Science Show – Nuclear power plants – now safer and cheaper

In Part Deux of my ABC Radio National spree on nuclear power, I spoke with The Science Show presenter Robyn Williams. This interview was actually recorded a few weeks before my Counterpoint gig, live with Robyn when he was visiting Adelaide, but it was ultimately scheduled to run afterwards. It was a thrill to get a run on this great programme — it’s my favourite weekly radio slot, and Robyn’s a really switched on kinda guy (if you want to hear me talking on The Science Show a few years ago about two totally different topics, listen here and here).

The slant was this time focused on the history of nuclear power deployment, and the many benefits of 4th Generation Nuclear Power, epitomised by (but by no means exclusive to, ye Thorium buffs), the Integral Fast Reactor.

Below is the transcript of the interview, broadcast on 18 July, and a link to the original .MP3 audio of the broadcast. As with the previous interview, I’d be interested in any feedback. Note that there was one error I made, three times, in the audio, which I have corrected on the transcript — see if you can pick it. I put it down to Gremlins dancing in my head, because I really do know the difference between “x“ and “y” and have never made that slip when writing here — at least as far as I’m aware.

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Barry Brook traces the history of nuclear power. Today, about 440 nuclear power reactors are in use, known as Generation 2 reactors. These were designed between 1960 and 1980. Recently, Generation 3 reactors have adopted a standard design, allowing for faster approval. 45 are being built. 350 are planned. Chernobyl was a cheap design. There was no containment building. Barry Brook describes Chernobyl as an accident waiting to happen. Newer reactors are orders of magnitude safer than the older models. Generation 4 is the new excitement. Efficiency is much higher meaning uranium supplies will last so much longer. They can burn a range of isotopes of uranium and other elements producing short-lived waste.

Download audio (ABC Radio National, The Science Show, 18 July 2009)

Transcript

Robyn Williams: The nuclear power stations some of us grew up with are now over 50 years old. The next, the fourth generation, represents a whole new prospect, one which may have influenced environment minister Peter Garrett with his go-ahead for another uranium mine this week. Here’s Professor Barry Brook with a brief history of nukes.

Barry Brook: Well, the very first generation, I guess you’d call generation zero, was Fermi’s graphite pile under the basketball court in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb during WWII. And from that technology spun out the reactor program for US submarines, and so there was a big push by Admiral Rickover to develop the pressurised water reactor for US submarines. Then they basically took a submarine reactor and put it on land in Shippingport and it was the generation one nuclear reactor. And then they built one in Calder Hall in the UK…

Robyn Williams: Calder Hall in the north, that’s right. I remember that was opened over 50 years ago.

Barry Brook: Yes, that was in the early ’50s, about 1952 Calder Hall was opened. From that then it was a rapid phase of research and development and refining the technology. From the 1960s through to the 1980s is generally what’s called generation two nuclear power, and that involves a whole raft of different designs. Most of the nuclear power that’s delivering today…so there’s about 440 reactors delivering today and all of them use water as a moderator and a coolant, and so they’re called light water reactors. They can either be pressurised water reactors or boiling water reactors, but they’re the same fundamental technology.

Recently, in what’s being called an evolutionary advance in nuclear power, there are these generation three nuclear reactors, and they’re basically like generation two but they’re less costly, they’re more modular, you can build a lot of the components in a factory. Importantly there’s a standardised design that they’re trying to develop, which means you can get certification for just one design and then plonk it down in many different places without having to seek independent certification in every new reactor, which was a big stumbling block, especially in the US, in the 1970s. China, for instance, is building 12 nuclear power plants right now, all of the same model, called the AP-1000, which is one of those generation three units developed by Westinghouse.

So that’s the thing that’s happening right now, and I think there’s about 45 nuclear power plants under construction, about 350-odd in planning stages around the world, so that’s taking off. But that’s still basically the nuclear power that everyone thinks about. It is certainly much safer technology than those earlier reactors and certainly the reactor that had a steam explosion and a graphite fire in Chernobyl was a funny sort of Russian design, was very cheap to make, didn’t have a containment building, would never be built in a western country. Essentially as an accident it was, whilst appalling, just can’t happen in any western reactor.

But even from there the design safety has gone orders of magnitude further. And so the most recent model developed by General Electric Hitachi called the Economic and Simplified Boiling Water Reactor had a thorough risk assessment done on it and they estimated the chance of a Three Mile Island style meltdown (which was that accident that happened in Pennsylvania in 1979, it didn’t kill anyone but it wrecked the reactor) about once every 29 million reactor years for these new designs, so that’s a pretty unlikely prospect.

Robyn Williams: But these ones because they’ve really got built-in safety, they’re really carefully designed and so on, they’re really expensive, aren’t they. They take a long time to put up and cost a fortune, so that’s why so many people are reluctant (even the Americans) to put them up.

Barry Brook: That’s the popular opinion, that they’re very expensive, but most of the expense in the US comes from the complicated certification rules right now. Japan, for instance, is building a lot of nuclear reactors and in the late ’90s they built two advanced boiling water reactors which were one of these first of the generation three design, and they built them for a cost of less than $2,000 a kilowatt installed, which is highly competitive. Coal, you might bring it in at $1,500 a kilowatt installed, so it’s very close to that sort of price range.

Similarly, the AP-1000s, the whole idea is that you have the standardised, modularised designs. A lot of the components can be factory built, they’ve been simplified in many ways, inherently safe in that their safety systems rely on the basic laws of physics to shut them down, so it’s often called walk-away safety. There’s so many redundant back-up systems and physical systems that need to fail and essentially can’t fail unless Newton and Einstein are wrong, that they’re inherently safe. So I think the costs of nuclear power are vastly overplayed in the argument about whether we should take it up.

Robyn Williams: What about generation four, using up some of the old waste?

Barry Brook: Yes, generation four is a big excitement I think in nuclear power, and that is often called a revolutionary design. So generation three is evolutionary, the same sort of technology just done better. Generation four looks at it in a completely different way, although ironically most of the technology for it has been developed quite consistently over the last 50 years. The very first experimental reactors used a system called a fast spectrum, to have really fast neutrons that could break up not just what we think of as enriched uranium, uranium-235, but also uranium-238, depleted uranium. So instead of getting less than 1% of the energy out of uranium, these fast reactors get about 99.8% of the energy out of it which means they’re incredibly more efficient in terms of using the uranium resource. And actually we’ve mined enough uranium already to run the whole world in these reactors for about 500 years.

Robyn Williams: So the old argument about running out of uranium isn’t on any more?

Barry Brook: We may run out in 50,000 or so years if we powered the whole world by uranium, but then we’ve got about four times as much thorium to use as well. So the argument that we’ll run out of uranium is a dead duck.

Robyn Williams: And what about using the old waste stuff that we’ve got stored away?

Barry Brook: That’s the really exciting prospect, that these fourth generation reactors, because they can burn all sorts of transuranics, so not just uranium but plutonium and americium and curium, and they can burn the fertile isotopes as well as the fissile isotopes, so they can burn uranium-238. It means that what is generally considered spent fuel, which is about 1% plutonium, about 98% uranium and a bunch of transuranics, all of that can be burnt in these reactors. So something that would have to be stored for around 100,000 years because of their long half-lives (plutonium is 24,500 years, for instance, it can take quite a while to decay) these can all be consumed in these reactors, generate electricity and then the fission products, the result of smashing these large atoms into smaller ones, highly radioactive which is a good thing actually because it means that their half-lives are very short and within less than 300 years they’re below the radioactive level of the original uranium ore. So all of the fuel that’s currently being produced by the current generation of light water reactors will go into fast reactors and be totally consumed. So there is no long-lived radioactive waste problem.

Robyn Williams: But 300 years is more than my lifetime and it’s still going to be around. Doesn’t that worry you a bit?

Barry Brook: It produces about a tenth the waste of the current generation reactors, so it’s a very small amount of waste. It comes in a vitrified form which is a type of rocky glass that locks up these fission products for about 1,000 years.

Robyn Williams: Like synroc?

Barry Brook: Very similar to synroc. And of course 1,000 years if you’ve got to wait 100,000 years isn’t sufficient, but if you’ve only got to wait 300 years then that’s fine. So we’ve built places like Yucca Mountain. We’ll need geological storage areas for this waste, but managing it for 300 years is clearly not a problem. We’ve managed many structures built by humans for 300 years, and it will be about a tenth of the waste, and frankly it’s also the only possible solution for getting rid of that long-lived waste. And so I think for all of the huge benefits that using this sort of power source brings, the small cost of storing about a tenth the amount of waste that comes out of current reactors is a tiny price to pay.

Robyn Williams: How much do they cost and how long does it take to put them up?

Barry Brook: That’s a question that can only really be answered by building a commercial scale demonstration. The Russians are building a reactor called the BN-800 right now, which is a sodium cooled fast reactor, it’s one of these generation four reactors, currently under construction. The Chinese are looking at building one too. The Indians are building a fast breeder reactor. So we’ll know within the next couple of years about how much they cost and about how quickly they can be built.

General Electric Hitachi, one of the major world producers of nuclear power stations, has got a model blueprint called the S-PRISM which is one of these integral fast reactors that they say can be built for about $1,500 per kilowatt installed, which is extremely competitive. And the design of these plants is such that they’re very modular. Each reactor is about 300 megawatts, and so you might have them in double loops and about four of these reactor loops within a plant, so a total plant of about 2.5 gigawatts, which is considerably larger than any coal-fired power station. The economics of doing it that way means that most of it can be built in a factory and then brought on to site, and so that reduces costs. You can actually build them on sites where coal-fired power stations currently are. Even in some cases there’s the prospect of ripping out the coal burner and whacking in one of these fast reactors. And frankly if we’re going to replace the 500-plus gigawatts that are being built in China right now and that have been built in the last ten years, all of that coal that we’ve got to shut down, I see this as being by far the best most economic prospect of convincing China to do that.

Robyn Williams: Barry Brook, who is the Sir Hubert Wilkins Professor of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide, Wilkins a legendary explorer. The fourth generation of nuclear power, perhaps that why Peter Garrett gave the nod to another Australian uranium mine this week.

We need a real global plan for carbon mitigation

I’m in Japan this week, attending the 1st Asian Heads of Research Council Joint Symposium in Nagoya, with a follow-up workshop for training junior researchers later in the week. This is my fifth trip to Japan, but it’s always an exciting place to visit — and I have a special connection to this country, as my wife is Japanese. Today, after an intensive morning session at which I gave a keynote talk on my work on integrating bioclimate and population models to improve forecasts of species extinction under climate change, we visited the Ramsar-listed Fujimae Tidal Flats and the stunning Kaisho forest.

Reflecting on the energy situation in Japan and its chances for complete decarbonisation, this is a country with few natural advantages — almost no domestic fossil fuel reserves or uranium supplies (fast breeders anyone?), poor conditions for solar thermal (today was 32C and cloudy — such is the rainy season), and few suitable locations for onshore wind (offshore may be more viable for any serious expansion). Its hydro resource is mostly tapped. The Greenpeace [r]evolution scenario for Japan, for what it’s worth, demands huge gains in energy efficiency and conservation, and yet is still left with a disturbingly large dependence on fossil fuels (one wonders why they eliminated Japan’s nuclear power…).

Anyway, to the main point of this post — to reproduce the third in a series by Steve Kirsch on IFRs as a solution to the global energy crisis. Like the previous two articles, Steve published this originally on the Huffington Post. I’m mirroring it here because its material is obviously highly relevant to the ongoing BNC discussion on the prospects for IFR nuclear power — and Steve (now a good friend of mine via regular electronic  conversations!) has a real knack of asking the right questions about climate change mitigation. He, like me, is seeking a real solution, that will WORK, globally. Take it away Steve:

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How Does Obama Expect to Solve the Climate Crisis Without a Plan?

The climate crisis is the most important issue of all time. But the White House has no plan to solve it. How do we save the planet without a viable plan?

The ship is sinking slowly and we are quickly running out of time to develop and implement any such plan if we are to have any hope of saving the planet. What we need is a plan we can all believe in. A plan where our country’s smartest people all nod their heads in agreement and say, “Yes, this is a solid, viable plan for keeping CO2 levels from touching 425ppm and averting a global climate catastrophe.”

At his Senate testimony a few days ago, noted climate scientist James Hansen made it crystal clear once again that the only way to avert an irreversible climate meltdown and save the planet is to phase out virtually all coal plants worldwide over a 20 year period from 2010 to 2030. Indeed, if we don’t virtually eliminate the use of coal worldwide, everything else we do will be as effective as re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Plans that won’t work

Unfortunately, nobody has proposed a realistic and practical plan to eliminate coal use worldwide or anywhere close to that. There is no White House URL with such a plan. No environmental group has a workable plan either.

Hoping that everyone will abandon their coal plants and replace them with a renewable power mix isn’t a viable strategy — we’ve proven that in the U.S. Heck, even if the Waxman-Markey bill passes Congress (a big “if”), it is so weak that it won’t do much at all to eliminate coal plants. So even though we have Democrats controlling all three branches of government, it is almost impossible to get even a weak climate bill passed.

If we can’t pass strong climate legislation in the U.S. with all the stars aligned, how can we expect anyone else to do it? So expecting all countries to pass a 100% renewable portfolio standard (which is far far beyond that contemplated in the current energy bill) just isn’t possible. Secondly, even if you could mandate it politically in every country, from a practical standpoint, you’d never be able to implement it in time. And there are lots of experts in this country, including Secretary Chu, who say it’s impossible without nuclear (a point which I am strongly in agreement with).

Hoping that everyone will spontaneously adopt carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is also a non-starter solution. First of all, CCS doesn’t exist at commercial scale. Secondly, even if we could make it work at scale, and even it could be magically retrofitted on every coal plant (which we don’t know how to do), it would require all countries to agree to add about 30% in extra cost for no perceivable benefit. At the recent G8 conference, India and China have made it clear yet again that they aren’t going to agree to emission goals.

Saying that we’ll invent some magical new technology that will rescue us at the last minute is a bad solution. That’s at best a poor contingency plan.

The point is this: It should be apparent to us that we aren’t going to be able to solve the climate crisis by either “force” (economic coercion or legislation) or by international agreement. And relying on technologies like CCS that may never work is a really bad idea.

The only remaining way to solve the crisis is to make it economically irresistible for countries to “do the right thing.” The best way to do that is to give the world a way to generate electric power that is economically more attractive than coal with the same benefits as coal (compact power plants, 24×7 generation, can be sited almost anywhere, etc). Even better is if the new technology can simply replace the existing burner in a coal plant. That way, they’ll want to switch. No coercion is required.

Since Obama doesn’t have a plan and I’m not aware of a viable plan that experts agree can move the entire world off of coal, I thought I’d propose one that is viable. You may not like it, but if there is a better alternative that is practical and viable, please let me know because none of the experts I’ve consulted with are aware of one.

The Kirsch plan for saving the planet

The Kirsch plan for saving the planet is very simple and practical. My plan is based on a simple observation:

Nuclear is the elephant in the room

70% of the carbon free power in America is still generated by nuclear, even though we haven’t built a new nuclear plant in this country in the last 30 years. Hydro is a distant second. Wind and solar are rounding error. Worldwide, it’s even more skewed: nuclear is more than 100 times bigger than solar and more than 100 times bigger than wind. If I drew a bar chart of nuclear vs. solar vs. wind use worldwide, you wouldn’t even see solar and wind on the chart.

So our best bet is to join the parade and get behind supporting the big elephant. We put all the wood behind one arrow: nuclear. We invest in and promote these new, low-cost modular nuclear designs worldwide and get the volumes up so we can drive the price down. These plants are low-cost, can be built in small capacities, can be manufactured quickly, and assembled on-site in a few years.

Nuclear can be rolled out very quickly. About two thirds of the currently operating 440 reactors around the world came online during a 10 year period between 1980 and 1990. In southeast Asia, reactors are typically constructed in 4 years or less (about 44 months)

Secondly, the nuclear reactor can replace the burner in a coal plant making upgrading an existing coal plant very cost effective. Finally, it is also critically important for big entities (such as the U.S. government in partnership with other governments) to offer low-cost financing to bring down the upfront cash investment in a new nuclear reactor to be less than that required to build a coal plant.

Under my plan, we now have a way to economically displace the building of new coal plants that nobody can refuse. People will then want to build modular nuclear plants because since they are cheaper, last longer, and are cleaner than coal. No legislation or mandate is required.

My plan is credible since it doesn’t require Congress to act. Power companies worldwide simply make an economic decision to do the right thing. No force required.

My plan would provide huge economic benefits to the United States. We’d create jobs, improve our trade deficit, and get a nice on-going monthly cash flow from the plants we finance. So whether you believe in global warming or not, this plan works.

The only political impediment to overcome is to convince those countries that have a ban on nuclear to reconsider. However, this is not strictly required since the few countries that have such a ban have relatively small coal emissions compared to the countries that have no such ban.

Nuclear waste and proliferation issues are quite manageable. These issues are covered in my Huffington Post article “Climate Bill Ignores Our Biggest Clean Energy Source.”

Do we really think we solve our biggest crisis without a plan? That would be insane. If the White House doesn’t like my plan then they should propose a more viable plan, communicate it to the world, and start implementing it now, while there is still time.

Why is the US ignoring the Integral Fast Reactor?

Cartoon by Nicholson from “The Australian” newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

Here is something written by Steve Kirsch, and published recently on the Huffington Post. It is obviously highly relevant to our discussions on IFR and ETS bills in Australia, so I thought BNC readers would find it of interest. I’ll ask Steve if he wants to join in the commentary herein…

Waxman-Markey: Three Tough, Unanswered Questions

Steve Kirsch

On June 10, 1Sky sponsored a conference call with Waxman, Markey, and their staff to talk about the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) a.k.a. the Waxman-Markey bill. I had three really tough questions that weren’t addressed in the call, so I e-mailed the House staffers who spoke on the call.

I received a response which I’ve included below, but the response didn’t directly answer my questions.

So I thought it would be fun to speculate at how they might have responded if they were required to answer each question directly, without being “politically correct.”

Question #1: Jim Hansen did an analysis of the bill. He told me on June 7 that he will write something soon showing that Waxman-Markey “locks in terrible results for two decades.”

Now we all know that Hansen is a really smart guy that we wished we had listened to back in 1988 when he first testified about global warming. His prognostications have all materialized.

Since we are so late in addressing climate change, and we really cannot afford to make any mistakes this time around (our last chance), how can you be so certain that Hansen is wrong in his assessment of Waxman-Markey? Do you have an expert who is as smart as Hansen (and as right in his prognostications) who has convinced you that Hansen is wrong?

Answer #1: No, we haven’t seen Hansen’s analysis.

Question #2: Both Secretary Chu and the President of MIT point out that nuclear has to be a key part of the energy mix going forward. We can’t supply all our clean energy needs relying on just renewables.

Yet this bill has over 932 pages, and the word “nuclear” only appears twice.

That seems pretty odd considering that 70% of our CO2-free power is from nuclear. Even more odd considering we haven’t built a new nuclear plant in 30 years and it’s still 70% of our clean power!

I’m sure you all know that the energy content contained in light water reactor (LWR) spent fuel and depleted uranium exceeds all the known oil reserves in the world. It’s an energy resource that is 10 times bigger than the energy of the coal we have in the ground. And that’s just the stuff we have on hand! That’s not even counting the stuff we haven’t mined. Using fast reactors, we can run the entire planet for over 700 years on just the uranium “waste” we have on hand and for millions of years if we are willing to use the uranium that hasn’t yet been mined.

So we have this huge energy resource just lying there and we invented the fast reactor technology (known as the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR)) at Argonne National Laboratory 25 years ago to use it 100 times more efficiently than in an LWR with minimal waste, lower cost, and better safety than existing nuclear plants. It also solves our nuclear waste problem since it uses the existing nuclear waste for fuel. But we aren’t talking about it at all in this bill on clean energy security. It’s not even a footnote in the bill.

Secretary Chu is talking about fast reactors as a critical piece to moving forward, yet nobody in Congress in the last 15 years has brought it up and it sure isn’t anywhere in this bill. Isn’t this a bit short sighted to not even mention this in the bill? The current DOE funding for this is ridiculously inadequate.

I spoke to the former top guy in charge of civilian nuclear for DOE (Ray Hunter) and he thinks this is a travesty. He was so disgusted he sent a letter to Senator Reid and a few other Senators explaining all of this, but they all ignored his letter (Senator Mikulski’s office sent him a “thank you for writing us” response). That’s a bit odd considering this is our biggest energy resource and this guy was the top civilian nuclear guy at DOE.

Unfortunately, this bill is no different. Jim Hansen has been building a fast reactor as one of his top 5 priorities for Obama to fix global warming. I heard that Congressman McNerney was briefed on fast reactors and tried to have a hearing on it. Nothing happened and this bill has nothing on it at all.

Is there any chance we can fix that? Or at least acknowledge the reason for this stunning omission?

Answer #2: No. Congressman Markey hates nuclear and he always has. He isn’t going to let little things like “facts” and “science” change his beliefs. Even if nuclear supplied 99% of our clean energy, it still wouldn’t be called out in the bill. However, the bill doesn’t penalize utilities for constructing nuclear plants.

Question #3: One of the reasons we are in this crisis is due to our government’s lack of a long term vision and a viable strategy with respect to global warming. This seems to me not to have changed. Am I wrong?

On the call, Markey correctly pointed out that in order to control climate change, we not only have to reduce our emissions at home, but we also have to get other countries to dramatically reduce their emissions. Coal is the big problem. If we can’t virtually eliminate coal use worldwide, we are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Is there a strategy for how we are going to move other countries off of coal? Markey talked about developing and then exporting carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), but such a strategy would rely on exporting a technology that doesn’t exist (at scale), that may never exist, that nobody really wants, that would raise the price of electricity to be unaffordably high, and which can only be retrofitted onto coal plants originally designed to capture CO2 of which there are none.

That’s a lot of assumptions. Is that our official core strategy to save the planet??!?!?!

Wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in commercializing the IFR fast reactor technology that we invented 25 years ago, spend lots of money to modularize and mass produce the pieces, have the US finance construction of the plants in foreign countries, and make in-country joint partnerships with the local government to build and operate the plants? Such a plan could displace existing coal plants because it would provide power at a cheaper cost. It would be the equivalent of Walmart moving into town and displacing higher priced competitors. And of course, it will also eliminate the construction of new coal plants.

The benefits to the US would be huge: a nice recurring profitable revenue stream helping our trade deficit and creation of a huge number of high paying jobs to build these plants and the parts for them and to operate them. So we make tons of money and create lots of jobs. And the benefits to the world are huge in terms of CO2 reduction. We’d also virtually eliminate the nuclear waste worldwide. And the host country gets cheaper power. Everyone wins.

Isn’t the latter a fundamentally better strategy than Markey’s “pray for CCS” strategy?

Or is there a better strategy for getting other countries to eliminate CO2 from all power generation?

Answer #3: Sure, a strategy that relies on pure economics for getting people to abandon coal is better than a strategy of relying on an uneconomic and unproven technology and the threat of economic sanctions for non-compliance. Carrots are always better than sticks. Look at our own country for example. We are having a heck of a time getting enough votes for this bill and it we’ve already watered down the renewable portfolio standards so much that they basically don’t require much change from the status quo at all. So sure, that’s a better strategy, but that’s not the strategy we are pursuing.

Look, it’s not about economics or what is in the public’s best interest for saving the planet. If you are trying to get enough votes to pass a bill in Congress, the political realities are this: We want to do the right thing for the planet and for the public. But If we don’t have a strategy that makes the coal, oil, and gas companies happy, they’ll spend lots of money on misleading ads to try to ensure that we don’t get re-elected. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Members who are afraid of that.

The official response

Here is the response to the three questions that I did receive from one of the House staff members:

Thanks for your emails. We wanted to provide some information on how the Waxman-Markey bill (ACES) provides opportunities for new nuclear power:

● Because nuclear power generates far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels, utilities will need to hold far fewer emission allowances for the nuclear plants to comply with the carbon limitations in ACES. According to EPA modeling, twice as many new nuclear plants would be built by 2025 under ACES than without the legislation.

● Under the federal Renewable Electricity Standard, electricity generated from new nuclear units is not added to a utility’s baseline electricity level. As a result, the addition of a nuclear plant would not require a utility to obtain additional renewable electricity. This ensures that the RES provides no disincentive to the construction of new nuclear units.

● ACES establishes a self-sustaining Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) within the Department of Energy to promote the domestic development and deployment of clean energy technologies. CEDA would be empowered to provide direct loans, loan guarantees, and letters of credit to support clean energy technologies that might otherwise be unable to secure financing, including nuclear power.

● ACES includes reforms to the existing Department of Energy loan guarantee program. The Department has received applications for federal loan guarantees from 21 proposed nuclear power plants, totaling $122 billion in requested assistance.

Chairman Waxman is committed to developing the strongest legislation that can pass Congress. Our staff is all working very hard to get the bill ready for the House floor next week, but if you’d like to talk about this issue or others, please let us know and we’ll be glad to talk to you during the next recess.

Carbon tax or cap-and-trade? The debate we never had

Guest Post by Tim Kelly. Tim is works as a Principal Climate Change Advisor in the Water Industry.

The Federal Government has now released its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme White Paper and as expected the mechanism it has chosen is that of a pollution permit and trade system (cap and trade).  The cap and trade approach has been widely accepted by many businesses, green groups and Australia’s major political parties including the Australian Greens, and yet I am continuously witnessing surprise by individuals and groups when they learn more about the impact of such an approach on eliminating the economy wide benefits of voluntary behaviour.

At the outset, when State and Federal Governments were considering which approach would best deliver National emissions reductions, they should have explained the basic advantages and disadvantages of the two likely contenders, being a carbon emissions tax (carbon tax) or the cap and trade approach, in an open and transparent manner.  At the end of this post I provide a ‘pros and cons’ table comparing these two alternatives. In particular, I note that in the disadvantages column of a cap and trade scheme, stakeholders should have been advised of the following critical points:

1. A cap and trade scheme, by its nature, extinguishes the impact of voluntary efforts from reducing aggregated economy wide emissions as any greenhouse reduction or avoided emission by an individual or entity, because it merely results in freeing up permits to pollute in another part of the economy (i.e., it makes no difference whether I ride my bicycle to work or buy the biggest worst performing V8 petrol vehicle — national emissions will be the same!).

2. A cap and trade system, by its nature, does not drive innovation in voluntary markets, and greatly reduces diversity in voluntary markets.

3. A cap and trade scheme that uses the voluntary surrender of permits as a greenhouse reduction mechanism, ties the cost of voluntary abatement with the cost of pollution, thereby diminishing prospects of continued voluntary action.

This is not to suggest that the cap and trade approach might not drive actions to reduce emissions by permit holders.  But it leaves out vast numbers of individuals and small to medium businesses in the economy from being able to contribute to reduce national emissions in a meaningful way.  A cap and trade approach largely alienates non-permit holding businesses and individuals from taking a meaningful role in reducing the nation’s emissions.  So there is a question as to whether there is any value in the Department of Climate Change slogan “Think climate. Think change. We can’t afford not to”.

Anyway, below is a comparison of the two main approaches focussing on the mechanisms, their effectiveness and flexibility to reduce emissions for a given target.  Naturally, this appears superficial in the table, so if you don’t agree, please consider my full discussion and reasoning (PDF document) which led to my conclusions.

[Barry Brook: This post from Tim is particularly timely, because the Federal Government has just announced an inquiry into the merits of their cap-and-trape model. For instance, a Canberra Times article says:

"The Federal Government's plan to reduce Australia's carbon emissions will be re-examined after Treasurer Wayne Swan referred the emissions trading scheme to the House economics committee. It will examine whether carbon trading is the best way to reduce emissions, while maintaining low economic costs, putting in place long-term incentives for clean energy and contributing to a solution for climate change".

So we may yet have a chance to fix this deeply flawed approach before its gets locked into legislation].

Aspect	Cap and trade	Carbon tax	Winner
Cost on business and community	For a given price on emissions the cost on carbon is has no influence for change in the broader economy (beyond businesses covered by the scheme), other than to become more efficient.	The cost on emissions has a wider impact than just the covered emitters as the tax drives the broader community and smaller businesses to seek alternative low emission electricity, products and services that can reduce National emissions	Tax
Economy wide and community wide involvement	Destroys the ability for an individual or business entity from reducing economy wide impacts.	Drives action directly through emitters and in secondary voluntary markets as people use their choices to avoid the cost and contribute to national emissions reduction	Tax
Simplicity and bureaucracy cost	Terrible, complex documents, complex schemes, complex shifting of funds and compensation for little value, legal risks	MinimalCan be managed to charge only what is required to cause change, letting the market decide where the change would occur without the merry go round.	Tax
Encouraging innovation in the market	Rules out many offset products and as proposed, destroys the integrity of voluntary purchases of renewable energy	Drives innovation and a full suite of low emissions solutions and renewable energy solutions that can be led by market choice for genuine renewable energy	Tax
Need for non tangible offset frameworks.	Creates perverse outcomes and the need for intangible concepts such as using permits as carbon offsets which do not directly link to low emissions solutions and may not indirectly drive low emission solutions and may not even cause economy wide reductions.	No need for weird reverse logic intangible offset concepts using permits to pollute as tangible market offset products and renewable energy choices would work to lower economy wide emissions.	Tax
Price certainty	Requires massive free permit allocations to indirectly manage the permit price. Falls back on a carbon tax to ensure the price stays below $40 even with many emitters paying nothing like this when grandfathered permits are factored in	Easily assigned and controlled by Government.Easily adjusted with new science and negotiations at regular intervals at markets transition.	Tax
Need for full information	Requires complex assessment of current emissions and forecasting of future emissions in five year blocks to seek to minimise over-allocation that would constrain progress or under-allocation that would cause mechanism failure and the need for review and intervention	Not required as the price becomes a constant driver in the economy throughout economic cycles	Tax
Certainty in achieving the greenhouse reduction objective	Unclear as to whether the CPRS could achieve certainty due to its compromises, measurement methodologies and the ability for Government to issue unlimited permits in a given year	Reduces emissions without direct control and necessarily requires reviews as the economy transitions to lower emissions and updates with science and negotiation.	Neither approach provides absolute certainty
Creating a difference between pollution costs and abatement for customers to decide on what products and services they would buy.	Buying and surrendering CPRS permits to reduce emissions causes Siamese twinning, locking the cost of abatement with the cost of pollution. (ultimately all other offsets form national and international sources would cease where all nations adopt cap and trade)	Increases the cost of polluting technologies and provides a relative benefit for other technologies to compete more fairly, letting the market decide what type of electricity, offsets and efficiencies they buy, knowing that these will reduce National emissions	Tax
International linking	Reduces options for trading offsets and low emission products	Increases opportunities to trade in offsets and low emission products	Tax

Integral Fast Reactors for the masses

There was both interest and confusion over at the ABC Unleashed site when I wrote my first piece there on nuclear power. Going by the comments, most folks who were traditionally anti-nuclear continued to harbour their old beliefs and misconceptions about the technologies involved, even after reading my short piece. I did briefly (in one paragraph) explain the advantages of advanced nuclear power (Gen IV, the exemplar being the Integral Fast Reactor) — that is, it eliminates or at least minimises the major concerns held against Gen II (Gen III also solves some, but not waste/supply) and carries a bunch of advantages (like a huge amount of concentrated, zero-carbon energy). But that first Op Ed was always meant primarily to get people thinking more broadly about energy solutions — pointing out that mitigating climate change is the crucial end game: if you don’t get this right, everything else is ceases to matter.

Anyway, in order to take the basic idea of IFR to the masses, I wrote a second piece which is focused specifically on this tech (and a little more on Gen III+, which are also attractive as a transition/stop-gap). I’ve reproduced the essay at the end of this post. For regular readers, there is probably nothing new there. On the other hand, it contains almost too much detail for those unfamiliar with the concepts (at least that is what GR says!).

For another popular audience take on it, Steve Kirsch has written a nice piece for a The Mercury News, a Silicon Valley newspaper. It’s called “How a 24-year-old technology can save the planet“. It’s also well worth a read.

Finally, Jim Green from Friends of the Earth, has posted a critique of IFR. Check it out, and see what you think after reading the details of the IFR technology here  and elsewhere (follow those links). As a head’s up, I plan to post a rejoinder to Jim’s critique,  once I clear a few other things off the desk.

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Why old nuclear power is not new

Previously in this forum I have expressed the view that nuclear power will likely play a key role in the world’s future energy mix. My bottom line was this: the climate and energy crises need fixing with extreme urgency, and both require solutions which completely solve their underlying causes. Half measures at best merely help to delay the same eventual result as business-as-usual (and at worst encourage complacency) — saddling future generations with a climatically hostile planet with a scarcity of available energy.

The comments in response to my openness about the nuclear option were not unexpected. In short, five principle objections were mounted against the viability or desirability of nuclear power.

First, uranium supplies are small, such that if the world was wholly powered by nuclear reactors, there would be at most a few decades of energy to use before our resource was exhausted and the power plants would have to shut down. Second, nuclear accidents have happened in the past, and therefore this power-generation technology is inherently dangerous. Third, expansion of nuclear power would axiomatically risk the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Fourth, in taking the short-term nuclear energy option, we would be bequeathing future generations with the legacy of long-lived nuclear waste requiring thousands of years of management. Fifth, large amounts of energy (and possibly greenhouse gases) would be required to mine, mill and enrich uranium, and to construct and later decommission the nuclear power stations themselves.

Cost and embedded energy arguments used against nuclear must be left for another day, because to be addressed fairly, this also requires a critical examination of the costs and embedded energy requirements for the alternative sources (renewables and fossil fuels).

Now all five of the above points have some merit, although their relative importance compared to threat of climate change and the societal disruption caused by critical energy shortages is debatable. The chaos and bitter complaints which stemmed from the power shortages experienced during the current heatwave in southern Australia demonstrate how dependent we are on a secure, reliable energy supply. But to be honest, there is little point in even having a debate on how persuasive these five objections are, because none will be applicable to future nuclear energy generation.

Of the more than 440 commercial nuclear power stations operating worldwide today and supplying 16 per cent of the world’s electricity, almost all are thermal spectrum reactors. These use ordinary water to both slow the neutrons which cause uranium atoms to split (fission) and to carry the heat generated in this controlled chain reaction to a steam turbine to generate electricity. Because of the gradual build-up of fission products (nuclear poisons) in fuel rods over time, we end up getting about 1 per cent of the useable energy out of the uranium, and throw the rest out as that problematic long-lived waste.

Modern reactors are incredibly safe, with physics-based ‘passive’ safety systems requiring no user-operated or mechanical control to shut down the reaction. Indeed, a certification assessment for the ‘Generation III+’ Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) put the risk of a core meltdown as severe as the one which occurred at Three Mile Island (TMI) in 1979 at once every 29 million years. For reference, the TMI incident resulted in no deaths. Similarly, comparing the inherently unsafe Chernobyl reactor design to an ESBWR is a bit like comparing an army revolver to a water gun.

Fast spectrum reactors, also known as ‘Generation IV’, are able to use 99.5 per cent of the energy in uranium. There is enough energy in already-mined uranium and stored plutonium from existing stockpiles to supply all the world’s power needs for over a century before we even need to mine any more uranium. Once we do start mining again, there is enough energy in proven uranium deposits to supply the entire world for at least 50,000 years. Fast reactors can be used to burn all existing reserves of plutonium and the waste stream of the past and present generation of thermal reactors.

The safety features of Gen IV designs, due for instance to the metal alloy fuel used, is superior even to the ESBWR. The nuclear fuel used by fast reactors is fiendishly radioactive and contaminated with various heavy elements (which are all eventually burned up in the power generation process!), making it impossible to divert to a nuclear weapons programme without an expensive, heavily shielded off-site reprocessing facility which would be easily detected by inspectors.

Yet in reality the only nuclear waste material that will ever leave an Integrated Fast Reactor complex (a systems design for power stations which includes on-site reprocessing) are fission products, which decay to background levels of radiation with a few hundred years (not hundreds of millennia), and can be readily stored because they produce so little heat compared to ‘conventional’ nuclear waste.

For further details, I refer you to my review of the book Prescription for the Planet, which discusses the Integral Fast Reactor technology in-depth, as well as ways to transform our vehicle fleet to use zero-emissions metal-powered burners and how to convert our municipal solid waste to plasma.

Business-as-usual projections suggest that at current pace, we may have Gen IV fast spectrum reactors delivering commercial power by 2025 to 2030. Too late, you say! True enough, but these same sort of forward projections resulted in the International Energy Agency recently predicting that non-hydro renewables will go from meeting 1per cent, to 2 per cent, of global energy use. Either option therefore requires radically accelerated research, development and deployment, if it is to make a difference to climate change and energy supply. A project of Manhattan-style proportions (America’s development of the atom bomb, three years after the first controlled chain reaction) or the audacity of the moon-shot vision (12 years from Sputnik to Neil Armstrong’s famous small step), is required.

There is no doubt in my mind that we have the means to ‘fix’ the climate and energy crises, or at least avert the worst consequences, if we have full recognition of the scale and immediacy of the challenges now faced. New generation nuclear power is one possible path to success, and one that all nations should actively support – though certainly not to the exclusion of other zero-carbon energy options such as renewables and efficiencies. So let’s be sure, when rationally considering energy planning, that we are not mired in old-school thinking about exciting new technologies.

Time to stop pretending on emissions reduction

So the final model of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme — Australia cap-and-trade system — has been released. It’s byline is ‘Australia’s ever-so-slightly-maybe Lower Pollution Future‘. Sorry, now I’m just being cynical.

There’s been plenty written about it over the subsequent 24 hours, including some comments from me here, here, here and here. I also hammered some points out in a few radio slots yesterday, but I’m not sure if the message is really getting through. A bunch of short but incisive comments from other scientists and economists is also available at the Australian Science Media Centre. They’re worth reading for (i) the diversity of issues raised and (ii) for the near unanimity of criticism of the targets and general model set forth.

The final scheme clearly rewards big polluters by handing them a swag of free permits, right up to 2020. The poor hard-done-by coal-fired power generators get the majority of these; $4 billion in the first 5 years alone — naturally (I’ll let you go figure that one out). It rightly provides significant compensation to low and middle income households, but sadly directs ~3% of the income generated into research and development on low-carbon energy technologies and energy efficiency. It sets a reduction target of 5% of 2000 levels by 2020, unless ‘all the major emitters come on board’, in which case the government says they’ll increase the cuts to 15%. In other words, Australia is only willing to move with the pack (actually, somewhere in the middle of the pack – you know, for extra safety). Global leaders? Forget it.

But in my opinion, the biggest problem is the sheer dishonesty about the science. If targets greater than 5% are impossible to implement on political grounds, then that’s the current reality. The government should be honest about this, and say:

‘This is as large a cut as we feel the community will accept, even though the science of climate change clearly show that we require much more. Accepting this current reality, our job, as government, is to now better inform you, the general public, of the seriousness of this issue, the short time frames for action, and the need for deeper cuts“.

But no. Instead we get artful political spin and greenwash, with the claim that Australia is doing something meaningful to avoid dangerous climate change and that the targets will miraculously allow us to go no higher than 450 ppm CO2. As the calculations in the Garnaut Review pointed out, this is simply false. It’s a shame the government has chosen to ignore a large swathe of the recommendations of that review, modest as they were.

I’ve opined on this further in a little piece I wrote for the Adelaide Advertiser. I’m not sure it if will end up appearing in the paper or not, but at least BNC readers can get to look at it.

With the Poznan climate conference now over, the Australian Government has announced its aim to cut greenhouse gas emission by up to 14% compared to 1990 levels by the year 2020 and 60% by 2050.

This is the centrepiece of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which is another name for a cap-and-trade system for limiting Australia’s future carbon emissions, from 2010 onwards.

In many respects 14% seems sensible. After all, it represents a 41% reduction on a per person basis. It’s in line with goals set by other developed nations such as the UK, US and European Union.

Such a target seems to walk the political middle ground.

Not too steep a cut as to anger industry who are concerned about the economic risks of action. But enough to show Australia’s doing our part in reducing the impact of climate change. Enough to avoid 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, by limiting carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million (ppm).

That, at least, is the simple political message that is being sold. Trouble is, it’s simply not true.

First, it misrepresents what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. This work shows that to have a decent chance of avoiding warming 2 to 2.4C, the world must cut emissions by up to 80% by 2050. That’s a 98% cut for Australia, per person.

Second, it pretends that more recent relevant science doesn’t exist.

Work published in 2007 and 2008–after the IPCC closed its review books–shows that global carbon emissions growth is greater than had been previously anticipated. To add despair to this despondency,  recent observations also indicate that the climate system is more sensitive to additional greenhouse gases than we’d suspected.

This means 450 ppm is could commit us to 4C or more of warming. A dangerous prospect indeed, which risks appallingly severe impacts which were described in the Garnaut review earlier this year, on the economic and environmental costs of action (or inaction) on climate change.

Now even getting to a 41% per capita emissions reduction by 2020 will be tough. Really tough.

It will require strong policy intervention to increase the adoption of energy efficiency and conservation and build-out renewable energy such as wind, solar, wave and geothermal on a massive scale. No new coal fired power stations that do not capture the carbon dioxide. And so on.

Given this requirement for transformational change to even match middle-of-the road targets, why not commit to going ‘all the way’?  Actually fully solve the crisis before it happens, rather than merely half-fixing it, with adjustment pain anyway, and yet only delay the inevitable crunch.

But such full commitment would mean decision makers have to stop pretending that their emissions reduction targets match the latest scientific evidence. Right now, they don’t. So if nothing else, let’s at least be honest with the Australian public about that.

Climate ripe for transformative change

Opinion Editorial published in the Herald Sun, Wed 1 October 2008. Note that the Herald Sun version was trimmed in editing. The full version, hyperlinked, with a few key statements about energy costs included, is reprinted below.

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The Garnaut Climate Change Review is now complete. Its brief was to “examine the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy, and recommend medium to long-term policies and policy frameworks to improve the prospects for sustainable prosperity.”

To me, the concept of sustainable prosperity is the key to turning climate change mitigation into a win-win scenario. I’ll explain why in a moment. But first, some background.

Ross Garnaut, the economics professor from the Australian National University who had oversight of the review, was criticised by many climate scientists for proposing weak carbon emissions reduction targets. After all, the mainstream science says we are close to, or have already overshot, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide that causes dangerous climate change.

Yet Garnaut’s initial proposal would have us increasing carbon dioxide by another 44%. This is a compromise goal, but one he considers feasible. After all, the difficulty in reaching international agreements on how each nation might wind back their carbon output is immense.

This mismatch between the policy and the science poses a significant problem. With it, we cannot hope to avoid most of the really serious economic and environmental impacts of global warming.

Garnaut calls it the ‘diabolical problem’.

But what if we are looking at the problem from the wrong way around? What if the diabolical problem is really just the ultimate gold-plated opportunity for the next economic revolution?

A reliable and continually growing supply of cheap, easily generated energy was the driving force behind the industrial revolution and modern communications age. This, in turn, has brought us high standards of living, amazing technological breakthroughs, and sustained economic growth.

The catch is that this cheap, reliable energy has come from fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Huge stores of carbon, buried safely for millions of years, are now being released back into the air by us at an astounding rate. Hit the climate system with a shock like this, and it hits back. Hard.

Experts also admit to another, little discussed problem. Our energy infrastructure needs a major overhaul, to replace ageing equipment and increase its capacity to supply more energy to an expanding economy. The International Energy Agency’s price tag is $US 22 trillion by 2030.

Then there is the peaking of fossil fuel supplies.

We are close to the point where we’ve reached maximum global oil production. Black gold, Texas tea – it’s getting harder and harder to squeeze out of the rocks at an economically competitive price. And demand from China for oil is growing fast. Prices are rising as a result, and they’re not ever heading back to the inexpensive days of the 1980s and 1990s.

It’s not only oil. There’s plenty of coal left in the ground (at least in some locations), but much of it is difficult to mine (it’s deeply buried), or it’s too hard to get it quickly enough to the heaviest users due to supply bottlenecks. The price of thermal coal, as a result, has tripled in the last 12 months.

So, we need more energy to prosper. But traditional sources of energy, based on fossil fuels, are becoming scarcer and more expensive. Their extensive use also causes dangerous climate change.

Put this way, the decision to invest heavily – and rapidly – in renewable energies like geothermal (hot rocks), solar thermal (desert mirrors), wave and wind power, and rooftop photovoltaic systems, is a no brainer. These technologies offer the only way to achieve an ongoing, growing energy supply. What’s more, unlike carbon-based energy, they are getting cheaper, not more expensive.

The Garnaut Review recognises these core issues, but its focus remains too heavily directed towards emissions reductions targets. I’d argue that if we concentrate most of our effort on helping the market get the renewable energy solution right, then carbon emission will fall rapidly as result. It’s an emergent property of fixing the energy supply. It doesn’t need to be an explicit aim.

Oh, and we get a prosperous, sustainable economy to boot. Win-win.

Climate Change Review – Final Report

The long-awaited, much-anticipated Final Report of the Garnaut Climate Change Review has now been released. As per its website, the review was set up to: “…examine the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy, and recommend medium to long-term policies and policy frameworks to improve the prospects for sustainable prosperity.” It is an independent study by Professor Ross Garnaut, which was commissioned by Australia’s Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments.

A draft report was released in June, and engendered much discussion in the media, as well as a vocal response from scientists. Here is what I had to say on it at the time:

The Garnaut Draft Review is an extensive document and very much a work in progress. But the key fundamentals are already there. It rightly points out that the scientific evidence for climate change, on which hard economic decisions must ultimately hinge, is already flashing some extremely worrying warning signals: carbon emissions and the impacts of climate change are tracking at or above the top end of predictions made a decade ago, tipping elements such as the Arctic sea ice and polewards expansion of the tropical weather systems are being crossed decades ahead of schedule, and because of amplifying carbon-cycle feedbacks, were are now close to the time at which this ‘diabolical problem’ runs away from us, and which point neither mitigation nor adaptation will be sufficient for us to cope.

Our great natural assets – the Great Barrier Reef, the wetlands of Kakadu, the enormously productive agricultural basin of the Murray-Darling system – will be severely degraded or all but eliminated within the lifetimes of current generations. As Garnaut said, we should have moved on this issue years or decades earlier, when potential impacts were already reasonable well understood and yet greater uncertainty about the extent of the problem existed, compared to today.

By explicitly recognising these harsh realities, the Garnaut Report positions the economic and social arguments within the right frame of reference – one in which urgent action is required, and where forward-looking domestic action from the developed world, especially nations that are exquisitely sensitive to climate change impacts, must be the trigger for international multilateral agreements – which are ultimately the only way to solve the problem, and at the same time spawn the energy revolution of the new century – renewables, not fossil carbon.

Unlike the most up-to-date climate modelling, which has recently been detailed by the IPCC, the full economic modelling of impacts will await a supplementary draft report in August. However, some clear points have already been made in this report:

• Scenarios that project a business-as-usual pathway towards a 700% increase in the size of the Australian economy, and a greater per capita wealth of the average Indian compared to Australians by 2100, are pure fantasy – there are not only insufficient fossil fuels available to meet the needs of this model scenario, but the multitude of damaging impacts that would be caused by the resulting catastrophic climate changes mean that societal collapse, rather than unconstrained growth, would be the order of the century, for the world economy in general and for Australia specifically.
  
• Scenarios which explicitly attempt to build in the costs of climate change impacts show major disruptions to our economic, environmental and social well being, amounting to, conservatively, hundreds of billions of dollars of additional economic burden each and every year. And these stated costs are an absolute minimum: rather than try to put a dollar value on the lives of future generations, or the irreplaceable loss of millions of species and natural treasures, or on the staggering potential costs of crossing run-away tipping points such as the collapse of the polar ice sheets, these are quite deliberately left out the Garnaut Report economic modelling. After all there is a price that goes well beyond what humanity is willing to pay, or indeed able to pay, to impacts that are impossible to pay for, or to build into economically rationalist thinking.

The Garnaut Review team has also released a variety of working papers on targets and trajectories, low emissions energy technologies, emissions trading schemes, land use and forestry, managing financial risks, and the need to develop new emissions scenarios to better reflect development in the so-called ‘Platinum Age’. They are definitely worth reading.

The Final Report is a huge document – both in coverage and implications – and it will obviously take time to digest the details. I’d be very interested in considered feedback on it from Brave New Climate readers – from all perspectives. This is clearly a critically important thing to get right, because the government is yet to write its policy white paper, which will give final form to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Now has never been a better time to make your voice heard! This Open Thread is one place where you can have a chance to debate these matters.

Update: My reaction to the Final Report (for other scientist’s views, read here).

The Garnaut Climate Change Review is a landmark achievement. The depth of thought and research that Garnaut and his team have given to the impacts and implications of climate change is profound, and there are many powerful insights given into how a cooperative global agreement might be reached – and what it could look like. Those convening the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009 should be grateful – much of the necessary intellectual groundwork for this key meeting has been laid out in the Final Report.

The impacts of unmitigated climate change, as modelled in the review’s ‘Platinum Age’ scenarios, are certainly frightening, both in terms of the staggering economic and environmental damage that will result. And that’s without ‘non-market costs’ being factored in. The abiding message from the review is clear – we cannot afford to go to the dark and unpleasant future that business-as-usual threatens to take us – so let’s instead work out how we best manage an alternative, low-carbon future, as soon as is physically and socially possible.

The recommendation that Australia should reduce its per capita emissions by 95% by 2050 is certainly one the government ought to openly address – do they agree with this assessment (and if not, why not?), and how are they going to meet such a target? This brings the issue back to the absolutely key question of how we achieve transformative change. That is, we could reach such ‘ambitious’ emissions reductions targets easily, because we’ve developed an entirely new and renewable energy infrastructure which delivers huge benefits to Australia and allows us to export this knowledge and huge amounts of clean energy to a worldwide market. Or we could continue to look backwards, to a Victorian Era style of coal-based energy investment, which leaves us far behind these lofty ambitions, and takes the planet to climate purgatory for bad measure.

Seems a clear enough choice to me.

Footnote: Garnaut on ‘Dissenters’… (Final Report, Introduction, pg xvii):

Scientific opinion and dissent
There is no doubt about the position of most reputed specialists in climate science, in Australia and abroad, on the risks of climate change (Chapter 2). There is no doubt about the position of the leaders of the relevant science academies in all of the major countries. The outsider to climate science has no rational choice but to accept that, on a balance of probabilities, the mainstream science is right in pointing to high risks from unmitigated climate change.

There are nevertheless large uncertainties in the science. There is debate and recognition of limits to knowledge about the times and ways in which the risk will manifest itself. Every climate scientist has views on some issues that differ from the mainstream in detail.

There are prominent dissenters on this matter, gathered under the rubric of ‘sceptic’. For the most part ‘sceptic’ is a misnomer for their position, because these dissenters hold strongly to the belief that the mainstream science is wrong. In a different category are a small number of climate scientists of professional repute who maintain that the mainstream science embodies misjudgments about quantities. These scientists, who accept the theory of the warming effects of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, hold the view that these warming effects are relatively or even trivially small in comparison with many other causes of climate variations that are beyond the control of humans.

The dissent took a curious turn in Australia in 2008, with much prominence being given to assertions that the warming trend had ended over the last decade. This is a question that is amenable to statistical analysis, and we asked econometricians with expertise in analysis of time series to examine it. Their response—that the temperatures recorded in most of the last decade lie above the confidence level produced by any model that does not allow for a warming trend—is reported in Chapter 4 (Box 4.1).

Ongoing rise in global carbon emissions and the lazy audience

The Global Carbon Project just released their annual report (’Carbon Budget 2007‘), which makes for rather depressing reading, at least if you were hoping for a turn-around any time soon in global carbon emissions. The media release associated with the report is packed with good information, and so I’ll reproduce it at the end of this blog post. There have also been some news reports on this in the Australian and international media in which I am quoted, such as here, here and here.

My comments on the report, made to AusSMC, are as follows:

The carbon emissions growth story coming out of the latest Global Carbon Project analyses isn’t getting any brighter. At the average rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere over the last few years, we’ll reach a concentration of 450 parts per million by about the year 2040. And that’s an optimistic outlook under a business-as-usual economic scenario, if carbon ‘sinks’ in the ocean miraculously cease their decline in effectiveness, and industrial emissions growth somehow stagnates at the current output. A more realistic projection, accounting for further decline in carbon sinks and ramping up of industrial activity, suggests 2030 is a plausible timeline. But whatever the specific date, 450ppm CO2 commits us to >2 degrees C global warming and all the disastrous consequences this sets in train.

Of particular concern is that emissions from deforestation (mostly the burning of rain forest) in our nearest tropical neighbour region, Southeast Asia, continue to skyrocket. Not only is this damaging to this area’s rich biodiversity (because habitat is degraded and fragmented), but it also has a huge impact on the region’s carbon budget. Yet Southeast Asia, like Australia is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change from sea level rise and changes in rainfall patterns. Emissions from Southeast Asian forest loss now exceed those of Latin America or Africa – truly the global ‘hotspot’ of CO2 from deforestation. Australia’s regional role in abatement has never been clearer.

Each year that Australia’s industrial emissions and Southeast Asia’s forestry emissions continues to grow, our chances of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change diminish. Are we willing to continue to act like a lazy audience in a movie theatre, watching passively as a disaster film plays out in slow motion, in which we are the real-life actors? Who is going to ask the projectionist to turn off the reel before we get to the disturbing climax and the end credits start to roll?

This report is timely in the sense that it is a good lead in to another blog post I plan to make within the next few days, which will try to clarify the confusion around whether we are currently at atmospheric concentrations of 455 or 380 ppm CO2-equivalent. The answer is very much that… it depends…

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Carbon Budget 2007 Key Facts

(I also suggest you grab the PDF of their PowerPoint presentation, which has some excellent visuals)

[ppm = parts per million, 1 Pg = petagram (1 billion or 1000 x million tons), C = carbon (multiply by 3.6 to get mass in terms of CO2)].

Atmospheric CO2 growth
Annual mean growth rate of atmospheric CO2 was 2.2 ppm per year in 2007 (up from 1.8 ppm in 2006), and above the 2.0 ppm average for the period 2000-2007. The average annual mean growth rate for the previous 20 years was about 1.5 ppm per year. This increase brought the atmospheric CO2 concentration to 383 ppm in 2007, 37% above the concentration at the start of the industrial revolution (about 280 ppm in 1750).  The present concentration is the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years.

Emissions from land use change
Land use change was responsible for estimated net emissions of 1.5 PgC per year to the atmosphere. This is largely the difference between CO2 emissions from deforestation and CO2 uptake by reforestation. Emissions for 2006 and 2007 were extrapolated from the previous 25-year trend of 1.5 PgC per year. Land use change emissions come almost exclusively from deforestation in tropical countries with an estimated 41% from South and Central America, 43% from South and Southeast Asia, and 17% from Africa. An estimated 160 PgC were emitted to the atmosphere from land use change during the period 1850-2007.

Emissions from fossil fuel and cement
Emissions increased from 6.2 PgC per year in 1990 to 8.5 PgC in 2007, a 38% increase from the Kyoto reference year 1990. The growth rate of emissions was 3.5% per year for the period of 2000-2007, an almost four fold increase from 0.9% per year in 1990-1999. The actual emissions growth rate for 2000-2007 exceeded the highest forecast growth rates for the decade 2000-2010 in the emissions scenarios of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (IPCC-SRES). This makes current trends in emissions higher than the worst case IPCC-SRES scenario. Fossil fuel and cement emissions released approximately 348 PgC to the atmosphere from 1850 to 2007.

Regional fossil fuel emissions
The biggest increase in emissions has taken place in developing countries, largely in China and India, while developed countries have been growing slowly. The largest regional shift was that China passed the U.S. in 2006 to become the largest CO2 emitter, and India will soon overtake Russia to become the third largest emitter. Currently, more than half of the global emissions come from less developed countries. From a historical perspective, developing countries with 80% of the world’s population still account for only 20% of the cumulative emissions since 1751; the poorest countries in the world, with 800 million people, have contributed less than 1% of these cumulative emissions.

Carbon intensity of the economy
After decades of improvements, the carbon intensity of the global economy, the carbon emitted per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was stalled during the period 2003-2005. This change was largely caused by China’s rapidly growing share in economic output and carbon emissions. Since 2005 China’s energy intensity (which underpins carbon intensity) has decreased (improved) by 1.2% in 2006 and 3.7% in 2007 compared to 2005 levels (according to the National Energy Administration in China).

CO2 removal by natural sinks
Natural land and ocean CO2 sinks have removed 54% (or 4.8 PgC per year) of all CO2 emitted from human activities during the period 2000-2007. The size of the natural sinks has grown in proportion to increasing atmospheric CO2. However, the efficiency of these sinks in removing CO2 has decreased by 5% over the last 50 years, and will continue to do so in the future. That is, 50 years ago, for every ton of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere, natural sinks removed 600 kg. Currently, the sinks are removing only 550 kg for every ton of CO2 emitted, and this amount is falling.

Natural Ocean CO2 sinks
The global oceanic CO2 sink removed 25% of all CO2 emissions for the period 2000-2007, equivalent to an average of 2.3 PgC per year. The size of the CO2 sink in 2007 was similar to that in the previous year but lower by 0.1 PgC compared to its expected increase from atmospheric CO2 growth. This was due to the presence of a La Nina event in the equatorial Pacific. The Southern Ocean CO2 sink was higher in 2007 compared to 2006, consistent with the relatively weak winds and the low Southern Annular Mode (a circumpolar pressure oscillation between Antarctica and southern mid-latitudes). An analysis of the long term trend of the ocean sink shows a slower growth than expected of the CO2 sink over the last 20 years.

Natural Land CO2 sinks
Terrestrial CO2 sinks removed 29% of all anthropogenic emissions for the period 2000-2007, equivalent to an average of 2.6 PgC per year. Terrestrial ecosystems removed 2.9 PgC in 2007, down from 3.6 Pg in 2006, largely showing the high year-to-year variability of the sink. An analysis of the long term trend of the terrestrial sink shows a growing size of the CO2 sink over the last 50 years.

Conclusions. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions have been growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the previous decade, and despite efforts to curb emissions in a number of countries which are signatories of the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions from the combustion of fossil fuel and land use change reached the mark of 10 billion tones of carbon in 2007. Natural CO2 sinks are growing, but more slowly than atmospheric CO2, which has been growing at 2 ppm per year since 2000. This is 33% faster than during the previous 20 years. All of these changes characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger climate forcing and sooner than expected.

Paying the climate change piper

Guest Post by Tony Kevin.

Tony Kevin served as an Australian diplomat in Moscow (1969–71), UN New York (1973-76), and as Australian Ambassador in Poland (1991–1994). This opinion piece was originally published in Eureka Street.

Ross Garnaut’s important public statement was largely overwhelmed by the welter of federal and state political news. It was a world away from his impassioned, ethically challenging, first public report on 4 July.

Quietly, government has narrowed the goalposts back to a safe world of can-do politics, of short-term realism at the expense of long-term responsibility. Unnerved by the hostile reaction of powerful stakeholders to the July report, it now seeks a conventional balance between the demands of a worried population, and a decision-making elite uniting corporate and trade unions in high-emitting industries and sympathisers in parliament.

Garnaut’s sombre, low-key second report recommends a narrow range of possibilities for greenhouse gas emissions limitations by Australia to 2020, likely to have minimal impacts on the Australian economy. It won cautious decision-makers’ approval. It is politically achievable, despite disappointed green lobbies.

Unlike epic debates over industry protectionism in the 1970s–1980s, we do not have a visionary Keating and Button driving necessary change. I see no comparable passion in Rudd or Wong.

Now, Australia’s decision-making elite believe deep down — if indeed they think it through, and I suspect many are instinctive climate change denialists at bottom — that Australia is rich enough to insulate itself against climate change.

They live on higher ground in the green coastal zone. Food and utility costs are a small part of their budgets. If it gets too hot, they will turn up the air conditioning.

For these status-quo people, the issues that matter are macroeconomic — dividends, high salaries, superanuation earnings. They want to keep the economy we have now. The desertification of the Murray-Darling and the dying of the Barrier Reef do not affect them directly, and they lack imagination to conceive of polar icemelt sufficient in their lifetimes to inundate fertile populated coastal areas of Australia. Apres nous, le deluge.

Garnaut says Australia should establish its emissions reduction framework within an agreed global target to stabilise atmospheric carbon at between 450 and 550 parts per million (ppm): the present level is 387 ppm.

Australia should advocate international agreement to stabilise atmospheric carbon at 450ppm, but one set at 550 ppm is more likely initially. A world of 550 ppm atmospheric carbon is, according to informed scientific consensus, a horror scenario in which global warming already underway would cause irreversible polar icemelt and major inundations of global human settlements.

Garnaut defends his lowered expectations. There is no point in Australia doing more now if the world does not follow. A country of high immigration, Australia needs special latitude. I doubt this argument will win us credit at the next global climate meeting in Copenhagen.

Lost is Garnaut’s firm July advocacy that developed countries must set the example even if major developing countries China and India do not immediately follow. We are back in the realist world where nobody moves much unless everybody moves.

Garnaut defends his proposed ‘first stage’ aim of stabilising atmospheric carbon at 550 ppm: it was his ‘reluctant conclusion that a more ambitious international agreement is not possible at this time … My aim is to nurture the slender chance that humanity can get its act together.’

His sadness bespeaks a man overcome by the selfish myopia of political realism. Scientific truth and a sense of society’s accountability to future generations have been overwhelmed. (For example consider Paul Kelly’s triumphant view on Sunday’s ABC Insiders that the debate in Australia is now over, and that anyone seeking an Australian emissions reduction target higher than 5 pet cent or 10 per cent lives in a fantasy world.)

I believe Garnaut now modestly seeks two things: getting an Australian carbon trading system into operation and accustoming industry to it, while waiting for mounting scientific evidence of destructive climate change to penetrate the resistance of decision-makers. As Gwynne Dyer recently observed, drowning polar bears and disappearing polar icecaps will not suffice:

‘The regrettable reality is there will not be a critical mass of people willing to act decisively on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the developed countries where most of the cuts must be made until some really big natural disaster kills a lot of people in one of those countries.’

Nor, I might add, will the slow death of the Murray-Darling Basin and the human settlements depending on its water supply. I’ll be criticised for saying this, but we may need such a disaster as a Class 5 tropical cyclone slamming into Brisbane to jolt us into decisive action. Meanwhile, our decision-makers live on in a bland limbo-land of short-term complacency. They do not even react when the chairman of the Coleambally Irrigation Co operative suggests selling off this whole Riverina town and its water rights for $3.5 billion, so the people can decently relocate!

I’m strongly reminded of the cautionary fable of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. A greedy town council, faced with terrible threat, tries to buy a solution on the cheap, refusing to pay a fair price for what needs to be done. It is not until they lose their children that they realise, too late, the cost of their greed and stupidity.

I pray that Garnaut’s second report, by keeping the carbon trading ball in play and keeping Australia however imperfectly in the international debate, will protect the Australian people from the short-sighted ‘realism’ of our decision-making classes.