The Washington Post Editorial Board asks a great question today:
CAN THE WORLD fight global warming without nuclear power?
The article then notes that, “One major industrialized country — Germany — is determined to find out, and another — Japan — is debating whether to try. Both illustrate how hard it would be.” And the majority of the article is about the facts of this choice.
“Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record last year, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery….Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.”
There was some hope before that one of the few positive side effects of the global recession would be a trend of less of these pollutants. But our continuing fossil-fuel-based energy choices – coal, natural gas, etc – pumped a half-billion extra tons of carbon into our skies in 2010. This is not the path for sustainable development or clean energy implementation—achieving those goals requires a substantial increase in clean, reliable, low-carbon nuclear energy.
There’s a new name championing the cause for climate change solutions, aptly named: The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. At first glance, such a promissory name could easily be dismissed as audacious brand marketing, but the “C2ES” (as they call themselves) is the fresh face and successor of the highly respected Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
As a new member of the C2ES Business Environmental Leadership council, AREVA continues its partnership with C2ES in its mission to address climate change and deliver innovative clean energy solutions. As C2ES states on its website,
“Now more than ever, we need committed voices with the expertise to cut through complexity and craft innovative solutions; the independence to separate fact from fiction; and the credibility to work with all sides to build common ground.”
We wholeheartedly agree, and welcome The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions’ ongoing, experienced advocacy and leadership.
Author, professor and blogger Barry Brook runs the numbers on “Germany’s Grand Energy Experiment” on his blog today. After a detailed look at the math, he concludes:
Germany will have to initiative a range of aggressive measures, focused on energy efficiency, smart metering, car taxation, renewable energy heating systems, etc. etc. This was to make up a ‘gap’ compared to 2009 policies of 70 – 90 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2-e. The gap is now much larger…
The current reality in Germany is that subsidized coal-fired electricity (with the funds generated by the trade in CO2 emissions certificates – yes, turn up the irony dial) will be ‘filling the gap‘ (interesting euphemism) left by the nuclear phaseout. We’re talking here of upwards of 20 GWe of new fossil fuel power plants to be built in Germany over the next decade…
You can read the whole article here.
Another great article, this time written by author and environmental activist Mark Lynas. He describes the current discussion over nuclear power choices in the UK and offers his view:
Atomic energy, while far from perfect, is an essential option to combat two looming problems: climate change, caused by man-made carbon emissions, and a growing ‘energy gap’ by which Britain generates far less electricity than it needs, sending fuel bills soaring….Because while Greens may be right about climate change, they stick their heads in the sand when it comes to one of the strongest solutions we have to this crisis — nuclear power…
A report from the Government’s Climate Change Committee last week outlined aims to get 40 per cent of our electricity from nuclear by 2030, producing an equivalent proportion of energy from renewable sources, such as wind and solar power.
But for this to happen and for Britain to have any chance of meeting its ambitious carbon-reduction targets, Green groups need to stop scare- mongering about atomic power and blocking plans for nuclear plants….
And he offers a glimpse at how his own thinking had evolved:
It has taken me a long time to reach this conclusion. I used to passionately oppose not only nuclear power but GM crops. I once even threw a pie in the face of a Danish scientist who dared to question the orthodox environmental line. So what changed?
Through research, I found that much of what I believed about environmental issues had little, if any, basis in science. Put simply, though my concerns were right, my solutions were wrong….
Our environment and energy problems are solvable — but can be tackled effectively only with pragmatism, rather than ideological wishful thinking. And the litmus test for that may well be the issue of nuclear power.
It’s an excellent article, do read the whole thing and share it.
Watch Jacques Besnainou (video) speak at a recent Climate One event in California. It makes for an interesting discussion on nuclear energy.
Facing climate change issues, utilities are looking for long-term strategies to optimize their investments and manage uncertainties – like fossil fuel costs and CO2 price. This goal is reachable with an optimal combination of AREVA’s nuclear and renewable energy technologies.
To learn more about the challenges of climate change and AREVA’s solutions for sustainable power generation, including information on a Clean Energy Park for New Brunswick check here.
For a realistic vision and opinion on climate change legislation, check out the post today on the Atlantic by David Roberts.
He describes how “cap-and-trade’s defeat owes less to policy—the particular balance of penalties and incentives in the legislation—than to the simple fact that climate hawks lack the social, political clout wielded by those who benefit from the fossil fuel status quo.” So what went wrong? Roberts describes that in retrospect, it is “painfully clear, that given the manifold dysfunctions of America politics (filibuster abuse, unrestricted corporate money), the energy status quo is too powerful to take down in direct conflict.”
His proposition for the climate hawks, “heed the lesson America’s revolutionary militias learned after they took a few drubbings at the hands of the British Redcoats: disperse. Take to the hills. Run and gun.”
This militaristic strategy comes from understanding that to change the status quo of the energy industry is more complex than financial figures:
“It’s true that the world’s energy systems are shaped by the relative costs of different technologies. But it’s equally true that those costs are shaped by the distribution of economic and political power. Cost is a cultural artifact–the result of a contingent set of economic models, market regulations, political connections, and consumer habits–as much as an objective feature of technology. Dirty-energy incumbents have spent the last century rigging the rules in their favor. Efforts to change costs must attend to sociopolitical and economic reform as well as technological development.”
Read “Time for Climate Hawks to Take to the Hills?” here.
As we look to the options for addressing these energy and climate challenges, it is important to consider nuclear and renewables energy need to play a part in this dialogue. A combination of nuclear and renewables is probably the best path forward to beat the Redcoats.
U.K. newspaper the Guardian, recently asked its online readers to put together their toughest questions on energy to be answered by nine of the world’s leading energy scientists.
The paper posted the ten best questions and the scientists’ responses. The underlying context in every question is about energy’s role in the future. These questions of carbon reductions, energy efficiency, and needing a long term approach are critical, and they are issues that governments around the global are looking at right now.
A particularly good one, in our opinion, is question number three:
3. The world’s population is due to rise to 9 billion people. Can the planet supply the energy needed to achieve that end? From Ken Brookes
Tom Blees: Widespread predictions that energy demand will double by mid-century to meet the needs of an expected 9-10 billion humans are, I believe, too conservative. Billions of people rely on now-shrinking glaciers for much of their water supply, with many areas of the world already lacking adequate water. Increasing human numbers by 50% means that we will have to provide most of the water for some billions of people primarily with desalination, an energy-intensive process. Add to that the fact that the majority of people in the world today use a fraction of the energy used by those in developed countries, and one could easily anticipate at least a tripling of demand in developing countries as they strive to improve their standard of living.
In the book Prescription for the Planet, I explained how a doubling of energy supply could easily be accomplished by 2050 at a rate of deployment even less ambitious than the French employed as they converted to nuclear power in the 1970s and 80s. Given the ability to factory-produce fast reactors of the type described here, a concerted global effort to meet mid-century energy demands should be quite within reach. The fuel is already available and – for all intents and purposes – virtually free.
We would also add that the nuclear and renewable energy technologies available now are solutions to help meet this projected demand. Combined, these energy solutions provide reliable, CO2-free energy that can help with the combined pressure of population growth, greater access to energy, and economic expansion.
Progressive Think-Tank Thinking Positively about New Nuclear Energy
The Third Way, an organization that describes itself as the “leading think tank of the moderate wing of the progressive movement,” recently released a brief on the role of small, modular nuclear reactors. While AREVA’s portfolio of reactor options does not include small, modular reactors, we do endorse the pro-nuclear stance taken by a leading progressive organization.
The brief, “Thinking Small on Nuclear Power,” emphasizes the benefits of nuclear energy that reach across partisan lines, saying:
“This is the promise of new nuclear energy. With most of the nation’s available hydropower already harnessed, only nuclear energy is a currently available technology capable of generating consistent amounts of electricity 24 hours a day—known as “baseload” power—at this scale and emissions-free.”
In another brief, authored by Matt Bennett, Josh Freed, and Jeremy Ershow, the organization describes how the “Third Way has long advocated and strongly supports the expansion of loan guarantees.”
We support this forward-looking stance and believe that nuclear energy is a consensus- building issue that can help reach the nation’s clean energy needs.
