In the wake of the release Professor Garnaut’s draft report this morning, Stateline WA ran a well timed piece this evening on the nuclear industry’s unsightly scramble for a place at the climate change table. The piece used clips from a film I produced last year titled ‘Climate of Hope‘ which reviews the nuclear fuel chain and exposes the nuclear industry’s reliance on fossil fuels. The alleged ‘nuclear renaissance’ just isn’t happening. The renewable energy stats I quoted in the film are already out of date - the wind industry installed ten times more capacity worldwide last year than nuclear power. It’s time Australia kicked the fossil/nuclear habit once and for all.
It’s a really excellent production, Scott, but where’s the rest of it?!
That clip in the way it ends actually looks like a promotion of the nuclear industry. :o - it stops at the point of telling us that nuclear power stations by the end of the 80s produced 6% of total power.
Can you post the whole vid, or provide links to subsequent parts?
cheers
sorry just to clarify -
- the climate of hope link in the post isn’t opening.
- i think given this is the greensblog, it would be great to have the full film up in segments, so that people don’t take that first part out of context.
and btw, congratulations on your Senate debut - I look forward to seeing your excellent contributions to this country continue.
Hiya,
youtube has a ten minute limit on it’s video clips. All three parts of the vid are here:
http://www.anawa.org.au/climate-of-hope/
it’s also up in one piece at engage media or available for download at that page.
cheers & enjoy,
Scott
Scott,
Your right the Wind industry needs to be kick started quick smart. Australia is going to get left behind here in relation to renewables and put into the same basket as the USA. IE: We dont care about the Environment. What can the Greens do though?
I’m very pleased to read that Stateline WA has paid attention to your fine film, Scott.
The “nuclear renaissance’ is looking mre tatty every week. The Australian media, on the whole, does not cover the number of incidents, the escalating costs, and the political pitfalls that face this dying industry.
For just one examplw, no coverage at all has been given to the report of no less an authority tha World Nuclear News (26 June 2008) - about the downfall of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. John Howard signed us up to this, quite secretly last year. A plan to hitch our uranium industry to the nuclear waste disposal star.
But according to World Nuclear News the GNEP is now ‘zeroed’ the US Congress House Committee having completely rejected funding for it. At the same time the US National Academy of Sciences pronounced the GNEP sheme to be” not economically justifiable”
As France struggles to promote its troubled new reactors in France and Finland, nuclear reactors world-wide are running down - soon needing to be “decommissioned” - (lovely euphemism for a costly, dirty , process).
I suspect that Australia’s uranium/nuclear lobby is racing desperately to grab the money before the nuclear industry’s final collapse. (Of course, there’s always the weapons industry, especially in Middle East countries, to revive it)
Christina Macpherson http://www.antinuclear.net
Good stuff Scott…a highly useful vid. We recently changed to 100% Green energy from our electricity supplier Origin here in QLD. Apparently they source wind energy. I hope they keep their side of the agreement…we’ve been contributing an extra 40 dollars or so to the green option for ages…but decided to go full bore now. Only works out at an extra dollar a day or so anyway. It’s like the old days when you put a coin or so in the jar for phonecalls…tho we actually use the automatic deduction from our bank account every f/t feature which ensures we don’t get that big bill every quarter. When the bill comes we don’t feel stressed & it’s good to see we’re helping a bit.
Must be fun to pay electricity bills and think they are wind sourced.I look out at the lines often when the wind is blowing and know today,s Wind industry is obsolete,if only I could have something spinning around the various power lines as is, that reduced the necessity of transformers and stopped transmission loss.So how may transformers does the happy customer here knows are situated between his Wind Power and his fluorescent Light!?Try to stop yourselves,lying to yourselves,and recognise the fundamental failures of your choices,by the simple process of observation.I am not dictating dirty carbon,I am pointing out the fallacy of this incomprehensive support for Wind Energy in its present form.You are just as bad as the rest of the unthinking lot on this matter.
Philip@7 it is absurd to require a system without losses.
Transmission losses are not special and somehow qualitatively different from other losses. A MW wind generator located optimally will far outperform one hundred distributed 10kW systems located close to consumption, even when all transmission losses are taken into account.
Everything that functions experiences losses, even biological systems. Biological systems operate by harvesting an energy gradient, and without that energy input will perish for the simple reason that they are lossy.
It is one thing for you to ramble incoherently, however when you aggressively criticise others as unthinking and do so with highly questionable reasoning you need to be called to account for being so obnoxious.
We really must continue to make the point that renewables represent the most secure energy source.
They don’t blow up the way gas plants do.
Once built they are extremely independant. They don’t rely on a consistent supply line of things like coal. Such supply lines can be compromised.
You’re right, John, especially where you state that renewables “once built they are extremely independant”.
This is the main reason that the fossillists fear renewable energy. They want us to stay dependent, controlable, passive and, of course, to keep paying them.
Quoting capacity on wind and nuclear is a completely fallacious comparison. You need to take into consideration the wildly differing capacity factors of the two energy sources. Nuclear plants have capacity factors of over 90% - that is, they produce energy equivalent to being run at full nameplate capacity over 90% of the time. Wind does a quarter that, if you’re lucky, at times that suit the vagaries of the weather rather than the demands of electricity users. Given that, the difference in actual generation expansion is probably more like 2.5 to 1…
And, yes, uranium requires fossil fuels to mine, and fossil fuel energy is expended in the construction of plants (do wind turbines construct and install themselves). But the energy you get from that uranium dwarfs the energy you put in. The energy return on investment - a concept I imagine you’re familiar with - is enormous, as can readily be confirmed by any back of the envelope calculations.
I was most interested to read your blog. 20 years ago I had a book published on different economic concepts to point the way to a sustainable world economy. Someone who liked the book recently contacted me to suggest that I update and re-publish it as a blog. She set up the blog and is posting the book in sections as I write and send it to her. Here is the link:
http://www.economicsforaroundearth.com
With all good wishes,
Charles Pierce