Japan is pushing ahead with a fuel source that’s exacerbating climate change. //

The reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant automatically shut down in response to the earthquake, but the tsunami overtopped the plant’s seawall, stalling the backup generators that were providing vital cooling to the idled reactors. The lost coolant led to meltdowns and explosions at the plant, releasing dangerous radioactive material.

In response, more than 150,000 people were evacuated from the region. While there were some increases in ambient radiation exposure, the main harms from the disaster stemmed from relocating so many people, ranging from worsened illnesses from loss of access to health care to mental health problems like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Meanwhile, Japan’s entire nuclear power fleet, providing one-third of the country’s electricity, was taken offline for safety inspections and updates. Before the disaster, Japan was looking to ramp up its share of nuclear energy to 53 percent.

The impacts of the disaster rippled out other countries too. Germany was also preparing to build more nuclear power plants before the 2011 earthquake. After the Fukushima disaster, Germany pulled a 180 and decided to embark on ending its use of nuclear power entirely.

Nine years later, the impacts of the earthquake continue to rock Japan. The country has or will decommission 24 reactors, 40 percent of its total. Of the remaining reactors, fewer than half have been restarted. Nuclear’s share of electricity generation has now fallen to 3 percent, with fossil fuels largely filling the void. //

The Japanese government is more worried about the economy than the environment //

But across Japan as a whole, solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower generation provide just 17 percent of the country’s electricity. As a densely populated island country, Japan has run into land use constraints around deploying large-scale wind and solar plants. //

That pretty much leaves nuclear as Japan’s remaining option for carbon-free electricity. But the public is resolutely against it. “Nuclear has a pretty bad reputation in Japan,” said Scott Harold, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. //

The rise of China threatens Japan, and so it wants to use coal to solidify and expand its influence
Behind India and China, Japan is the world’s third-largest coal importer. About two-thirds of Japan’s coal is from Australia, a country that is also facing climate-linked disasters and is struggling to curb its economic reliance on coal.

But Japan is also a major exporter of coal technology, and its government has used these power plants as a means to exert soft power. Through government institutions like the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, the government has financed new coal power plants in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.

The Green New Deal is anything but 'clean' or 'green.' Even the relatively modest numbers of solar and wind installations in the United States today are causing serious environmental damage. //

A few minutes of serious thought from self-described environmentalists would prompt a realization that if the Green New Deal, a program championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were implemented, it would create an environmental disaster.

In recent decades, policymakers have forced public utilities to generate increasingly more electricity from fashionable “renewable energy” sources, especially wind and solar, and pushed automakers to manufacture more electric vehicles. Their chief goal is to eliminate reliable, affordable, generally clean fossil fuels, including natural gas, even though they generate most of America’s electricity and power most U.S. transportation.

Environmentalists claim to worry that carbon dioxide from these fuels will cause devastating global warming. Many would also eliminate nuclear power, which they say is inherently unsafe. //

environmentalists have paid too little attention to the serious harm Green New Deal policies would inflict on the environment — including scenic lands, wildlife habitats, and threatened and endangered species. Implementing the Green New Deal would undermine the very values environmentalists have espoused for decades.

America faces a dilemma. Will it focus on real environmental problems that do measurable harm to human and ecological wellbeing, or will it mandate policies to head off climate disasters that are based on warming predictions have been repeatedly proven wrong by real-world empirical observations? Will it recognize that harnessing intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy requires enormous amounts of raw materials and mining, resulting in massive land-use impacts and human rights abuses, and is anything but clean, green, renewable, and sustainable? Or will it ignore all this? //

Solar farms generate only 1.5 percent of the nation’s electricity and would be an inefficient way to generate the more than 8 billion megawatt-hours of power that fossil fuels and nuclear provide each year to meet industrial, commercial, residential, and automotive transportation needs and charge backup-power batteries. Using cutting-edge Nellis Air Force Base solar panels to generate that electricity would require completely blanketing 57,000 square miles of land — equivalent to the land area of New York and Vermont — with 19 billion photovoltaic solar panels. //

Turbines ruin scenic views, kill countless birds and bats, and harm marine mammals, which is why environmentalists — and even the late leftist icon Sen. Ted Kennedy — have long opposed the planned Vineyard Wind facility off the Massachusetts coast. To provide enough power for the country, Green New Deal advocates would have to build hundreds of thousands of truly gigantic offshore turbines. //

Solar panels require many toxic materials, and wind turbines require enormous amounts of steel, concrete, copper, and rare earth elements. Storing a week’s worth of power for periods when the sun is not shining or the wind isn’t blowing would require some 2 billion half-ton Tesla car battery packs. Meeting these needs would require a massive expansion of mining for lithium, cobalt, and other substances in the United States or in Asia, Africa, and South America. Operations in the latter countries involve extensive child labor, create environmental disasters, and even lead to premature death.

What’s more, disposing of obsolescent solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries is already causing problems in the United States and in countries such as Germany. Green New Deal advocates ignore this problem, which would multiply substantially under their plan.

Somewhere on the Earth, on average every 12 seconds, a child dies of DDT-preventable malaria. The United States National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved 500 million lives before it was banned. The discoverer of DDT was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Then came Silent Spring — a book filled with deliberate falsehoods and blatantly marketed unreasoning and unjustified fear. The burgeoning enviro movement chose these lies for one of their first big campaigns. This campaign coincided with the rise of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA was in search of a big win with which to promote itself. The EPA studied the subject and its own scientific review board reported that – DDT is harmless to the environment and is a very beneficial substance that should not be banned.

Politics prevailed, however, over reason. DDT was banned, and the U.S. government spread that ban throughout the world by tying it to all sorts of international programs.

The result: Malaria, which was well on the way to control and eradication, now afflicts 250 million adults and kills about 3 million children per year. The deaths of children alone make this the most heinous act of technological genocide the world has ever known. It is the second-most extensive overall act of genocide — surpassed only by the reigns of terror under Communism in Red China. //

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the book that spearheaded the demonization of DDT, was dedicated to Albeit Schweitzer, whom Carson quoted as saying “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.” This was falsely presented to Carson’s readers as Albert Scweitzer’s concern about DDT. //

The quotation in Silent Spring, however, was about Schweitzer’s fear of nuclear weapons. Of malaria, Schweitzer actually said, “How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause us.. . . but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.”

In 2005 while a freshman California Assemblyman, I had the chance to visit Northern California and meet with the forest product industry professionals who grew, managed, and harvested trees on private and public lands. They told me of a worrisome trend started years earlier where both federal and state regulators were making it more and more difficult for them to do their jobs. As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need.

As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees.

The result was accurately forecast by my forest management industry hosts in Siskiyou County in 2005: larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape. More importantly, fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control. //

In the 1850s and 1860s, the typical Sierra landscape was of open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pine stands and a few scattered oak trees. The first branches on the pine trees started about 20 feet up—lower branches having been burned off by low-intensity grassfires. California’s Native American population had for years shaped this landscape with fire to encourage the grasslands and boost the game animal population. //

Some two decades ago, California produced so much wood waste from its timber operations, including brush and small trees from thinning efforts, that the resulting renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state. But cheap, subsidized solar power, combined with air quality concerns (wood doesn’t burn as cleanly as natural gas) and a lack of fuel due to cutbacks in logging, led to the closure of many biomass generators. What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires. Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.

Mark Bailey
a month ago
As an engineer with over 40 years in electrical generation and distribution, including 7+ years actually working in a nuclear power station in the United States, I believe nuclear generation is absolutely essential for renewable energy to be viable. Of the technologies currently available, only nuclear and hydro power are dispatchable, i.e. predictable well in advance of need and not subject to unavoidable interruption. Until renewables solve the storage problem, any source that is not dispatchable requires back up or the willingness to tolerate outages over significant areas of the country. There is also the transport issue. Power lines are harder to get approved and cause more political heartburn than power plants. The move to non polluting sources will also require much more electrical energy to displace fossil fuel home and building heating, industrial thermal processes, and motor driven transportation. Nuclear plants produce more power per unit area occupied and do not cause large numbers of deaths to common and protected bird species.

Our president is a global warming denier, is anti-vaccine, and is a conspiracy theorist. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, being anti-science is never a good thing. When those in positions of power are ignorant of science and hostile to the institutions of science and the methods that those institutions espouse, that is a recipe for disaster. But even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. And even though there appears to be a significant asymmetry in the degree to which our two major political parties take anti-scientific positions, on some issues the political left has it wrong for their own ideological reasons. The two big anti-science issues popular on the left are anti-GMO stances and anti-nuclear energy. The latter was recently brought into sharp relief when Trump signed a, "Memorandum on the Effect of Uranium Imports on the National Security and Establishment of the United States Nuclear Fuel Working Group." //

Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced.

Nuclear waste can be dealt with, and the newer reactors produce less waste, and can even theoretically burn reprocessed waste from older plants…

This is also the option most likely to succeed. We do have examples from other countries. Germany tried to go completely renewable and closed their nuclear plants, and now have to build coal-fired plants to meet their energy needs. Meanwhile, the countries that are doing the best with low carbon energy are France and Sweden, who invested heavily in nuclear. This is why Bernie’s plan would be a disaster, it would exactly follow the failed strategy of Germany, but on a larger scale.

Light it up //

The consensus among virtually every expert in this field, including scientists who are concerned about carbon emissions and climate change, is that we need more nuclear power (actually, a lot more) not less. And yet there was Warren, vowing to shut down every reactor in the country as quickly as possible. (Washington Examiner) //

You won’t find much of a better example than the one Novella mentions when he compares Germany and France. Germany eliminated their nuke plants entirely, promising to power the nation on wind and solar. They are now rushing to build coal plants because they can’t keep the lights on. France, on the other hand, has significantly increased its investment in nuclear energy and is currently building even more plants. They’re meeting their carbon emission goals and have electrical power to spare. //

Liberals continue to cling to old beliefs based on watching The China Syndrome too many times and summoning up images of Chernobyl and Fukushima. The fact is that when Three Mile Island melted down, it created a God awful mess inside the protective dome that’s still being cleaned up today. But at no time did radiation leak out of that plant in greater amounts than you’d get by spending a day walking around Denver airport.

Chernobyl blew up because the Russians were using a horrible, unsafe reactor design. We don’t build them that way. Fukushima was working fine until it got hit by a tsunami. Yes, you have to be careful and you have to be smart when planning a new nuclear plant. Don’t build them on fault lines or on the coast where the ocean may swamp them. But there are plenty of geologically stable locations where we could start construction.

Concerns about the storage of spent fuel rods are mostly a thing of the past. They were a terrible and valid concern with our earlier reactor models, but the technology has come a long way. //

Why aren’t we building more nuclear plants in America today? Partly because of the politics, but also because we have so heavily regulated the industry that utility companies can no longer afford all of the hoops they have to jump through. New nuke plants under the current regulatory scheme will never be profitable so the energy companies don’t even bother trying. There is a regulatory overhaul on the table that could resurrect the nuclear energy industry (read all about it here), but the usual list of suspects are fighting it tooth and claw.

1950s = 5000

2000s = 25000

Recently there have been calls for tree planting on a colossal scale to capture CO2 and curb climate change. However, whilst young trees are efficient and effective carbon sinks, the same is not so true for mature trees. The Earth maintains a balanced carbon cycle – trees (along with all other plants and animals) grow using carbon, they fall and die, and release that carbon again.

Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada's great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled.

Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material.