Thursday 31 January 2013

Renewables, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

In an example of the kind of story that people who oppose nuclear power hate to read or consider, Japanese Prime Minister last week reneged on Japan's promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions 25% by 2020, because of Japan's future reduced reliance on nuclear power.

For the large number of well-meaning people who believe that renewable power (chiefly wind and solar) can take up the slack if fossil fuel usage is reduced, this kind of information must induce a level of cognitive dissonance that could cause an aneurism. Much easier to just ignore it. That is why articles like that receive relatively little coverage in the Japanese (indeed, the world) press while the announcement that TEPCO is releasing a little treated water sparks outrage.

The belief on the part of many people that renewable power can replace both fossil fuels and nuclear is rarely critically examined. The connection between rising emissions and a nuclear-less energy production industry is rarely made.

When the need for nuclear power is overtly pushed by scientists, even scientists who are famous for their contribution to climate change study, the result makes the green left very uneasy indeed. Known as NASA's point man of climate change, James Hansen is one such scientist. For decades he has researched climate change and has been informing governments about it. As such he is revered by green movements around the world and vilified by climate change deniers, but when it comes to his scientifically-backed assertions about how to deal with the problem, his green supporters just tune him out. In what I find to be an extraordinary document, clear and concise, Hansen lays out the case for why renewable energy, although being an important part of the mix, is never going to make the big time, and that people who believe otherwise may as well believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

Wednesday 30 January 2013

Perceptions of safety, illusions of danger

A few days ago TEPCO announced that it would be releasing contaminated cooling water into the ocean, water that has been treated to remove radioactive substances so that it is below the legally permissible level of radioactive contamination.

This is necessary because water has been accumulating from efforts to continue cooling the three melted down reactors and the radiation will be reduced through a new process that removes 60 different kinds of radiactive substances. The resulting release will be orders of magnitude less radioactive than is necessary to cause harm to humans, and will then be diluted by nothing less than the Pacific Ocean, so that the radioactivity will be diluted billions of times more, to way, way below normal background levels of radiation in seawater.

You will not be able to find a respectable scientific source stating that this release will endanger the environment in any way. Yet the Japan Times article, as well as other pieces in the net, is followed by comments implying some kind of crime being committed by TEPCO.

This small example neatly illuminates much of the difficulty the nuclear power industry faces in dealing with public perception of safety. The excessive standards of safety and reporting forced on the industry do little to allay fears. On the contrary, they seem to merely enforce the perception that nuclear power is dangerous. Coal power plants, which emit radiation as part of their normal operations, never make any announcements about this at all. Behind all this is the false assumption that nuclear power is inherently more dangerous than other forms of energy production.

That this assumption has nasty add-on effects should hardly be surprising. One of the most important is that the extraordinary standards of safety that are forced upon nuclear power result in massive cost overruns in plant construction. ANS cafe has an extraordinarily informative post on this topic, finding that much of the cost of plant construction originates in unrealistic and self-defeating standards of Quality Assurance.

It is ironic that 'cost' is one of the main reasons given by anti-nuclear campaigners as to why nuclear power cannot provide electricity for the entire world. If those anti-nuke proponents were willing to rationally compare safety standards in terms of health effects across differenct forms of energy production, the costs of nuclear power plant construction could drop dramatically. Construction costs in China, for example, are a fraction of those in the West, much of which cannot be explained merely by the lower cost of labour.

Friday 18 January 2013

Hopefully the Prime Minister takes my advice

The Japan Times this week has published my letter to the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, where I invite him to consider reason and common sense when it comes to the nuclear issue in Japan.

My little letter was sandwiched between two rabidly anti-nuclear opinion pieces. One is an emotionally-charged use of the 'nuclear waste is bad' argument. One could, of course, use 90% of it and just change the topic to 'not using nuclear power'. At least that way the charge of generational betrayal would be appropriate. Regarding the issue of waste, suffice it to say that 95% of nuclear waste can be recycled, and the disposal of the remainder is not so much a safety or technical issue as a political one.

The second piece is a somewhat random scare piece about the accumulation of strontium-90 in childrens' teeth. It's notable for its complete lack of claimed health effects - leading the reader nonplused as to what it was written for. I suspect the editor demanded scientific references for the supposed ill-effects of the reported strontium-90, and the authors were unable to come up with any.

One thing for sure. Now that I have read many, many anti-nuclear articles I am no longer afraid of trying to get my own stuff published. These writers may or may not be professional journalists, but if they are, they are professionals who are either deliberately deceitful or have an extraordinarily poor understanding of the scientific method.