Chernobyl Shows a Green Light for Nuclear.

Unthinkable though it would have been 20 years ago, the lights have changed from red to amber and look set to turn green for nuclear power mainly because, catastrophic as the Chernobyl event in 1986 undoubtedly was, there has been no serious nuclear incident since then, despite a prediction made at the time that we could expect a calamity on an equivalent scale roughly every 10 years. This, and more decisively the desperate thinking about how we are to provide for our future energy in the light of "Peak Oil" shortages of cheap petroleum fuel, and an increasing lack of political certainties in those countries where our fuel originates (Iraq, Iran and Saudi) have passed the buck back to "nuclear" which is perceived as the more certain and most cost effective option, against a potentially shaky and expensive fossil fuel market.
Personally, I don't understand an argument that smacks to me of short-term economics. As I have explained in previous postings of this blog, even setting aside for a moment all the nuclear industry's less charming and well documented characteristics - loads of nuclear waste to dispose of securely in the long-term, including an "olympic sized swimming pool" of plutonium and uranium mix dissolved in concentrated nitric acid "found" unexpectedly at Sellafield that had poured from a fractured pipe for nine months without arousing suspicion, and is so radioactive that no one dare go anywhere near it to clean it up (so I guess it will just sit there in perpetuity); threats of terrorism; that another such Chernobyl incident could happen especially in more maverick regions of the world, and maybe we've just been lucky since Chernobyl etc. (that nothing else has "gone-up" since then) - uranium is a finite resource which will be used-up within 40-60 years, depending on the quality of the ore we are finally left with to mine, mill, process and fabricate into nuclear fuel. If the world were to go "all-out" for nuclear, we would use it all up in about 10 years or less!
The alternative is to "burn" the 99% majority isotope of uranium (uranium-238) by converting it into plutonium (239) in fast breeder reactors, a route that the French who produce nearly 80% of their nation's electricity from nuclear power plan to take in the longer term. Fast breeders have not been popular, mainly because they are perceived as less safe to operate than conventional fission reactors which "burn" the minority isotope (uranium-235), which constitutes only 0.7% of natural uranium and normally requires enrichment (using a centrifuge or gaseous diffusion) to 3.5% of uranium-235 in the nuclear fuel, unless "heavy water" rather than ordinary "light water", as comes from the tap, is used as the coolant and moderator.
Among the worrying aspects of breeder reactors are the necessity to handle plutonium which is highly toxic and that they use liquid sodium metal (which explodes on contact with water and ignites in air) as the moderator and coolant since unlike the nuclei (protons) in ordinary ("light") water, the sodium nuclei provide a poor moderator material and so do not slow down (moderate) the flux of "fast neutrons" that is required to "breed" plutonium (239) from uranium-238.
All a terrorist would need to wreak great terror and the consequent evacuation of a city such as London is a few grams of plutonium and a hand-grenade - he wouldn't need the 8 kilograms of plutonium required to make an atom bomb - a small "dirty bomb" would do just fine as a means for eliciting terror. Even the U.K. government's own Sustainable Development Committee has weighed it in the balance and found "nuclear" wanting on several counts (see my previous posting "No to Nuclear!").
Despite all of this clean and unequivocal evidence, and with the visceral thrust of Chernobyl comfortingly blunted by time, nuclear is back on the agenda as part of the energy portfolio that the U.K. government has in mind. As I have pointed out before, our emphasis must be on energy saving - less cars, more thermally efficient buildings, sea power (wave and tidal stream), micro-generation (even Her Majesty the Queen, with whom I celebrated a joint birthday on 21 April, has had a couple of hydroelectric turbines installed in the River Thames, below Windsor Castle), getting the majority of cars off the road by living in sustainable small (20,000 population) communities and so forth. This would relinquish probably 60% of the nation's annual energy demand in total and 90% of its reliance on oil - the fuel of wars and all kinds of human tragedy. Whether we like it or not, if we believe that burning oil causes global warming or not, we are shortly to be forced into a "low carbon lifestyle" by Peak Oil, who's wedge we are already seeing the thin end of, in the alarming price of oil which hit $75 a barrel a few days ago.
There are excuses being made for this, but frankly we need to be aware that oil is a precious and limited resource not to be squandered. There is nothing I can think of that isn't provided by oil either as a fuel or a chemical feedstock or both (including the fabrication of the keyboard I am typing this text on), and once it is gone it is gone for good. Certainly there is money to be made, and there are those lining their pockets by selling oil and cars, but it is future generations that will bear the cross of such foolish and selfish short term thinking. "We all need an SUV - 4x4"; well no we don't unless we live on a farm with limited transport access, but not just to take the kids to school. Transportation is the most immediate excess that humankind can tackle; forget about nuclear.

Chernobyl (26th April 2006); 20 Years On.

In the early hours of the morning 20 years ago tomorrow (1:23:04) an ill-conceived experiment was embarked upon, the outcome of which would change the course of history. I have documented the details in my previous posting "Chernobyl (26th April 1986)" but in summary, a conspiracy of events and circumstances resulted in an unexpected surge in the power of the Unit 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station which caused a steam explosion from the water in the primary cooling circuit of sufficient force to rupture the containment pipes, throw the 1,000 tonne concrete lid from the top of the reactor (it now sits to the side of it, sinking into the ground by a few inches every year), and blow the roof off the building. I was working in Russia at the time, and remember the whole incident and its aftermath very well. I also recall that my Russian colleagues got most of their information about what precisely had happened from their colleagues in the West, such was the influence of Soviet secrecy at the time, which delayed immediate action on the scale necessary to deal with such a calamitous incident, and it is the opinion of some that this contributed spectacularly to the demise of the Soviet Union.
The reactor core was thus exposed to air, and at the high temperature it had been heated to by the power surge, the graphite moderator ignited and sent a plume of radioactive smoke over the western U.S.S.R., western Europe and as far as the western United States - right across the Atlantic Ocean. This was a severe disaster whose detritus ended up in pretty well everybody's back yard. "NIMBY" is not an applicable strategy for nuclear issues, it is everybody's problem.
It is estimated that about 60% of the radioactive fallout landed on Belarus (then an area of the U.S.S.R. called Byelorussia) and the Ukraine (where the nuclear power plant, and the heavily contaminated town of Pripiat are; the city of Chernobyl itself lying some distance away), and around 200,000 people were evacuated within a few days from these regions.
To mark the burden suffered by his country, Ukraine Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov has pledged 20 million hryvnia (about $4 million) in this, the world's most catastrophic nuclear accident. The money is intended to be spent on awards for those involved in dealing directly with the outcome of the disaster, of whom 50 died shortly afterwards. 1,000 cars are to be provided for those invalided by its aftermath. Two new health centres are to be built and pensions increased for those who responded actively in averting the disaster from becoming even worse than it was, or for their families as many of these true heroes no longer survive. In view of the sheer scale of the disaster, its widespread radioactive contamination, and images of horror and babies born with disfiguring cancers and other infirmities of radiation exposure, it is easy to imagine that a wasteland has been left of apocalyptic "Mad Max" movie proportions. However, this would be a naive and misguided image. Although a massive resettlement of people was acted out rapidly (within 5 days), many, mostly older, people came "home" again soon after, though none dare to live in the heart of the so called "Dead Zone" which is a six-mile exclusion zone too radioactive for humans to inhabit.
For plants and animals, the situation is quite different, since the absence of human activities has allowed flora and fauna to flourish. That anything even approximately good might emerge from a catastrophe of such proportions flies in the face of conventional wisdom about the risks of nuclear power. The picture becomes dephased by the defocussing estimates of the true human tragedy wreaked upon a neighbouring population of whom 5 million were exposed to elevated levels of radiation. According to U.N. estimates, around 4,000 cancer deaths are expected as a consequence of Chernobyl; however, a recent report by Greenpeace suggests that the true figure is nearer 100,000. There are estimates that 500,000 have already died in the wake of the disaster, but this remains unsubstantiated. Undoubtedly, cancer is not the sole health problem that Chernobyl caused, and there are more widespread effects of social disintegration, partly from the displacement of a large population, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the consequent disruption of communities and families; loss of livelihoods and a sense of foreboding dispondency and gloom which leads to harmful lifestyle changes (cigarettes and vodka).
There is the sense of living with both a stigma and a time-bomb: that "Chernobyl" will "get you", or your children eventually: a sentiment reinforced by elevated incidences of thyroid and other cancers, leukemia and other diseases, particularly in the young. The witnessing of a weakening of the future generation convinces that there is no integral future - and forges a psychological break in cultural tradition and our innate belief in the order of human lineage. That we should die before our children; not the other way round.
That flora and fauna are thriving appears as an anomaly which requires explanation. Sergey Franchuk, a guide and local expert who has worked in the area since 1982 believes that the radiation has purified the soil by some inexplicable means. Most likely it is the removal of 135,000 people from an area about twice than of Luxemburg that is the driver of fertility. Those who still live and work in the 18 mile exclusion zone do so in highly localised areas, where the radiation levels are sufficiently low to permit them to, and so the region has become a natural wilderness where, largely in the absence of humans, animal and plant life is left to flourish undisturbed. An essential difference between animals and humans is the relative longevity of the latter species. Hence animals may live-out healthy lives of normal and shorter duration than a human life-span without developing cancer; humans on the other hand are more likely to get cancer in later life. Animals are more likely to be killed by predators before they reach a ripe old age - even in terms of ages noted for animals protected in captivity.
There is talk of opening the region as a a nature reserve, but it would make sense for any tourists to prepare for their visit according to the standard radioactive dress code - not quite the self contained radiation suit, but boots, gloves and sealed clothing to minimize possible contamination. Other estimates suggest that the area will be dangerous for at least 100 years, and there is no doubt that farms even as far away as Wales remain contaminated and will do for decades. In Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the west of England 81,000 square kilometers of land was contaminated to a level above 4,000 Bequerels per square metre, which is blamed for increased rates of thyroid cancer in children; most notably a 12 fold increase in Cumbria which received most of the fallout from the Chernobyl plume.
One should not be mislead into a false sense of security about Chernobyl or about nuclear power plants generally.

"Biohydrogen - a Preposterous Idea": Letter published in "New Scientist".

I submitted a letter to the magazine "New scientist", based on my previous posting "Biohydrogen - a Preposterous Idea" (which it is) and that was published in the 8 April issue. I referred to this blog (http://ergobalance.blogspot.com) for details of how I arrived at this conclusion. The text is the following:

Peter Abrahams (Letters, 11 March) raises the question of how much water would be required to produce hydrogen fuel by farming algae, in response to the 25 February articles "The parched planet" (p 32) and "Green gold" (p 37). While I do not have the figures to answer this question, I have made a calculation on hydrogen production by bio-fermentation, which might prove illustrative. To replace the 54 million tonnes (and rising) of petroleum fuel currently used annually in the U.K. would require 1.78 x 10*11 cubic metres of H2. To produce this amount would need a total volume of 152 cubic kilometers of fermentation vessels, which is rather more than the entire reserve of freshwater available in the U.K. (148 km*3), assuming we had no other need for it. To grow the sugar crop for fermentation would require around 520,000 km*2 of land, which is more than twice the entire area of the U.K. mainland (most of which, of course, is not arable). The waste, mainly butyric acid (essence of sweat) and acetic acid (raw vinegar) produced would amount to around 400 million tonnes, or more than sufficient to fill Lake Windermere...and that is every year, in perpetuity. The details of these and other calculations on meeting future fuel requirements by renewables, nuclear etc are available at: http://ergobalance.blogspot.com, which your readers might find interesting.

The Three Degrees (...or the inevitability of global warming).

No matter what we do now, the global temperature will continue to rise. Even if Mr Blair manages to convince the rest of the world to join his gang and sign-up to a global consensus on stabilising greenhouse gas emissions, the world is likely to experience a temperature increase of 3 degrees Centigrade, according to the U.K. government's Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor Sir David King. He warned that even if such international agreement could be met - unlikely, given the U.S.'s refusal to so comply, on the grounds that to do so would "ruin the U.S. economy" as George Bush put it, and India and China's need to increase their economies in order to tackle the poverty of their combined and rising population of 2.5 billion people - at 550 parts per million of CO2, this would cause a temperature rise in excess of the 2 degrees C that the U.K. government seeks, in accord with the limits set by the European Union.
3 degrees C might not sound like much, but the consequences of such a temperature rise are forecast to be profound. For instance, it is estimated that there would be a fall in cereal production of 400 million tonnes, placing around 400 million people at risk of hunger; further stress on already dwindling supplies of fresh water would pose between 1.2 billion and 3 billion people in danger of water shortages. The effect of a 3 deg. C rise would compromise the various ecosystems of the earth, such as natural forests, few of which could adapt to the stress thus imposed upon them, and it is likely that half of nature reserves would no longer be worthwhile and one fifth of coastal wetlands would be lost to flooding.
In Professor King's view, it is unlikely that Mr Blair will manage to obtain unanimous global consensus (and practical action beyond the usual lip-service, if even that I would venture!); however, this doesn't mean we should do nothing and be bludgeoned into an attitude of apathy and despondency where we shrug our shoulders hopelessly and carry on with our business as usual. We are going to have to cut our use of fuel in any case, once the supply becomes too expensive to squander - I note this morning that the price of oil has reached $75 a barrel, and probably "Peak Oil" is already with us. So, we'd better all hang-on to our seats in the repercussions of this fact.
It is interesting though that the U.K. looks almost certainly set to miss its own target to cut CO2 emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by the year 2010 (which is only three and a half years away). I remember that when that target was set, 2010 seemed a comfortingly distant date - now it is almost with us. So, we are not setting too good an example if Mr Blair expects other nations to rally to our cause, especially developing nations like India, China and those in Latin America, all with rather more pressing agendas of their own. In the face of poverty, rhetoric about CO2 emissions must seem a nebulous luxury. At one stage the U.K. appeared to be doing well, having indeed cut its CO2 discharges into the atmosphere, but this was a red herring and had nothing to do with cuts in energy use or gains in energy efficiency, but was simply the result of switching over to cheap natural gas as a fuel for power stations, from more expensive coal, since gas is a more energy-rich fuel and produces less CO2 than coal does per unit of electricity generated. Ironically, economics now looks set to reverse this trend.
The U.K. is now a net importer of gas, and will henceforth rely on imports of gas from elsewhere, with unpredictable vagaries in its supply. (However, as a Post Script in this see-saw saga, the government has just announced its intention to build new gas-fired power plants - I wonder whether ultimately they will in fact become coal-fired?). Gas prices (and electricity prices too, since much of the U.K.'s electricity is made from burning gas) are about to increase sharply, and the government - at last! - is now called for "energy efficiency". In consequence of both forces - economic and of supply worries - it appears that we will switch, at least partly, back to coal, and this will increase the nation's CO2 emissions, unless we cut electricity production dramatically, which we won't!
In order to hit our 20% CO2 reduction target by 2010, we need to make personal changes, inasmuch as reducing use of gas/electricity in the home, at work (for those of us who are self-employed and have an office at home it is the same difference), and cutting-out unnecessary journeys. As I have commented before, by changing our society to a more "localised" level of operation, we could cut-out 90% of transportation immediately, which would eliminate 90% of 26% of the nation's total energy bill or 23%, all of which is derived from burning liquid petroleum fuel - oil! - and so our CO2 emissions would be well within the limits set for them.
The sad fact is that it matters not one iota what the U.K. does, and even if we alone do by some means meet the target set for us by our elected leadership, the good work will literally be swamped-out by the rising levels of CO2 from China, India and the recalcitrant "U.S. of A", all of them acting on economic grounds. Ultimately, all nations will be forced to cut their emissions from transportation as we head downwards on the roller-coaster of Peak Oil; an inexorable perspective heralded from the relatively comfortable flat fulcrum of "Hubbert's Peak", where we appear to be just now. We will continue to burn gas directly as a fuel to make electricity, while it remains available as a stable supply at an acceptable cost. Then we will burn coal, and lots of it.
Interestingly in the U.K., either to put a literal seal on the coal industry or in an act of spite, or both, many of the coal mines were filled with concrete. This was an economic decision, since Margaret Thatcher's government believed we would never again need our (then) uneconomic coal industry - riddled with militancy and strikes - since we were rich in gas and oil and could buy coal cheaper from Germany and Eastern Europe than mine it ourselves. Now the tables may be turned, and the current government will need to blast away the concrete as a first stage to revamp the extraction of a fuel we need once again to produce on our own shores.
It doesn't look too good regarding CO2 emissions, however, but I suspect such considerations will take an economic back-seat in the U.K. as they seem to have done in those other countries which bear more than half the world's population.

Coal and Dust.

In 2004, 6,000 people died in China as a result of coal mining accidents, which has added another black mark to the Chinese coal mining industry. Burning coal is furthermore a major source of arsenic poisoning in rural communities. China is both the world's largest producer and consumer of coal, and its production has increased year on year for the past 25 years to an annual output of almost 1.7 billion tonnes. While in the U.S. only a small fraction of coal is consumed domestically, perhaps 1%, in China over 50% of the energy for urban households is supplied by burning coal in stoves and small coal fired boilers. 75% of China's primary energy is produced from coal, in contrast say to the U.K. which uses less than 20%, but around 40% natural gas and 32% petroleum (including 26% used for transportation; most of the other 6% for industry) instead. The loss of 6,000 lives in a single year has prompted the Chinese government to announce the closure of 7,000 coal mines across the entire country; however, these are the smallest mines and so coal production should be overall little affected. Nonetheless, since it is the small mines that are less well regulated and operate with less stringently imposed safety rules, a significant improvement to the industry's safety record is to be expected.
At a ratio of 6,000 deaths/1.7 billion tonnes of coal, which amounts to a fatality rate of four deaths per million tonnes of coal produced, China has the worst safety record in the world. By means of comparison, the United States produces one billion tonnes of coal per year, which is an output similar to that of China, but at a death toll of 50 miners, giving a fatality rate of 0.04 per million tonnes of coal, or over a hundred times better, as a simple statistic, which it is not to those directly involved or to their families. The consequences of China's industrialisation programme, fuelled as it is by coal, are unpleasant but predictable. Air-borne pollution and smogs blight major cities, which is a problem compounded by the rising number of cars and other road vehicles. As a result, there are unprecedented levels of pulmonary (lung) disease.
However, even more rural regions such as Guizhou Province are far from immune to the effects of burning coal, where over 3,000 of its population are documented to be suffering from severe arsenic poisoning. The principal cause of this epidemic is thought to be the consumption of chili peppers that have been dried over fires fuelled by coal containing up to 35,000 parts per million (i.e. 3.5%!) of arsenic, from which they absorb an average of 500 parts per million of their own weight of arsenic. This is not the sole problem, since more than 10 million people in Guizhou Province are showing symptoms of fluorosis: an accumulation of excess fluoride in the teeth and bones. The excess fluoride arises from eating corn that has been dried over burning briquettes fabricated from coal containing high levels of fluoride bound with clay that also has a high fluoride content. A double-whammy.
The practice of burning coal in poorly ventilated homes produces high ambient levels of PAH (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons), which are known carcinogens (cancer causing agents) and are believed to contribute to the elevated incidence of esophageal and lung cancers in parts of China. I note, however, that the Chinese tend to be heavy smokers, and it is perhaps the combined burden of these two sources of PAH that causes the problem. Incidences of mercury and selenium poisoning have also been attributed to the domestic burning of coal that is contaminated by these elements.
While this is an essentially localised "dust" problem, I find my thinking being led onto one that is not: namely, the long-range transport of mineral dust, principally from North Africa (meaning the Sahara Desert and regions north of there), into the global atmosphere. Measurements made at sampling stations over the Earth indicate that atmospheric dust can be considered as an almost homogeneous component of the atmosphere, something like a trace gas.
Soil dust is a main provider of airborne particles ubiquitously to the atmosphere, as attested to by the sighting of dust-plumes, which are one of the most prominent and commonly visible features imaged by satellites. It is thought that dust may play a fundamental role in many biogeochemical processes, though the details remain as yet speculative. Dust particles that are transported over large distances usually have a mean particle diameter of less than 10 microns (one micron is one thousandth of a millimeter, hence 10 microns is one hundredth of a millimeter. For comparison, a human hair is on average 70 microns thick). Larger particles tend to settle-out of the atmosphere before they can travel very far.
Particles of less than 2.5 microns in size have been established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as constituting a human health hazard, because they are small enough to be inhaled into the deep lung. Since dust particles from North Africa can be detected as far away as Florida, concerns have been raised regarding its potential health hazard, although clearly this kind of dust has been with humankind throughout the course of our evolution, and it is the truly anthropogenic aerosols that are a greater cause for concern, e.g. that from combustion processes, including running motorised vehicles, and sulphate particles which arise at least partly through human activities, though they are mostly an entirely natural phenomenon.
It might be argued that because of climate change and the increased desertification of central regions of Africa, e.g. the inexorable advance of the Sahara Desert that I have noted in previous postings, the atmospheric dust load is increasing and so there is a potential health issue thus connected with climate change. It is further plausible that there may be an interplay, in which increasing dust generation through global warming induced climate change participates in a feedback loop where the mobilised dust causes "climate-forcing", e.g. to cool the earth's surface by reflecting sunlight away from the earth and back into space.
In truth, these are all complex issues that cannot realistically be addressed in isolation of one another. The global experiment that we are all part of will need to run its full course before we may perceive a valid answer to any of our currently vexed questions. As the English writer Sir Osbert Sitwell put it: "But what is dust, save time's most lethal weapon...?"