A fair enough summary of the real position down here.
Regardless of whether the world (sic) decides to take major steps to reduce CO2 emissions at or after Copenhagen, it is absolute folly for a country our size to be "first cab off the rank". It will indeed add significant costs to all Australians, destroy (not reduce) our international competitiveness in those markets where there is still some, and achieve 2/3rds of 3/5ths of fark-all in terms of global emissions. Banning hamburgers worldwide would have a greater impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
While Fielding is currently being ridiculed by the supporters of the global warming scam, there is a growing feeling that the whole argument is a con.
There always have been global warming/cooling cycles, evidenced by semitropical forests under icecaps. The link however between these cycles and contemporary CO2 emission levels is tenuous at best.
The Australian CTS is best summarised as noble and well intentioned, but stupid and suicidal for the nation.
Largely because the oil companies and coal miers have been spending money on denialist propaganda.
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CO2 levels were higher - sometimes a lot higher - in the geological past. The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum - whch took place some 55 million years ago - is an instructive lesson on the dangers of pumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere.
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Since Australia makes most of its export income by selling iron ore to China, it's difficult to see how moving towards sustainable (and slightly more expensive) energy sources is going to destroy the country, but denialist propaganda is never very strong on logic.
Largely because the oil companies and coal miers have been spending money on denialist propaganda.
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CO2 levels were higher - sometimes a lot higher - in the geological past. The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum - whch took place some 55 million years ago - is an instructive lesson on the dangers of pumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere.
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Since Australia makes most of its export income by selling iron ore to China, it's difficult to see how moving towards sustainable (and slightly more expensive) energy sources is going to destroy the country, but denialist propaganda is never very strong on logic.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Bill is quite right, but the main factor driving the CO2 hysteria is, in Obama's words: "U.S. dependence on Foreign Oil".
The free energy of oil (and coal) is a literal and political dependency whereever its source, but more importantly, being limited, it is critical that alternative permanent energy sources are found. As governments think only as far as the next election, they tend to promote short term trivial solutions that suck up resources and distance real progress.
Most of Australia's problems could be solved by going into huge debt to create generational water, power, and transport infrastructure for future generations to use and to pay for. Our grandchildren will be very unhappy if they find that they are paying for debt that had bought them nothing but pink batts, faded PV panels and worn out windmills, and the lights are off.
Australia also produces more than 80% of its electricity from its plentiful coal reserves. I'm still waiting for someone to identify a *practical* alternative source (other than nuclear) which will at the same time reduce CO2 emissions and not blow the economy out of the water.
Australia is a very good place to build solar power plants. At the moment they produce power at about twice the cost of burning fossil carbon, but economies of scale are going to push this down. There are predictions that solar power will hit grid parity by 2015, and be genuinely cheaper by about 2045. Wind power is further down the track and is expected to be genuinely cheaper than fossil-carbon derived power by 2030.
Soar radiation is not availalble at night, so you need complementary power stations or storage systems to carry you through the night. Some thermal solar plants are designed to accumulate lots of molten salt doing the day to sustain steam generation overnight, and there are a bunch of pump storage schemes.
Sufficiently dispersed wind-power generation doesn't have this problem
- the wind blows overnight.
Doubling the price of grid power may not look like a "practical" solution to you, but it's manageable - particularly if it is spread over a decade or so. Coal and oil aren't going to get cheaper as time goes by,and their inflationadjusted price may well double over the next decade as China and India start competing to satisfing the ever- growing energy demands of their progressively richer citizens.
Both countries have more to fear from the consequences of anthropogenic global warming than we do, and can be expected to be enthusiastic purchasers of tried and tested sustainable energy generating plant, so it would be a good idea for Australia to invest in developing and proving large scale generating plants.
yet everyone seems happy to ignore the energy input into solar photovoltaics, which (a) takes up to 15 years of their output to replace; and (b) would currently be drawn from the >80% fossil-fuelled grid ....
(I've been a SP-V applier for decades. They provide a local solution, NOT a global one).
Snort!
Australia has a sizeable peak-flattening (aka off-peak generation) system in the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme. It's not a new solution, but it does require sympathetic topography, which is NOT ubiquitous here.
More snort!
It's neither practical nor manageable in the context of supporting continued economic survival of industries which are always facing stiff international competition. And regrettably to allow those to go under makes us MORE of a consumer and less a producer. Our standard of living won't support any more loss of local production after the ravaged of GATT et al.
Hah! Australia will still have plenty of coal to burn long after it is outlawed.
No, they are currently keen to produce the plant in the form of SP-V's. Almost all those available in Australia currently are Chinese-made. Every time we export technology, it comes back as a flood of imported product. China only purchases technology to replicate.
They *may* both have more to fear, but they are steadfast in their drive towards higher output and a progressively higher standard of living, at the expense of consumer nations with a higher cost/standard of living. And they haven't been backward about snapping up bargains during the current economic cycle.
You are looking at out-of-date figures. The current energy pay-back time on photovoltaics is a couple of years.
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1.5 to 3.5 years for single crystal silicon, 1 to 1.5 years for thin film cells.
Your information seems to be as old as your cells.
Google a few sources. I did.
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Flatter areas compress air into underground cavities during the day, and let the compressed air spin turbines overnight. Enthusiasts for high temperature superconductors want to store vast amounts of energy in superconducting inductors, but I don't think that anybody has even costed such a scheme. The proponents of the hydrogen economy want to electrolyes water during the day ...
The wind doesn't blow when you are asleep?
Rubbish. Energy costs aren't a large proportion of manufacturing costs in almost all industries - aluminium extraction would be the obvious exception. The relatively small domestic market is a much larger problem for Australian manufacturers. You need to answer Barry Jone's famous question,"Why isn't the parking lot of the Swedish parliment house full of Holdens".( For non-Australians, the parking lot of the Australian parliment in Canberra is always full of Volvos.)
But giving Australian manufacturers cheap energy isn't going to make them internationally competitive, or anything like it. We need to concentrate on areas where we do have an advantage - when I left Australia (in1971) we'd always had a positive balance of trade in scientific instruments - and we need to concnetrate on the niche markets where we can do well.
IIRR the most promising innovative producer of solar photovoltaic cells in Callifornia is an Australian enterpreneur who set up production there because he could manufacture and sell on a larger scale than he could in Australia. You need to think about what that implies.
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You are confusing higher output and higher standards of living with higher carbon dioxode emissions; the whole point about sustainable energy sources is that they offer you the advantages of an energy- intensive life-style without the problem of accelerated climate change. Denialist propaganda loves to publicise the lunatic finge of the green movement, who want to cut carbon dioxide emissions by cutting energy consumption - the rational approach is to get your energy from sources that don't burn fossil carbon - or a least don't dump the carbon dioxide they produce into the atmosphere.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen (but in Sydney at the moment)
The greenies seem to object to everthing. Widely dispersed wind turbines need less energy storage than solar photovoltaic. the wind is usually blowing somewhere.
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But as you mentioned, Australia isn't over-supplied with mountains and hgh altitude lakes.
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Every manufacturer wants to get all their inputs as cheaply as possible, but if an Australian manufacturer is sailing so close to the wind that energy costs really matter, they haven't got a hope of being economically competitive - the tiny domestic market means that they can't compete internationally if they haven't got a lot else going for them.
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The science policy academics in the UK loved him, and kept "Sleepers Wake" in print for some ten years after it was first published in
1982. There's a lot more to Barry Jones than a good memory, and rather more than got into his autobiography.
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Don't be silly. Small countries have to specialise and play to their strengths. Trying to run your own car industry to service a population of twenty million is just stupid.
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Which should not be treated as the ideal condition which we want to sustain, just because we happen to be there at the moment.
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I've always wanted to know what the competition was doing, and how they were doing it, but I can't recall an occasion when it would have made sense to copy what they were making. For complicated products, what you make and how you make reflects what you've done before, and the competitors products are shaped by a different history, different markets, and different customer preferences.
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Depends how nervous you are about the nuclear waste. People have been looking for fool-proof ways to get rid of it since I was a kid, and they still haven't got an accdeptable solution. CSIRO haven't mananged to sell Synroc to anybody
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The Chinese know - from European experience - that they can clean up their current levels of pollution ina couple of decades. Nuclear waste hangs around for quite a while.
The biggest obstacles to nuclear waste disposal are political rather than technical. Anti-nukers appear to me to want lack of a waste disposal solution in order to oppose nukes.
One place to dump nuclear waste is into a salt dome that had the petroleum under it depleted. The salt dome had a track record over 200 million years long for successful containment.
I wonder what mental disorder it is that makes warmingists also anti- nuclear power? You'd think that, if they were sane, that'd be their first choice!
Or reprocess it, but of course the paranoids will shriek, "But then the terroirsts will make bombs", not realizing that that ship has sailed about three of four decades ago.
Why doesn't somebody ask the French or Japanese operators what they do with theirs? Or, for that matter, the US government? They've been running nuclear subs and aircraft carriers for decades - where does that waste go? And that's not to mention the plants where they built those 10,000 or so bombs of our own.
Warmingists have this problem that they think about the long-term consequences of what they are doing.
Burning fossil carbon and dumping the consequent carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is slowly but persistently making the world warmer. Warmingists are foresighted enough to realise that if we keep on doing it , the world will eventually be too warm for comfort.
The same foresightedness makes them worry about what's going to happen to all the nuclear waste inside a reactor when it has to be decommisioned.
As mental disorders go, foresightedness is inconvenient, but emminently treatable. Rich has managed to destroy the offending parts of his brain y the perisitent ingestion of recreational substances, such as ethanol. A lobotomy wold be quicker, but less enjoyable.
The Japanese were sending their nuclear waste to the UK for reprocessing. The French dump theirs into temporary storage, which is also what the US governemnt has been doing for the last fifity-odd years, while they try to devise a satisfactory long-term repository.
A problem which a number of countries have been trying - and failing - to solve for the past fifty-odd years does appear to verge on the intractable.
This "fact" is based on one set of anomalous observations. Pretty much everybody else who has been monitoring global temperatures has seen small, but appreciable warming over this period.
Denialist do have this tendency to pounce on anomalous results that support their point of view while ignoring the bulk of the data. It's called "selective reporting" by the diplomatic, and "lying by omission" by everybody else.
Although after you take the oil and gas out you cannot be sure that the integrity of the chamber has not been compromised in the process.
The problem with reprocessing is that for every kg of highly radioactive nuclear fuel you reprocess you also end up with several kg of medium level waste and vast amounts of low level contaminated reagents. The daughter products of nuclear fission and the irradiated fuel casings are neutron rich and inclined to be hot for a long time to come.
You can glassify them to immobilise but no-one really wants a nuclear dump near their town. With the possible exception of Sellafield formerly Windscale formerly Calder Hall - they changed the name after each major disaster at the site. Their new Thorp MOX plant is still not running properly and maybe never will. The politics of plutonium is very complicated given its obvious dual use capability. eg
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(hells bells that is one long URL!)
Since I doubt that will work Google "thorp mox sellafield"
Japanese have their own reprocessing at Donenki. They have had a really dumb criticality event with enriched uranium at Tokaimura.
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Typically into deep pits full of very pure cooling water until the stuff is cool (in both senses of the word) enough to handle. radioactivity falls pretty fast initially as the short lived species decay.
The really bad stuff from a storage POV has half lives in the hundreds or thousands of years.
There were bulk ponds at Handford that have crusts of nitrate and still boil under their own steam.
Problem is that a geologically sound repository in the UK would have to be under the wrong part of the country where rich people live. Instead it looks like they will bodge it and put the repository under Sellafield.
You can chemically immobilise it and dilute it to a point where it cannot thermally run away.
(I, Don Klipstein wrote the multiply quoted section)
Vitrify the waste, then dump it into a salt dome a mile under the desert. Vitrified waste is safe there even if the salt dome cracks.
If people weren't so opposed to this, owners of land over salt domes can make a ton of money taking vitrified nuclear waste from other areas and countries that don't have a good or politically palatable place to put it. The Federal government can make money putting an import duty on nuclear waste.
Depends a bit on the chemical environment. Hot brine can be very corrosive if water penetrates on a geological timescale. The Finnish deep burial model relies on clay around the canisters to restrict very long mobility.
The trouble is that no-one wants nuclear waste in their own back yard (except possibly the people whose jobs depend on nuclear reprocessing). The history of the nuclear arms race has left some pretty noxious messes. Certainly countries with large deserts and the right geological stability could usefully take on high tech nuclear waste dumping.
I much prefer the idea of placing the nuclear waste in dry worked out anhydrite mines in the most geologically stable places we can find. In the UK some of the best locations happen to be under very expensive real estate where the rich and powerful live.
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Unfortunately I expect we will end up with a bodged job. Greenpeace do not help by being against just about everything in the modern world.
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