Energy Probe

Climate change

Posted on August 5, 2008 by energyprbe

The Solar Influences Data Analysis Center — SIDC — is the solar physics research department of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, a data analysis service of the Federation of Astronomical and Geophysical data analysis Service, and the World Data Center for the Sunspot Index.

SIDC collects monthly observations from worldwide stations in order to calculate the International Sunspot Number, Ri. The center broadcasts the daily, monthly, yearly sunspot numbers, with middle-range predictions (up to 12 months). Since August 1992, it has also provided hemispheric sunspot numbers.

ROB has operated SIDC since 1981. In 2000, SIDC obtained the status of Regional Warning Center (RWC) of the International Space Environment Service (ISES) and became the "Solar Influences Data analysis Center."

Posted in Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

Radioactive part was missing at Bruce plant

Posted on July 26, 2008 by energyprbe

(July 26) A radioactive part was missing for almost two months at the Bruce nuclear plant before a worker walking through an area called “the vault” discovered the problem after his radiation detector went off, writes Tyler Hamilton in the Toronto Star. Continue reading →

Posted in Nuclear Safety | Tagged Nuclear Safety | Leave a comment

India rejects climate doom, pursues economic boom

Posted on July 26, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 26, 2008

India loves the UN’s climate change policies and so does India’s representative at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri.

Why the love-in? The Indian government’s new “National Action Plan on Climate Change,” which Pachauri helped craft, plainly explains why: The UN formally establishes that global warming is a matter of secondary importance to India, allowing the world’s largest democracy to pursue its own best interests.

As the National Action Plan unapologetically puts it, the UN’s climate change convention “recognizes that ‘economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country parties.’ Thus, developing countries are not required to divert resources from development priorities by implementing projects involving incremental costs.”

And India doesn’t. Throughout its National Action Plan, India demonstrates that it will divert precious little of its scarce resources to solving the climate crisis. Where greenhouse gases will be curbed — for example, by aggressively building hydro dams or modernizing industry — the curbs will be a by-product of India’s national security concerns or economic development plans.

The UN’s climate change convention is even better than that — it’s a money-maker for India and a lever with which to obtain western technology. As the Action Plan makes clear, there’s only one condition under which India need spend a upee to help curb global warming “– (if) these incremental costs are borne by developed countries and the needed technologies are transferred.”

Apart from wanting to develop, and wanting transfers of western wealth, the Indian government has one other reason for putting global warming on the back burner — although it agrees that climate change may one day pose a threat, the National Action Plan states boldly that man-made global warming may not exist, and that if it does exist, its existence may be of no account to India.

“No firm link between the changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established,” the report states matter-of-factly, before proceeding to list the areas in which the science is not settled.

Parts of India have warmed, the Action Plan explains, and parts have cooled. Monsoon rains have increased in some areas and decreased in others. There have been no marked long-term trends in droughts or floods. Some regions have had a greater and others a lesser frequency of severe storms. Neither do the Himalayan glaciers demonstrate any consistent trend.

The upshot? With climate change such an ephemeral threat, why spend money on this possible non-event. Much better to focus on maximizing wealth and health.

The prescription? Grow the economy as fast as one billion people can possibly manage by building hundreds of new coal-fired power plants — India is planning a five-fold increase by 2030, making it the world’s third largest CO2 producer.

This National Action Plan is no ordinary report from a low-level government bureaucracy. It was commissioned last year by the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, chaired by the Prime Minister of India himself, and has the imprimatur of both the Government of India and the Prime Minister’s council.

Neither is Rajendra Pachauri an ordinary government representative at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is its chairman, in effect the world’s most senior climate change official. As such, he has been a vehement defender of the UN Panel’s position, brooking no dissent from the view that time was short if the planet was to avert climate change catastrophe. As one example, when the mild-mannered Danish statistician Bjorn Lomberg, a believer in man-made climate change, concluded that climate change was unlikely to cause catastrophe, Pachauri likened him to Hitler.

How did Pachauri react when his own prime minister, and the government that he represents at the UN, not only downplayed man-made global warming but positively asserted that there is no proof for it?

He vehemently endorsed his Prime Minister’s National Action Plan. “We are an expanding economy. How can we levy a cap [on CO2 emissions] when millions are living with deprivation?,” he told the Indian press. The National Action Plan should be implemented and the west should “get off the back of India.”

Posted in Coal, Costs, Benefits and Risks, Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

Radioactive part was missing at Bruce plant

Posted on July 26, 2008 by energyprbe

Tyler Hamilton
Toronto Star
July 26, 2008

A radioactive part was missing for almost two months at the Bruce nuclear plant before a worker walking through an area called “the vault” discovered the problem after his radiation detector went off.

Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., which misplaced the part while working on the multi-billion-dollar restart of the plant, failed to notify officials at Bruce Power about the incident.

The federal nuclear regulator wants to know why the loss of the part was kept quiet until it was accidentally discovered.

A spokesperson for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission said Bruce Power has until Aug. 8 to file a detailed report of what happened at Unit 2. Industry experts say it’s just the latest in a string of events that reflect poorly on AECL.

“AECL became aware of the problem on April 23 that a calandria tube insert was unaccounted for, however they failed to notify the RP (radiation protection) department of this fact,” according to an incident briefing filed on June 24 by Bruce Power to the regulator. “The increased hazard would have existed from that time.”

The document said the worker, who discovered the radioactive part on June 22, followed proper procedure and kept his radiation exposure to safe limits.

The reactor contains hundreds of calandria tubes, which contain heavy water. Collectively, these metal tubes form the core of a Candu nuclear reactor.

Duncan Hawthorne, chief executive officer of Bruce Power, dismissed the seriousness of the incident when contacted by the Star. “It’s not a story,” he said. “It’s a bull—- story. There is no issue.”

Federally owned AECL is a key contractor in the Bruce restart project and a supplier of Candu reactor technology that lies at the heart of all nuclear plants in Ontario. Spokesperson Dale Coffin acknowledged it took too long for the company to alert officials.

“We’re disappointed we didn’t notify Bruce Power sooner,” he said.

Coffin explained that the work AECL was doing is all automated, done by remote control outside of the vault area and monitored through TV cameras. A robot removes and destroys the old calandria tubes and tube inserts, which are chopped up and disposed of in a shielded waste bin. A single reactor has 960 metal tube inserts.

He said the company was aware of an “accounting discrepancy” with regards to the parts that were handled.

“We were going back and verifying whether or not (the part) was still in the tube or placed in the bin. It did not add up. We were in the process of verifying that,” Coffin said.

Frank Greening, a nuclear scientist and consultant with more than three decades of industry experience, equated the incident to a doctor leaving a scalpel inside a patient, knowing about it, but taking two months before saying anything.

“They seem to have a habit of not reporting stuff, then they have to talk their way out of it when it finally is reported,” he said. “There’s a bit of a pattern here of sloppy bookkeeping and reporting.”

Norm Rubin, director of nuclear research at Energy Probe, which is critical of nuclear power, said it’s standard practice to immediately report such events. “Obviously, things that are carcinogenic and lethal shouldn’t be left around, no matter what field you’re in,” said Rubin.

Bruce Power is trying to restart reactor units 1 and 2 at its Bruce A site, a project originally estimated at $2.75 billion. The nuclear power generator is now expecting costs in the range of $3.1 billion to $3.4 billion under a contract with the government that will see Ontario electricity consumers pay for $237.5 million of budget overruns so far.

TransCanada Pipelines Ltd., a financial partner in the Bruce restart project, told shareholders in April that AECL has been largely responsible for the delay and added rebuilding costs.

AECL is among three bidders hoping to win the chance to build two new nuclear reactors at the Darlington site, a decision the Ontario government yesterday delayed by three months to March 2009.

The incident at Bruce is just the latest in a series of troubles for the Crown corporation, currently the subject of a federal government review that could result in its privatization.

Last November, AECL’s research reactor at its Chalk River laboratory was shut down after regulators found problems with an emergency backup system. This led to a prolonged outage that put the world’s medical isotope supply at risk and resulted in the federal government bypassing the authority of the regulator.

Earlier this month, life sciences companies MDS Inc. launched a $1.6 billion lawsuit against AECL after it decided to cancel a 12-year-old project for two new research reactors at Chalk River. Those reactors were supposed to guarantee a long-term supply of medical isotopes to MDS but AECL couldn’t get them to work properly.

Read the article here.

Posted in Energy Probe News, Nuclear Safety | Leave a comment

You can’t have your yellowcake and hide it

Posted on July 15, 2008 by energyprbe

Energy Probe

July 15, 2008

“The international trade in nuclear materials and technology is inherently and uniquely fraught with long-term hazards to world peace and security.”

Energy Probe‘s Norman Rubin made an appearance in a recent report by Global-TV on the delivery this month of 550 metric tons of Iraqi yellowcake uranium to the Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp. The yellowcake, described as the last remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear arms program, was bought by Cameco from the United States for a reported sum in the tens of millions of dollars.

Norm’s points of interest concerning the yellowcake deal follow below and include news angles that were not touched on by the Global-TV report and that have yet to be followed up by other media outlets.

According to Norm, although Cameco “solved’ a potential nuclear-proliferation problem by getting some uranium out of unstable Iraq, Cameco and others are selling these same materials to countries that will probably become unstable in the future — long before the uranium itself becomes safe. (Says Norm: the Uranium-235 isotope boasts a billion-year half-life, so the ‘hazard’ can wait).

Norm argues that although the origin of the uranium yellowcake has not been revealed, what is clear is that Canada has long been willing to sell uranium and other nuclear materials and technology to Iraq, making Canada a possible source of origin, perhaps even Cameco itself, or one of its predecessor companies! Atomic Energy Canada Limited competed with France to sell Saddam-era Iraq the Osiraq research reactor — the same reactor destroyed by Israeli fighter pilots in the 1980s. In fact, says Norm, one source quotes a French nuclear official as saying that Canada’s AECL had even promoted the superior plutonium producing advantage of the Canadian design as a selling point.

The Associated Press story that has served as the basis for most coverage of the Iraqi yellowcake deal reports (and it’s the first time I’ve seen it reported – Norm) that Iraq also received four highly radioactive gamma sources from Canada’s MDS Nordion (presumably the radioactive isotope cobalt-60, which can be used directly for the making of a ‘dirty bomb’). These were reportedly removed from Iraq earlier in 2008 and returned to Nordion in Canada, by the US military.

Rather than neutralizing the threat, using yellowcake to make fuel for a civilian reactor makes the material more nuclear-weapons-usable (and therefore more ‘dirty bombs’ usable), says Norm. Specifically, he says, the used reactor fuel that it produces contains “almost 1000 bombs’-worth of plutonium.” Extracting the plutonium for use in a nuclear bomb is technically much simpler than turning yellowcake into any other kind of weapons material. But even though plutonium’s half-life to safety is a ‘mere’ 24,000 years, that’s still long enough a wait for even Canada to have become destabilized, nuclear-militaristic, or similar.

In short, says Norm, “the international trade in nuclear materials and technology is inherently and uniquely fraught with long-term hazards to world peace and security.”

Norm notes that yellowcake — a very crude form of uranium, neither extremely hazardous nor especially easy to use for nuclear weapons — isn’t usually shipped with top-secret ultra-secure handling. But for some reason, the Iraqi yellowcake was. Perhaps, says Norm, “to give the erroneous impression that it was connected somehow to Saddam’s non-existent post-Gulf-War stockpile of WMDs?”

One angle to this sale that has yet to be explored: Cameco is currently a willing buyer of uranium, partly because its output has nosedived since the 2006 flooding of its huge Cigar Lake mine in northern Saskatoon. That mine was scheduled to produce huge quantities of uranium this year, but its opening is now delayed until at least 2011.

Posted in Energy Probe News, Nuclear Proliferation | Leave a comment

NOW for example

Posted on July 14, 2008 by energyprbe

NOW magazine
July 3, 2008

May Warming warning

NOW magazine, May 15-21

How on earth anti-nuke pioneers Energy Probe became global warming deniers is beyond us. Yes, EP executive director Lawrence Solomon‘s The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, And Fraud is the hottest-selling "environmental" book in Canada and the U.S. Blaming the Third World for the planet’s eco problems, as Solomon does here, may make us energy hogs in the West feel better. But we’re the ones in real denial.

Just wait for the next smog day for that to become crystal-clear.

====================

Letter in response, July 3-10

Warning warming deniers

Your criticism of Lawrence Solomon’s The Deniers speaks well of the global warming hysteria (NOW, May 15-21).

If you’d bypassed your delicious dismay surrounding the provocative book title, you would have seen that it speaks more to scientific integrity than it does to taking sides in this complicated debate.

You could have made public one of the great suggestions: cutting subsidies for the energy industry and road users as a way of reducing negative environmental impacts (yes, directed at us energy hogs in the North).

We cannot rely solely on popular opinion and what the media presents as settled issues.

Alison Doyle
Toronto

Posted in Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

Abundant energy will power future growth

Posted on July 12, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 12, 2008

Up! Up! Up! The world is consuming more and more energy and, as if by miracle, the amount left to consume grows ever higher. Never before in human history has energy been accessible in greater abundance and in more regions, never before has mankind had more energy options and faced a brighter energy future.

Take oil, the scarcest of the major energy commodities. In the Americas, proven oil reserves have increased from 170 billion barrels to 180 billion barrels over the last two decades, according to the 2008 Statistical World Review from British Petroleum. In Europe and Eurasia, proven oil reserves almost doubled, from 76 billion barrels to 144. Africa’s proven oil reserves did double, from 58 billion barrels to 117. Even the Asia Pacific region, where China and India are reputed to be sucking up everything in sight, has increased its proven reserves. And the Middle East, the gas tank of the world, shows no sign of slowing down — its reserves soared by almost 200 billion barrels, from a whopping 567 billion barrels to a super-whopping 756.

Bottom line for the world: an incredible 36% increase in oil reserves during the two decades that saw the greatest globalization-spurred oil consumption in the history of mankind. And that doesn’t include the 152 billion barrels in proven oil reserves obtainable from Canada’s tar sands. Is there any reason to doubt that the next two decades won’t build on the steady growth of the last two?

These oil reserves aren’t the end of it. These figures — for the year ending December 2006 — represent oil that’s not only known to be available, but also economic at 2006 prices using 2006 technology. Since prices have soared in the last year, and technology has improved too, BP’s annual assessment for the 2007 year will show greater proven oil reserves still.

But this is still not the end of it. Unconventional oil reserves are now in play. In 2005, the Rand Corporation estimated that the oil shale in America’s Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, contains 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, with as much as 1.1 trillion barrels of oil recoverable, an amount comparable to the reserves of four Saudi Arabias. Oil shale becomes recoverable at $95 a barrel, it determined. With oil now trading at $140 a barrel, oil shale exploitation is now very much economic. Then there’s Canada’s tar sands, with its even greater potential — estimates of the total reserves that may be available top two trillion barrels, or eight Saudi Arabias.

This is still not the end to it. Most of the oil we know about lies in the well travelled portions of the globe. But most of the world remains unexplored — the interiors of Africa, Asia and South America have seen relatively little oil exploration. Oil exploration in the oceans, too, is in its infancy. For all practical purposes, mankind has limitless oil supplies available to it. The story is similar for natural gas and coal, the other major nonrenewable sources of energy. And for nuclear power. And for the renewables.

The amount of solar power landing on Earth could supply our current needs 10,000 times over. This potential will soon start to be realized on a large scale thanks to breakthroughs in the U.S. and Israel that have dramatically brought down the cost of solar technology. Wind also represents an inexhaustible resource, as seen in a 2005 NASA-funded study at Stanford University of viable wind sites worldwide. It found that wind power could satisfy global demand seven times over, assuming a realistic capture rate of 20%. Some European countries already meet a significant portion of their power needs with wind.

The world is awash with exploitable energy, both renewable and non-renewable. Availability is not at issue and never has been.

The only issue is the cost — both economic and environmental — at which it can be exploited.

Nuclear currently fails on economic grounds. But most fossil fuel technologies don’t need subsidies and soon, neither will most renewable technologies. That leaves the environment as the chief determinant of what energy we use, and where we use it. Thanks to environmental awareness and the high energy prices we now face, energy production has become ever cleaner, safer, and more efficient, giving us more meaningful options than ever before.

Whatever the outcome, whatever energy forms we ultimately rely on, the table is diverse and bountiful, allowing the world economy to grow large and to grow cleanly. And it will have been largely set by environmentalists.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Posted in Tar Sands | 1 Comment

Medical firm sues AECL, Ottawa

Posted on July 10, 2008 by energyprbe

Tyler Hamilton
Toronto Star
July 10, 2008

Life sciences company MDS Inc. has launched a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. and the federal government after a decision to cancel a 12-year-old project to build new nuclear reactors for producing medical isotopes.

Norm Rubin, director of nuclear research at Energy Probe, said any deal the federal government makes to privatize AECL will probably involve taxpayers taking on any potential liabilities from the lawsuit.

“We already have precedents of the Crown hanging onto the liabilities while selling what’s left. They sell the jewels and keep the garbage,”* he said.

He added, however, that the MDS lawsuit could make it more difficult for AECL to sell its next-generation Candu reactors in Ontario and elsewhere around the world.

“This is one more day that everyone is going to remember the Maple debacle, and that it wasn’t small. That’s got to hurt them.”

*The original report lists garage instead of garbage.

Source

Posted in Energy Probe News, Nuclear Economics, Nuclear Plant Security, Nuclear Power, Towards Shutdown | Tagged nuclear costs | Leave a comment

Is Wikipedia promoting global warming hysteria?

Posted on July 9, 2008 by energyprbe

Noel Sheppard
News Busters
July 9, 2008

Two weeks ago, a parent-teacher council blamed the online research source Wikipedia for falling test scores in Scotland.

On Tuesday, Canadian columnist Lawrence Solomon blamed Wikipedia for helping to spread global warming hysteria around the world.

The connection? Oftentimes “inaccurate or deliberately misleading information” published by Wikipedia is taken as fact by unsuspecting readers.

In the case of climate change, such inaccurate or deliberately misleading information acts to solidify the myth being espoused by Nobel Laureate Al Gore as millions of people across the globe believe Wikipedia is a purely factual resource.

To continue reading this article, please see: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/07/09/wikipedia-promoting-global-warming-hysteria

Posted in Costs, Benefits and Risks, Energy Probe News | 1 Comment

Wikipropaganda – Spinning green

Posted on July 8, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Review Online
July 8, 2008

Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus” confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works.

As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month. In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia” written and edited by the people who read it — anyone with an Internet connection. So on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.

Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.

I first noticed this when I entered a correction to a Wikipedia page on the work of Naomi Oreskes, author of the now-infamous paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, claiming to have exhaustively reviewed the scientific literature and found not one single article dissenting from the alarmist version of global warming.

Of course Oreskes’ conclusions were absurd, and have been widely ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly world-eminent scientists whose work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of global warming. Following the references in my book The Deniers, one can find hundreds of refereed papers that cast doubt on some aspect of the Gore/U.N. case, and that only scratches the surface.

Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’ work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right.

I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.

I soon found others who had the same experience: they would try to squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out.

Now Petersen is merely a Wikipedia “editor.” Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party. And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore.

Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley’s supervision, Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry.

Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favors.

“Peiser’s crap shouldn’t be in here,” Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an “edit war,” as they’re called. Trumping Wikipedia’s stated rules, Connelly used his authority to ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding.

Nor are Wikipedia’s ideological biases limited to global warming. As an environmentalist I find myself with allies and adversaries on both sides of the aisle, Left and Right. But there is no doubt where Wikipedia stands: firmly on the Left. Try out Wikipedia’s entries on say, Roe v. Wade or Intelligent Design, and you will see that Wikipedia is the people’s encyclopedia only if those people are not conservatives.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers.