Bernie Masters is a geologist/zoologist who spent 8 years as a member of the Western Australian Parliament. Married to Carolina since 1976 and living in south west WA, Bernie is involved in many community groups. This blog offers insights into politics, the environment and other issues that annoy or interest him. For something completely different, visit www.fiatechnology.com.au for information about vegetated floating islands - the natural way to improve water quality.
Taking aspirin once a week could cut the risk of developing some cancers by nearly 40 per cent, a new study has found.
Aspirin has
previously been linked to a reduction in the risk of bowel cancer, but
new research shows the power of the everyday painkiller may stretch to
other digestive tract cancers - including throat, esophageal, stomach
and intestinal.
Scientists looked at evidence from 113 studies investigating various
digestive cancers. The results showed regular use of aspirin - defined
as taking one or two tablets a week - was linked to a significant
reduction in the risk of developing all but one cancer.
The drug reduced the risk of developing cancer
of the gastric cardia (the part of the stomach that connects to the
oesophagus) and hepato-biliary (liver, gallbladder and bile ducts) by 39
per cent.
Bowel cancer was lowered by more than a quarter, oesophageal cancer
by more than a third, stomach cancer by 36 per cent and pancreatic
cancer by 22 per cent. Studies of head and neck cancer did not show a
significant reduction in risk.
The team also analysed the effect of aspirin dose and duration on
bowel cancer. A high daily dose (500 milligrams) could halve the risk of
developing bowel cancer with the effects lasting a decade, the
researchers found.
The study - the largest and most comprehensive analysis of the link
between aspirin and digestive cancers to date - was published in the
journal Annals of Oncology.
Dr Carlo La Vecchia, senior author from the University of Milan,
said: "The findings for pancreatic and other digestive tract cancers may
have implications for the prevention of these highly lethal diseases.
"People who are at high risk of the disease are most likely to gain the greatest benefits from aspirin."
The authors advise people to consult a doctor before taking aspirin for the prevention of cancer due to potential complications.
A week doesn’t pass without a mayor, governor, policymaker or pundit
joining the rush to demand, or predict, an energy future that is
entirely based on wind/solar and batteries, freed from the “burden” of
the hydrocarbons that have fueled societies for centuries. Regardless of
one’s opinion about whether, or why, an energy “transformation” is
called for, the physics and economics of energy combined with scale
realities make it clear that there is no possibility of anything
resembling a radically “new energy economy” in the foreseeable future.
Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities
“we need to bring math to the problem.”
He’s right. So, in my recent Manhattan Institute report, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,” I did just that. Herein, then, is a summary of some of bottom-line realities from the
underlying math. (See the full report for explanations, documentation
and citations.)
Realities About the Scale of Energy Demand
1. Hydrocarbons supply over 80% of world energy: If all that were in
the form of oil, the barrels would line up from Washington, D.C., to Los
Angeles, and that entire line would grow by the height of the
Washington Monument every week.
2. The small two percentage-point decline in the hydrocarbon share of
world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global
spending on alternatives over that period; solar and wind today supply
less than 2% of the global energy.
3. When the world’s four billion poor people increase energy use to
just one-third of Europe’s per capita level, global demand rises by an
amount equal to twice America’s total consumption.
4. A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace 5% of global oil demand.
5. Renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global
hydrocarbons in two decades. It took a half-century for global petroleum
production to expand “only” 10-fold.
6. Replacing U.S. hydrocarbon-based electric generation over the next
30 years would require a construction program building out the grid at a
rate 14-fold greater than any time in history.
7. Eliminating hydrocarbons to make U.S. electricity (impossible
soon, infeasible for decades) would leave untouched 70% of U.S.
hydrocarbons use—America uses 16% of world energy.
8. Efficiency increases energy demand by making products &
services cheaper: since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33%, the
economy grew 80% and global energy use is up 40%.
9. Efficiency increases energy demand: Since 1995, aviation fuel
use/passenger-mile is down 70%, air traffic rose more than 10-fold, and
global aviation fuel use rose over 50%.
10. Efficiency increases energy demand: since 1995, energy used per
byte is down about 10,000-fold, but global data traffic rose about a
million-fold; global electricity used for computing soared.
11. Since 1995, total world energy use rose by 50%, an amount equal to adding two entire United States’ worth of demand.
12. For security and reliability, an average of two months of
national demand for hydrocarbons are in storage at any time. Today,
barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored
in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million
electric cars in America.
13. Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory) can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electric demand.
14. To make enough batteries to store two-day’s worth of U.S.
electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the
Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory).
15. Every $1 billion in aircraft produced leads to some $5 billion in
aviation fuel consumed over two decades to operate them. Global
spending on new jets is more than $50 billion a year—and rising.
16. Every $1 billion spent on datacenters leads to $7 billion in
electricity consumed over two decades. Global spending on datacenters is
more than $100 billion a year—and rising.
Realities About Energy Economics
17. Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or
wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million
worth of shale well produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million
kWh over 30 years.
18. It costs about the same to build one shale well or two wind
turbines: the latter, combined, produces 0.7 barrels of oil (equivalent
energy) per hour, the shale rig averages 10 barrels of oil per hour.
19. It costs less than $0.50 to store a barrel of oil, or its
equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent
energy of a barrel of oil in batteries.
20. Cost models for wind and solar assume, respectively, 41% and 29%
capacity factors (i.e., how often they produce electricity). Real-world
data reveal as much as 10 percentage points less for both. That
translates into $3 million less energy produced than assumed over a
20-year life of a 2-MW $3 million wind turbine.
21. In order to compensate for episodic wind/solar output, U.S.
utilities are using oil- and gas-burning reciprocating engines (big
cruise-ship-like diesels); three times as many have been added to the
grid since 2000 as in the 50 years prior to that.
22. Wind-farm capacity factors have improving at about 0.7% per year;
this small gain comes mainly from reducing the number of turbines per
acre leading to 50% increase in average land used to produce a
wind-kilowatt-hour.
23. Over 90% of America’s electricity, and 99% of the power used in
transportation, comes from sources that can easily supply energy to the
economy any time the market demands it.
24. Wind and solar machines produce energy an average of 25%–30% of
the time, and only when nature permits. Conventional power plants can
operate nearly continuously and are available when needed.
25. The shale revolution collapsed the prices of natural gas &
coal, the two fuels that produce 70% of U.S. electricity. But electric
rates haven’t gone down, rising instead 20% since 2008. Direct and
indirect subsidies for solar and wind consumed those savings.
Mark P. Millsis
a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a McCormick School of
Engineering Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University, and author of Work in the Age of Robots, published by Encounter Books.
This could be it.
None of the contents are new or original, but in this
longer-than-an-average opinion piece, Bjorn Lomborg distils all the
elements of the argument he has been making for the past decade or two –
coincidentally, from a position of someone who is not a “climate change
denier” at all – into the perfect elixir of truth:
This year, the world will spend $US162 billion ($230bn) subsidising
renewable energy, propping up inefficient industries and supporting
middle-class homeowners to erect solar panels, according to the
International Energy Agency. In addition, the Paris Agreement on climate
change will cost the world from $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion a year
by 2030. Astonishingly, neither of these hugely expensive policies will
have any measurable impact on temperatures by the end of the century.
Climate campaigners want to convince us that not only should we
maintain these staggering costs, but that we should spend a fortune more
on climate change, since our very survival is allegedly at stake. But
they are mostly wrong, and we’re likely to end up wasting trillions
during the coming decades. I will outline how we could spend less, do a
better job addressing climate change, and help far more effectively
with many of the world’s other ills…
The present approach to climate change isn’t working. If fully
implemented, analysis of the leading climate-economic models shows that
the Paris Agreement will cost $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion every year
in slowed economic growth. Our response to climate change is so
expensive because alternative energy sources remain expensive and
inefficient in most scenarios. It is still very expensive to switch from
fossil fuels — hence the fortune being spent on subsidies, to little
overall effect.
I could easily quote the whole article, and maybe I should). This, in
my mind, has always been the problem with the current approach to the
greenhouse effect, which became global warming, which became climate
change, which most recently became climate emergency:
The actions proposed under all the relevant international
treaties and agreements so far to tackle the CO2 emissions will have a
negligible effect on global temperatures and climate while at the same
time sporting a mind-boggling price tag and therefore a dire impact on
economy and standard of life across the world.
This is because the world needs energy* and if that energy won’t be
provided by fossil fuels it has to be provided by various “alternative”,
“green”, “renewable” sources, which at this point in time are
significantly more expensive than traditional carbon-based energy.
To solve the problem of the high cost and save us the economic and
social consequences of such high cost, instead of subsidising the
renewables to make them more economical vis-a-vis coal and gas, we
should instead be investing in research to develop technologies that
will actually in the long term make the renewables cheaper than fossil
fuels and as reliable in provision of base power.
As Lomborg never tires of pointing out, people across the developing
world suffer from a multitude of problems which have nothing to do with
global temperatures, but are not as sexy as all the usual hot causes
that transfix the activists in the developed world, like climate change
or AIDS. They might not be sexy but they are relatively inexpensive to
fix and can have far-reaching positive implications for the world.
Imagine if some of the money we currently waste under the pious guise of
addressing climate change was redirected to such ends.
We should strive towards cheap and reliable renewable energy,
whether or not you believe that CO2 is harmful to the Earth. Fossil
fuels, while more abundant than their critics posit, are finite and
unevenly distributed. Renewables, on the other hand, have the potential
to democritise energy by bringing it to all those who currently lack a
sufficient supply on account of their paucity of natural resources or
the economic underdevelopment. Thus, they can help to break the vicious
cycle of poverty by spurring economic development with all its positive
externalities for the “bottom billion” or two.
Idiots like
members of Extinction Rebellion glueing themselves to busy
intersections for the cause of “100 per cent renewables by 2030” are
doing zilch to advance the debate or bring the solution any closer. As
it currently stands, you wouldn’t be able to go all-green without
completely collapsing our societies. The only way it can be achieved is
by making green energy cheap, and that, in turn, will only come about
through more research and development. You want to “save the world”?
Lobby governments to spend less on subsidies and green spivs and
rent-seekers and more on science and technology. Also, ditch animal
onesies and industrial glue and study science and engineering. We need
less Greta and more Bjorn.
*Not according to everyone; many on the post-industrial left see
climate change as a great opportunity to combat modern capitalism with
its “fetish” for economic growth. Take, for example, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff:
Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing
about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate
thing at all.” Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an attentive
poker face. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti
continued. “Because we really think of it as a
how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
In other words, some sort of socialism, a notion that would strike
old-style Marxists as ridiculous though they would no doubt appreciate
the naked and shameless cunning in the pursuit of one’s radical
political ends.
Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk, where this piece also appears.
Socialism is a global political movement that emerged from the French
Revolution. Its goal was to speak for the dispossessed, only sometimes
as a democratic political party. In all of its guises, it has been a
powerful political force in most of the world. In the United States,
however, it has been relegated to the political margins, seen largely as
alien to the American ethos. It has now emerged explicitly as a subject
of debate in American politics and therefore requires some thought.
Origin Stories
The important difference between socialism and capitalism – even more
important than what each actually preaches – is that capitalism is less
an intellectual or moral system than a reality born of the industrial
revolution. Socialism, on the other hand, has always been an
intellectual movement, crafted by intellectuals such as Saint-Simon,
Fourier, Lassalle and Marx, all of whom made the moral case for
socialism and imagined what such a system would look like. These
intellectuals loathed inequality and despised the intellectual
shallowness of the rich and sought to create a political movement that
could bring their vision to life. It was commandeered by politicians
such as Karl Kautsky in Germany, and Vladimir Lenin in Russia.
Socialism argued that the private ownership and control of investment
capital, which created the means of production, was flawed in two ways.
First, it diverted wealth from the common good to the private benefit of
the rich. Second, in investing on the basis of the highest return on
capital, capitalism neglected investment in social goods that had a
lower or no return on capital. It limited human possibilities.
In
general, socialism advocates a radical restructuring of society – the
means of production should be transferred to state control, and the
state should determine the investment strategy. There were three
underlying goals to this argument. First, that socialism would make
possible the political equality that wealth inequality did not allow
for. Second, that the state would produce for the common good, since
state officials would not profit from the decisions they made. Finally,
that the state would be controlled democratically, and therefore be
under control of the public.
Capitalism did not attempt to make
the case for itself. In fact, it was not something imagined and planned
for. It was the reality that emerged alongside the Industrial
Revolution. The industrial revolution could not develop without
investment, and the investors hoped to make a profit, and that profit
was reinvested. The capitalists’ wealth came to dwarf that of the old
European aristocracy, and it grew larger as capitalists pursued more
wealth. The capitalist did not contemplate the virtue of wealth, or the
effects of industrialism on the human condition. The capitalist
considered the moment and acted on it. Capitalism was not an ideology,
nor did intellectuals defend it until the 20th century, when Hayek and
Friedman, among others, sought to make the moral case. In the United
States, capitalists bound their work to Christian notions of charity,
but they had no systematic vision of their own.
Capitalism’s
greatest explicator was Adam Smith, who wrote “The Wealth of Nations.”
In it, he described how individual decisions, driven by self-interest,
would culminate in an increase in the wealth of nations. In one of his
lesser-read books, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith made the
argument that moral principles do not derive from external theories (by
which he implicitly meant socialism and religion) but rather from
pragmatic, necessary solutions to problems. So, Smith’s ultimate defense
of capitalism is that it worked. But by this he meant that it maximized
wealth – not that it limited inequality.
The capitalists
determined where money was invested, based on expectations of returns on
capital. In this sense, they controlled the direction capitalism would
go, in that they didn’t care where it went so long as their wealth
increased. From this came the towering structures of Euro-American
civilization, along with the reality that the wealth of nations left
vast swaths of society serving the system as workers and excluded many
others from the system. Human action usually comes at the expense of
others.
Reallocating Capital
The socialist argument was
that, so long as capitalists pursued their own immediate interests, the
wealth of society would accumulate in their hands, and the matters of
inequality and poverty would not be addressed. At the core of the
socialist argument was that the very indifference to ideology by the
capitalists would create vast wealth for the few, without alleviating
the suffering of the many. Therefore, there had to be a reallocation of
capital. Some capital would go toward easing the suffering of the
excluded. But even more would go to the state, which would assume
responsibility for investment. The state was a superior agent of
investment the individuals making investment decisions would either be
civil servants or an elected representative of the people, and, having
no personal interest in the outcome, would make the best decisions
possible based on democratically defined ends.
The clash between
capitalism and socialism has many dimensions, but the most important is
this: Capitalist investment is not centralized. Investment capital comes
from many sources, and there are countless investors making decisions.
The diversification of capital limits the consequences of any single
decision. It makes capitalism vulnerable to cycles and fads, but
devastation is not the same as annihilation. It can and (and regularly
does) recover from devastation. But the emphasis is on what the
investment process can recover from, not the havoc that the devastation
might cause to the public.
Socialism places confidence in the
state, and control of the state in the hands of the public. The public
as a whole has an understanding of what it needs but is not sensitive to
the price paid. The state, then, must either abide by the will of the
many or make investment decisions regardless of the public will, but for
the good of the public (or at least what the state regards as their
good). Since the state is an abstraction, the decisions are actually
made by state officials. Given the vastness of the decisions made by the
state, it must devolve to an army of civil servants who individually
hold minimal power, but who collectively would take the place of
investors, unbound by the demand of self-interest.
Democratic
socialism cannot be democratic because of the scope and scale of modern
economies. It either evolves in a Soviet direction, to name one extreme,
or, as in oft-cited Sweden, leaves most investment decisions to private
investors, taxing them and transferring money to the rest of society.
In the Soviet model, the state tries to manage mid-level civil servants
by terrifying them with death. In the Swedish model, the battle is
formed by demands of increasing social benefits and decreasing
investment capital.
Under capitalism, the diversification of
capital sources protects against bad decisions made by centralized
governments. But it must, by its nature, create inequality and
occasional social crisis. The flow of money into the hands of the
investor class must generate crises as industries are shut down and as
new ones are created. The speed of what Joseph Schumpeter called
“creative destruction” generates rapid and intense crises that can turn
just as rapidly into social unrest, chaos or repression. Capitalism has
generally solved this in the same way that social democracy has: It has
left investment to private investors and then imposed taxes on them to
cushion social dislocation.
In short, the distinction between
modern industrial capitalism and social democracy is minimal. Leaving
aside socialist fantasies about the abolition of greed or capitalist
fantasies in which a state will expect nothing from its citizens, the
two systems have more or less merged. Capitalists and socialists accept
private investment. Both expect economies to grow and from that growth
they will pay taxes. In both Sweden and the United States, taxes are
hated by the public, but the benefits are loved. Still, the political
system decides the taxes and the politicians do what they were meant to
do in a democracy – pander to the public. What may differentiate one
politician from the next is the amount of taxation they propose, but
even that is used to balance the system.
Even within today’s
hybrid system, democratic socialism has risen as a topic of debate
within the Democratic Party. I would argue that the reasons for the
emergence can be explained this way. The Democratic Party was defeated
by Donald Trump in the last presidential election because he seemed to
speak for the interests of the industrial working class that is in
decline. This class had been the foundation of the New Deal coalition
that had dominated the Democrats and from which the Democrats shifted,
focusing instead on other sectors of society.
The conversation
around socialism in the Democratic Party represents an attempt to woo
the voters feeling intense pain who voted for Trump. Whether this group
will respond is a key question. For the most part, the conversation will
appeal most to those already committed to the Democratic left. That is
where the battle is going on now. So it seems designed to win the
Democratic nomination and lose the general election. But I am not a
politician, so they may see things I can’t. What I can say is that the
discussion of socialism is purely symbolic and intended to indicate a
commitment to unspecified radical change. But structurally, there is
little there that can substantially change the economic system, because
there has been a massive convergence between the socialists rising from
the French Revolution and the industrialists rising in the factories of
Edinburgh. The debate is functionally archaic – but perhaps of some
symbolic power.
In hindsight, the
Coalition’s win on May 18 should not have been a surprise. As numerous media
commentators are now pointing out, Bill Shorten was not well liked, his
policies made the ALP a big target for criticism and fear-mongering from a
range of non-Labor sources and the election wasn’t a defacto referendum on
Australia’s climate change policies, regardless of how much activists wanted it
to be so.
The most obvious conclusion
to draw from the election is that voters readily differentiate between state
and federal issues. Labor was hoping the low Coalition vote in the most recent Victorian
and West Australian elections would be reflected in federal voting intentions.
This didn’t happen and instead voters in those two states assessed the policies
and personalities of the various parties and decided to maintain the status quo.
It’s clear that
climate change was not the issue that Labor, the Greens and GetUp! were telling
us it was. In Queensland, the ALP was devastated electorally because voters put
jobs above climate change. In Tony Abbott’s seat, while ‘independent’ Zali
Steggall may have campaigned on climate-related issues, voters are more likely
to have decided that, after 25 years and with no prospects of Abbott returning
to the ministry, it was time for a change.
GetUp! also had a
dismay result. They focused on seven Coalition seats and only one of these
seats changed hands – in Warringah, Tony Abbott lost for reasons that I believe
had nothing to do with climate change and not because Warringah voters suddenly
changed from being blue-ribbon conservative Liberal supporters to green
activist supporters.
And let’s not forget
the hypocrisy of Getup! and other losers in this election. Their national
director said that the election results were disappointing ‘as it shows fear
campaigns have successfully divided us’, yet GetUp! and various green groups
based their own climate change campaigning on fear – we only have 10 years to save
the planet!
The union movement can
take no joy from Saturday’s results. Not only did their hand-picked man Bill
Shorten lose and announce his retirement as opposition leader but, out of the
16 seats they targeted around Australia, 15 of those seats remain unchanged.
Still on climate, according
to The Australian, 14 independent candidates signed a climate change pledge
under the heading ‘Independence Day’. Only 3 of the 13 were successful –
Steggall who as stated above almost certainly didn’t win on her climate change
policies; Andrew Wilkie who was going to win anyway because of his personal
popularity; and Rebekha Sharkie who also was a sitting member, up against
Alexander Downer’s daughter in a country where the promise of political
dynasties generally do not attract a great deal of support – e.g., Hanna
Beasley failed to win her WA seat in spite of her father’s high profile as the
state’s governor and his long political history.
There were other
issues. The Australian reported on a swing against Labor in outer Sydney seats
where voters had voted against same sex marriage at the referendum in 2017.
Quadrant magazine
suggested 11 important reasons why the ALP lost the election. You can make up your
own mind on the actual or relative importance of each of these reasons but here
they are for your edification:
11.Bob
Brown’s motor convoy from Tasmania to the Galilee Basin in April to protest the
Adani mine
10. Shorten’s offer to public broadcasters of
massive bribes to guarantee their support
9.The
shredding of Israel Folau’s $4 million rugby contract for quoting the Bible’s
disapproval of homosexuality
8. The Tasmanian Parliament’s decision in
April to drop the sex of babies from birth certificates
7.Clive
Palmer
6.The
birth of royal baby Archie to Meghan and Prince Harry on May 6
5.As
a slogan, “Real action on climate change” turned out to be a loser
4.The
children’s climate marches
3.Taking
the politics of social division as his key to The Lodge, Shorten set out to
divide voters by age
Human-caused climate change is real. It’s a
problem that has to be addressed so that global levels of atmospheric CO2 are
reduced, but we still have several decades before it’s too late (and even if we
do nothing, human beings have a wonderful propensity to adapt!).
The problem for Australia is that we
produce about 1.4% of global CO2 emissions. With atmospheric CO2 levels increasing
by about 4 parts per million every year, we’re responsible for 0.056 parts per
million, with developing countries adding between 1.6 and 2.4 parts per million
each year. In other words, Australia could radically change its economy
overnight and go carbon free tomorrow, but our CO2 savings would be swamped by
the increased emissions from China alone within 19 days! So spending between 200
billion and one trillion dollars (depending who you want to believe) is a severe
waste of our taxpayer money.
But Australia is a rich country and there
is support for us doing our fair share to help combat what is a global problem
of which we are part. So what do we do?
Contrary to what some climate change
commentators claim, we still don’t have the technological solutions needed to
allow the world to go carbon free while still providing energy to a world where
a billion people still live in poverty and another 2 or 3 million are desperate
to raise their standards of living. Yes, we can generate electricity cheaply
with renewable solar and wind but we still need batteries or pumped hydro or
some other way of storing that energy in a way that will provide dispatchable,
non-intermittent, affordable and industrial-scale energy. Regardless of what
the activists say, such technologies simply do not exist (with the possible exception
of nuclear power but it remains expensive and socially unpopular in Australia).
So, Australia is rich, we’re contributing
to a global problem and we should be doing our fair share. I believe we should
radically change the way we’re spending taxpayer money in Australia and redirect
most of it into finding and developing the technologies the world still lacks
if we are to become a carbon-free world. We should therefore be putting our
money into the CSIRO, our universities and private industry to undertake the R&D
and commercialisation on these needed new technologies.
We can do no bigger favour to the citizens
of developing countries and to the entire world than to use our brains and
imagination to find the technological solutions to their and our problems.
Throwing more money at rooftop solar or even large solar farms located hundreds
of kilometres from infrastructure and with no nearby industries wanting to use
such energy is inefficient and just plain stupid.
If
we really want to save the planet, we have to think globally and develop new energy-related
technologies that we can sell or give to a world desperate for effective
solutions to the problems of climate change.
Science 22 Feb 2019: Vol. 363, Issue 6429, pp. 806-809 DOI: 10.1126/science.363.6429.806
Billed as safe and cheap, NuScale's small reactors aim to revive the ailing nuclear industry and help save a warming planet.
To a world facing the existential threat of
global warming, nuclear power would appear to be a lifeline. Advocates
say nuclear reactors, compact and able to deliver steady, carbon-free
power, are ideal replacements for fossil fuels and a way to slash
greenhouse gas emissions. However, in most of the world, the nuclear
industry is in retreat. The public continues to distrust it, especially
after three reactors melted down in a 2011 accident at the Fukushima
Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. Nations also continue to dither
over what to do with radioactive reactor waste. Most important, with new
reactors costing $7 billion or more, the nuclear industry struggles to
compete with cheaper forms of energy, such as natural gas. So even as
global temperatures break one record after another, just one nuclear
reactor has turned on in the United States in the past 20 years.
Globally, nuclear power supplies just 11% of electrical power, down from
a high of 17.6% in 1996.
Jose Reyes, a nuclear engineer
and cofounder of NuScale Power, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, says
he and his colleagues can revive nuclear by thinking small. Reyes and
NuScale's 350 employees have designed a small modular reactor (SMR) that
would take up 1% of the space of a conventional reactor. Whereas a
typical commercial reactor cranks out a gigawatt of power, each NuScale
SMR would generate just 60 megawatts. For about $3 billion, NuScale
would stack up to 12 SMRs side by side, like beer cans in a six-pack, to
form a power plant.
But size alone isn't a panacea. “If I
just scale down a large reactor, I'll lose, no doubt,” says Reyes, 63, a
soft-spoken native of New York City and son of Honduran and Dominican
immigrants. To make their reactors safer, NuScale engineers have
simplified them, eliminating pumps, valves, and other moving parts while
adding safeguards in a design they say would be virtually impervious to
meltdown. To make their reactors cheaper, the engineers plan to
fabricate them whole in a factory instead of assembling them at a
construction site, cutting costs enough to compete with other forms of
energy.
Spun out of nearby Oregon State University (OSU)
here in 2007, NuScale has spent more than $800 million on its
design—$288 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the rest
mainly from NuScale's backer, the global engineering and construction
firm Fluor. The design is now working its way through licensing with the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the company has lined up a
first customer, a utility association that wants to start construction
on a plant in Idaho in 2023.
NuScale is far from alone.
With similar projects rising in China and Russia, the company is riding a
global wave of interest in SMRs. “SMRs as a class have a potential to
change the economics,” says Robert Rosner, a physicist at the University
of Chicago in Illinois who co-wrote a 2011 report on them. In the
United States, NuScale is the only company seeking to license and build
an SMR. Rosner is optimistic about its prospects. “NuScale has really
made the case that they'll be able to pull it off,” Rosner says.
For
now, NuScale's reactors exist mostly as computer models. But in an
industrial area north of town here, the company has built a full-size
mock-up of the upper portion of a reactor. Festooned with pipes, the
8-meter-tall gray cylinder isn't exactly small. It resembles the conning
tower of a submarine, one that has somehow surfaced through the dusty
ground. NuScale built it to see if workers could squeeze inside for
inspections, says Ben Heald, a NuScale reactor designer. “It's a great
marketing tool.”
Not everyone thinks NuScale will make
the transition from mock-up to reality, however. Dozens of advanced
reactor designs have come and gone. And even if NuScale and other
startups succeed, the nuclear industry won't build enough plants quickly
enough to matter in the fight against climate change, says Allison
Macfarlane, a professor of public policy and geologist at George
Washington University in Washington, D.C., who chaired NRC from 2012
through 2014. “Nuclear does not do anything quickly,” she says.
A NUCLEAR REACTOR
is a glorified boiler. Within its core hang ranks of fuel rods, usually
filled with pellets of uranium oxide. The radioactive uranium atoms
spontaneously split, releasing energy and neutrons that go on to split
more uranium atoms in a chain reaction called fission. Heat from the
chain reaction ultimately boils water to drive steam turbines and
generate electricity. Designs vary (see sidebar, p. 809),
but 85% of the world's 452 power reactors circulate water through the
core to cool it and ferry heat to a steam generator that drives a
turbine.
The water plays a second safety role. Power
reactors typically use a fuel with a small amount of the fissile isotope
uranium-235. The dilute fuel sustains a chain reaction only if the
neutrons are slowed to increase the probability that they'll split other
atoms. The cooling water itself serves to slow, or moderate, the
neutrons. If that water is lost in an accident, fission fizzles,
preventing a runaway chain reaction like the one that blew up a
graphite-moderated reactor in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
in Ukraine.
Even after the chain reaction dies, however,
heat from the radioactive decay of nuclei created by fission can melt
the core. That happened at Fukushima when a tsunami swamped the
emergency generators needed to pump water through the plant's reactors.
NuScale's
design would reduce such risks in multiple ways. First, in an accident
the small cores would produce far less decay heat. NuScale engineers
have also cut out the pumps that drive the cooling water through the
core, relying instead on natural convection. That design eliminates
moving parts that could fail and cause an accident in the first place,
says Eric Young, a NuScale engineer. “If it's not there, it can't
break,” he says.
NuScale's new reactor housings offer
further protection. A conventional reactor sits within a reinforced
concrete containment vessel up to 40 meters in diameter. Each
3-meter-wide NuScale reactor nestles into its own 4.6-meter-wide steel
containment vessel, which by virtue of its much smaller diameter can
withstand pressures 15 times greater. The vessels sit submerged in a
vast pool of water: NuScale's ultimate line of defense.
For
example, in an emergency, operators can cool the core by diverting
steam from the turbines to heat exchangers in the pool. During normal
operations, the space between the reactor and the containment vessel is
kept under vacuum, like a thermos, to insulate the core and allow it to
heat up. But if the reactor overheats, relief valves would pop open to
release steam and water into the vacuum space, where they would transfer
heat to the pool. Such passive features ensure that in just about any
conceivable accident, the core would remain intact, Reyes says.
To
prove that the reactor will behave as predicted, NuScale engineers have
constructed a one-third scale model. A 7-metertall tangle of pipes,
valves, and wires lurks in the corner of a lab at OSU's department of
nuclear engineering. The model aims not to run exactly like the real
reactor, Young says, but rather to validate the computer models that NRC
will use to evaluate the design's safety. The model's core heats water
not with nuclear fuel but with 56 electric heaters like those in curling
irons, Young says. “It's like a big percolator,” he says. “We set up a
test and watch coffee being made for 3 days.”
Making a
reactor smaller has a downside, says M. V. Ramana, a physicist at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. A smaller reactor
will extract less energy from every ton of fuel, he argues, driving up
operating costs. “There's a reason reactors became larger,” Ramana says.
“Inherently, NuScale is giving up the advantages of economies of
scale.”
But small size pays off in versatility, Reyes
says. One little reactor might power a plant to desalinate seawater or
supply heat for an industrial process. A customized NuScale plant might
support a developing country's smaller electrical grid. And in the
developed world, where intermittent renewable sources are growing
rapidly, a full 12-pack of reactors could provide steady power to make
up for the fitful output of windmills and solar panels. By varying the
number of reactors producing power, a NuScale plant could “load follow”
and fill in the gaps, Reyes says.
SUCH VISIONS
point to another key aspect of NuScale's plans: Designers want to
dramatically change how nuclear plants are organized and run. Under NRC
regulations, a control room can operate no more than two reactors, in
which case it must have a staff of at least six operators. NuScale wants
permission to run a dozen of their simpler, safer reactors from such a
control room. “People have laughed at me when I said I could run this
plant with six people,” says NuScale senior operations engineer Ross
Snuggerud.
To show that it's possible, NuScale engineers
built a fully operational control room to run a virtual power plant.
The control room, locked away on the second floor of NuScale's building
in an industrial park along the Willamette River, has a wall of jumbo
high-resolution monitors that display the 12 virtual reactors'
performance. On a recent day, Snuggerud manipulates a touch screen to
cook up a mock crisis. Reactivity spikes in one of the 12 virtual
reactors. Graphite control rods, which should drop into the core to
absorb neutrons and stop the reaction, fail to respond.
An
alarm sounds. Lights flash. The core's temperature surges. But the
NuScale reactor handles the crisis with ease. Within minutes,
temperatures fall as the reactor automatically shunts heat into the
pool. So is melting the core impossible? “No responsible engineer would
say ‘never,’” Snuggerud says. “But we've done a lot of things right to
ensure the core's integrity.”
NuScale engineers must convince NRC that a real
plant would run as placidly. Two years ago, the company submitted its
12,000-page application, and the review should conclude by September
2020. The NuScale team has plenty of experience with such reviews. While
Reyes was at OSU, he helped NRC certify two conventional Westinghouse
designs. If approved, NuScale's design would be the first that NRC has
licensed since 2014.
NuScale has responded to more than
1500 formal requests for more information, about a third of the typical
number, says Carrie Fosaaen, a licensing specialist at NuScale. “I think
that speaks volumes about what we put together up front,” she says.
Still, Fosaaen says, “Our design is so different that it's a challenge
even for people who have done a lot of licensing.”
If
interpreted strictly, Fosaaen says, NRC regulations would push NuScale
engineers toward building a miniature version of a conventional
reactor—exactly what they don't want to do. So the task, she says, is to
explain to regulators how the NuScale design is safe without having to
add back layers of complexity.
Some of NuScale's
requests are bold. The company has asked NRC to eliminate a requirement
for backup electrical power because its reactors can shut down without
power. Similarly, NuScale wants to avoid a requirement for an emergency
evacuation zone 32 kilometers wide, arguing its reactors pose no risk of
spreading radiation beyond the plant boundary. Such a rule change would
enable a utility to replace an aging coal plant with a NuScale plant in
a populated area. “That's something that utilities really want,” Reyes
says.
Such requests strike one prominent critic as
hubris. Nuclear safety relies on layers of protection, says Edwin Lyman,
a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.,
and NuScale is peeling them away to cut costs. “To say that you know so
well how a new reactor will work that you don't need an emergency
evacuation zone, that's just dangerous and irresponsible,” he says.
However, Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, says NuScale's requests are
reasonable and likely to win approval. “I would disagree that they're
removing safety features,” he says. “Quite the opposite.”
NUSCALE ENGINEERS ARE ITCHING
to build a real plant. The company has a tentative deal with Utah
Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), a consortium of 46 public
utilities in six western states, to build a 12-pack plant at DOE's Idaho
National Laboratory near Idaho Falls as part of UAMPS's carbon-free
power project. As DOE's lead nuclear energy lab, Idaho National
Laboratory would use one module for research and another to supply the
lab with power. The other 10 modules would feed the grid. UAMPS should
decide this year about the plant, which would be built by 2027.
NuScale
expects other customers to follow. “There are many companies that don't
want to be first but would clearly like to be second in line,” says Tom
Mundy, NuScale's chief commercial officer. According to a 2014 report
by the National Nuclear Laboratory in Sellafield, U.K., by 2035 SMRs
could provide 65 to 85 gigawatts of power globally, a building spree
worth between $320 billion and $510 billion. Engineers in Argentina,
China, Russia, and South Korea have all developed SMR designs. However,
because of the quality of its design, “internationally, NuScale is going
to be a formidable competitor,” Rosner predicts.
To
succeed, NuScale will have to compete with cheap natural gas. The
company aims to produce electricity at a total cost, including
construction and operations, of $65 per megawatt-hour. That's about 20%
higher than the current cost of energy from a gas-powered plant.
However, Rosner says, “The price of gas isn't going to stay low
forever.” Countries also could put a price on carbon emissions, which
would drive up the cost of fossil-fuel power. In fact, a September 2018
report from MIT indicated that a carbon tax could make nuclear
competitive with gas.
Nuclear power could face even
stiffer competition from renewable sources of energy such as wind and
solar power, which are getting cheaper and cheaper, Ramana says. And
given the numbers, Lyman says he expects NuScale will find few
customers—and that's only if DOE subsidizes the deals, as it has for
UAMPS. “I just don't see this tsunami of small reactors around the
world,” he says, “and it's because the economics is so bad.” But like
many experts, Reyes argues that an energy economy based on renewables
will require some form of steady “baseload” power—and nuclear, unlike
gas, can deliver it without carbon emissions.
Although
NuScale is eager to break ground in the United States, an indicator of
its prospects may come from across the Atlantic. To reduce carbon
emissions, the United Kingdom has committed to shuttering its remaining
seven coal-fired power plants by 2025. It could replace them with
gas-fired plants, but NuScale is trying to persuade U.K. government
officials to make a bolder choice and opt for its nuclear plants. “We
are not a concept, we are not a technology that is still on the drawing
board,” Mundy says. “We're real.” A few years should tell whether that's
true.
History contains many lessons that current politicians and governments need to understand.
In the 1980s, with Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in charge of the federal Labor government, the Liberal Party took a decision to support the government in the Senate and pass legislation that was deemed to be good for the future of the nation. The Liberals didn't abandon their role as the official 'opposition' but Hawke and Keating were prepared to stand up to the unions and propose legislation that would harm the union movement but bring long term benefits for all Australians.
To the small number of Liberal MPs who believed their only goal in life was to win government and hence to oppose everything, this decision to support the Hawke/Keating government was unacceptable. Yet, just a few years later in 1996, John Howard's team won government and ruled for the next 11 years, longer than either of the Hawke or Keating terms of government.
Under Howard's good governance and with the benefits flowing on from the financial and economic decisions made in the 1980s with Liberal support, Australia safely weathered the 2008 global financial crisis and is still enjoying the world's longest period of continuous economic growth - 28 years and counting.
What has all this got to do with Labor's Mark McGowan and the WA Labor government? Well, right now, McGowan is being challenged by the CFMMEU, one of the most left-wing and militant unions in Australia. Christy Cain from the MUA (which is in the process of merging with the CFMEU) is attempting to intimidate McGowan by calling him 'average' and saying he's no friend of his. In contrast, he can only say good things about federal ALP leader Bill Shorten who he describes as well balanced and a good leader.
The problem is that Shorten is beholden to the union movement and has agreed to wind back industrial relation laws to give unions more power and to force Australian companies like BHP to use Australian-crewed ships, significantly increasing costs and hence reducing Australia's competitiveness.
If Liberal MPs want to see good government should Shorten and the ALP win government in May's federal election, they should offer their bipartisan support to Mark McGowan in his fight with the unions. To do this will send a message to Shorten and his union mates that the Liberal Party supports good governance and good legislation, implying that a Shorten Labor government's payoffs to the union movement will be vigorously opposed in the Senate but it may be able to get good legislation through the Senate with Liberal Party support (remembering that the Senate is expected to be controlled by independents and possibly the Greens after May's election).
It's two years until the next state election here in WA and voters like to know that their government is running the state well. But voters also like to know that the opposition won't just oppose everything regardless of its merit but will support good legislation. If McGowan capitulates to the excessive demands of the union movement, the vast majority of West Australians will suffer, remembering that employee membership of unions currently stands at 14%. If McGowan is seen to be supported by Liberal MPs in his fight with the unions, both Labor and Liberals will be seen in a good light by voters.
Only the militant unions will be the losers, should the Liberal Party and its MPs support McGowan.
