Regards, Mike B)
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So, once more, we look to remedies to tackle warming. Here’s a tantalising proposition from John Veevers, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at Macquarie University.
John Veevers: James Lovelock says that nuclear power is the only green solution to CO2-induced global warming. The great Earth system Gaia is trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback. It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the house was alight. Global warming is accelerating and almost no time is left to act. Should we enjoy a warm 21st century, and make cosmetic attempts, such as the Kyoto Treaty, to salve our conscience, or should we turn to generating electricity by the only safe and reliable means of nuclear fission?
Lovelock presents the nuclear argument in the full knowledge of the four basic obstacles in the way of its being scaled up by a factor of 20:50 necessary to satisfy the world’s energy demand.
First, cost: no breeder reactor, necessary for nuclear fission to be a long-term solution, has ever been successful in the marketplace.
Second, incompetence: because each plant has such enormous energy content, staff incompetence, even at reactors billed as inherently safe, can lead to much more serious disasters than from other energy sources. The two accidents (Chernobyl and Three Mile Island) of the earlier nuclear age could multiply a hundredfold in the scaled up age.
Three, a world filled with breeder reactors would necessarily include large-scale traffic in plutonium; just one criminal fanatic in the supply chain could trigger a nuclear catastrophe.
And four, the long-lived cumulative character of nuclear waste defies solution.
On the local New South Wales scene, electricity consumption is forecast to grow by 2.2% a year for base-load, and 2.9% for peak. We are caught between the rock of insatiable energy demand and the hard place of global warming.
As it happens, Australia has a way out. We are well endowed with a safe no-emissions solution in a vast hot fractured rock resource beneath the Innamincka area of Central Australia. About 320-million years ago, molten granite with enhanced abundances of radioactive elements rose up from the depths. By 20-million years later, after it had cooled, the granite was unroofed by erosion, and its surface sculpted by glaciers. During the unroofing, natural cooling fractures expanded and filled with water. The granite was then blanketed by river and lake deposits of shale, coal and sandstone that now contain the natural gas of the Cooper Basin. Later still, the region was covered again by river deposits that now form part of the Great Artesian Basin. Nature has brought together in one place a huge body of hot fractured granite with its insulator of gas-and water-bearing sedimentary rocks at a depth within reach of current drilling technology. It is this geothermal resource that the Australian company, Geodynamics Limited, has recently started tapping with great promise of success.
The Earth is hot: all but the outermost shell is hotter than 1000 degrees, and the core is 5000 degrees. Some of this is fossil heat from the beginning four and a half billion years ago when the earth accreted from rock, dust and gas into a molten ball. Most comes from the slow radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium that became concentrated in continental crust. If it wasn’t for this radioactivity the earth would have cooled to a dead planet several billion years ago and life would be very different. Land masses may not have existed above the watery surface, and what then of humanity? But that’s another story....
full: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1440622.htm
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>From the former article:
Environmental and opposition groups criticised the deal, suggesting that a guarantee of Australian uranium would allow Beijing to earmark more domestically-produced uranium for its nuclear weapons programme.
Mr Downer dismissed the argument, telling Australian radio the deal "is not going to make the slightest difference" to the Chinese weapons programme.
[Energy needs China is desperate for energy to fuel its booming economy, the BBC's Daniel Griffiths reports from Beijing. ENERGY IN CHINA Fossil fuels currently provide 80% of energy Hydro-electric projects provide 18% of energy Nuclear energy from nine reactors currently supplies 2% Plans for 30 new reactors to be built by 2020 Nuclear power to account for 4% of national output by 2020 Sources: World Nuclear Association and Reuters]
The old coal mines that the country relies on cannot keep up with demand and there is not enough oil to go around.
Read "The Perthian Brickburner": http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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