Coalition Against Nuclear Energy
Steve Hayes
Coalition Against Nuclear Energy (CANE), on April 12, in a statement below
that will be sent to newspapers across the country.
Representative coalition members from around the country will meet in
Bloemfontein on that day to set CANE up as a democratic lobby group for those
who wish to advocate for energy solutions that do not include nuclear power.
This is an opportunity to support an end to the nuclear programme and send a
clear message that South Africans want to exercise their democratic right to
have a say in energy decisions that will affect generations to come.
Please could you return a signed letter of endorsement as soon as possible
should you wish to participate. Your support is appreciated.
For more details or to join CANE, click www.cane.org.za
If you are an anti-nuclear stakeholder or are concerned in any way about South
Africa's push for nuclear energy and wish to attend the launch of CANE on the
12th of April in Bloemfontein, please contact caneo...@cane.org.za for more
information.
Sincerely
CANE Interim Committee:
Dominique Gilbert 012-205 1125 / 083 7404 676
Daniel Reinecke 0844 0844 08
Christine & Rob Garbett 082 568 8844 / 082 565 7686
Mike Kantey 072 628 5131
from SAFCEI:
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Peter H.M.Brooks
> We invite you to endorse our official launch of the national umbrella
> Coalition Against Nuclear Energy (CANE), on April 12, in a statement below
> that will be sent to newspapers across the country.
>
> Representative coalition members from around the country will meet in
> Bloemfontein on that day to set CANE up as a democratic lobby group for those
> who wish to advocate for energy solutions that do not include nuclear power.
> This is an opportunity to support an end to the nuclear programme and send a
> clear message that South Africans want to exercise their democratic right to
> have a say in energy decisions that will affect generations to come.
>
basement. Where do I sign up for that?
I wish they had got their arse into gear to build the pebble bed reactor
a decade ago - we wouldn't be having these Eskom problems if they had!
Let's not try and move back to the stone-age...
Steve Hayes
wrote:
Nothing calculated to move us there quicker than backyard nukes.
Peter H.M.Brooks
> On Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:53:49 +0200, "Peter H.M.Brooks" <pe...@news.co.za>
> wrote:
>
>> Steve Hayes wrote:
>>> We invite you to endorse our official launch of the national umbrella
>>> Coalition Against Nuclear Energy (CANE), on April 12, in a statement below
>>> that will be sent to newspapers across the country.
>>>
>>> Representative coalition members from around the country will meet in
>>> Bloemfontein on that day to set CANE up as a democratic lobby group for those
>>> who wish to advocate for energy solutions that do not include nuclear power.
>>> This is an opportunity to support an end to the nuclear programme and send a
>>> clear message that South Africans want to exercise their democratic right to
>>> have a say in energy decisions that will affect generations to come.
>>>
>> I'm looking forward to the day that I can have my own mini-nuke in the
>> basement. Where do I sign up for that?
>>
>> I wish they had got their arse into gear to build the pebble bed reactor
>> a decade ago - we wouldn't be having these Eskom problems if they had!
>>
>> Let's not try and move back to the stone-age...
>
> Nothing calculated to move us there quicker than backyard nukes.
>
like wanting to stop the use of electricity because of the danger of the
electric chair.
Steve Hayes
wrote:
Nukes (pronounced "Nooks") IS nucular weapons, my china.
Georgie boy isn't planning to nook Iran back to the stone age because he
thinks they're building power stations.
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
>
> Nukes (pronounced "Nooks") IS nucular weapons, my china.
>
they have problems with lots of words, they can't even, for example,
say 'news', but call it 'noos'.
You're also right that they don't understand that 'are' goes with a
plural, not 'is'.
The OED definition is:
"
nuke, n.2
(nju;k, U.S. nu;k) Also (U.S.) nook.
Abbrev. of 'nuclear bomb, weapon,' etc.
1959 N.Y. Times Mag. 1 Feb. 46/3 Soon there may be 5-inch nuclear
shells and portable Davy Crockett 'nukes' for the infantryman. 1960
Time 4 July 52/1 But the nuclear submarines--called 'nukes'--can cruise
underwater for weeks at top speed. 1964 Daily Mirror 24 Aug. 4/5 The
generals should be allowed to decide whether to use tactical nuclear
weapons, or as the current ugly phrase has it: 'Where and when to put
in the nooks.' 1967 Word Study Oct. 8/1, I heard a grim, affectionate
diminutive: 'nook' (nük). 'If the bird is carrying nooks.' 1969 Life
29 Sept. 23/2 Once communities vied for nuclear power plants ('nukes')
as passports to prosperity. 1971 J. Ball First Team (1972) xv. 224
'What is nukes?' the man asked. 'Nuclear specialists; no one else can
handle this stuff.' 1973 Publishers' Weekly 14 May 44/1 They hijack a
liner at sea and sink it with a baby nuke.+ He is given the job of
detonating the big nuke.
"
You can see that the term can mean nuclear power plants (from the 1969
quote) and nuclear specialists as well as nuclear weapons.
Peter H.M. Brooks
basement, here's an article about just such a basement nuke developed
by Toshiba:
http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news-toshiba-micro-nuclear-12.17b.html
Every home should have one!
Just think how good it would be to get rid of all those ugly and
environmentally damaging electricity pylons and the horrid coal
burning power stations. It is a wonderful new world!
One nice side effect is that you can drop the neighbour's cat into it
and, in the spirit of Schroedinger, be able, truthfully, to express
ignorance of its whereabouts afterwards. For me just this would
justify the expense...
Ferdi
<haye...@hotmail.com> wrote:
<<>We invite you to endorse our official launch of the national
umbrella
>Coalition Against Nuclear Energy (CANE), on April 12, in a statement below
>that will be sent to newspapers across the country.>>
Yaeh, let's rather burn cow dung for electricity.
Ferdi
<Peter.H....@gmail.com> wrote:
<<>Just think how good it would be to get rid of all those ugly and
>environmentally damaging electricity pylons and the horrid coal
>burning power stations. >>
That day may come sooner than you think.
-------------------------------------------------
Coal: Bleak outlook for the black stuff
19 January 2008
From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues
David Strahan
PrintSendFeeds
THERE used to be a saying about taking coal to Newcastle, but these
days the issue is getting the stuff out. Newcastle in New South Wales,
Australia, may be the biggest coal export terminal in the world's
biggest coal-exporting country, but even it is having trouble keeping
up with demand. The line of ships waiting to load coal can stretch
almost to Sydney, 150 kilometres to the south. At its peak last year,
there were 80 vessels in the queue, each forced to lie idle for up to
a month.
The delays have been increasing since 2003, and not just because of
the port's limited capacity. Gnawing doubts are also beginning to
emerge about the supply of coal, not just in Australia but worldwide,
and not only because of logistics but also because of geology. In
short, coal may be running out.
Ask most energy analysts how much coal we have left, and the answer
will be some variant of "plenty". It is commonly agreed that supplies
of coal will last for well over a century; coal is generally seen as
our safety net in a world of dwindling oil supplies. But is it? A
number of recent reports suggest coal reserves may be hugely inflated,
a possibility that has profound implications for both global energy
supply and climate change.
The latest "official" statistics from the World Energy Council,
published in 2007, put global coal reserves at a staggering 847
billion tonnes (see Diagram). Since world coal production that year
was just under 6 billion tonnes, the reserves appear at first glance
to be ample to sustain output for at least a century - well beyond
even the most distant planning horizon.
Mine below the surface, however, and the numbers are not so
reassuring. Over the past 20 years, official reserves have fallen by
more than 170 billion tonnes, even though we have consumed nowhere
near that much. What's more, by a measure known as the
reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio - the number of years the reserves
would last at the current rate of consumption - coal has declined even
more dramatically. In February 2007, the European Commission's
Institute for Energy reported that the R/P ratio had dropped by more
than a third between 2000 and 2005, from 277 years to just 155. If
this rate of decline were to continue, the institute warns, "the world
could run out of economically recoverable reserves of coal much
earlier than widely anticipated". In 2006, according to the BP
Statistical Review of World Energy, the R/P fell again, to 144 years.
So why are estimates of coal reserves falling so fast - and why now?
One reason is clear: consumption is soaring, particularly in the
developing world. Global coal consumption rose 35 per cent between
2000 and 2006. In 2006, China alone added 102 gigawatts of coal-fired
generating capacity, enough to produce three times as much electricity
as California consumed that year. China is by far the world's largest
producer of coal, but such is its appetite for the fuel that in 2007
it became a net importer. According to the International Energy
Agency, coal consumption is likely to grow ever faster in both China
and India.
Another less noticed reason is that in recent years many countries
have revised their official coal reserves downwards, in some cases
massively, and often by far more than had been mined since the
previous assessment. For instance, the UK and Germany have cut their
reserves by more than 90 per cent and Poland by 50 per cent. Declared
global reserves of high-quality "hard coal" have fallen by 25 per cent
since 1990, from almost 640 billion tonnes to fewer than 480 billion -
again, larger than could be accounted for by consumption.
At the same time, however, many countries including China and Vietnam
have left their official reserves suspiciously unchanged for decades,
even though they have mined billions of tonnes of coal over that
period.
Taken together, dramatic falls in some countries' reserves coupled
with the stubborn refusal of others to revise their figures down in
the face of massive production suggest that the numbers are not to be
relied on. Is it possible that the sturdy pit prop of unlimited coal
is actually a flimsy stick?
That is certainly the conclusion of Energy Watch, a group of
scientists led by the German renewable energy consultancy Ludwig
Bölkow Systemtechnik (LBST). In a 2007 report, the group argues that
official coal reserves are likely to be biased on the high side. "As
scientists, we were surprised to find that so-called proven reserves
were anything but proven," says lead author Werner Zittel. "It is a
clear sign that something is seriously wrong."
Since it is widely accepted that major new discoveries of coal are
unlikely, Energy Watch forecasts that global coal output will peak as
early as 2025 and then fall into terminal decline. That's a lot
earlier than is generally assumed by policy-makers, who look to the
much higher forecasts of the International Energy Agency. "The
perception that coal is the fossil resource of last resort -that you
can come back to when you run into problems with all the others - is
probably an illusion," says Jörg Schindler of LBST.
"The perception that coal is the fossil fuel of last resort may well
be an illusion"A look at how official global reserves are calculated
does little to bolster confidence. The figures, compiled by a
husband-and-wife energy consultancy called Energy Data Associates
based in Dorset, UK, are gathered principally by sending out a
questionnaire to the governments of 100 coal-producing countries.
Officials are asked to supply figures under clearly defined
guidelines, but many do not. "About two-thirds of the countries
reply," says Alan Clarke of Energy Data Associates, "and maybe 50 are
usable."
Some countries have been known to make elementary errors filling in
the forms, often with the effect of massively increasing their
reserves. Undoing these apparently innocent mistakes has led to some
of the major downward revisions of recent years.
Imminent shortage?
Although Clarke defends his data as the best available, he is also the
first to admit that there are shortcomings. "It's no secret that the
result is a bit of a ragbag. It ranges from well-established estimates
for some countries to others that are fairly airy-fairy, and some that
are highly political and not to be believed."
Figures for two of the world's biggest coal producers are particularly
hard to glean. Russia has failed to update its numbers since 1996,
China since 1990. "There is really nothing very certain or clear-cut
about reserves figures anywhere," Clarke says. Even senior officials
in the coal industry admit that the figures are unreliable. "We don't
have good reserves numbers in the coal business," says David Brewer of
CoalPro, the UK mine owners' association.
Even so, the industry consensus rejects thoughts of an imminent
shortage, or "peak coal". Milton Catelin of the World Coal Institute,
the international producers' trade body, admits that he does not
understand what has led to the reductions in reserves, but insists
that it is not down to a lack of coal. "The world is not
resource-limited," he says. "It's limited only by the economics of
recovery and environmental concerns."
The industry position is born of the traditional view that "reserves"
is essentially an economic concept - the amount of coal that could be
produced at today's prices using existing technology. This is not the
same as "resources" - the total amount that exists. Reserves are, to
some extent, replenishable. If shortage bites and prices rise,
uneconomic seams - too thin, too deep or too remote from markets -
become economic and can be reclassified as reserves. Because global
resources are vastly greater than reserves, the industry argues there
can be no imminent shortage. "It's there if the price is high enough,"
Brewer says.
The problem is, the real world seems to have forgotten this piece of
economic lore. Although the price of coal has quintupled since 2002
(see Graph), reserves have still fallen. This is similar to what is
happening with oil, where fresh reserves have not been forthcoming,
despite soaring prices. To a growing number of oil-industry figures
this is because we have reached, or are just about to reach, peak oil
- the point at which oil production hits an all-time high then goes
into terminal decline.
Some experts are starting to reach a similar conclusion about coal.
"Normally when prices go up, mine managers ramp up production as fast
as possible and shortage quickly turns to glut," says coal geologist
Graham Chapman of the consultancy Energy Edge in Richmond, Surrey, UK.
"This time it hasn't happened."
He concludes that the industry has already produced most of the easily
mined coal and "from now on it's going to be a significant challenge".
In China, for example, much of the remaining coal is more than 1000
metres below the surface, Chapman says, while in South Africa the
geology is extremely complex. Elsewhere, flooding and subsidence may
have "sterilised" significant reserves: the coal is there, but will
almost certainly never be mined. As a result, Chapman agrees that true
reserves are probably much lower than the official figure.
David Rutledge, chair of Engineering and Applied Science at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, shares this view. He
became interested in coal after attending a presentation on climate
change at which the levels of carbon emissions from fossil fuels were
said to be too uncertain to be specified. Although the issue was not
strictly on his patch, Caltech has a healthy interdisciplinary
tradition, so early in 2007 Rutledge decided to have a go at solving
the uncertainty. The results are even more dramatic than those of
Energy Watch.
To forecast coal production, Rutledge borrowed a statistical technique
developed for oil forecasting known as Hubbert linearisation. M. King
Hubbert, after whom the method is named, was a Shell geologist who
founded the "peak oil" school of thought. In 1956, Hubbert famously
predicted that US oil production would peak within 15 years. He was
vindicated in 1970.
Although accurate, Hubbert's original forecast depended on the rather
basic idea that oil peaks when the amount that has been extracted is
equal to the amount still left in the ground. This method works, but
only if you have a reasonably accurate estimate of the total oil that
will ever be produced. Such estimates can be unreliable for oil - and
are even worse in the case of coal. Hubbert linearisation, published
in 1982, solves this problem by presenting the numbers in a different
way.
Linearisation works by plotting annual production as a percentage of
total production up to that point on the vertical axis, against total
production on the horizontal axis. This produces a graph showing how
the percentage growth rate of total production changes as the resource
is extracted (see Graph). For oil, this percentage generally declines
from almost the earliest days of production, even when annual output
is still rising, and soon settles into a roughly straight
downward-sloping line. By extending the line to the bottom of the
graph, you can deduce the total amount that will ever be produced.
"Once you have a straight line," says Rutledge, "you're off to the
races."
To test the linearisation technique for coal, Rutledge applied it to
historical data for UK production, which peaked in 1913. He says it
provides a better model of the decline than traditional economics,
which tends to blame factors such as foreign competition, Winston
Churchill's decision to switch the navy to oil and the displacement of
coal by natural gas. Because the straight-line decline in the growth
rate of total production starts long before the peak and continues
long after, for Rutledge this suggests the cause is fundamentally
geological, reflecting the increasing difficulty of increasing
production while exploiting resources of progressively poorer quality.
"Had you known this method in the 1920s," Rutledge says, "you could
have predicted accurately where British coal output is today."
He has also applied it to today's major coal-producing countries,
including the US, China, Russia, India, Australia and South Africa -
with startling results. Hubbert linearisation suggests that future
coal production will amount to around 450 billion tonnes - little more
than half the current official reserves.
The idea of an imminent coal peak is very new and has so far made
little impact on mainstream coal geology or economics, and it could be
wrong. Most academics and officials reject the idea out of hand. Yet
in doing so they tend to fall back on the traditional argument that
higher coal prices will transform resources into reserves - something
that is clearly not happening this time.
So what if coal does peak much sooner than most people expect?
According to the International Energy Agency's latest long-term
forecast, economic growth will require global coal production to rise
by more than 70 per cent by 2030, so if Rutledge is right, the world
is heading for an energy crisis even worse than many already predict.
Hopes that coal-derived liquid fuels will be able to step in as oil
runs out will also be dashed.
The silver lining to this gloomy scenario is coal's effect on climate.
Forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assume more
or less infinite replenishment of coal reserves, in line with
traditional economic theory. Less coal means less carbon dioxide, so
the impact on emissions could be enormous. Using one of the IPCC's
simpler climate models, Rutledge forecasts that total CO2 emissions
from fossil fuel will be lower than any of the IPCC scenarios. He
found that atmospheric concentration of CO2 will peak in 2070 at 460
parts per million, fractionally above what many scientists believe is
the threshold for runaway climate change. "In some sense, this is good
news," Rutledge says. "Production limits mean we are likely to hit the
general target without any policy intervention."
Neither Energy Watch nor Rutledge could remotely be described as
climate-change deniers - quite the opposite - but their findings worry
many climate scientists, including Pushker Kharecha at the NASA
Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He agrees that coal
reserves are probably overstated, but insists that curtailment of coal
emissions is still essential to combat climate change. He gives a
simple reason for this view: "What are the risks if the low-coal
people are wrong?" To pin our hopes on low coal would be dangerously
complacent, he argues, because if it is only marginally wrong the
additional emissions could ensure catastrophe.
Whoever turns out to be right, the good news is that the imperatives
of climate change and peak coal are identical. "In the long run,
economies that rely on depletable resources are doomed to fail," says
Zittel. "The coal peak makes it even more urgent to switch to
renewable energy without delay."
Energy and Fuels - Learn more about the looming energy crisis in our
comprehensive special report.
Moira de Swardt
> We invite you to endorse our official launch of the national umbrella
> Coalition Against Nuclear Energy (CANE), on April 12, in a statement below
> that will be sent to newspapers across the country.
I approve of nuclear energy. It is one of the cleaner options.
Peter H.M. Brooks
bats and birds.
It is, after all, the way that the sun works and that's done life
pretty well for the past few million years!
As you say, it is much cleaner than coal or oil.
Amazingly, in Dubai, they use oil to desalinate water - that they then
use to grow gardens in the desert. This seems an amazing waste of a
limited resource. Nuclear power would be a much better thing to use
for desalination.