Lepreau delays force Quebec to postpone work on its nuclear reactor

Posted on August 17, 2010 by energyprbe

(Aug. 17, 2010) Lepreau delays force Quebec to postpone work on its nuclear reactor

Mounting delays to the refurbishment of the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor have prompted a postponement of similar work at the Gentilly 2 station in Quebec.

Hydro-Quebec announced Monday that it’s putting off the $1.9-billion project until 2012. It was to begin next year.

The electricity giant said it made the decision so it can benefit from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s solutions to problems that have put the Point Lepreau work more than 21/2 years behind schedule.

It’s a move that could bolster New Brunswick’s argument that the lessons learned from delays at Lepreau will help AECL’s efforts elsewhere.

Problems involving seals on joints in calandria tubes have been encountered during AECL’s work at Lepreau and the Wolsong reactor in South Korea, which like Gentilly 2 are Candu-6 reactors.

Officials with Hydro-Quebec expect the lessons learned from those two projects will benefit the work at their plant by avoiding those same delays.

“We hope that by looking at what’s been learned, we will be able to come up with a schedule and a work plan that can be met because solutions have been found for the problems encountered at Point Lepreau and Wolsong,” Hydro-Quebec spokeswoman Marie-Elaine Deveault said Monday, speaking in French. “We want to develop a schedule that is realistic and will be respected.”

In the meantime, Gentilly 2 will continue to churn out 675 megawatts of electricity every hour. That means Quebec may be able to avoid additional costs of generating replacement power.

That’s likely to add ammunition to the New Brunswick government’s arguments for federal compensation because of the lengthy delay.

Premier Shawn Graham and Energy Minister Jack Keir have been pressing AECL and the federal government to compensate New Brunswick for the delays. New Brunswick has been saddled with the cost of buying replacement power during the refurbishment, something that’s expected to drive up costs close to $1 billion.

Keir, who was unavailable for comment Monday, has said he believes AECL is responsible for the extra costs that will otherwise have to be carried by NB Power.

“The sand on the beach changed in September 2009 when Hugh MacDiarmid, the president of AECL, said ‘I look at that schedule in the contract and it never had any chance for success,’ ” Keir said in an interview last week.

Part of the rationale Keir and Graham have put forward is that AECL will apply the lessons learned on Lepreau to other nuclear reactors, which will benefit the Crown-owned nuclear power company.

AECL and NB Power have been exchanging information in order to assess the delays and costs.

To date, federal leaders have indicated only that “AECL will honour its contractual obligations to complete the project.”

According to the agreement, NB Power is to cover the cost of replacement power.

Deveault said an inspection conducted during an annual maintenance shutdown earlier this month found that the state of equipment at Gentilly 2 was satisfactory to continue generation.

Hydro-Quebec said the postponement will also give it time to secure assurances about who might eventually own AECL.

The Becancour, Que., nuclear power plant is that province’s only nuclear reactor. The 25-year-old plant produces enough energy to power 270,000 homes.

Norm Rubin, director of nuclear research for Energy Probe, an energy issues think-tank, said he isn’t surprised by Quebec’s decision.

“I don’t expect it to go ahead, but then I was surprised when New Brunswick decided to go ahead,” he said. “I think the message is pretty clear: The next time you get a report from your own utilities board that says it’s a loser to invest in something nuclear that has a track record that looks like the underside of a rock, the next time you get that advice, take it.”

In a 2002 decision, the former New Brunswick Board of Commissioners of Public Utilities recommended against the refurbishment, saying there was “no significant economic advantage to the proposed refurbishment project.”

Hydro-Quebec isn’t facing the same problem as New Brunswick in terms of buying replacement power. While Lepreau accounts for about 30 per cent of New Brunswick’s power generation, Gentilly 2 accounts for about three per cent of Quebec’s total production.

Shawn Berry, The Daily Gleaner,  Aug. 17, 2010
Posted in New Brunswick Power | Leave a comment

Lepreau delays force Quebec to postpone work on its nuclear reactor

Posted on August 17, 2010 by energyprbe

Shawn Berry
The Daily Gleaner
August 17, 2010

Lepreau delays force Quebec to postpone work on its nuclear reactor

Mounting delays to the refurbishment of the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor have prompted a postponement of similar work at the Gentilly 2 station in Quebec.

Hydro-Quebec announced Monday that it’s putting off the $1.9-billion project until 2012. It was to begin next year.

The electricity giant said it made the decision so it can benefit from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s solutions to problems that have put the Point Lepreau work more than 21/2 years behind schedule.

It’s a move that could bolster New Brunswick’s argument that the lessons learned from delays at Lepreau will help AECL’s efforts elsewhere.

Problems involving seals on joints in calandria tubes have been encountered during AECL’s work at Lepreau and the Wolsong reactor in South Korea, which like Gentilly 2 are Candu-6 reactors.

Officials with Hydro-Quebec expect the lessons learned from those two projects will benefit the work at their plant by avoiding those same delays.

“We hope that by looking at what’s been learned, we will be able to come up with a schedule and a work plan that can be met because solutions have been found for the problems encountered at Point Lepreau and Wolsong,” Hydro-Quebec spokeswoman Marie-Elaine Deveault said Monday, speaking in French. “We want to develop a schedule that is realistic and will be respected.”

In the meantime, Gentilly 2 will continue to churn out 675 megawatts of electricity every hour. That means Quebec may be able to avoid additional costs of generating replacement power.

That’s likely to add ammunition to the New Brunswick government’s arguments for federal compensation because of the lengthy delay.

Premier Shawn Graham and Energy Minister Jack Keir have been pressing AECL and the federal government to compensate New Brunswick for the delays. New Brunswick has been saddled with the cost of buying replacement power during the refurbishment, something that’s expected to drive up costs close to $1 billion.

Keir, who was unavailable for comment Monday, has said he believes AECL is responsible for the extra costs that will otherwise have to be carried by NB Power.

“The sand on the beach changed in September 2009 when Hugh MacDiarmid, the president of AECL, said ‘I look at that schedule in the contract and it never had any chance for success,’ ” Keir said in an interview last week.

Part of the rationale Keir and Graham have put forward is that AECL will apply the lessons learned on Lepreau to other nuclear reactors, which will benefit the Crown-owned nuclear power company.

AECL and NB Power have been exchanging information in order to assess the delays and costs.

To date, federal leaders have indicated only that “AECL will honour its contractual obligations to complete the project.”

According to the agreement, NB Power is to cover the cost of replacement power.

Deveault said an inspection conducted during an annual maintenance shutdown earlier this month found that the state of equipment at Gentilly 2 was satisfactory to continue generation.

Hydro-Quebec said the postponement will also give it time to secure assurances about who might eventually own AECL.

The Becancour, Que., nuclear power plant is that province’s only nuclear reactor. The 25-year-old plant produces enough energy to power 270,000 homes.

Norm Rubin, director of nuclear research for Energy Probe, an energy issues think-tank, said he isn’t surprised by Quebec’s decision.

“I don’t expect it to go ahead, but then I was surprised when New Brunswick decided to go ahead,” he said. “I think the message is pretty clear: The next time you get a report from your own utilities board that says it’s a loser to invest in something nuclear that has a track record that looks like the underside of a rock, the next time you get that advice, take it.”

In a 2002 decision, the former New Brunswick Board of Commissioners of Public Utilities recommended against the refurbishment, saying there was “no significant economic advantage to the proposed refurbishment project.”

Hydro-Quebec isn’t facing the same problem as New Brunswick in terms of buying replacement power. While Lepreau accounts for about 30 per cent of New Brunswick’s power generation, Gentilly 2 accounts for about three per cent of Quebec’s total production.

Posted in Energy Probe News, New Brunswick Power | Leave a comment

Organized crime greasing the wheels of Europe’s wind industry

Posted on August 13, 2010 by energyprbe

The green economy is attracting a new type of investor: organized crime. According to the corporate investigations and security group, Kroll, Europe’s growing wind industry is being exploited by criminals looking for a share of the billions in subsidies on offer. They’re also using it to easily launder money.

Jason Wright, senior director of Kroll’s consulting group, says groups linked to the mafia have infiltrated the industry.

Kroll says that since 2007 it has seen a drastic increase of fraud and corruption in the wind energy sector—particularly in Italy and Spain, but also in Bulgaria, Romania and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe.

What makes the renewable energy such a target for corruption? Government subsidies.

“Renewable energy is completely dependent on subsidies, so it is clearly an area for corruption,” Mr Wright said. “Wind farms are a profitable way to make money because of the subsidies, and they are also a great way of laundering it.”

Wright added that wind projects are particularly prone to corruption, as they often depend on political patronage of local officials in charge of issuing licences and access to public land.

And how much money is there for the taking? Billions. Figures show that more than €6 billion of EU subsidies have been earmarked for renewable energy projects over a 13-year period ending in 2013. In Italy, the growth of renewable energy projects has been much quicker in Sicily and the south than in the north of the country—a reflection, Wright believes, of the ease which developers can secure licences in these regions.

Wright said his company found that about 50 per cent of the renewable energy cases investigated on behalf of clients in Milan and Madrid uncovered evidence of fraud or corruption—compared to around 10 to 20 percent for most projects investigated by the company.

According to one report, eight people in the Trapani area of western Sicily, as well as in Salerno in the southwest of the mainland, were arrested last year after in investigation in Mafia activities revealed connections to a string of wind projects. Police say officials had received bribes and luxury cars to encourage the town to invest in wind farms.

The rising connection between crime and renewable energy has resulted in Italy’s police force greatly increasing its surveillance of the wind industry. Police in the country now run three operations targeting the wind industry.

And in Spain, it’s more of the same—with officials in the Canary Islands alleging five local officials, a mayor and two developers misappropriated land.

In Corsica, officials have been accused of skimming more than €1.5 million worth of EU subsidies for wind energy projects.

Can we now say crime has gone “green”?

Energy Probe is a keen supporter of renewable energy. We believe renewable energy has the ability to diversify our electricity supply, while allowing for more decentralized sources of power for consumers. But we’re not in favour of throwing massive subsides at forms of energy that are not technically or economically feasible.

Read the previous gangrene economy report, "The Latest Cost Of Going Green: Your Health" here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Why wind power is more complicated than people imagine

Posted on August 8, 2010 by energyprbe

(Aug. 8, 2010) July 8 — a Thursday — was the height of Ontario’s heat wave, the day it reached 35 degrees in Ottawa, the day when air conditioners strained our electrical system to the limit. Continue reading →

Posted in Renewables | Leave a comment

Why wind power is more complicated than people imagine

Posted on August 8, 2010 by energyprbe

Tom Spears
The Ottawa Citizen
August 8, 2010

July 8 — a Thursday — was the height of Ontario’s heat wave, the day it reached 35 degrees in Ottawa, the day when air conditioners strained our electrical system to the limit.

Ontario was drinking power at a rate of more than 25,000 megawatts — that’s 25 billion watts — in the late afternoon. Not a record, but far more than most summer days.

Our nuclear reactors were pumping out more than 9,200 megawatts. Hydroelectric power (mainly Niagara Falls) supplied another 3,400. We burned gas and coal to generate another 10,200.

But wind power, one of the ways of the future, supplied just 107 megawatts of electricity. That’s less than half of one per cent of the province’s demand and enough to power a mere 32,100 homes.

Wind turbines dot much of Ontario’s landscape today — hundreds of tall, white structures with three giant blades. Most of them stand 80 or 100 metres high at the centre hub where those blades revolve.

We’ll be buying more soon. Ontario has contracted with the Korean giant Samsung to build wind turbine factories in Ontario and install hundreds more of the machines, some on breezy hilltops, more along the shores of the Great Lakes, and some standing in the lakes themselves.

On paper, the turbines we already have are able to supply nearly 1,100 megawatts. That’s called their capacity.

In practice their annual average is about 30 per cent of that, because wind doesn’t blow all the time.

And the reality is that in summer, the time when Ontario needs more electricity than at any other time of year, they produce far less even than 30 per cent of their capacity. (In winter, another high-demand time, they produce more — often around 70 per cent.)

The 107 megawatts they produced on the afternoon of July 8 equalled just more than 10 per cent of capacity. For much of July they produced 100 to 200 MW, but sometimes they produced even less — 85 MW on the afternoon of July 9, 72 MW on July 12, and all the way down to a negligible five MW on July 20.

On many of these days, Ontario got more electricity from wood fires and from burning waste methane gas at garbage dumps than from the expensive wind turbines.

So, is wind power worthless? Not at all. But it’s much more complicated than people imagine in the clean-sounding deal where Ontario decided to shut down all its coal-burning generating stations and build smog-free windmills.

Ontario has boosted wind by guaranteeing new wind farms a premium price of 13.5 cents a kilowatt hour, removing the need for wind to compete against cheaper coal and established nuclear plants. The guaranteed price is called a feed-in tariff. Ontario is also building new transmission lines to allow for new and expanded wind farms.

We will get more wind power. What we won’t get is an all-green grid where most of our lights, computers and factories are powered by the wind. At most, wind seems likely to supply up to 10 per cent of our power, and even that will vary with the weather.

As Ontario swings toward new sources of electricity for our lights and computers and factories, a lot of juggling becomes necessary.

“As the electricity system grows and diversifies, with more and more different types of generation coming into the mix, there’s more variability on the supply side,” says Robert Hornung, president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association. It represents wind energy producers.

“The system operators — their big job is to ensure that supply equals demand,” he said. “When somebody flips the switch, the power is going to be there. And they deal with a lot of variability. You’ve got demand that varies enormously from four in the morning to five in the afternoon,” as well as seasonal changes.

Despite recent growth, Ontario still gets a small proportion of its power from wind, and when the wind changes radically, it doesn’t upset the overall picture much. Someone adds a little power from gas or coal, and the supply stays the same.

But when there’s a capacity of 5,000 megawatts instead of today’s 1,100, this will change. Either a sudden increase or decrease in wind can surprise us:

n The wind drops. Gas-fired turbines must be standing by to pick up the slack.

n The wind rises. This doesn’t sound bad, but in some conditions it might be, if we suddenly have too much power.

This happened in the spring of 2009, though the wind wasn’t to blame. There had been very heavy snow that winter; runoff was filling rivers. The nuclear plants were running at a fairly constant level and suddenly we had a glut of hydroelectric power. Meanwhile demand was down; in April there was little demand for either heating or air conditioning.

With too much power on hand, Ontario has to get rid of it or risk overloading and damage to equipment. For a full month the price of our power was negative — that is, we were paying utilities in Ohio and Michigan to take it off our hands.

Private energy analyst Tom Adams thinks that could happen again when we lean more heavily on wind power. Wind turbines can shut down in high wind, but Ontario would still have to pay them for the power they aren’t generating, like a diner who orders a restaurant meal and doesn’t eat it. It’s called “curtailed output.”

“As wind becomes a big player in the power market, the dynamics of wind power, the come-and-go nature of wind output, becomes critical,” he said.

“You may get a spike of 7,000 megawatts of wind power that comes on at one o’clock in the morning.” Suddenly the Ontario Power Authority has to get rid of surplus power, or there will be damage. “This is a major, major concern.”

Variability is also an issue closely watched by the Independent Electricity System Operator, the Ontario body that provides a market where generators and consumers buy and sell electricity.

“I often think back to a weekend last fall, actually it was Halloween weekend, when we (had) a record of over 1,000 megawatts from wind between 3 and 4 p.m.” said IESO spokesman Terry Young. “And between three and four o’clock the next day it was seven megawatts. So it’s kind of gone from record high to near-record low in 24 hours.”

The other odd side of wind power is that when it falls off, we’re going to use gas-fired turbines to replace it. We traditionally used coal-burning plants but the Ontario Liberal government is phasing these out by 2014. Coal causes more smog and emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than gas. Some coal “units” are closed already. One plant in Mississauga is demolished.

But Adams and others argue this is the worst plan for a wind-loving province.

When they’re standing by, coal plants can run at about 20 per cent of full power. Gas turbine plants, however, must run at a higher level — about 60 per cent.

Adams’ analysis is that this will waste energy as Ontario builds new gas-fired plants for backup. As well, gas is more expensive than coal.

Expanding wind doesn’t fit with phasing out coal, says Norm Rubin of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental policy organization. If these were pieces in a puzzle, “you couldn’t bang them together with a hammer.”

At the Canadian Wind Energy Association, Robert Hornung doesn’t see much risk.

A group of North American utilities has analysed the question. It finds that “you can get up to about 10 per cent of electricity coming from wind without having any really significant impact on system operations,” said Hornung. After that, the ups and downs of wind power are harder to handle. But he notes that Alberta has removed limits on wind installation originally set for just this reason.

“Because wind is so new in North America, there’s still an evolutionary process and learning process going on.”

Read the original article here.

Posted in Alternative Energy, Energy Probe News, Renewables | Leave a comment

Work on N.B. nuclear plant delayed again, another year added to schedule 6/08/2010

Posted on August 6, 2010 by energyprbe

(Aug. 6, 2010) FREDERICTON – The refurbishment of the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant in New Brunswick has been delayed by at least another year, putting the project 2 1/2 years behind schedule and driving the cost beyond the $2 billion mark. Continue reading →

Posted in New Brunswick Power | Leave a comment

Work on N.B. nuclear plant delayed again, another year added to schedule 6/08/2010

Posted on August 6, 2010 by energyprbe

Kevin Bissett, The Canadian Press
Winnipeg Free Press
August 6, 2010

FREDERICTON – The refurbishment of the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant in New Brunswick has been delayed by at least another year, putting the project 2 1/2 years behind schedule and driving the cost beyond the $2 billion mark.

NB Power president Gaetan Thomas said crews continue to have a problem getting a tight seal in the joints of the reactor’s new calandria tubes, which contain pressure tubes that hold the fuel bundles. Of the 380 tubes, 80 have been passed and 80 have failed, while the remaining 220 have yet to be tested.

Hugh MacDiarmid, president and CEO of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., confirmed the delay Friday when he met with New Brunswick Energy Minister Jack Keir and Thomas in Fredericton.

Thomas said NB Power needs the refurbishment to last 25 to 30 years, so strict standards must be met.

“For NB Power, we must ensure that when the plant is turned back over from AECL to us that it is exactly as we expect,” Thomas said.

The refurbishment was originally budgeted at $1.4 billion, including $400 million for replacement power. It costs NB Power about $1 million a day to provide replacement power, which means the cost of replacement power could be well over $1 billion.

Thomas said there’s no way to know what the higher costs could do to power rates in the province until the utility learns the exact length of the delay.

Premier Shawn Graham has been pressing the federal government to shoulder the cost overruns because AECL is a federal Crown Corporation.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and federal Conservative MPs have said the contract will be honoured, but have not agreed to pay for the replacement power during the delays.

In a letter to Graham last month, Harper said the province was “fully aware that there were uncertainties involved” when the project was started.

The contract was signed by the province’s previous Conservative government in 2005, a year before Graham’s Liberals came to power.

Graham has threatened to sue Ottawa for the extra costs, but Keir said he wants a mediation process with the federal government to settle the question of who will pay.

“The people of New Brunswick contracted for success on this project, not for failure,” Keir said.

This is the first refurbishment of a Candu-6 reactor by AECL, and Keir said New Brunswickers should not be paying for a federal Crown corporation that’s on a learning curve that will allow it to do a better job of refurbishing similar reactors elsewhere around the world.

But Paul Robichaud, the Tory energy critic, said he thinks the provincial government is jumping the gun.

“I believe there is still some time and some place for discussion and instead of calling a press conference, what the province of New Brunswick should do is to sit at the table with the federal government and try to find a solution to this situation,” he said.

Work on Point Lepreau was scheduled to take 18 months when it began in March 2008. It is now expected to be at least early 2012 when the work is complete.

“Until we have a solution to the leak testing and acceptance testing for the calandria tubes, we just can’t provide a definitive date yet to when the reactor will be returned to service,” said Dale Coffin, a spokesman for AECL.

“We’re working through those options and narrowing down the options to identify which is the best solution.”

The delays faced by AECL at Point Lepreau and at a plant in North Korea have prompted Hydro-Quebec to hold off on the refurbishment of its Gentilly-2 nuclear station, according to media reports. It is also a Candu-6 reactor like Lepreau.

Norm Rubin of the Toronto-based energy watchdog Energy Probe said he’s not surprised by the added delays at Point Lepreau or the decision by Hydro-Quebec.

“People who look at this as a reliable source of power are destined to live in the dark,” he said.

“This is an unforgiving technology and it has found ways to break the hearts of investors and electricity consumers all over the world for decades.”

Read the original article here. 

Posted in Energy Probe News, New Brunswick Power | 3 Comments

Lawrence Solomon: Global cooling could be killing penguins

Posted on July 20, 2010 by energyprbe

An alarmingly large number of penguins could be starving due to unusually cold waters in the southern hemisphere, according to scientists interviewed by the Associated Press. “What worries us this year is the absurdly high number of penguins that have appeared dead in a short period of time,” said Thiago do Nascimento, a biologist at Brazil’s Peruibe Aquarium, referring to 500 penguins found dead in the last 10 days alone on three beaches in Sao Paulo state.

Autopsies on several penguins show their stomachs to be entirely empty, pointing to starvation as a cause of death. The scientists speculate that frigid waters in the southern hemisphere, exacerbated by overfishing, may have deprived the penguins of food, forcing them to travel to warmer waters in search of sustenance.

The Antarctic has been in the throes of a long term cooling period that has seen the southern polar cap get progressively colder for decades. In 2002, scientists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at Harvard warned that the cooling that was then occurring in the Antarctic was leading to the starvation of penguin chicks. The Antarctic cooling with a resulting growth in sea ice — a cooling that proved wrong the warming predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – was disrupting penguin populations, forcing them to migrate to more hospitable surroundings.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, July 20, 2010

Posted in Climate Change | Leave a comment

Lawrence Solomon: The Globe and Mail’s overheated rhetoric

Posted on July 17, 2010 by energyprbe

The planet is experiencing “a summer of swelter,” states a front-page story in today’s Globe and Mail that provides us with anecdotes of the upshot, such as “more than 1000 Russians have drowned in the last month trying to escape record temperatures.” The Globe then speculates that one cause of the worldwide heat wave could be “the ever-shrinking size of the world’s ice caps.”

First, the Russians. The Globe might have told us that they drown in droves every year, disproportionately in the summer months, and the Globe might also have told us why. “The majority of those drowned were drunk,” explains Vadim Seryogin, a department head at Russia’s Emergencies Ministry. Last year, when 3000 Russian drowned, one analysis of drowned Russian males found that 94% had been drunk.

Perhaps the heat caused Russians to drink more – the data is not yet in – but most don’t need heat to drive them to drink. According to a study last year published in the British journal, the Lancet, alcohol was responsible for the deaths of about three quarters of all Russian men, and half of all Russian women, aged 15-54.

Next, those “ever-shrinking” ice caps, of which this planet has two. The ice cap in the southern hemisphere, in the Antarctic, has been growing steadily since the 1970s, especially so this summer. The ice cap in the northern hemisphere, in contrast, did shrink temporarily over the last few months, after having expanded temporarily earlier in the year, and it is now expanding again. On balance, Planet Earth now has slightly more ice than usual, according to the most recent data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It shows the Arctic to have 1.379 million fewer million square kilometres of ice while the Antarctic has 1.404 more.

“Ice reflects sun and when you melt it, the Earth absorbs more heat, which causes further melt back, which causes more warming,” Danny Harvey, a climate researcher at University of Toronto, told The Globe. “So when you lose ice, it means we’re in big trouble.”

So, when we gain ice, as the Earth is now doing, does it mean we are we safe and sound? The Globe didn’t ask, and Harvey didn’t answer.

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, July 17, 2010

Posted in Climate Change | Leave a comment

Lawrence Solomon: IPCC to Scientists: Shut Up!

Posted on July 16, 2010 by energyprbe

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on July 5th warned the scientists in its camp to avoid talking to the press. The warning came just before the Muir Russell report into the Climategate Email scandal stated that IPCC scientists needed to enter “a new world of openness” because their bunker mentality was harming the cause of science.

The July 5th letter, written by IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri to hundreds of scientists preparing the IPCC’s next mammoth report, expected to be published in 2013, stressed the importance of managing the media through the IPCC’s PR department:

“I would also like to emphasize that enhanced media interest in the work of the IPCC would probably subject you to queries about your work and the IPCC. My sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media and should any questions be asked about the Working Group with which you are associated, please direct such media questions to the Co-chairs of your Working Group and for any questions regarding the IPCC to the secretariat of the IPCC.”

The scientists may have trouble reconciling Pachauri’s instructions with those from Muir Russell, who stated that “Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct.”

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, July 16, 2010

Posted in Climate Change, The Deniers | Leave a comment