Drop the fission line

Friday 29 June 2007
(URL for source to be found)
From Courier Mail, QLD, Australia



Smart State ambassador Ian Lowe warns against a nuclear future

THE Queensland ALP conference this weekend offers an important forum for the Beattie Government to steer the state away from the risks of a radioactive future and towards sustainable energy options.

Prime Minister John Howard is actively promoting nuclear power as a belated answer to global climate change. Recent media reports suggest a wider federal nuclear agenda for Queensland that includes uranium enrichment and nuclear power.

Against this background it is important Premier Peter Beattie continues to keep the door firmly shut on uranium mining and the nuclear industry.

Uranium mining in Queensland would be economically short-sighted and environmentally disastrous. If we want to be the Smart State, we must use solar energy and other forms of renewables.

We should move towards better efficiency, turning our energy more effectively into the services we want. There are many more jobs and dollars in becoming a world leader in clean energy.

We have known for more than 20 years that burning coal, oil and gas is changing the global climate. Moves by the coal industry to clean up its act and reduce its pollution are welcome, but rushed pledges of taxpayer funding to assist this are not. The same money would do much more to curb greenhouse pollution if it were allocated to efficiency improvements and clean energy.

Some claim nuclear energy could help to slow climate change, but this is not a sensible solution. Even the Switkowski report, put together by a hand-picked group of pro-nuclear technocrats, did not make a convincing case.

The summary was optimistic, but the fine print of the report shows it would take about 15 years to build one nuclear power station if we started today, and the cost of electricity would more than double.

Even the most fanciful crash program, dotting 25 nuclear power stations all over the landscape, would only slow the growth in greenhouse pollution by less than 20 per cent. The science shows we need to make serious cuts, 60-90 per cent by 2050, not allow more increases.

Would uranium exports be an economic bonanza? No. The most optimistic forecast of the possible export income is about a third of our earnings from cheese exports. Uranium accounts for only about 1 per cent of our mineral exports and there is little prospect of it becoming a big earner.

What would be the cost of mining and exporting uranium? Huge volumes of radioactive mine tailings, depleted and degraded water resources and an increased risk from nuclear weapons and waste. We are still living with the legacy of the mines at Mary Kathleen and across the Northern Territory border at Rum Jungle.

Uranium mining needs large volumes of water -- not easy to find in Queensland at the moment -- and uses vast amounts of fossil energy, actually worsening greenhouse pollution.

Finally, as the Ranger uranium report said 30 years ago, uranium exports inevitably produce high-level radioactive waste that will have to be managed for hundreds of thousands of years and equally inevitably increase the risk of nuclear weapons.

Even if we say we have the best safeguards in the world and only export to the most responsible leaders, they won't be in power forever and can't control what others will do with the fissile material we sell.

We should learn the lesson of Iran. The world is now getting nervous about its possible nuclear developments. Thirty years ago, we were being urged to export uranium to Iran, and the US was trying to sell its nuclear technology to the Shah. Had that deal gone ahead, Iran would now have all it needs to build nuclear weapons.

The report A Bright Future showed we could get 25 per cent of our power from a mix of renewables by 2020. We should use solar hot water universally. Going that way would create literally thousands of real, skilled and permanent jobs in regional Australia.

Rather than facing a future of leaking tailings dams and increased pressure for nuclear reactors and waste dumps, Queensland can lead Australia and the world in sustainable and clean energy solutions.

The smart sunshine state is a much better option than being a toxic quarry.

Before last year's state election, the Premier stood firmly against the nuclear lobby and promised that the state would not support the mining or processing of uranium.

Beattie also resisted the silly suggestion that we should allow others to inflict on Queensland other stages of uranium processing, such as enrichment or dumping waste. As a Smart State ambassador, I strongly urge the Premier to resist those who want to drag us back into the Dark Age of uranium mining.

Ian Lowe is emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University and president of the Australian Conservation Foundation

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Kunstler: Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society

February 10, 2007
From AlterNet.org

This is an excellent opinion piece from earlier this year that I've had bookmarked but have only got around to reading now.

Kunstler lists several ways of life that will change in a post-oil / post-carbon society of limited energy. There is always Cold Fusion to come along and save our bacon. He doesn't specifically mention this though the premise of the article is that we have a limited amount of vast amounts of energy left, and given that the development of the science of developing things like Fusion requires VAST amounts of energy, we might not have time.

His list is made up of:

1. Cars are part of the problem - we shouldn't be trying to find alternate energies to run them;
   
2. We have to produce food differently - the current model relies on large input from fossil fuels including for fertilisers;
   
3. We have to change our town infrastructure since they are currently designed for large amounts of car transport;
   
4. We need to transport people and things differently items due to the high cost (in terms of Carbon cost aswell as energy);
   
5. Retail trade will change due to the cost of transporting items;
   
6. Local production will need to increase due to the great cost of transporting items;
   
7. Entertainment will need to come from local activities rather than distribution through the internet and airwaves since these will be less reliable as energy becomes more expensive;
   
8. The educational system will change due to there being less ability for people to go vast distances to centralised education centers (eg. big Universities);
   
9. The medical system will change due to less emphasis on self-interest medicine (cosmetic surgury);
   
10. Life will become local, much like how our (grand) parents (in the 40's) used to live.
    

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Monbiot: Breast Beating

Posted June 5, 2007
From Monbiot.com

It is time once again for that touching annual ritual, in which the world’s most powerful people move themselves to tears. At Heiligendamm they will emote with the wretched of the earth. They will beat their breasts and say many worthy and necessary things – about climate change, Africa, poverty, trade – but one word will not leave their lips. Power. Amid the patrician goodwill, there will be no acknowledgement that the power they wield over other nations destroys everything they claim to stand for.

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The G8 demands action on climate change; the World Bank, controlled by the G8 nations, funds coal burning power stations and deforestation projects. The G8 requests better terms of trade for Africa; Europe and the United States use the world trade talks to make sure this doesn’t happen. The G8 leaders call for the debt to be reduced; the IMF demands that poor nations remove barriers to the capital flows which leave them in hock. The G8 leaders simultaneously wring their hands and wash their hands. We have done what we can; if we have failed, it is only because of the corruption of third world elites.

The question is no longer whether the undemocratic power the G8 nations exert over the rest of the world can be used for good or ill. The question is whether it will cease to be used.

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Liberal and Labor, make a call: how much heat can you stand?

Richard Di Natale Adam Bandt
June 11, 2007
From The Age (Aust)

WHAT risk of a plane crashing do you accept before buying a ticket? If it was 85 per cent likely, you'd never fly; 10 per cent, or even 1 per cent, would be too much.

Knowing that a plane might go down isn't enough; we want to know the degree of risk. So it's odd that we are prepared to make decisions about the planet's future without knowing the risk or likelihood of catastrophic consequences if action is taken, or not taken.

It can be hard to cut through the fog of figures about global warming targets: the difference, for example, between a 60 or an 80 per cent cut in emissions, by 2020 or by 2050, is difficult to crystallise.

This confusion is being exploited by both major parties and manufactured debates are played out relentlessly. Labor presents itself as tough on climate change while the Coalition says it puts economics above abstract goals.

But more than anything else, there is one number that really counts. It is the first step on the ladder of climate-change policy — and it is the one to which neither Labor nor the Coalition is willing to give an answer.

Given the science and likely impacts, how hot are we willing to let the planet get? Two degrees, three degrees, four degrees hotter?

And what risk will we accept of exceeding this target?

Temperatures have, already, risen 0.74 degrees above pre-industrial levels and, even if human activity added no more to current greenhouse gas levels, the planet will continue to warm about 1.4 degrees due to lags in the climate system.

The CSIRO last year predicted that, if we exceed a two-degree rise, 97 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef will be bleached annually and an 80 per cent loss of Kakadu's freshwater wetlands is likely. At just under three degrees, there's a 99 per cent risk of Greenland irreversibly melting, with an eventual global sea level rise of five to seven metres.

In the two to three-degree range, we can conservatively pencil in about 20 per cent of the planet's species becoming extinct and a one in five chance of the oceanic currents that regulate the planet's temperature simply shutting down.

A three-degree rise is simply way outside human experience. The last time it was that hot, in the Pliocene, 3 million years ago, beech trees grew in the Transantarctic mountains and seas were 25 metres higher.

If we can limit warming to less than two degrees, knowing about 1.4 degrees is already locked in, the consequences will still be severe, but the risk of triggering runaway climate-change events (where we lose the capacity to control the consequences) lessens significantly.

This is why German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the British Conservative party — both from the right of European politics — have recently reaffirmed the importance of a two-degree limit. The Howard Government, by contrast, isn't even in the realm of reason on this question, with the Prime Minister saying a rise of four to six degrees might make life "uncomfortable" for some, but that it was difficult to predict with any certainty.

His comment shows fundamental ignorance. The planet as we know it will not survive past a five or six-degree rise: it is predicted that, at four degrees, hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon locked up in Arctic permafrost — particularly in Siberia — will enter the melt zone, releasing the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide in immense quantities.

Labor might know where the ballpark is, but they haven't bought an entry ticket yet. The ALP's Peter Garrett set out his party's policy on this page recently (The Age, 5/6), relying on a CSIRO submission to the Prime Minister's emissions taskforce that says a 60 to 90 per cent cut to industrialised countries' emissions is needed to stabilise climate change.

But Australia, as one of the worst emitters among the industrialised countries, requires a cut at the higher end of this range.

The CSIRO research and other research makes it clear that the "temperature stabilisation" associated with a 60 per cent cut is considered by many as too risky, giving us a massive 80 to 85 per cent chance of overshooting a two-degree target. Labor's policy for Australia of a 60 per cent cut by 2050 is therefore more about hope than science.

There is literally a world of difference between a two and three-degree rise in the impacts of climate change on both humans and the environment.

Caught between the science and the politics, Labor's Peter Garrett talks vaguely in the two to three-degree range, never being specific, never committing Labor to putting even one foot on the first rung of the climate change policy ladder — an unambiguous target.

And Labor does not have a short-term target — in many ways much more important than targets five decades away.

The Greens policy is to achieve emissions cuts of 30 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. This would give us an 80 per cent chance of keeping the temperature rise below two degrees. To maximise the chance of staying below two degrees, we must make big cuts early. For John Howard, a climate-change sceptic, this is more about smoothing over a political problem than real action. But Labor, too, falls short of the mark — they do not even set a temperature target.

Professor Tim Flannery, the Australian of the Year environmentalist, said recently his greatest wish was that political parties would state their "temperature limits" as to how hot the planet should get. The Greens recently moved a motion in the Senate to have a two-degree limit endorsed as Australia's target. The ALP joined with the Coalition to defeat the motion.

The challenge to the major parties is: just how hot are you prepared to let the planet get?

Dr Richard Di Natale and Adam Bandt are Greens candidates in this year's federal election.

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