The Guardian has reported this morning that:
The US and 18 other countries have pledged to double funds for clean energy research to a total of $20bn over five years, boosting a parallel initiative by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and increasing the prospects for successful agreement at the Paris climate negotiations that start on Monday.
So that's near enough £13 billion over 5 years or £2.6 billion a year split between 18 countries, or in our case, assuming we get a double weighting as we're bigger than average, £300 million a year.
And we're meant to celebrate that?
To put that in context, that's the same sum as we gave to just 500 people in capital gains tax entrepreneur's relief in 2013-14 when the total cost of that one tax relief was £2.7 billion in a year.
Do we really think that this is all climate change is worth?
Are our hopes so low?
I despair.
And offer Climate QE as a real alternative.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Last time I looked, Bill Gates was making a big financial investment in nuclear energy research, which is hardly the type of “clean energy” the world needs more of.
While nuclear has perceived economic advantages as a baseload energy source, its obvious environmental and military risks would mean moving from one existential threat to an even bigger one.
The frying pan and fire come to mind!
This seems a rather shallow dismissal of nuclear energy. The environmental impacts of nuclear fission are far below those of fossil fuel plants, and the safety record far better. And the energy density, efficiency and operational reliability vastly above “natural” distributed sources like wind and solar. The key thing in nuclear is responsible management of power stations and long-term waste storage — which to first order means avoiding outsourcing and commercial incentives to cut corners on safety.
Military risks… you mean the appeal as a target, or as a source of bomb material? We already have plenty of paramilitary action, and plenty of nuclear power plants, and those threats have not yet come to pass, even with less safe reactors than those built nowadays. They are threats, but not obviously at a level that would override any rational cost-benefit analysis.
I fully agree that $20bn over 5 years is pathetic. But green technology R&D should include nuclear power improvements, particularly on nuclear fusion — which we know exists in nature, and which would be exceptionally clean, but whose civilian exploitation has been woefully underfunded for decades… no wonder the research moves so slowly.
“The environmental impacts of nuclear fission are far below those of fossil fuel plants, and the safety record far better.”
By what bizarre statistical measures can you possible make that statement??
Does your “rational cost-benefit analysis” exclude the effects of radioactive pollution of the entire world?
The only “safe” nuclear fusion is the sun, which is fortunately a very very long way away from us and can power our entire energy needs many times over if we just applied the necessary funding into its capture, storage and distribution.
“Burning” any other fuel source on earth has to be measured primarily by its full external costs to the planet and all its species.
I do have mild hope for fusion, but will need persuasion
Hi Keith,
Try this on generalised environmental impact and public safety:
“In terms of lives lost per unit of energy generated, nuclear power has caused fewer accidental deaths per unit of energy generated than all other major sources of energy generation. Energy produced by coal, petroleum, natural gas and hydropower has caused more deaths per unit of energy generated, from air pollution and energy accidents. This is found in the following comparisons, when the immediate nuclear related deaths from accidents are compared to the immediate deaths from these other energy sources,[38] when the latent, or predicted, indirect cancer deaths from nuclear energy accidents are compared to the immediate deaths from the above energy sources,[40][41][176] and when the combined immediate and indirect fatalities from nuclear power and all fossil fuels are compared, fatalities resulting from the mining of the necessary natural resources to power generation and to air pollution.[177] With these data, the use of nuclear power has been calculated to have prevented in the region of 1.8 million deaths between 1971 and 2009, by reducing the proportion of energy that would otherwise have been generated by fossil fuels, and is projected to continue to do so.[178][179]”
from, yes, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Accidents_and_safety.2C_the_human_and_financial_costs
What statistical measures are you using?
Here’s more on safety, focusing on fatalities at nuclear plants:
“These three significant accidents [Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima] occurred during more than 16,000 reactor-years of civil operation. Of all the accidents and incidents, only the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents resulted in radiation doses to the public greater than those resulting from the exposure to natural sources. The Fukushima accident resulted in some radiation exposure of workers at the plant, but not such as to threaten their health, unlike Chernobyl. Other incidents (and one ‘accident’) have been completely confined to the plant.
Apart from Chernobyl, no nuclear workers or members of the public have ever died as a result of exposure to radiation due to a commercial nuclear reactor incident.”
from http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/safety-of-nuclear-power-reactors/ (Vested interest, you cry? Perhaps, but it’s quite balanced and factual and I trust it a *lot* further than polemics from major environmental NGOs, who have a lot of tragic history in misrepresenting data.)
On military risks, from that last article:
“It should be emphasised that a commercial-type power reactor simply cannot under any circumstances explode like a nuclear bomb — the fuel is not enriched beyond about 5%, and much higher enrichment is needed for explosives.”
and
“New reactor designs have features of passive safety, which may help. In the United States, the NRC carries out “Force on Force” (FOF) exercises at all Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) sites at least once every three years.”
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_safety_and_security
Any “rational cost-benefit analysis” includes the effects of radioactive pollution of the whole world, at the appropriate likelihood… which based on that 16000 reactor years over 6 decades, is exceedingly small. Even old, mismanaged sites like the 4 reactors at Fukushima did not lead to any identified radiation fatalities when hit by a combination of earthquake and tsunami, let alone pollute the whole world.
Not sure why you would say that fusion power (if made to work) would not be safe. Try these, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Safety_and_the_environment :
“Catastrophic accidents that release radioactivity to the environment or injury to non-staff are not possible, unlike fission reactors. Nuclear fusion is very unlike nuclear fission: fusion requires extremely precise and controlled temperature, pressure and magnetic field parameters for any net energy to be produced along with a far smaller amount of fuel. If a reactor suffers damage or loses even a small degree of required control, fusion reactions and heat generation would rapidly cease.[166] Therefore, fusion reactors are considered extremely safe.[167]
Runaway reactions cannot occur in a fusion reactor.”
“in the case of a fire it is possible that the lithium stored on-site could be burned up and escape. In this case, the tritium contents of the lithium would be released into the atmosphere, posing a radiation risk. Calculations suggest that at about 1 kg the total amount of tritium and other radioactive gases in a typical power plant would be so small that they would have diluted to legally acceptable limits by the time they blew as far as the plant’s perimeter fence.[169]”
“In general terms, fusion reactors would create far less radioactive material than a fission reactor, the material it would create is less damaging biologically, and the radioactivity “burns off” within a time period that is well within existing engineering capabilities for safe long-term waste storage.”
The tone of your comment implies to me that you don’t know any details of nuclear power, except that it’s defined to be BAD. That’s a very naive and self-defeating position.
I simply look at Sizewell and know that there will be no coast around there in a hundred years or so and wonder how anyone will sustain safety of two unused power stations on that site on what will then be a very difficult to maintain artificial island and know that all your stats are meaningless
Richard, I’m disappointed: this comes close to “anything nuclear is automatically so bad that I don’t need to look at any of that thar fancy-schmancy evidence”. The sort off ideological line that you’re usually so good at picking others up on.
Youre right: climate change and sea level rise is a serious logistical problem for all power stations, not just nuclear ones. It’s undoubtedly something that needs to be included in the risk assessment for building new nukes, as well as the lifetime management plan for existing sites… and I’m sure it is. But this does not automatically make it an unsolveable problem, nor an existential threat.
And those risks need to be considered against the very considerable evidence that nuclear is the safest and most environmentally sound current power source per unit of energy. David Mackay has a very nice graph illustrating the “death per gigawatt-year” rates of various generation technologies: http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml And here’s a more up-to-date study that reached the same conclusion: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
It seems to me that when there is good evidence that a technology is safe in operation, but could be cheaper, and greener (fusion), and needs development to protect against factors like sea level change, nuclear R&D should absolutely be part of Green Infrastructure / Climate Change funding, by QE or otherwise.
No it is you ducking the issue
Safe in iooperation in the case of nuclear is beyond the time scale of any knbown technology
That is beyond knonw safety parameters
I thought that aged 12 when I first opposed it. 45 years later no one has answered the question how it is made safe
I think that is because it is not possible
Andy, I’ve read your articles with interest. I’m not a nuclear expert by any means but have taken an interest since childhood as I lived within a few miles of Daresbury Nuclear Research Laboratory and our next door neighbour was one of the scientists there. I remember him once saying that the problem with nuclear technology is not the science, it is the people who decide on the level of risk to expose the population to as part of advancing it that should be considered dangerous.
I accept the scientific and economic argument for nuclear and read David Mackay’s excellent book several years ago. The problem for me is the potentially catastrophic nature of even a single nuclear incident. If we build nuclear sites that are not 100% guaranteed safe, then we are accepting that a catastrophic incident is just waiting to happen.
I would happily have solar panels or geothermal heat exchangers at my house, live next door to a solar farm, out of earshot of a wind farm and within a safe range of any large scale geothermal, hydroelectric, wave or tidal power station. I cannot say the same for nuclear, coal, oil or even gas.
When the UK parliament grants permission for a nuclear power station in the centre of London just across the river from Westminster, I might be willing to think again!
Again this sounds like ideology over evidence. So you regard nuclear fission as a no-no because it requires long-term waste management? (As in the link above, this is a much smaller issue for fusion due to relatively very short half-lives.)
This seems to be ignoring quite concrete evidence on relative safety both in normal operation and in terms of major accidents, in favour of the bogeyman of long-term management which have not come to pass in 50 years of commercial operation. Which is not to minimise the problems nor to say that everything has been well managed (especially when commercial cost-cutting incentives have been allowed to get in the way), but that the doom-mongering has not come to pass.
By comparison, fossil fuel plants are more dangerous in many conventional ways because at least nuclear plants don’t fundamentally work with flammable & explosive materials, and they all share the risks of pressurised steam systems. Wind power, especially offshore, has a fairly high rate of maintenance accidents, hence how the fatality / unit energy breakdown looks. I don’t see why nuclear should be exempt from such comparisons on the basis of fear-mongering that has not come to pass, and which is guarded against more carefully in each generation of reactor designs.
“That is beyond knonw safety parameters” — what does that even mean?
“I thought that aged 12 when I first opposed it. 45 years later no one has answered the question how it is made safe”
By improved failsafe designs (done, and still improving) and by responsible waste-management (more a management than technical problem, although I do occasionally wonder why deep ocean sequestering isn’t considered an option).
“I think that is because it is not possible”
Oh well, that’s that then.
Off-topic anyway, so I suggest we stop here.
Andy
We might as well end there
Not a word you wrote changed my view in any way
What we see here, Richard, is what we’ve been seeing on an increasing basis every day since mid last week. That as always climate change summits are about spin. Or greenwash if people prefer that term. It’s the same every single time there’s a conference.
Indeed, so regular is it that the spin is clearly well planned in advance, complete with a timetable for strategically announcing the various elements of the “spin plan”. And here you have an absolutely classic example, because it allows all those concerned (on governments’ side, that is) to claim that before they’ve even started the outcome is going to be a good one.
But good for you for pointing out the utter paucity of ambition and financial commitment, and setting it in a context where everyone can see that, because when I read it yesterday, it looked very much like the media had swallowed this guff hook, line and sinker.
Ivan
I suspect they will continue to buy the guff whatever I say
R
If someone can claim their full £10m lifetime allowance of entrepreneur’s relief in one year, getting them 18% tax relief on the lot (10% tax, instead of 28%), it would save them / cost the exchequer £1.8m each. So £300m would be the tax relief for less than 170 people. I suspect there might just be around 200 people in that position each year. Lucky them!
Two interesting articles in The Independent today add to the current environmental debate with the additional political, social and economic risks of over dependence on a fuel source which leads to concentrated wealth and mass poverty.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/inequality-is-behind-the-rise-of-isis-says-author-thomas-piketty-a6754786.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/russia-faces-financial-crisis-if-oil-price-falls-below-30-a-barrel-a6754611.html