Blog Action Day

Well, long time no post. I hope all my readers are well.

So, apparently today is something called “Blog Action Day“, and this year the topic of interest is anthropogenic forcing of the climate system, and mitigating the potential thereof.

So, OK, I thought I’ll write a blog post about it. The day is supposed to be about action, as the name suggests, so let’s talk about specific actions, with a view towards making a significant mitigation, in a realistic way, of Australia’s anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.

Australia’s brown coal (lignite) fired electricity generators have by far the highest specific carbon dioxide emissions intensity per unit of electrical energy generated, since they’re burning relatively high moisture brown coal. They are the most concentrated point contributors to the anthropogenic GHG output. Therefore, these are the “low-hanging fruit” – a very valuable target to look at first and foremost if we want to make the greatest realistic mitigation of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions in a practical way, followed by black coal-fired generators.

Australia’s total net greenhouse gas emissions in 2006 were 549.9 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

If we look at the three main sets of lignite-fired generators in the Latrobe valley in Victoria, they represent a very concentrated point source of CO2 output, so they’re a very good case to focus on specifically.

In 2006, Hazelwood generated 11.6 TWh of electrical energy, and 16,149,398 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

In 2006, Loy Yang A generated 15.994 TWh of electrical energy sent out to the grid and 19,326,812 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

I’ll exclude Loy Yang B from this list for the moment, since its numbers are eluding me.

In 2006, the Yallourn power station generated 10.392 TWh of electrical energy sent out to the grid and 14,680,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

If you look at the the total contribution of just those three brown-coal-fired plants combined, you’re looking at 9.12 percent of Australia’s total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. If you replace those with clean technology that can deliver an equivalent electricity output, you get a 9.12 percent reduction in Australia’s CO2 emissions. (When you include Loy Yang B, I think it’s approximately 11-12%.)

That’s not a bad target for Australia to implement for the relatively short term for a real reduction in CO2 emissions. It can actually be done, if the real political will exists to do it.

Now, I’m not interested in this “100% renewable energy by 2020″ business from the extremist any-excuse-for-a-protest Socialist Alternative set, because it is nonsense.

Replacing all the coal-fired and gas-fired generators in this country inside 10 years (and presumably only using wind turbines and solar cells, not nuclear energy of course since it doesn’t fit their para-religious ideology)? That’s complete bullshit, of course, because in the real world it cannot be done.

There’s a difference between setting a challenging target and setting a nonsense target. Unless you’re only trying to implement a political bullshit stunt instead of actually trying to hit your targets.

Of course, you don’t just close down the coal-fired generators. You’ve actually got to build their clean replacements first. So what do you use that can realistically replace a coal-fired power station? Nuclear power, of course.

Now, again, to be realistic, we probably can’t build LFTR/MSR, PBMR/HTGR, IFR/PRISM or any kind of nuclear fusion based generation capacity on a large scale to generate grid-connected energy right now. That’s not to say that pilot-scale research and development on those very cool technologies shouldn’t continue, but right now, getting more nuclear energy on the grid means advanced light water reactors – or maybe heavy water CANDU-type things, or conventional sodium-cooled fast reactors maybe. The most practical thing for serious deployment in the relatively short term is advanced LWR technology. In the slightly longer term, there is certainly a place to be encouraging both Gen. IV and fusion.

To get the same amount of energy as the total output from those coal plants, as above, which we’re talking about replacing, we need 4.56 GW of installed nuclear capacity, assuming a 95% capacity factor.

With 4 x 1154 MWe Westinghouse AP1000s, with a 95% capacity factor, you’ve got 4.62 GW, which is a little more than what’s needed.

You can easily have four nuclear power reactors integrated into one nuclear power plant.

Now, how much does it cost?

On March 27, 2008, South Carolina Electric & Gas applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a COL to build two AP1000s at the Virgil nuclear power plant in South Carolina. On May 27, 2008, SCE&G and Santee Cooper announced an engineering, procurement, and construction contract had been reached with Westinghouse. Costs are estimated to be approximately $9.8 billion for both AP1000 units, plus transmission facility and financing costs.

That gives you an idea of how much a nuclear power plant costs today, in the current financial environment, in the current regulatory environment.

If we double that figure of USD$9.8 billion, it’s AUD $21.4 billion. There will be some saving since we’re considering building four reactors at one plant, not two independent two-reactor plants.

How much that saving will be, quantitatively, I don’t really know. If the cost is reduced by 30%, we’re looking at 15 billion Australian dollars.

How long would it take? If the real political will exists to do it, 10 years is heaps of time. We could probably do even more in that timeframe if we really, really wanted to. AP1000 construction takes 36 months from first concrete poured to fuel load, if you ignore any political protest rubbish.

This is really just a base-line relatively achievable “base case”. After this decade, of course, the rate of nuclear power deployment – and related GHG emissions mitigation – could foreseeably accelerate.

What about the uranium input? About 600 tonnes of natural uranium per year total, for all four reactors. Australia’s present production, off the top of my head, is something like 10,000-11,000 tonnes. Australia’s present uranium production can very, very easily provide for Australia’s total electricity production even without expansion of uranium production – again, considering the inefficient once-through use of low-enriched uranium in conventional LWRs.

What about the so-called “waste”?
Roughly 80-85 tonnes of used uranium fuel per year. 96% of that is unchanged uranium, so that 76.8 tonnes of uranium can be seperated and re-used. It’s just uranium, so it’s not going to hurt you.

The remaining 3200 kg is made up of the valuable, interesting and unique byproduct materials from a nuclear reactor – unique resources with all kinds of different technological applications, which aren’t all radioactive, which you cannot get anywhere else.

Anyway, that’s one scenario which I happen to think has a lot of merit.

Maybe you don’t agree – but if you don’t agree, I’d love to see you elucidate an alternative scenario which can deliver the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions mitigation – shown to be accurate in a quantitative way – within a comparable timeframe and within a comparable cost.

It will not be inexpensive, and it will not happen overnight – but I have yet to see any scenario which can honestly do the same job faster and cheaper, when some real quantitative analysis is applied.

Conspiracy at Three Mile Island…

I wrote this in response to a comment over at Brave New Climate (shameless plug), but I thought it was quite a nice little post, so as not to waste it, I’ll re-post it.

PS: Sorry about my lack of blog activity lately, sometimes real life seems to eat up my time. Extra apologies, especially, if you’ve posted comments that the software has kept from being posted pending manual moderator approval, and therefore your comments haven’t been getting through.
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Ah, the old Three Mile Island conspiracy theory, the notion that there were enormous amounts of radioactivity released, and people who experienced acute radiation poisoning, that was somehow covered up.

Let’s look, for a moment, at the Chernobyl disaster. When the Chernobyl disaster happened, we didn’t see the Soviet premier calling up Reagan to tell him all about this catastrophic accident and large release of radioactivity, did we? Of course, they tried to keep it a secret.
So, how did we in the industrialised world find out about the Chernobyl accident and this large release of radioactivity? We found out about it when all the radiological sensors and alarms started going off at the Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden.

As another example, we all know today that it is possible, if you live in an area of relatively uranium-rich geology, for significant amounts of radioactivity in the form of radon to leach into your basement naturally from the surrounding rock.
But how was this radon issue first discovered? It was discovered when a person employed at a nuclear power station in the United States kept setting off the radiological sensors when he arrived at work every day.

Those incidents show you just how sensitive the detectors and monitors used at facilities like nuclear power plants are.

In the modern world, if there is some sort of massive release of radioactivity into the atmosphere it is impossible to hide it or to cover it up.

If this massive release of radioactivity at TMI isn’t just a myth, then you would have recorded clear evidence of it on every bit of photographic film for miles around. After the accident, all such photographic film was collected and analysed by Kodak, and no such evidence was found.

There are many other nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania and neighbouring states which aren’t too far away from TMI. They would have recorded real evidence of a large cloud of radioactivity in the environment, if it was really present to that extent.

You’d record real evidence of it anywhere where photographic film is stored or used. You’d record it at every nuclear power plant, or anywhere else where radioactive materials are stored or used where health physics controls are implemented. You’d record real evidence of it anywhere where medical or industrial X-ray images are made. You’d record it anywhere where radioactivity is used for scientific or medical purposes. You’d record it everywhere where particle detectors are used for physics experiments. You’d maybe even detect it on every old duck-and-cover civil defence radiological detector that someone might have had laying around as an unpleasant relic of history.

But no such real physical recorded evidence to support the theory was ever recorded, anywhere. People went looking for it, but it wasn’t there.

There are people who claim they got sick as a result of the Three Mile Island accident, who claim that they exhibited symptoms consistent with acute radiation poisoning, and massive doses of ionising radiation.

There are also people who claim that they have been made sick by witches who put a curse on them – once upon a time, upon hearing these stories, we’d have them tell us the identity of the witch so the witch could then be tortured and murdered, based on these stories.

There are people who tell stories about how they’ve been beamed aboard the extraterrestrial flying saucer, and sexually molested by the aliens – but once again, as with the above examples, there are mere stories but there is no actual real evidence that stands up to scientific enquiry.

Shortly after the TMI accident, people like Helen Caldicott went and gathered up local residents and described to them the scary sounding symptopms of acute radiation poisoning from acute exposure to massive doses of ionising radiation, and implied that that’s what would happen to them. With that kind of fear and stress, it’s no surprise that we can see mass hysteria, and we can see people who say that they think they might be starting to exhibit those symptoms that they’ve been told about.

But instruments and detectors and photographic films and thermoluminescent dosimeter crystals aren’t subject to fear, panic and mass hysteria – and they recorded nothing.

A common claim of TMI conspiracy theorists such as Caldicott is that longer lived radionuclides, such as Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu-239 (or pick your favourite moderate-to-long half-life well-known reactor-produced radionuclide) were released into the environment at TMI, not just short-lived gaseous fission products.

But if such nuclides were released, you could go and take some soil from TMI, and physically show the evidence of such release, because those radionuclides would still, mostly, be there. They can show us real, undeniable, physical evidence today, if that hypothesis is true. But that evidence is never forthcoming.

A bit of an apology…

…I’ve been a little busy lately, and you may have noticed the absence of many new posts.

More regrettably, though, is that there seem to be a large number of comments accumulating in the pending-comment-moderation queue, and they haven’t been posted.

So, if you’ve been trying to post comments without success, this is why, and I will make sure they’re all posted now. (Unless there are any I really insist on moderating, but that’s unlikely.) I will have to try experimenting with the WordPress settings regarding spam filtering and automatic comment approval a little bit.

Looking for a particular graphic.

Dear readers;

There’s a certain image that I’ve seen when browsing the web before which I found useful. I’m trying to find this image again, but haven’t seen any success in finding it again.

It’s a pie chart which shows the physical composition of typical used LWR nuclear fuel, showing a breakdown of x % uranium, y % Zircaloy cladding, z % hardware, w % fission products and so forth. This was notable in that it included the portion of the fuel element’s mass which is the cladding and hardware, not just the uranium oxide fuel matrix itself.

Does anybody recognise the graph I’m referring to, and know where to find it online?

Regards.

The argument from appeal to hatred of Howard.

Here’s a comment I received recently, in the context of talking about nuclear power.

“remember John Howard sold his soul to GW Bush, why would yoy [sic] trust anything he supports ?”

We see this occasionally in discussions about nuclear power. It’s the appeal to hatred of Howard, an argumentative technique, similar to a kind of contemporary derivative of the good old fashioned argumentum ad hominem, that goes something like this:

i) John Howard was actively interested in investigating the use of nuclear power in Australia, and was open to the idea.

ii) Of course, everybody obviously knows that Howard is literally pure immoral evil, and he feasts on babies, or something.

iii) Ergo, nuclear power is bad.

You sometimes have the persuasive appeal to hatred of the GOP or hatred of Bush, or something similar, it works in exactly the same way.

Well, it looks like the Obama administration is going to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain.

Well, there will be no Yucca Mountain facility opening in the US any time soon. But is that a big deal? No. There never was any urgent need for Yucca Mountain. The used nuclear fuel at the civilian power reactors is quite safe where it is, and it isn’t hurting anybody. The current on-site storage can be maintained for many years to come, and it’s just not a problem that requires any pressing intractable attention.

It will be interesting to see what happens in relation to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act – obviously they will have to change the law.
I suppose that money will be put back into the hands of the nuclear utilities, or used by the government to implement recycling of fuel.
I’d be happy to see the money used by the government to implement recycling infrastructure, and/or used by the nuclear generation utilities to implement dry cask storage for all the on-site storage capacity for their fuel that they need and that they’re going to need, until reprocessing and/or central storage is implemented.

It’s worth remembering that we’re not abandoning Yucca Mountain, we’re not “wasting” billions of dollars – the Obama government is not going to backfill it with concrete and burn all the research data. We’re just putting Yucca Mountain on the back burner for a little while, that’s all. If, in 10 years, we decide that Yucca Mountain wasn’t such a bad idea after all, we can always go straight back to it where we left off.

I think that’s not actually all that bad, because it gives us time to step back, breathe, and realise that taking this used LWR fuel, which is 96% unchanged uranium, declaring it to be so-called “waste”, and throwing it in Yucca Mountain really is a little stupid.

Off the top of my head I can’t remember how deep the Yucca tunnels are, but perhaps the facility will be useful for particle physics experiments (neutrino physics, dark matter detection and the like) just like the WIPP site in New Mexico.

As much as I fully support sensible recycling of nuclear fuel, and I hate to see good useful material “wasted”, I think, yes, it’s worth ultimately having a geological repository, although it’s certainly not needed urgently.

Even with the efficient use of uranium and actinides, and the extraction of useful fission products, I think we’re going to be producing medium-lifetime radioactive fission products (such as Cs-137, Tc-99, Sr-90, or what-have-you) at a rate which will exceed their consumption for useful applications, and therefore, we will have surplus material that will probably be best going to deep geological storage. Add in the transuranic-contaminated waste from the Cold War and the weapons facilities, and industrial and scientific radioactive waste, and yes, it really doesn’t hurt to have a deep geological repository such as Yucca mountain.

A roundup of some interesting things.

A few interesting things I’ve come across this week:

i) In pure water, (and in particular in ice, which has a much greater density of hydrogen bonds) electric charge is primarily carried not by electrons, but by a flow of mobile protons. (Or deuterons, in D₂O.)

Further reading here and here.

ii) A compendium of water-related pseudoscience and quackery. From magical quantum water purification, to “water memory”, to converting your car to run on water, it’s all discussed here.

iii) Neodymium-iron-boron magnets are dangerous!

Super-strong neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets are very cool. They’re fun to play with, and they’re also extremely useful for many technological applications.

But they should be treated with a great deal of respect, and not toyed around with, especially not if they’re large – anything bigger than a few cubic centimetres.
A pair of these magnets the size of cigarette packets are not novelties and they’re not toys – they will take off your hand quite easily if they’re not treated with respect.

Do not want!

Finally:
To Mars by A-bomb: The Secret History of Project Orion.
I think I’ve posted little bits from this before, but I was delighted to find that someone’s posted the entire one-hour series on YouTube. Very, very cool.

Here’s the first part, the next five parts are at the above page.

Watching the start of this program, I was actually a little surprised to see that there actually exists video footage (indeed, colour video footage) of the assembly of the Gadget for the Trinity test in 1945.

‘Dirty bomb’ parts found in slain man’s home?

The Bangor Daily News reports that one James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, “allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.””

According to an FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, an investigation into the case revealed that radioactive materials were removed from Cummings’ home after his shooting death on Dec. 9.

The report posted on the WikiLeaks Web site states that “On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased [person] James Cummings.”

It says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.

Also found was literature on how to build “dirty bombs” and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups. This would seem to confirm observations by local tradesmen who worked at the Cummings home that he was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and had a collection of Nazi memorabilia around the house, including a prominently displayed flag with swastika. Cummings claimed to have pieces of Hitler’s personal silverware and place settings, painter Mike Robbins said a few days after the shooting.

Now, of course, this seems like a bit of a beat-up – but I’m not sure who’s to blame here, the newspaper, or the perhaps overly dramatic (internal) FBI report.

The memo leaked on WikiLeaks reports that:

“State authorities detected radiation emissions in four small jars in the residence labelled ‘uranium metal’, as well as one jar labelled ‘thorium’. The four jars of uranium carried the label of an identified US company.”

“Further preliminary analysis on 30 december 2008 indicated an unlabeled jar to be a second jar of thorium. Each bottle of uranium contained depleted uranium-238. Analysis also indicated the two jars of thorium held thorium-232.”

Now, regarding this US company. I have a pretty good suspicion who this company is – there aren’t too many companies that sell small samples of depleted uranium to the public – but I’m not going to mention the company by name, simply because they do not deserve to be unfairly tarnished or persecuted in relation to this incident.

This company provides quite a few products which are very interesting and very useful in scientific teaching, education and research, including some items which are extremely difficult to find on the market anywhere else, and they already cop enough persecution and flak as it is. Nothing they sell poses any special danger to the community at large, and small samples of uranium metal are, personally, one of the least dangerous things they sell.

The company in question, from what I recall, sells (depleted) uranium metal samples in 5 gram bottles, and used to sell thorium as one-gram samples.

If these samples were what these bottles possessed by this person were, then you’re talking about approximately 20 g of depleted uranium metal, and approximately 2 g of thorium metal. That’s about 10 microcuries of uranium, and about 0.22 microcuries of thorium.

There’s nothing that constitutes any radiological hazard to anybody. A bucket full of uranium-bearing rock picked up out of the ground would contain more radioactivity than this. Uranium-238 and thorium-232 are some of the least radioactive substances you can find that can still actually be called radioactive. They’re completely, utterly irrelevant to any threat of a radiological weapon, at all.

That said, however, I’m sure it is within the limits plausibility that this person was intent on trying to build a radiological weapon, he simply didn’t go about it in a particularly effective fashion.

Clean coal project ‘will fail’ under emissions trading scheme.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/19/2468820.htm

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt says a major clean coal project in central Queensland will fail unless the Federal Government changes its emissions trading scheme.

ZeroGen is working to develop a low emissions plant but says under the proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme it may be forced to buy permits.

If this “clean coal” is so clean, and actually does not have any significant emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, why are GHG emissions permits any significant issue at all? Any and all technologies which are truly “clean” obviously have a competitive advantage under the emissions trading scheme – so how exactly is the coal industry able to complain about a financial disadvantage faced by “clean coal”?

Of course they should be forced to buy permits – as should every power station – corresponding to their quantitative greenhouse gas emissions. If you don’t want to sink money into GHG permits, then you deploy low-emissions or zero-emissions technologies.

Even after what is basically an admission that “clean coal” is still associated with very high emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, more than natural gas and more than essentially any other energy generation technology with the exception of conventional coal-firing, the coal industry is still expecting even more handouts for the government for purported “clean coal” – and the government will probably give in, since “clean coal” is the only example the Australian Government has that they can try and meaningfully show as evidence of their supposed commitment to the management of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. If Big Coal threatens to walk away on the “clean coal” projects if they don’t get the additional taxpayer-funded pork they demand, the government is left with nothing to show off.

In a letter to Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson the company said it should be exempted from buying carbon permits as it is a research and development project.

It has warned that if it has to buy permits the project may become unviable.

The Queensland Government has provided $100 million for the project and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has voiced his support for it.
Mr Hunt has accused the Commonwealth of “turning its back” on clean energy.

“The project will fail under Mr Rudd’s regime,” he said.

“Very clearly ZeroGen, clean coal, the future of Australian clean energy will fail under Mr Rudd’s regime.”

What a bunch of ridiculous rhetoric.
Given that we’re seeing so much government money being handed out to the coal-fired generation industry in relation to coal and emissions trading, and so many exemptions from emissions trading and the issuing of free permits, it might almost come as a surprise that there is interest in “clean coal”, when there is no real significant economic disincentive to the use of conventional coal-fired technology. The answer does indeed seem to be that these mendaciously small-scale “clean coal” projects seem to be an attractive source of easy government handouts for Big Coal.

Mr Hunt says the Government’s stance on emissions trading has already hurt the company.

“We’ve learnt that there are already job losses at ZeroGen,” he said.

The entire business development and corporate affairs section has been sacked in the last few days, the company is already winding down.”

A spokesperson for Mr Ferguson says the minister will address the issues raised in ZeroGen’s letter in “due course”.

Last year the Government allocated $100 million to the formation of the Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.

About 80 per cent of Australia’s electricity is created by coal-fired power generators.

Under the proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme, all revenue from the sale of permits will be used to compensate households for rising costs.

The Government’s climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut, had urged the Government to allocate about a third of collected revenue to clean energy research and development.

A Question, dear readers…

I’m currently interested in trying to find an example of any kind of scholarly paper or article published by Helen Caldicott, which has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, which is not just the usual “nuclear power bad” stuff we’ve all heard before. For example, any example of an article dealing with research into or treatment of cystic fibrosis, which was her area of professional expertise. Given that Caldicott was “Researcher in Cystic Fibrosis, Boston Clinic; formerly Director of Cystic Fibrosis Research, Adelaide Children’s Hospital, Adelaide. Australia.”, or at least so I’m reading, I’m surprised to find that despite running a few search queries through Elsevier, Medline, Web of Science and so forth, I’ve not been able to find any such example of any published works. I’d like to see a kind of baseline example of what her grasp of critical thinking, science and scholarly research was like, before it was swamped by this fervent dogma and drowned out.

That seems strange. Can anybody else find any such articles, or published works?