get the benefit of cleaner air and cleaner water and a climate less perturbed by those of us living today. Indeed, in 50 years, the hazmat may be being fully exploited in breeders, so that it will really be a resource we have handed onto them.
Good luck prosecuting the dead. FTR, I agree very much that we should not leave negative legacies — hence my support for CO2 mitigation. Yet your advocacy, to the extent that your preferred solutions will inevitably leave a larger CO2 (and other toxic) footprint than nuclear power fall more easily into the category of intergenerational malfeasance.
The likelihood of that occurring is very slim, too slim for us to rely on it and transfer the probability of catastrophic climate disruption and the certainty of ubiquitous and toxic pollution to future generations. And even then, there would be a lead time for it to be fully commercvialised and rolled out.
Of course it’s not only nuclear fission-based power that would become obsolete if fusion lived up to its promise. This applies also to gigatonnes of useless wind turbines, solar panels, CST plants, tidal barrages etc. Then again, if that occurred, the problem of waste disposal would be even more trivial than it is now.
“in 50 years, the hazmat may be being fully exploited in breeders”
Not if breeders neverfulfill their commercial expectations and or are surpased by for more successful technologies.
As to commitments, construction materials can be recycled, debt can be written off, and poisonous materials must be deconstructed. These things can be performed within the lifetime of the creators. But the highly to radioactive nuclear waste materials must be stored and managed.
@Chris O’Neill
No you gotthis wong too.
What matters to me is the hypocritical pretence by nucloholics that only they are concerned about CO2.
What matters to me is the myopia of nucloholics who cannot see the full range of solutions to CO2 emmissions.
What matters to me is the sheer stupidity and immorality of those who seem intent on foisting nuclear waste on future generations, without even the ability to to provide accurate details on its isotope composition or decay sequence.
O’Neill reminds me of an old adage:
You can lead a nucloholic to facts, but you can’t make it think.
BilB
As a general moral principle this is rubbish. How many large dams are there in the world? How many are not designed to the best standards and how many are not properly maintained? Lots. Dams can be very dangerous things and in fact have been – killing far more than any nuclear accident or any conceivable nuclear accident. So you reckon that the current generation should dispose of all it’s dams before it passes on?
It is a question of degree of harm, and the harm from GHG gas emissions is extreme.
According to ITER, the earliest date for a grid connected demonstration plant is 2040. Note the word demonstration. That’s if all goes well. Anybody expecting inexpensive commercially available fusion power before 2050 is living in fairy land.
@BilB
So dealing with the massive consequences of CO2 release should be a massive criminal act. OK, when are we going to start acting in proportion to the issue?
Indeed it is Chris Oneill. We know that, now, and we have acted collectively to produce the mess that we are now faced with. But there are many who have acted more recklessly that others. Consider a young person growing up in an oil depleted world in India with all of the same desires that Westerners have. He may well feel that those who squandered the oil are criminals.
When are we going to act in proportion to the issue? When our politicians start thinking properly, or maybe that is honestly. I have demonstrated at length the very simple method of resolving our CO2 emission problem rapidly, affordably and in a renewable way on many occasions. Eventually, when there is no other alternative but to act, progress will be made. Until then people are right to think of those who intentionally frustrate the process of conversion to renewables as acting dishonestly, even criminally.
No doubt you think of the only solution as being a nuclear one. I’m saying that that introduces a crime of another kind, the crime of creating unresolveable toxic wastes in the present in the hope that a new future technology will clean up the mess. To date it has not, and there is absolutely no certainty that it will in the future. The prospect of a rapidly expanding nuclear industry guarantees a rapidly expanding nuclear waste problem for which the only proposed solution is the creation and operation of the most dangerous energy conversion machinery ever devised.
As for Quokka’s desperate flailing about comparing dams to nuclear accidents, we haven’t had the first Chinese or Indian major accident yet, but it will happen as Asia rushes forward with nuclear programmes. That is only one issue.
On fusion power, no one is holding their breath expecting this to work anytime soon. But should it work and work well, the stockpile of spent fission fuel rods and the machinery to consume them would certainly become abandoned with disasterous consequences, particularly for dupe countries left holding stocks of toxic radioactive material with no commercial value. At that point the economics of nuclear energy takes on an entirely different face.
So tell me one thing, if radioactive waste is so dangerous that we should not countenance it’s management even to save the planet from catastrophic climate change, where are all the dead bodies? After 50 years of civilian nuclear power and over 14,000 reactor years, where are the casualties from the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. We don’t need to theorize about this. As in all areas of engineering, doing proves much more than talking. So just how much harm has actually been done and to whom?
When it comes to damage to important ecosystems, a single mega hydro project has probably done more harm that all storage of all nuclear waste.
There are plenty of bodies, Quokka. That is one issue. The other is the ongoing COST of managing the material over hundreds into thousands of years rendered commercially obsolete by abandoned Nuclear processes.
Here is a test when the Fission Nuclear industry have closed the loop and can operate with no toxic residuals at all on a 5 year cycle, they will have come of age and be on the path to be considered safe. Under this regime all residuals can be resolved in the event of commercial failure of various kinds. Until then the industry is a risk and must be considered experimental, and restricted, which is pretty much just what has happened over the past decades. I remember when fat breeder reactors were first proposed. The world took a long hard look at sodium/water cooling and went cold on the whole idea and that is where it has stayed since. Now there is the proposal for lead/water cooling,which is much safer. It is all still experimental though and that is where it should stay until it is fully proven to be fully safe and closed looped.
Where? Time for some facts. If storing nuclear waste is so dangerous, then where are all the fatalities?
Is any species on the endangered list, due to nuclear waste?
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2008/Kara_study
http://maps.grida.no/index.cfm?event=searchFree&q=radioactivity
Then do a little reading on Ceasium 137 , and it does not take a genius to deduce how many deaths have occured as a result of this contamination over time.
Then there were the Summer fires which burnt through the Chernobyl 3000sq klm exclusion zone. An interesting piece of nuclear trivia is that ceasium 137 is used to verify contained liquids prior to nuclear testing as ceasium 137 does not occur in nature in any measureable quantity.
And here is another little surprise for the radiation disappears enthusiasts
(https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2010/11/01/radioactive-sandpit/comment-page-3/#comment-270595) take it out of brackets to read. This material is post commercial operation waste storage, on a very large scale.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10819027).
I have a couple of questions. Over quite a long time I have observed that some people seem to try to ‘debate’ topics in science or economics or both using methods I can’t imagine would work even in a high school debating forum. More specifically, some people seem to think that by rearranging words (eg the sequence of words in a set of paragraps) they are saying something. My first question is: Does this method have a name and, if so, what is it.
My second question is: Why do nuclear advocates use this method?
@Chris O’Neill
@Alice
“There is no comparison between the problem of nuclear waste and the problem of CO2 released into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning.”
Utter nonsense. There is a comparison.
Chris
Utter nonsense. There is no comparison. How can you compare the massive, permanent damage from global warming and ocean acidification with whatever damage there might be from radioactive material sitting in a deserted salt pan minding its own business. There is no comparison.
Alice
Utter utter nonsense again. There is a comparison. The waste from chernobyl has poisoned a great swathe of land for generations – hundreds of years uninhabitable – the legacy of Nagasaki lives on – the depleted uranium is poisoning babies and kids and others in Iraq as you say smugly
“there is no comparison”
Nonsense. Nonsense and more nonsense Chris Oneil. You want to replace,… no add, one dirty dangerous fuel to another dirty dangerous fuel. You want to live in a Mad Max world.