Radwaste
In this weekend’s Observer, CoRWM’s Rebecca Lunn (she of the Geological Society lecture MORI poll “gaff” ), appears intent on providing a positive spin and glossing over the serious problems with GDF projects around the world. The one operating GDF, in the US, is suspended until further notice while investigations continue to discover the cause of the accidents in February 2014, which saw a release of airborne radioactive contamination. Other GDF projects in the pipeline have run into technical difficulties, which at the very least will delay them for years, and the problems may yet prove insurmountable.
Cumbria Trust 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
Carbon Floor Price
A week after the National Grid warned of power shortages from this winter onwards, the chancellor of the exchequer will be told that he is risking losing a quarter of the country’s power generating capacity because of his carbon tax, and keeping electricity prices high too. Research by Nera, the economic consultancy, says that George Osborne’s carbon price floor is inflating the cost of power by 7 per cent and, if it remains in place, could lead to two thirds of the UK’s coal-fired power stations, which together produce about 35 per cent of the nation’s electricity, being closed as commercially unviable. With the autumn statement due next month, representatives of the British coal industry will meet Mr Osborne this week to urge him to think again about the carbon price floor, which taxes users of fossil fuels. The chancellor effectively admitted in the spring budget that the carbon tax was too aggressive when he agreed to cap it at £18.08 per tonne of CO2 emitted from next year. That is almost double the £9.55 it is running at but significantly less than the original plans to increase it on an escalator to £30 per tonne by 2020. The coal lobby is arguing that if the chancellor continues to levy the carbon tax against the power plants, that will hasten the closure for most of them.
Times 3rd Nov 2014 read more »
Scotland
Niall Stuart, Chief Exectutive, Scottish Renewables emphasised that it would be difficult to operate a single UK energy market with further devolved powers on energy for Scotland and called for all devolved nations to work closely with the UK government going forward.
Scottish Energy News 3rd Nov 2014 read more »
Terror
It’s been a common trope in films since the 1950s; a madman with an atomic bomb holds a city for ransom while the authorities race to find it in time. If such a thing ever does come about, Sandia National Laboratories is working on taking the suspense out of the situation with its Mobile Imager of Neutrons for Emergency Responders (MINER) – a nuclear device detector capable of narrowing a search to within a city block without door-to-door sweeps.
Gizmag 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
US – radwaste
The Yucca Mountain radioactive dump may have been officially ‘cancelled’, writes John LaForge, and with very good reason. But like all those zombies out for Hallowe’en last night, it’s not dead yet, as US nuclear regulators declare that the site perfectly meets nuclear waste storage requirements.
Ecologist 1st Nov 2014 read more »
Japan
The city assembly and the mayor of Satsumasendai, Kagoshima Prefecture, have given their nod to the restart of Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai nuclear power plant, whose Nos. 1 and 2 pressurized light-water reactors, each with a generation capacity of 890,000 kW, cleared the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s screening in September under new safety standards that came into force after the March 2011 meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. The Kagoshima prefectural assembly and Gov. Yuichiro Ito are also expected to approve the plan as early as this week, setting the stage for the first restart of an idled nuclear power plant under the updated standards. Still, the concerns of many of the local residents have been left unanswered, especially those over the evacuation plans that would come into effect during a major accident at the Sendai plant. A detailed review of the evacuation plans drawn up by the local governments has not been carried out. It would be irresponsible of the central and the local governments concerned, as well as Kyushu Electric, to go ahead with the restart without addressing the concerns of the very people who could be most affected in case of a nuclear disaster.
Japan Times 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
Trident
British governments usually choose to describe the Trident nuclear weapons system as “an independent nuclear deterrent.” This fanciful description has a lot wrong with it – particularly the notion that Trident is independent. What’s more, just at the point when a majority of the population wants to see our nuclear weapons scrapped, our government is taking steps to ensure that we have even greater nuclear collaboration with the United States. The opportunity, seized on by the government, is the 10-year renewal of the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement – the world’s most extensive nuclear-sharing agreement – originally signed by the two countries in 1958.
Morning Star 3rd Nov 2014 read more »
Nuclear Weapon
The British government has stonewalled on giving a commitment to attend a forthcoming international conference on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons, saying merely that it is “considering” whether to attend. The Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Human Weapons, hosted by the Austrian government and scheduled to take place on 8-9 December 2014, aims to strengthen the global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime and to continue to development momentum behind the ‘humanitarian initiative’ to address the risks and consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. 128 nations attended the first conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons in 2013 in Norway and 145 went to a follow-up conference in Mexico earlier this year. 135 nations have agreed already to attend the third conference in Vienna, and 155 nations have supported an international statement from New Zealand urging universal attendance at the conference. The ‘P5’ group of nuclear armed states recognised under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the United Kingdom, joined North Korea and Israel in boycotting previous conferences because of fears that they could be used as a forum to push for the elimination of their stockpiles. India and Pakistan, also nuclear armed, attended the Mexico conference.
Nuclear Information Servive 1st Nov 2014 read more »
Renewables
People living near new windfarms will be able to buy a stake in them for as little as £5 under new plans, as part of a fightback by industry to win over opponents of wind turbines. In a report produced for the Liberal Democrat energy and climate secretary, Ed Davey, renewable energy trade bodies, community energy groups and academics say that major future wind and solar farms should give communities the chance to invest and own as much as a quarter of projects. Onshore windfarms have proved emotive and politically divisive in the UK, despite polling showing 70% of people would be happy to have one in their local area. The Tory party has promised to pull the plug on onshore windfarm subsidies if it wins the 2015 election.
Guardian 3rd Nov 2014 read more »
Climate
Scientists today completed the world’s most comprehensive review of research into the science, causes, and impacts of climate change. It’s over 5,000 pages long, cites more than 31,000 pieces of research and has taken seven years to complete. Here’s 10 charts that illustrate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth assessment report, from rising carbon dioxide emissions to transforming the energy sector.
Carbon Brief 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
The world has received the clearest message yet on how humans are changing the climate. Delegates from 195 countries gathered in Copenhagen this week to add their seal of approval to a 100-page “synthesis report”. It’s the final installment in a four-part series from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The synthesis report condenses the IPCC’s three other major reports on different aspects of climate change into one concise document. While that means some parts of it may sound familiar, there are some new and different sections as well. Here’s our assessment of what’s new, as well as a look at the report’s main conclusions.
Carbon Brief 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
Today marks the release of an important document in the climate science world. At 10 am this morning, the group of experts tasked by the United Nations with assessing the state of the climate released a major report on how and why it is changing, as well as what we can do about it. Covering everything from declining sea ice to harnessing energy from the wind, the 100-page document has been hailed as an essential “handbook” on climate change. It connects the dots between three reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over the past year, each looking at a different aspect of climate change.
Carbon Brief 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
The unrestricted use of fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100 if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, a UN-backed expert panel says. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in a stark report that most of the world’s electricity can – and must – be produced from low-carbon sources by 2050. If not, the world faces “severe, pervasive and irreversible” damage. “Science has spoken,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.”
BBC 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
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Scotsman 3rd Nov 2014 read more »
Herald 3rd Nov 2014 read more »
To achieve “negative emissions”, it would be necessary to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, such as by planting billions of trees that soaked up carbon as they grew, before harvesting the wood and burning it in power plants fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems. The report said many computer models used to project warming found that building CCS plants was the only way to prevent the global average temperature rising by 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial levels, the increase deemed to have dangerous consequences. However, CCS is very expensive and only one commercial-scale plant has been built: the £750 million Boundary Dam project in Canada. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, said fossil fuels could continue to be burnt on a large scale if CCS were widely deployed. “We have little time before the window of opportunity to stay within 2C of warming closes. The cost of inaction will be horrendously higher than the cost of action,” he said. Unless there were a much greater effort to cut emissions, the temperature could rise by 4.8C by 21 00, resulting in “substantial species extinction [and] global and regional food insecurity”, the report said. Delaying action would shift the burden on to future generations, who would have to make much deeper cuts while coping with the impacts of more extreme weather.
Times 3rd Nov 2014 read more »
The risk of runaway climate change can be prevented without seriously denting global economic growth, scientists forecast in the most comprehensive report on global warming yet published. The optimistic economic outlook could be combined with cuts to greenhouse gas emissions to nearly zero by the end of this century says the study by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on global warming. Without such deep reductions, there is a danger that more frequent and intense extreme weather, along with rising sea levels and other impacts of a changing climate, will add costs that “cannot even be quantified”, said panel chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, at the launch of the study in Copenhagen on Sunday. Global temperatures have already risen by nearly 1 degree Celsius since the industrial revolu tion and governments agreed in 2010 that warming should not exceed 2ºC, a threshold scientists say it is risky to breach.
FT 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
Bill McKibben: UN body’s warning on carbon emissions is hard to ignore, but breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry won’t be easy At this point, the scientists who run the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must feel like it’s time to trade their satellites, their carefully calibrated thermometers and spectrometers, their finely tuned computer models – all of them for a thesaurus. Surely, somewhere, there must be words that will prompt the world’s leaders to act. This week, with the release of their new synthesis report, they are trying the words “severe, widespread, and irreversible” to describe the effects of climate change – which for scientists, conservative by nature, falls just short of announcing that climate change will produce a zombie apocalypse plus random beheadings plus Ebola. It’s hard to imagine how they will up the language in tim e for the next big global confab in Paris. But even with all that, this new document – actually a synthesis of three big working group reports released over the last year – almost certainly underestimates the actual severity of the situation. As the Washington Post pointed out this week, past reports have always tried to err on the side of understatement; it’s a particular problem with sea level rise, since the current IPCC document does not even include the finding in May that the great Antarctic ice sheets have begun to melt. (The studies were published after the IPCC’s cutoff date.)
Guardian 2nd Nov 2014 read more »
