Yes we can do much more efficiency, and efficiency may reduce GHG even more than nuclear power. Much more wind, though wind, especially with inefficient natural gas backup, will not be as important either immediately or by mid-century as nuclear is likely to be. Yes we can do solar, likely to come in at far less than 1% of 2030 energy without major technology breakthroughs. We'll need coal with carbon capture and storage.

We need mechanisms to get there from here: cap and trade as a minimum, significantly more money for R&D, more mandates on fuel and appliance and bulb inefficiency, as well as designing cities around transportation rather than the other way around. We need more money.

A recent study shows that at least some people believe climate change is more serious if there are calls for nuclear power -- if others are willing to believe up their ideology because they are so concerned, maybe I'll give up mine. So less ideology, more listening, will help convince the public on the seriousness of climate change.

A Musing Environment

Karen Street

In January 2007, the European Commission issued a communication stating that "the European Union's objective is to limit global average temperature increase to less than 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels".

Andrew Weaver and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Canada say this means going well beyond the reduction of industrial emissions discussed in international negotiations.

Weaver's team used a computer model to determine how much emissions must be limited in order to avoid exceeding a 2°C increase. The model is an established tool for analysing future climate change and was used in studies cited in the IPCC's reports on climate change.

They modelled the reduction of industrial emissions below 2006 levels by between 20% and 100% by 2050. Only when emissions were entirely eliminated did the temperature increase remain below 2°C.

Original paper here.
Yikes!

Having said that, can someone elaborate on why Flannery contends that the upcoming data from IPCC is so much worse than what came out in the reports earlier this year?

Before you read further, describe to yourself the problems that could result from nuclear waste. Or describe to all of us. Ignore references that talk about lots of radioactivity, lasts a long time, but go to the bottom line: environmentally it's a non-issue, but how many might die?

From a questionnaire on relative dangers of energy use, there is a question on Yucca Mountain:

Assuming current technology and current plans to monitor over 200 years, how many are expected to die from US nuclear waste that will be generated this decade?

The answer may be smaller than you think. When I began looking into the issues of coal vs. nuclear for a school paper back in 1995, I went in with preconceptions that did not include nuclear waste being pretty much a non-issue. I spent a long time trying to find sources I could trust, people who did not mess up the numbers or the physics, who would justify my preconceptions. Not only would no reliable source do so, they kept harping on climate change.

If you want to know more, check out National Academies Press, written by the National Research Council Disposition of High-Level Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel: The Continuing Societal and Technical Challenges (2001) From the executive summary:

Today the biggest challenges to waste disposition are societal.

A Musing Environment

Karen Street

I'm not sure what you mean by efficient French system.

When the US started building nuclear power plants decades ago, a manager might order one for his utility because his golfing partner did. We are past that stage.

Basically, there haven't been any serious accidents since Three Mile Island.

Some favor government control, other private industry with a serious regulatory system (which the fossil fuels don't have -- why isn't this better covered????)

Some of the talk about efficient French program is because it was better than the earlier American program. Also, French nuclear power is cheap, the French export electricity to many nations, including anti-nuclear ones -- US plants needed to be retrofit, at enormous cost, in times of high inflation. Add in a protest or two to delay the construction even more, and we're talking real money. Americans at the time had a cheap alternative, coal plants with not much in the way of pollution controls, and relatively few controls on miner safety and mine damage. The French did not have the coal or the lack of concern for miners, so nuclear was cheaper than coal in one country, more expensive in the other.

More on waste:

In 1995, when I began reading about energy sources and climate change, tens of thousands of Americans died every year just from coal waste, tens of thousands died every year from other fossil fuel waste, hundreds of thousands of Chinese died every year from coal waste -- saving these lives was considered "another advantage of switching to nuclear power" and otherwise addressing climate change. Since then, concerns about climate change have become much scarier.

A Musing Environment

Karen Street

"the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions had reached about 455 parts per million by mid-2005"

- emissions is a rate, not a ppm number. And there's no way the CO2 ppm equivalent has jumped from 380 to 455 in the last couple of years. I have no idea what this is in reference to, but the numerical statement as quoted there is complete nonsense.

-- the 455 ppm may make sense if it's referring to only the net equivalent effect of the greenhouse gases, but not including the forcings that act in the opposite direction (aerosols etc.) The important number is still the total, which is about 375 ppm-equivalent according to realclimate.

Photovoltaic (solar) panels and windmills can be built faster, but nuclear power plants are large.

National Academy of Sciences estimates that of the 120 GW that will come online in the US by 2020, 19% maximum could come from wind. The 120 GW assumes that the windmill/power plant/PV is running at maximum 24/7.

California is investing $3 billion by 2017 (plus federal subsidies, plus the purchase price), with the hope of 3 GW in solar by that year. But 3 GW in solar is equivalent to 0.6 GW, or less. For $3 billion, a 1.5 GW nuclear power plant could be built, equivalent to about 1.35 GW. It could come online before 2017.

If you look at the most optimistic estimates for new solar (tiny), plus wind, plus nuclear (maybe 20 plants, maybe 1.5 GW each, by 2020, and 30 - 40 plants by 2025), together they do not account for all of the new electric capacity the US will build. I would hate to exclude any of them.

That's in wind and solar rich US. China and India are closer to the equator, but Rome is north of NYC. Mongolia and the US have the most wind. So Europe and Japan can also build nuclear faster than wind + solar.

The main question is this: do we want to replace some of those coal plant construction in the US and elsewhere with nuclear?

We need to add nuclear, wind, solar, much much greater efficiency as rapidly as possible. Europeans will be bringing more hydro online, a large portion of their new renewable by 2020. And the world will be adding coal.

A Musing Environment

Karen Street