Politics Vs Climate (and how to stop it)

Politics International Politics
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Personally, I think this is solving a problem that doesn’t exist. If people designed and built their houses properly here, they would need very little in the way of climate control. Yet they insist on building them to a temperate-climate design, out of unsuitable materials, and then when they find the building has pisspoor thermal performance, they throw energy at the problem with heating systems and A/C. Whether that energy comes from the grid or biofuels is immaterial - it’s still energy that could have been used for something more productive, or not used at all. And again, if you must have climate control, the most efficient solution is solar-heated hot water.

As for the rice straw: they burn it because rice straw carries disease, but that wouldn’t be a problem if they practiced proper crop rotation and/or polyculture. They could then leave the straw on the fields, where it belongs. Technically it would work, though. Rough guess: 1tonne/ha. dry weight containing 20MJ/kg = 20,000MJ = 5600kWh/ha. If you consume 20kWh/day in your boiler for 3 months (1800kWh) then you’d need about ~0.3ha. to heat your home. 0.3ha. would be considered a large field here, but not outrageously so.

Ideally, I suggest biofuels should be shaved from some perennial crop; otherwise, you’ve left a big patch of bare dirt that’s going to erode very fast.

I completely disagree, from a systems design point of view. We had a good discussion about that elsewhere.

Yeah, that’s true, but people tend to think in terms of domestic waste, which is a drop in the ocean (haha) compared to what gets used by agriculture and industry. It’s quite a subtle issue. Waste is only truly “waste” if the water is polluted in some way, for example by detergents or agricultural chemicals. There’s nothing wrong with taking a 200-litre shower and dumping the water back into the river. It just re-enters the water cycle and all is well. The problem is that you’ve also dumped 200x4.2x25’C = 21MJ = 6kWh of energy down the drain too (assuming it was a hot shower), and the detergents you’ve used will have some adverse affect on the river ecosystem, especially if you’re one of a million other people doing the same thing. What unregulated industry does is a hundred times worse. Fertilizer and pesticide runoff also causes major ecosystem disruption.

One particular “waste” of water that irritates me is the management of urban runoff. A lot of city infrastructure is devoted to catching, channelling and “disposing of” rainwater. A properly-designed city should (a) contain mostly green spaces that will naturally use this water to produce something useful (biofuel, food, whatever), with minimal costs or human management; and (b) collect, store, and locally filter water from rooftops for domestic use. To collect water in reservoirs and then build a cats-cradle of pipes to distribute it (and a parallel network to throw away water that falls out of the sky!) is utterly ridiculous. I have no idea who came up with such a stupid design, but we ought to have an annual celebration like Guy Fawkes’ where he’s drowned in effigy.

Anyway, like you said, these things are all interrelated. You can’t just talk about CO2, or energy, or water use, or environmental pollution; they’re inseparable. That’s what makes this stuff such an interesting topic!

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A lot of the stuff were talking about, is build from new. For the most part we know this isn’t possible or won’t happen in a reasonable time-scale. I think this is the challenge. To integrate with what is available. Sure it’s less likely to be as efficient, but again that is the challenge.

I don’t believe there to be one solution, but many. I think one of the biggest pitt-falls for success in energy reduction is actually going to be people’s laziness. What the general public want is something that ‘just’ plugs in and works, no effort involved and no dirty job to perform. I personally don’t mind the work.

The only current ‘seen’ motivation for people is saving money and some are too lazy to even do that!

And we have already talked about not forcing things on people. I’m all for freedom, but when that freedom is doomed by lack of direction and blindness – somebody has to do something! Depending how quickly and how bad the situation gets, the laws will have to change to cope with the shortages (from the ever growing burden of resources globally).

Would it be a waste of time and money to fit as many properties with solar panels on the roof and a rain water collection system for flushing the toilet? As a kind of bare minimum? Would it’s impact really make a difference? It seems from the talk here it wouldn’t.

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Hi all. I have some work to do this morning, so not much time to post. Anyway, I was bummed-out to see my lengthy post about hydrogen (along with Finley’s excellent response) vaporized by the reboot. No time now to recreate the whole thing, but essentially I was going on about how hydrogen is very difficult to work with (leaks easily, explodes) and is very energy inefficient, especially when you need to liquify it as you would if you wanted to make a hydrogen-powered car. As a storage medium, only pumped-storage makes any sense (if you have the right geographical conditions), and even it loses 30% of power.

On to this rice-straw thing… I don’t think it’s at all practical beyond the farm itself. Yes, if you live on a farm, you can gather up straw (very labor-intensive though) and burn it for cooking (as opposed to using wood or fossil fuel). Gathering it up, baling it and transporting it to Taipei or Kaohsiung (on trucks powered by fossil fuel) might be a bigger energy loss than just using the fossil fuel directly for cooking, heating and cooling in the cities. Straw is not exactly a very “energy dense” fuel. Also creates lots of smoke, a problem in polluted cities. Furthermore, farmers want to keep the ash to fertilize their next crop, so sending the straw to the cities means they’ve got to buy fertilizer.

There are lots of things you can do on a farm that are not practical in a city. Someone has mentioned water, so let me just add that pumping water is one of the things that wind power is actually useful for. Again, it does depend on whether or not you live in a windy area (and Taiwan might not be the best place for this) but wind has long been used for water pumping. You may well be familiar with scenes like this:

That is a wind-powered water pump, not an electrical generator. That sort of design (with the big blades) works fine in low-speed wind, but it doesn’t move fast enough for generating electricity.

The reason why this can work so well is because intermittency is seldom a problem with water pumping, since you can store water easily in ponds and cisterns. So if you get three days without wind, then one day with good wind, you can still have enough water pumped to accomplish your purpose (water for your crops and animals, and household use). This is quite different than generating electricity with wind, since three days without wind means three days without electricity.

Speaking of intermittency, yesterday I stumbled upon a couple of charts showing very clearly how much power (measured in megawatts) was generated in Germany in March, 2012. Germany is heavily pushing this “alternative energy” idea as anti-nuke fervor has really become a political hot potato since Fukushima. Let me note that March is one of the windiest months in Germany, or in most places - with a few rare exceptions, wind blows strongest in late winter and early spring. Most of Germany’s wind towers are in the north, along the North Sea, and solar is mainly in the far south of the country (Bavaria). So without further ado:

In a future post I want to get into the nuclear thing, but no time right now.

cheers,
DB

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DB, a wind-powered pump is an excellent example of what I mentioned earlier: it’s better to use energy directly in the form that nature delivers it, rather than attempt to convert it to something else; and, as you say, to accept intermittency as a fact of life and design the rest of your system to deal with that. The other aspect you mention - that the effectiveness of such solutions depends a lot on the situation - is one of the reasons I argue against high-rise living.

Personally I’m appalled by Germany’s subsidized deployment of solar panels on homes. The economics simply don’t work out, which means those panels are actually creating pollution, not mitigating it.

Yeah, shame about your H2 post. It was a good explanation of why high-tech makes good news headlines and attracts a lot of VC funding, but is rarely practical for real-world use.

Steviebike, I absolutely agree that there is no One True Way. In fact I think a lot of our problems are caused by international adoption of a homogeneous technological style: the same slab-concrete buildings with the same big glass windows, the same power stations and distribution systems all made by the same company, the same cars and roads. Countries ARE radically different and need different solutions. Solar will never work in Finland (not enough sun). Point-source power generation is inappropriate for Peru (too many mountains and jungles). Nuclear power in Iran is (would be) utterly ridiculous when they have the Kavir desert - one of the hottest regions on the planet - just south of Tehran.

I think it’s intellectual laziness, not physical. People simply can’t conceive that there might be a different way of doing things. It’s like the anecdote about Edison when he was marketing electric lighting: supposedly, he said that if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a better gas mantle. The tech I have in mind will be much more easy to use than what we’ve got now. If it wasn’t, it most likely wouldn’t be efficient (in energy terms).

It wouldn’t exactly be a waste of time, it would just be more difficult than it needs to be. If the government forced all building companies to cover the roof of new buildings with solar water heating panels and rainwater collectors, that would definitely be a good idea. But retrofit of anything is always painful, expensive, and less effective than it could be if properly designed-in.

Hopefully, the market will decide which solutions are better, but again, that’s why I think it’s better to start in countries with not much legacy technology. In The West, sunk costs, subsidy and tradition are too strong: they will maintain the status quo far beyond the point where it’s economical to do so. Also, a given amount of money can have a much larger effect. Providing someone with 1kWh/day, when before they had nothing, is a vast improvement which will have a snowball effect economically (so they’ll be able to pay their energy bills and have a better quality of life). Asking rich westerners to install the equivalent capacity on their roof when they can get as much power as they want from the wall socket is … well, not very practical. And in actual fact, they’re making the right decision to refuse.

Few buildings last longer than 50 years. There are new buildings (and entire new cities) going up all the time, all over the world. There are lots of fancy plans on the drawing board for “eco-cities”, but when the construction companies are called in, they just want to pour concrete. It’s what they know. So the “green” stuff never happens.

This needs to happen from the ground up, involving ordinary people building cities for themselves and bypassing TPTB. Governments, of course, are terrified of that sort of thing and make all sorts of laws to stop it. But there are places where it can still happen, and I think they can lead by example. It’s hard for the average man in the street to imagine what it’s like to actually live and work in a zero-carbon city. It’s too far removed from common experience. Somebody has to do it first, so other people can visit, gawk, take photos, and then go away thinking, “I like that”.

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How utterly god damned precious… what to do with Taiwanese rice straw, indeed. This is the most self-indulgent conversation that I have seen since the Chevron ads with their teachers who care and hardball pepper question oil industry execs. Wind? Oh yes… there is a lot of it… if only we could harness that to reduce global warming. Pah!

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Thanks Fred.

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Fred, this is a NON-POLITICAL discussion about possible technologies and policies to reduce CO2 emissions. We want to learn from each other. All cards are on the table here - we can discuss technologies even when we think they will NOT work, if for no other reason that to understand why they don’t work. We had already pretty much shot down the rice straw thing without your help, but it was worthwhile bringing it up to understand why biomass (which is widely touted in the media as an “alternative energy solution”) either does not work, or works poorly at best. Similarly, we’ve already discussed the serious limitations of wind power - we didn’t need your snide comment - and solar. So Fred, if you’ve got something to say about technology or policy, then let us hear from you. If you want to hurl “self-indulgent” insults at people for posting their ideas and questions, kindly take it someplace else. Everyone here is trying to be polite and respectful to each other even when we disagree, but you are not returning the favor. You only weaken your argument when you start getting nasty.

Unfortunately, I’m still pretty busy today. I’m working on that new house I mentioned. I’m setting a goal to move in by July 1, and not sure I’ll make it. But anyway, I wanted to delve into nuclear power.

I actually first got very interested in energy issues as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. I gravitated towards the anti-nuke movement, and I’d say I was in that for about a year. But I gradually came to realize that my fellow anti-nuke activists knew almost nothing about the technology other than that they were against it. They weren’t even interested in learning more, and they had no interest in looking for ways to fix it and make it safe. It was just “No Nukes Now!” And unfortunately, we were spreading misinformation, telling people that nuclear power plants could blow up like a bomb, and that anyway we could just shut them down and run everything on rooftop solar panels, and we didn’t actually need electric power companies (like Taipower). We told people we could put solar panels on the roofs of cars and would no longer need to buy gasoline, and put Big Oil out of business. We did have a few good arguments on our side, and I think that most of the people in the anti-nuke movement were sincere, but we were just ignorant and naive about a lot of things and there was a lot of wishful thinking on our part.

I’ve woken up to the harsh reality that we 1980s anti-nuke campaigners probably did more to cause global warming than stop it, by hampering the development of generation four nuclear power, which in turn has resulted in more coal burning. I’ve since then vowed to learn as much as possible about energy and pass along what I know, which is why threads like this one interest me. I do get upset when I see current anti-nuke folks making the same mistakes, using the same faux arguments, and engaging in outright propaganda - it seems that nothing has been learned, and time is running out.

Since I’m short of time today and can’t explain everything, I’ll just point to a couple of links. If nuclear power is to have a future, we’ve got to go fourth generation. All of the current nukes in Taiwan are second generation, and the one under construction is third generation, though it is early third generation and it’s already somewhat obsolete. Currently, most countries that are still building nukes (China, India, Russia, some other east European countries) are going with generation three-plus, but generation four reactors have been built. Sadly, the USA developed one of the best Gen-IV reactors, the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) back in the 1990s, but the Clinton administration shut it down to please the green lobby - ironic indeed since Clinton later signed the Kyoto Protocol (though the US Congress refused to ratify it) and those IFRs would have made it easy for the USA to meet Kyoto’s emission goals. It would have done the US economy a lot of good too - now the nuke-building business has moved to Japan, South Korea and Russia, though the US company Westinghouse still does joint-ventures with Toshiba.

The chief advantages of generation four reactors are:

  • Nuclear waste that remains dangerously radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia
  • 100-300 times more energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel
  • The ability to consume existing nuclear waste in the production of electricity
  • Improved operating safety

Anyway, some good links to start with:

Integral Fast Reactor

Brave New Climate (very informative pro-nuke blog)

Now I’ve go to run. More later.

cheers,
DB

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My idea for rice straw was pretty simple, for farmers to dry it, compress it and use it for heating (and cooking). In Taiwan rice farming is highly mechanized and specialized with multiple contractors for each part, baling and collecting rice straw is not difficult for them to do if they wanted to. I happen to know a little about this as my FIL is a part-time rice farmer. I still think it’s feasible but it seems rice husks are commonly used in Japan instead.
If one lives in Taiwan you would know of the severe air pollution from burning of rice straw.
So Fred, maybe you have a real contribution to make but you haven’t made it yet.

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Plus c’est change… plus c’est change, non? eh bien…

c’est la meme chose… c’est la meme chose…

Time is not running out. But it is amusing, no, wrong choice of words there, pathetic, to see the same global warming activists pushing biofuels which are “fueling” so much of the destruction of rain forests and leading, ironically, no, embarrassingly, to greater release of CO2 from these areas…

All right… all right… have your little discussion… I won’t interrupt… it reminds one of the new “insights” that newcomers find when they move to a city that one has already lived in for 30 years… but point taken… why take the enjoyment of the new experience away from them? You are right. I should not. I shall not. So proceed with your dialogue. :slight_smile:

Love Fred

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Thanks Fred.

EDIT: Actually Fred. Maybe you could be useful. Could you tell us what your position is? You know, what board[s] do you sit on? Where do you gather your knowledge from? It seems to be a far superior source than any of us have. Would really appreciate you sharing it with us, being new to the city and all.

None of us are saying we are right, just interested in exploring the ideas/facts that we have. I admit I know next to nothing but the discussion is interesting. I have no idea why you have to be so scathing with your comments, there is a nasty cruelness to it, but I get the feeling the man behind the keyboard isn’t as nasty? Come on, add something of value. Some own-knowledge fact not regurgitated internet facts. You know something then share it.

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I find it strange that the thread is titled politics vs climate yet there is very little discussion about the politics that feed our dependence on fossil fuels.

One area that that politics are good at maintaining the status quo is by dishing out massive subsidies to ensure that cheap fossil fuels are available. Defenders will say that cheap energy is a right but the ordinary person really requires very little electricity/fuel for their daily lives but they consume a lot because it is available. The biggest area of impact will be on the transportation of goods which will be passed onto the consumer. Of course the gov’t isn’t spending the subsidy money so that money can be redistributed to lower taxes/more services.

I’m all for practical initiatives that supply green(er) energy and/or reduce consumption.

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Actually most governments tax the hell out of fuel rather than subsidize it. Subsidies on fuel are being phased out in India now which is causing a lot of strife but the government has no choice there due to it’s fiscal situation.

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What? Electricity? Are you including the subsidies/tax breaks that go with every step from exploration to customer usage?

Perhaps I’m mistaken though.

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Perhaps, chances are that you are…

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OK, a little bit of energy politics and prices, though I personally prefer to talk about energy technology…

Taiwan is one of those places that subsidizes electricity consumption. Right now, the DPP is raising hell over the recent increase in electric prices. Taipower is a consistent money loser because their rates are set too low, but as a state-owned company politicians decide the rate, not the market.

The main reason why Taipower is recently losing even more money than usual is because of the recent increase in international oil prices. This is one of the big problems with depending of fossil fuels - price instability. Since Taiwan has no domestic fossil fuels and relies entirely on imports, dramatic price increases caused by international politics (ie wars jitters in the Middle East, OPEC manipulations, etc) is a constant threat. A war in Iran (which is entirely possible) could close the Straits of Hormez, leading to a world wide energy crisis - Taiwan would have no defense against that.

Except nuclear. Even though Taiwan has no uranium mines of its own (and thus has to import), uranium (and thorium) are especially “energy dense” fuels. With fourth generation nukes, it would be possible for Taiwan to stockpile several decades worth of fuel. With oil, coal and natural gas, I doubt that Taiwan could stockpile more than a month’s supply.

Of course, solar and wind are “fuels” that don’t have to be imported. But as we’ve already discussed, it would pretty much impossible for Taiwan to meet its current needs for power from these sources.

So my point in the above rambling…even if one is not terribly concerned about global warming, there are some other good reasons to get off fossil fuel dependency. If you happen to live in Saudi Arabia, you probably needn’t be concerned about an oil shortage, but in energy-starved Taiwan (among many other places), the supply and price of fossil fuels depends very much on the international political scene - even a slight disruption could result in brownouts, blackouts and a rapidly collapsing economy.

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I couldn’t agree more. HH, what you say is true, but there are subsidies. The gubmint giveth, and the gubmint taketh away. Nuclear power is a one example, which must have absorbed hundreds of billions in gov’t cash over the last few decades. Catastrophe insurance is also underwritten by governments, because the potential fallout (haha) from any nuclear accident could be extremely expensive to fix. Some “subsidies” are a bit more subtle and indirect. For instance, out-of-town supermarkets are often given planning permission with few questions asked, or even given handouts and favours, because they “create jobs”. Yet out-of-town supermarkets couldn’t exist unless the gov’t provided a road network, gave tax breaks to road-freight companies, and encouraged everyone to own cars. Shoppers agree to waste their own time and fuel so that the supermarket can make profits.

Back to nuclear: to a certain extent I agree with DB - the people shouting for “no nukes” generally have very little understanding of the technology - but the people pushing for them often don’t, also (present company excepted, of course :wink:). The main problem is that a nuclear power station is very, very, VERY complicated, and it can’t exist without a supporting “nuclear industry”. It’s hard for the man in the street (or in parliament) to imagine how much attention to detail is required to build and operate a nuclear plant safely. Few countries can muster the required talent (and regulatory enforcement). 4th-gen plants may well be better, but there is still a finite probability of catastrophic failure, and dire, costly consequences if it happens. That is, a very small number times a very big number is still a big number.

That said, there will be some places forever dependent on nuclear, because they don’t have any other realistic options. Current nuclear reactors are (as DB just said) not very good at turning fuel rods into heat, so an improvement in that area would definitely be welcome. Apart from anything else, it means there is a corresponding reduction in waste output - waste that’s dangerous for centuries is still a royal pain in the ass.

This is true, but Taiwan could still become that “green island” that the DPP (or was it the KMT?) used to spout off about, imagining that if they said it often enough it would become miraculously true.

Transport is one area: because of Taiwan’s geography, demographics, and transport preferences, it would be the ideal place for an automated transport network. It could easily parallel existing roads (have you seen the freeway-in-the-sky next to route 3 south to Hsinchu?) until cars/scooters could be phased out entirely. Taiwanese people could completely avoid learning to drive. Um … ok, no change there then, but they would pay less for their transport and there’s be less risk of maiming.

Then there’s building design. Building quality here is only a couple of notches above third-world level, and competent architects and structural engineers seem rare. I’ve heard there are a couple of celebrity “green” architects, but they’re considered cranks and only rolled out for face-saving projects. Design in general is not taught well in Taiwan. I come across all sorts of structural features here that make me think “WTF?”. Example: the huge pedestrian plaza outside HongShuLin MRT, which faces onto a two-lane road. One or both lanes are invariably blocked by people dropping off and picking up, and by parked shuttle buses transporting people to the (many) nearby communities. It apparently didn’t occur to the designer that a drop-off area might be a good idea.

Agriculture also needs attention. Subsidies for fuel, water, and fertilizers, and inappropriate methods imported from temperate climates are causing massive problems. I was reading a Taiwan gov’t website the other day crowing about their ‘discovery’ of symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria - something which farmers have been using since at least 1850.

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Here is an interesting comparison of petrol taxes by country. Each country has it’s own specific industrial, geographic and economic environment.

In countries such as the UK total tax take on petrol is well over 50%!

economist.com/node/17101124

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Since I’m plugging for nuclear power, I feel the need to address nuclear accidents.

To date, there have been three, though the anti-nuke folks will tell you with a straight face that there have been “tens of thousands” of accidents, including the recent “accident” in Taiwan where Taipower replaced two broken bolts during a routine maintenance shutdown (by this method of calculating, there must have been thousands of accidents involving wind power too, but I digress).

Of the three accidents, only the first, Three Mile Island, is a “true accident.” I say that because it was simply defective design. A valve in the cooling system failed, the reactor overheated and was destroyed. Although only a small amount of radiation was released and no one was killed, there is no denying that the reactor was inherently unsafe by design. The only upside is that the nuclear industry was forced to do a lot of safety redesigning as a result.

The second accident was Chernobyl, which was a generation one reactor. It was also a bad design, built to produce as much plutonium as possible (for nuclear weapons) - producing electricity was secondary. Despite the poor design, ironically the disaster wasn’t a true accident in the sense that it wasn’t caused by a mechanical failure or even an operator error. What happened is that a team of “experts” was sent from Moscow to conduct a dangerous experiment on the reactor, which involved shutting down the reactor with all the safety systems disconnected. The operators of the Chernobyl reactor objected to this, but they were overruled. They gritted their teeth and obeyed orders, unhooked backup safety equipment, knowing it could easily turn into a disaster. The experiment was conducted near midnight (because the demand for electricity is low then), so when the evening shift departed, the graveyard shift came on duty not even knowing what was being done. The reactor overheated and caught fire, an entirely predictable outcome. My understanding is that several people later went to jail because of their role in creating the disaster. Of course, whether or not one wishes to call it an “accident” or “sabotage,” there is no denying the fact that it was indeed a disaster, the most deadly one in the history of nuclear reactors.

Last accident was, of course, Fukushima Daiichi, a generation-two power plant composed of six reactors. First off, the reactors all came through the earthquake OK. The emergency earthquake detection system did its job and shut down all six reactors almost instantly, the emergency cooling system (which is diesel powered) started automatically. But this points to a major weakness in generation-II design - you need an active cooling system running even when the reactor is turned off. The tsunami arrived about 20 minutes after the earthquake, and carried away the diesel fuel tanks (which were stored outside the building housing the reactors). With no fuel, the diesel generators shut down. There was a backup cooling system which ran off of batteries, and this kicked-in as it was designed to do, but the batteries could only power the pumps for eight hours. Once the batteries were discharged, the cooling system went down, the hot reactor started boiling the water and it evaporated, exposing the core to the open air and causing a meltdown.

There are a few lessons that should be learned from Fukushima. First would be to locate reactors at least 20 meters above sea level (Fukushima was 10 meters, the tsunami was 15 meters). Ironically, a 45-meter high hill was bulldozed when the power plant was constructed, lowering the site to 10 meters - the landfill was used to construct the harbor for delivering uranium. I used Google Earth to look up the elevations of Taiwan’s reactors - sadly, the fourth nuclear powerplant (currently under construction) is only 10 meters high - like Fukushima, the site is actually being lowered to make it easier to deliver fuel by ship. That was dumb, and makes me wonder if the project shouldn’t be abandoned - it might actually be cheaper to do so, since the design being used is already obsolete and a generation three-plus plant could be up and running in three years.

Another lesson that should be learned is that we need to use generation-four reactors, which eliminate the whole problem of needing a cooling system running for weeks after shutdown. As an added bonus, generation-four plants burn their own plutonium waste (the most troublesome kind of waste, by far) - the Gen-IV plants can burn the waste of Gen-II and Gen-III plants, using it as fuel.

As Finley said, nuclear power is complicated, and the details matter. Unfortunately, the public and politicians want energy policy to be so simple that everything we need to know can be fit on a bumper sticker.

Looks like the USA will soon begin building two new gen-III-plus reactors, the first in decades:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

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I wouldn’t trust Taiwanese engineers to design and install a toilet roll holder without causing a major international incident. There are maybe five countries on the entire planet that have 1) the skills 2) the clipboard-wielding, ramrod-up-the-backside culture and 3) the learned-it-the-hard-way experiences with technology to build nuclear power stations correctly. Taiwan is not one of them. Although previous nuclear accidents might not have been actual “accidents”, that’s probably cold comfort to the people living nearby, for whom the result was much the same. Accidents in general are usually not “accidents”: they’re invariably caused by some human doing something jaw-droppingly stupid. Ever watched the Discovery Channel series on aircraft crashes? It’s quite … educational. Humans everywhere are equally stupid, I guess, but some cultures tolerate stupid behaviour more readily than others.

Then there’s the issue of fuel or waste going astray. I understand breeder reactors didn’t become popular in part because people were afraid of excess plutonium - although I believe that problem was soon solved in various ways, after the politicans had lost interest. Personally, I don’t think any terrorist organisation will ever be capable of building a nuclear weapon (I mean, a fission bomb). OTOH a “dirty bomb” is dead simple. We happened to drive past the waste dump on Orchid Island the other day. It doesn’t look very secure. I bet you could break in and out of there with a second-hand Mi-8, a couple of AKMs, and a good loud “Allahu akbar!”. Or you could just pick up a few of the glowing barrels floating gently out to sea.

The bottom line is: if you have some technology that is inherently safe and idiot-proof (such as solar), it’s better to use that rather than something that’s inherently dangerous - if at all possible.

Just on the subject of fuel taxes/subsidies: it’s interesting how the man-in-the-street actually believes fuel subsidies make fuel cheaper. Take Taiwan for instance, where electricity is (was!) heavily subsidized, although only unofficially. Mr Lin probably uses about the same amount of juice as Mr Chen down the street, and most likely pays a similar amount of tax. The government takes some certain slice of Mr Lin’s and Mr Chen’s tax and gives it to the power company so that the numbers on their respective bills are lower. But, in fact, they’ve both paid the market rate for their electricity - it’s just been made less visible. Something similar happens with fuel tax. Road infrastructure and the externalities associated with vehicle use all have to be paid for, one way or another. The cash can either come out of general taxation, or it can be directly linked to vehicle use. Personally I think the latter is a lot fairer.

Most certainly. There are all sorts of problems associated with excessive energy use (or just a perceived need for it). I know I keep banging on about poverty, but it depresses me how certain countries insist on trying to install expensive, outdated technology - roads and cars, for example - where there is no obvious economic payback and where they do not have the supporting industries (or culture) to make it work. If these places would a) accept that such things are not an indication of progress, but the twilight nightmares of a waning epoch and b) that they can do much better with much less investment, there would be a lot less misery in the world. Climate change doesn’t even come into it.

In Taiwan’s case, a distributed solar infrastructure would be very difficult to knock out with air strikes. Four nuclear power stations being bombed to rubble - yes, I know, they’re hard to crack, but not impossible - that’s what they call a “national security issue”.

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To a large extent I agree, though I would contend that Taiwanese could learn how to build nuclear power plants if that was any kind of national priority and it was funded. If you are today a young Taiwanese with engineering talent, you wouldn’t go into nuclear engineering given the possibility that Taiwan might shut down all their nukes as Japan recently did. Rather, you’d go to China, where the opportunities are. The ability to build and safely maintain nuclear power plants is being lost in Western countries, and the only people with those skills are older and nearing retirement. I expect that any future research and development will be done in China, Russia and possibly South Korea. France and the USA are dropping out of this business and may soon lose the ability to build nuke power plants, though there is a chance of revival if the fossil fuel situation becomes dire (which may happen).

Yes, I’m sorry if I gave the wrong impression. The disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima were disasters nonetheless, regardless of their cause. I only meant to emphasize that they weren’t mechanical failures, as was the case at Three Mile Island where defective design caused the accident. One might argue that Fukushima was defective, in that it should have been built higher above sea level (amazing that the original site was high enough but was intentionally lowered, and Taiwan is now repeating this mistake). Chernobyl was actually a very crappy design, but it wasn’t design failure that caused the disaster. It behooves the designers of future nuclear power plants to build them bulletproof, so that tsunamis and stupidity won’t lead to catastrophes.

Old-style breeders produced plutonium that could easily be diverted to weapons. The newest designs make that almost impossible (but not 100% impossible) by “polluting” the plutonium so that it’s never enriched enough to support a nuclear explosion. Separating out the plutonium until it becomes “weapons grade” is an extremely tedious and high-tech process that few countries have mastered.

Fourth generation would also make dirty bombs pretty difficult (I don’t want to say “impossible”) because there is no need to store large quantities of nuclear waste in pools. The “waste” gets consumed in the reactor. If one was looking to construct a terrorist weapon, it would be easier and deadlier to use toxic chemicals.

I agree 100% that solar is safer than nuclear. Ditto for wind. Ditto for horses and squirrel cages. The big question is whether or not solar, wind, horses and squirrels can provide enough power to run this society. OK, I’m being facetious about the horses and squirrels, but you get my point. Shut down all the nukes in Taiwan, put solar panels on every available rooftop, and you get…brownouts and blackouts. Sure, you will get some power from the panels, and solar hot water heaters mostly work well (not as well in north Taiwan, but reasonably well in the south). Wind I think is a dead loss in Taiwan, but sort of works in some places (along the North Sea coast of Europe, in winter), works really well year-round in a few places (ie Aleutian Islands). My big problem with alternative energy isn’t that it won’t produce anything - it will indeed produce power - I just don’t think it comes anywhere near what is needed for the type of society we live have on our crowded planet. In crowded Taipei, I don’t see how solar panels can even make a dent in power consumption - just try running the MRT or high-speed rail on them. But I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

The response most greenies give to the above argument is that we, as a society, need to “power down.” By this I think they mean we have to go back to a simpler lifestyle, ride a bicycle, read by candlelight, plow fields with horses, heat and cook with firewood, do away with air travel, sea travel allowed only by wind-driven ships - basically 19th century living. Which might be fine if we had the same population the world had in the 19th century (around one billion).

Of course, the world may get back to one billion (or less) people if we continue on our present path of environmental destruction. A nuclear war could go a long way to achieving this goal - one way in which nuclear power can definitely contribute to reducing fossil fuel consumption.