Archive for July, 2024

Nuclear again and again and again

July 15, 2024

The Coalitions “Nuclear Fantasy” is not generated by concerns about:

  • Energy supply, as the seven nukes will not even replace the coal power generated electricity that is being shut down, never mind grant the increase in energy we will need by 2040.
    • Small Modular Reactors do not exist commercially, so after a lot of blather, they are only going to use two of them, in the hope they will eventually exist. The experimental SMRs also seem to produce less electricity than do normal reactors, so they are not a substitute for normal reactors. We will probably need three times the number of nukes.
    • The Smart Energy Council calculates that the seven reactors will only provide 3.7% of Australia’s electricity demand by 2050. This is pretty trivial, and may not be worth the cost or the risk.
  • Emissions reduction or reducing climate damage, because they also want to cut back large scale renewable projects, and they are abandoning emissions reduction targets. They will have to increase emissions, to get the energy needed, probably from gas burning.
    • Nuclear is not very flexible, it is required to generate a baseload, that means that as with coal, it gets disrupted by high levels of solar generation. This implies that to make it work, cheaper renewable energy has to be turned off. This also implies that the Coalition will need to prevent the regular export of electricity from your rooftop into the grid, so solar will become more expensive to operate.
  • Delay or the electricity generation gap. Given the illegality of nuclear energy in Australia, even assuming best building practice in a country that has never built such a thing, it will take at least 15 years to complete, and many of those years will be without coal power or adequate renewables. So electricity prices will climb, and we will have shortages.
  • Lowering costs of electricity as they seem to be ignoring the costs of building, insuring and decommissioning nukes, and making renewables harder to use. In the UK for example electricity prices from the new nukes are so high (because of the cost of building), that they will massively increase the price of electricity generally.
    • The long delay means that nuclear will do nothing to lower energy prices in the near future, although they are trying to imply it will.
    • The CSIRO GenCost report, finds conventional nuclear power stations will cost about 2.5 times as much as onshore wind and 5 times more than large-scale solar. If so, the electricity price has to be higher to recover the capital cost.
    • Not surprisingly Nuclear reactors cost more to run than wind or solar. They have large numbers of moving parts, materials are dangerous, and a lot of care and precision is required.
  • Communities. They are happy to support opposition to, and veto over, renewable projects (because they oppose renewab;es), but no community will get a veto over nuclear because its in the “national interest”.
    • Coalition policy continues to ignore that the best thing for rural towns is community owned renewable energy, it keeps the money in the town, gives them control over their development and means everyone gets buy in.
  • Issues of taxpayer subsidies which will be required for the build, as there is no evidence that corporations want to build any nuclear energy for themselves, unlike renewables.
  • Costs of insurance and decommissioning. In general, even though nuclear is usually safe, because of the possibility of severe accidents insurance companies are reluctant to cover them, and taxpayers usually end up taking the risk and taxpayers usually pay the billions or more to demolish the reactors safely.
  • Money. As the project will probably be built by foreign companies, most of the money will leave Australia.
  • Nuclear waste. that appears to be something we worry about in the future.

Given the policy is not about anything sensible, it would seem to be about

  • Continuing their war on renewables
  • Supporting fossil fuel companies, and their emissions, for at least another 15 to 20 years

and

  • wasting lots of money, on something which could produce huge problems for Australia.

It appears this is the usual swamp politics of subsidising and protecting the fossil fuel corporate sector from change, at the taxpayers’ expense.

Nuclear might have been a great idea 10 to 20 years ago, but is not now a whole answer, or even a partial answer especially if emissions are being increased and alternatives suppressed.

In other words don’t think that building a few nuclear power stations stops the need for other action.

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Australia’s climate emissions

July 7, 2024

This is basically a summary of:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/ng-interactive/2022/oct/03/tracking-australias-progress-on-the-climate-crisis-and-the-consequences-of-global-heating

Emissions reduction targets and needs

  • Labor has targets of reducing emissions to 43% beneath 2005 levels by 2030 and reaching net zero by 2050.
  • Climate scientists say the cuts should be at least 50% by 2030, it would be better if they were 75%.
  • The Coalition opposition wants to abandon all 2030 targets so emissions can increase freely. It hopes all necessary emissions reduction will happen between 2040 and 2050 because of 7 nuclear power stations. This is impossible without massive cuts in Australian energy use.
  • The idea of a carbon budget calculates a ‘fair’ level of total GHGs that can be emitted for a country to avoid 1.5C or 2C of warming. The Climate Targets Panel,says Australia has a carbon budget of up to 10.1bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions between 2013 and 2050 to help keep heating below 2C.
  • Scientists warn there will likely be a significant and devastating difference in the damage caused by the climate change produced by a heating of 1.5C and the heating produced by 2C.

At current rats of GHG emissions (2024), Australia will have consumed its carbon budget for 1.5C in less than 5 years.

And it will have consumed its carbon budget for 2.0C in about 11 years.

This is according to figures from the Commonwealth Department of Industry and Resources, Climate Change Authority, and Guardian Australia

Current Emissions Reduction

The currently claimed emissions reductions almost completely stem from land use change, which is fairly contentious and hard to measure. However, if those emissions are removed, then it looks as though the emissions reductions since 2005 are trivial.

The emissions from the Australian economy (including electricity, industry, transport, agriculture and waste) have decreased about 2.5% since 2005. This low level of reduction is not unexpected as the Coalition, has ruled over most of this period.

As well, the emissions produced by burning Australian Coal and Gas, overseas is not included in these counts. For example according to the Resources and Energy Quarterly, National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Australian Energy Statistics, and the IPCC, Australian emissions from black coal are about 156.7 billion tonnes and emissions from Australian black coal sold overseas are 864.4 billion tonnes.

Consequences

2023 was a record-breaking year for average temperatures in Australia and the world, and 2024 has been hotter again, so far.

Global surface temperature of the sea has so far been hotter in 2024 than in 2023, which is the hottest year ever recorded.

In the past 18 months, the extent of sea ice (in millions of kilometres) in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. have been well below anything previously recorded.

A Table of Australian events which probably were worsened by climate change (Stops at 2020, missing massive floods and further bushfires)

EventType of EventLocationEffect of climate change
Australian bushfires, 2019-20WildfireSouth-east AustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Queensland fire weather, 2018WildfireQueensland, AustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
New South Wales hottest summer, 2017HeatNew South Wales, Southeastern AustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Northern Australia marine heatwave, 2016OceansOff Northern AustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Western Australia severe frosts, September 2016ColdWestern AustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Extratropical Australia wildfire risk, 2015-16WildfireAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Record Australian heat event of October 2015HeatAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
South of Australia “exceptional” air pressures, August 2014AtmosphereOff Southern AustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Australia high temperatures, spring 2014HeatAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Australia heatwave, May 2014HeatAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Australia record summer temperatures, 2013HeatAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Australia & tropical Pacific warm anomalies, 2013HeatAustralia & far west PacificMore severe or more likely to occur
Eastern Australia record heatHeatEastern inland AustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Australia record hot September, 2013HeatAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Australia record temperatures, 2013HeatAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Australia hot summer, 2012-13HeatAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur
Fitzroy river flooding, 2010Rain & floodingQueensland, AustraliaDecrease, less severe or less likely to occur
Global temperatures and rainfall extremes, 1951-2005HeatEurope, North America, Asia, Australia, and the Northern HemisphereMore severe or more likely to occur
Australian “Millennium Drought”, mid-1990s to late 2000sDroughtAustraliaMore severe or more likely to occur

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The Supreme Court and Trump

July 2, 2024

I still have not got around to reading the judgement yet, so please be charitable, but my understanding is that one of the problems of the judgement is that few of the important terms are defined properly, and the bias of the judgement is towards increasing the power of the US President, and to reinforce their lack of responsibility to the American people.

After the Court’s decision, the President is immune from criminal prosecution for all acts that can be interpreted as part of their official “core” duties, and given “presumptive” immunity for all other official acts. This appears to allow the official Presidential core or other capacities to be stretched to provide immunity anywhere. Assuming the President has good advisors, it will be very hard to argue that any action is not a core activity or one with “presumptive immunity”.

So if Trump or anyone else says, “As part of my core activity of protecting the constitution and the stability of the Country, I will declare Martial law and suspend all elections” or “I will prevent all Marxists from participating in elections,” defining Marxists to be people who do not vote Republican (which is pretty much the current FOX position and that of many Republican politicians). He can then suspend all elections and remove all non Republican voters and candidates, to cheers from his media.

We can be sure that the President’s party will ignore impeachment, especially if he can have them killed. So no President will ever be impeached, and the President could presumably have the witnesses or prosecutors ‘disappear’ to protect the State from insurrection.

It already seems to be recognised by the Court that Trump’s attempts to force Pence into not certifying the result, is part of his official job of communicating with the VP. His attempts to force the DoJ to overthrow results is part of his core duties as supervising the DoJ. Possibly his ‘talks’ with the governor of Georgia are part of his duties as President to ‘prevent’ electoral fraud, and so on. We have been told he can only obstruct congress by refusing information, so arranging the assault of members by followers does not count. His earlier attempts to obstruct justice in the Mueller inquiry have been ignored anyway.

In other words, because of vagueness over his core capacities (even without presumptive immunity), it should be relatively easy to rule that the President could assassinate someone, or imprison them without trial, as long as he made the connection to a core activity. What a future this opens.

The judgement should have given hypothetical examples of what might be a crime, especially given that it gave comments which are clearly directed at stopping the cases against Trump, but I guess that would have undone the purpose of the judgement. The members of the Court could, for example, have replied to justice Sotomayor’s objections, by saying the president could be prosecuted for organizing a military coup, trying to overthrow an election, shooting unarmed people, starting a war without consulting Congress, or for taking a payment (or gift) in exchange for a pardon etc. but they didn’t. This implies that the judgement potentially recognises such acts as non criminal when committed by the President.

If any of what I’ve written is remotely correct, then I really had expected better of the Supreme Court, even this one. They, at best, show a remarkable lack of understanding of consequences of their actions. If not now, then later, they have made it legal for the USA to be seized by a dictator. This is a decision which supports the Deep State and tyranny.

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I may be being too narrow. It may be that the Supreme court wants to make it so that the rich-power elites can be immune from buying up the government

Earlier this month they essentially legalised bribery by saying in Snyder v United States that a bribe had to be paid before an advantage was given to the payer, and that gratuities, tips, gifts and other signs of appreciation given afterwards were perfectly legal.

This ruling guts most corruption legislation, and previous cases of corruption.

It also frees some of the Supreme Court from challenges of being corrupt themselves. Which is convenient

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