Green news for the day:
Happy Birthday, nuclear disaster! It’s 30 years since the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island melted down.
TIME looks at how it changed the US energy industry, and asks: if the disaster hadn’t happened, and the nuclear industry had continued to grow unabated, would the country’s greenhouse emissions be significantly smaller?
Scientific American has some in-depth reports, including this great one on the robots that were used to clean up the disaster.
Earth Hour: the fallout. So, Earth Hour happened. The Boston Globe has picture — big pictures. Sydney power use dropped by about 9%, according to the SMH, but The Age reports that much of Melbourne was less enthusiastic.
Did you participate in Earth Hour? Or did you opt for Human Achievement Hour instead?
Is ecotourism inherently destructive? The Guardian’s John O’Mahony heads up the Amazon to look for monkeys, but ends up asking: can we visit the Amazon without destroying it?
It is idyllic: immensely biodiverse and sublimely beautiful, an ecotourist’s dream that makes it easy to forget all those statistics that mark this out as one of the most threatened regions on the planet – and suppress that niggling question of whether I should be here at all.
2 Comments
What do you mean, “disaster”?
No one was killed at Three Mile Island!
Perhaps you meant that the hysteria in the media
was a disaster for media ethics?
Or that the subsequent overreaction by the regulators
was a disaster for the development of later reactors?
Or that the setback to weaning us from coal
was a disaster for the greenhouse?
The commotion did provide a jackpot success for the disaster movie,
“China Syndrome” which was showing at the time,
a thriller which pumped horror into a credulous public.
(Better late than never? I sent this to Crikey but to this website 2 April.)
In his excellent overview Michael Grunwald describes its role in crippling nuclear power in the US. In my recent Crikey piece [http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20090305-Costellos-foolish-flirtation-with-nuclear-power.html#comments] I reported how it is simple economics that will prevent the much-heralded renaissance of nuclear power and not safety fears or other contentious issues. Grunwald provides hard data on why this has actually become much worse, not better as some have fondly imagined. I urge readers to examine the full articles but one or two things stand out. Despite up to 45 new applications for nuclear power plants in the US no hard investment decisions have been taken on a single new reactor (and remember that the last US reactor opened in 1996 after 25 years of enquiries, finance and construction delays outdoing even the Brits whose last reactor took a mere 14 years). Of course nuclear power has never stood on its own economic legs and relies upon endless subsidies, tax concessions and government guarantees not to mention government liability insurance including for the unsolved long-term waste handling (or as in France and China, the whole show is government financed and operated). Grunwald reports: “It turns out that new plants would be not just extremely expensive but spectacularly expensive. The first detailed cost estimate, filed by Florida Power & Light (FPL) came in at a shocking $12 billion to $18 billion.” He cites Amory Lovins calculations that “new nuclear wattage would cost more than twice as much as coal or gas and nearly three times as much as wind”. This is a little clue as to why no private interests (stock market, private companies etc) are seriously putting up the money for such plants. None of this is disputed by the actual industry. If advocates of Australian nuclear power, such as Peter Costello and Ziggy Switkowski are serious they need to demonstrate how Australia would magically avoid this economic lead balloon, and not just the ideological arm-waving they have given us to date.