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Saturday, October 31, 2009

WWF Study Puts Global Warming Into Perspective



Following are several highlights I took home from the study.


Bioenergy comes with the following caveats:

We will all have get to drive electric cars!














  1. Hi,

    in my view, the WWF position on nuclear energy completely invalidates their contribution. They have gone as far as fabricating numbers in their G8 scorecards to make nuclear power look bad because they are so strongly opposed to it.

    Nuclear energy can be made clean, safe, proliferation-resistant, and unappealing for terrorists to attack (there will always be easier targets). Nor are they expensive compared to fossil fuels if they are built as an industry and not as a research project.

    Nuclear waste is not a problem either if we adopt technologies which have been proven to work, such as the Integral Fast Reactor which is so much more efficient than conventional nuclear power that the residual waste is safe after only 300 years.

    I would encourage anyone who wants to know what nuclear power can really achieve for us to visit Barry Brook goes into great detail about the operation, construction, and cost of nuclear power.

    Nuclear power can even displace fossil fuels directly, by replacing the heat-source in existing power stations and re-using the turbines, generators, and distribution networks. It's already been done, in the Elk River power station, back in 1963, as a proof-of-concept prototype. also has a very good series of articles on the true cost of 'renewables', such as wind and solar power. If you do the math right, you soon realise that these sources cannot displace fossil fuels on their own, simply because they're not reliable. All you need is a week of freezing cold weather in winter, with no wind and lots of cloud, and you soon wish you had some decent baseload power to back it up. Factor in the cost of that backup, and your renewables suddenly cost a lot more than you thought, and do a lot more damage in the process.

    So I'm very skeptical of anything the WWF say about energy policy. They're being guided by rhetoric, not science, and I don't trust that.

  2. I tend to agree with Monbiot:

    I'd choose nuclear power over a climate crash. But will the government grow up and clean its mess up?

    But, is it rational to throw out the entire report just because the researchers were asked to look for a solution that did not include increased nuclear growth? The nuclear wedge shown on the chart on page 36 would only get wider. It would remain just one of the 24 wedges, reducing the size of some of the other wedges. It does not make or break the solution. I suspect that if Russia manages to design some safe and affordable reactors to sell to the rest of the world, the nuclear wedge will get bigger, if not here but in other countries and remember, global warming is global.

    There is no doubt in my mind that if we start having power outages because renewable can't handles base load, people will start demanding reliable base load and nuclear is clearly a better option from a global warming perspective than coal or natural gas. Time will tell.

  3. Keep in mind, cost of construction here in the US is different from places like China (number one emitter) and Russia.

  4. Hi Russ,

    the WWF have so blatantly misled us all about nuclear power that I would not believe anything they say on alternative sources of power, not without verifying it first. They have destroyed their own credibility, which is a great shame.

    I would far rather get my information from sources that are open and fair with their calculations, such as Barry Brook's blog, or at Both those sites give well-sourced numbers that back up the claim that renewables are not an easy, if indeed at all viable, global solution.

    Construction costs need not be an issue either. Even if the US can't match China for keeping costs down,there are other ways. Many people are considering small nuclear reactors, 100MW or less. These can be made in assembly lines, shipped to their destination, and installed in a fraction of the time that it would take for a large, on-site construction. This will dramatically reduce costs.

  5. Have to admit, Tony, I was a bit disappointed to see that they had excluded growth of nuclear from the mix. On the other hand, they were just barely able get us down to a safe level without it. Look at it as a reserve option.

    One thing you can say with certainty, the predictions made in the study will bear little resemblance to what is actually going to happen. The future is hard to predict.

    Whoever calls the shots at WFF told the researchers to leave it out, and obviously they have lost some credibility for doing so. But, do you suppose the backlash would have been even greater had they included nuclear? How many of their donors are old-school anti-nuc die hards?

    I suspect it will find favor if it turns out that we need some nuclear basload after all, and I suspect we will.

