Radioactive Wolves!

Last week I stumbled upon this recent PBS documentary called Radioactive Wolves, which is about wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. If a picture is worth a thousand words, video is worth a million of them. It was one of the most uplifting films I've seen in a long time. The comments below the film suggest I am not alone:

Amazing program: great work! So many fascinating, important issues raised — and I can’t get the haunting images out of my mind.

I thought the animal and plant life recovery was fascinating. As someone mentioned above…a lot of important issues were raised by this episode. I thoroughly enjoyed the program. Keep up the good work!

My son just returned from spending a week in the Ukraine. He toured Chernobyl…even fed the catfish and saw the wild horses. This episode was right on from he saw and experienced. It really let me share the experience vicariously. Thank you “Nature” for such a wonderful, thought-provoking episode.

This is the BEST show on TV I’ve seen in years! FASCINATING.

If I wasn’t already pro-nuclear energy before I would be more so now. This is critical info. If we destroy our world with our technology and self-serving greed then shame on us. But nice to know the planet and wildlife – and the way we were given this world to begin with – will survive.

Beautiful. Just as I remembered it. I worked for a few days in the zone and I was totally blown away by the richness and diversity of the life in the area. The frogs, and the hoopoes, the cuckoos, the wild pigs and the moose and the flowers and butterflies and… mosquitoes! When I came home to my socalled “healthy” and “unpolluted” home, I wandered around the forest just to compare and I found that my home is a sterile desert compared to the zone. It is indeed a strange feeling to know that the presence of humans are more detrimental to nature than the radioactivity from Chernobyl NPP. Choosing between me, you and Plutonium, nature would be better off with Plutonium than either of us.

There were, of course, also a few negative comments like this one (from a brainwashing victim) about unabashed brainwashing:

What utter, pro-nuke propaganda. Let’s see, now, twice the birth defect rate, though we’re supposed to think that’s OK since both rates are in the single digits. No mention that I recall (hard to watch such unabashed brainwashing) of longevity of populations in the dead zone compared to populations in clean environments. Comparing the “long-term” effects on relatively short-lived, and short-lived, animal populations with humans is simply not acceptable science. Just one more reason I despise the National Propaganda Network.

His claim that the film compared "the long-term effects on relatively short-lived, and short-lived, animal populations with humans..." is a strawman. No such comparison was made. When the narrator said "This land is lost to humans," I'm pretty sure he meant it. I'd have to watch the film again to be sure, but I don't think anything he said is correct. If you watch the film, let me know if I missed something.


There are a few scenes where people whore cheap dust masks to reduce exposure to potentially harmful radioactive dust, but for most of the film, nobody wears any protective clothing.

Darwin's as well as Einstein's theories were challenged by other scientists in their time. This is always the case for any theory and there are still some researchers claiming this area is not full of breeding populations of wildlife, but full of wildlife refugees who show up there only to die of radiation.

The area also has breeding populations of the European bison (wisent) and the last species of wild horse (Przewalski's) but there are no breeding populations of the giant wild ox known as the aurochs or the wild horse know as the tarpan ...because it's too late, they have already been driven to extinction. The last aurochs died on a game preserve in 1627. Ironically the wild horse population in the exclusion zone preserve is presently being decimated by poachers, so maybe there's no hope after all .

Chernobyl was a human tragedy that uprooted almost half a million people, but as far as wildlife is concerned, this film proves that low levels of radiation can be the least of two evils.

Photo courtesy of iam photography via Flickr

The Exaggerated Promise of Renewable Energy

Cross-posted from Consumer Energy Report

The continued existence and expansion of human civilization is wholly dependent on affordable sources of energy. The latest study just released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (an organization that exists to study and promote the viability of renewable energy) suggests that it may be possible to get 80% or so of our electric power from renewable sources by 2050. The study also (inadvertently) provides evidence that renewable energy will be a minority player in humanity's energy portfolio.

The results may disappoint my fellow solar enthusiasts because it suggests that only 13% of our electric energy will come from solar. Distributed solar enthusiasts (who favor photovoltaic solar panels on rooftops) will be further disappointed because half of that 13% will come from water-sucking centralized concentrated solar thermal power plants, many located in desert ecosystems, leaving only about 6% for solar panels on rooftops, of which many will probably not be on rooftops but in centralized power plants, probably displacing ecosystems or crops.

But electricity represents only 40% of our energy needs. If we hog up all renewable energy sources for electricity, there won't be any left for the other 60% of our energy needs. In other words, the study tells us that only 32% of our total energy needs can be "potentially" renewable. I.e., it is going to need a lot of help from other energy sources--fossil fuels or nuclear. Liquid biofuels were not part of this study even though they can be used to make electricity and heat homes in place of electricity:

However, the modeled scenarios also did not explicitly assume any competition for biomass resources, including from transportation demand for biofuels

The definition of renewable isn't as clear cut as you might think because it involves the fourth dimension--time. Wind and solar fit the definition of renewable because their power source (the sun) is very long-lived. As long as humanity can keep the panels, turbines, and grid maintained, they will convert solar radiation from a giant nuclear reactor in the sky into electricity in perpetuity.

Corn ethanol is considered a renewable energy source (by its proponents) even though roughly 75% of its energy content is derived from fossil fuels. It is in reality, no more renewable than fossil fuels.

Hydro power, like wind, is also ultimately powered by the sun's energy, making electricity from the potential energy of stored precipitation. But now the definition of renewable runs into trouble because the machines that extract that potential energy (dams) have limited practical life spans:



You can do just about anything in this world (or other worlds-- mining the moon) if you have enough money. However, removing the silt from behind most dams is not considered to be an economically viable option. The cost of decommissioning all of these dams is something humanity will eventually have to deal with. In short, one can easily argue that hydro does not fit the definition of renewable (especially by the year 2050--the time frame for this study). Removing it from the NREL study, we find that only 68% of our electricity can come from renewable sources (27% of our total energy).

Inversely, one can argue that because conventional nuclear energy can produce just as much energy for just as long as hydro, it fits the definition of renewable as well as hydro does, and to make matters worse, so do fossil fuels (as is argued by Matt Ridley in his latest book).

It gets worse. The study also assumed that a lot of biomass (15% of the energy mix) is going to be burned in place of coal and further "assumed" that three-fourths of it would not come from dedicated crops like switchgrass.

Nearly three-fourths of the biomass feedstock was predicted to come from wastes and residues (which were assumed to have no incremental land-use impacts), the remaining biomass supply was assumed to be derived from switchgrass.

...requiring an estimated 44,000–88,000 km2 of land ...By comparison, the total area used for corn production in 2009 in the United States was about 350,000 km2 (USDA 2010). Because biopower-related land use is estimated to be sizable, efforts are needed to assess the degree to which and conditions under which land is available to support such an expansion without undue competition with food production and other uses.

If it were economical to displace a meaningful amount of coal with biomass today we would already be doing so to lower electric bills or increase profit margins. Burning biomass for energy is an idea as old as walking on two legs. The 80% prediction would drop considerably if this assumption turns out significantly wrong because there would not be enough land left to grow any corn (of which 40% is already being turned into ethanol).

Today biomass accounts for about 1.3% of our energy mix. They need it to increase by an order of magnitude by 2050. From an air pollution perspective, biomass has little improvement over coal. And because of land displacement issues, it is also not necessarily much better in the GHG department. From a wildlife habitat displacement perspective, biomass is worse than coal. Recent studies in the journal Nature have suggested that the last thing humanity should be doing is asking more of the biosphere.

Also, like squeezing water from one end of a balloon to another, using biomass for electricity would preclude the increased use of biomass for things like home heating (community boilers) and transportation (assuming that cellulosic will ever actually become commercially viable), not that using biomass for this is a good idea either.

Removing biomass from the list as well as hydro would drop the percentage of energy for electricity and in total to 53% and 21% respectively.

The study looked at scenarios ranging from 30% to 90% and made no attempt to assign probabilities or costs. In other words, the odds that the 80% 53% scenario will come to fruition may approach zero. The study is largely a wish list of what it would take for this to happen. However, any study that tries to predict what our energy mix will be 40 years into the future has to make a rather large number of assumptions.

Lastly, as a long-term analysis, uncertainties associated with assumptions and data, along with limitations of the modeling capabilities, contribute to significant uncertainty in the implications reported.

Right ...significant uncertainty. To wit, I stopped counting at 500, the instances of the words "assume," "assumed." and “assumption” in just the first volume of this four volume study. I also counted over a hundred instances of the words “uncertain” and “uncertainty” and fifty five instances of “likely” or “likelihood” in that first volume.

Over the last twenty years renewable energy has gone from being 11% of our energy mix to 10%. Doing my own study, hang on a minute ...a linear extrapolation of that trend would suggest that in 2050 only 8% of our energy will be renewable.

Just about every study I've read on this topic over the last decade has suggested that wind and solar combined (cost issues aside) can provide a maximum of roughly 35% of our electric power quite simply because the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, particularly when we would need them to do so--on windless nights for example.

The NREL study pulled out the stops and managed to increase that 35% potential of wind and solar by roughly 15% for a total of 50%. As I often point out, I'm a big fan of solar so I was a little disappointed to see that wind will be providing about three-fourths of that 50% (wind 37%, solar 13%). This would require an increase in wind energy from about half of a percent to 37 percent in 40 years ...a 7500% increase. An increase of this magnitude would have to be done very carefully or it will be a disaster for some bird species. See this recent article in Nature titled The trouble with turbines: An ill wind:

“There are species of birds that are getting killed by wind turbines that do not get killed by autos, windows or buildings,” says Shawn Smallwood, an ecologist who has worked extensively in Altamont Pass, California, notorious for its expansive wind farms and raptor deaths. Smallwood has found that Altamont blades slay an average of 65 golden eagles a year. “We could lose eagles in this country if we keep on doing this,” he says.

Because this study was meant to see how much renewable energy could be incorporated it did not assume that any new nuclear power would be built. Interestingly enough the study also shows that about forty years from now existing nuclear power plants that have not reached retirement age would still be contributing more power than photovoltaic or concentrated solar. However, because the study did not account for the building of any new nuclear that would replace coal, coal is also still being used, also producing more power than photovoltaic or concentrated solar. It would have been smarter to replace that coal with nuclear. In their 80% renewable scenario, combined, photovoltaic and concentrated solar make up about 13% of the mix, coal and nuclear combined make up about 17%.

The scenarios described above—the Low-Demand Baseline scenario, the exploratory scenarios, and the six core 80% RE scenarios—were based on the low-demand assumptions, with overall electricity consumption that exhibits little growth from 2010 to 2050. To test the impacts of a higher-demand future, a scenario with the 80%-by-2050 renewable electricity generation but a higher end-use electricity demand was evaluated, with demand in 2050 30% higher than in the low-demand scenarios.

Wait a minute. The population of the United States is expected to grow by 37 percent by 2050. Demand for electricity will only grow 30 percent? Holding electric power growth at 30% would preclude the use of electricity (in place of oil) for things like transportation, heating, industry, again squeezing energy from one end of the balloon to the other. I drive an electric car which increased my electric bill about 30%. The Midwest is experiencing record heat waves. Assuming this is going to be a trend as a result of global warming we may experience higher air conditioning loads. My brother, who lives in the Midwest, expects his electric bill this month to top $300. Do the math.

Interestingly enough, the word nuclear was used just over eighty times in the first volume which is surprising considering that the study was about renewable energy. The study claims that this 80% renewable scenario would cost no more than has been predicted by preceding studies about future use of low carbon energy sources ...which include nuclear:

These studies generally considered a portfolio of clean generation technology options, including renewable, nuclear, and low emissions fossil. The estimated incremental price impacts of the core 80% RE scenarios are comparable to these estimates.

But the next quote demonstrates a bias against nuclear:

The future cost of nuclear power plants as well as power plants using CCS is particularly uncertain.

As if the future cost of renewables is not uncertain? How bizarre to compare an untested hypothesis like coal carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) with nuclear which has a proven track record of producing about 20% of our electricity for about half of a century at very competitive prices. There are also many improved versions of nuclear power in the pipeline that have great potential to reduce its high upfront costs and already unprecedented safety while maintaining its proven long-term cost effectiveness. The future cost is just as likely to go down as up.

As is typical, coal and nuclear are usually mentioned together in the report even though one dumps mountain ecosystems into creek ecosystems and uses the atmosphere as an open sewer, while the other has the same carbon footprint as solar power.

Achieving 80% renewable electricity would require considerable transmission investment

I strongly suspect that this will prove to be a gross understatement. Cost effectively distributing Southwest sun and Midwest wind to the coasts of the North American continent while integrating it into the grid is not going to be easy or cheap. To get there from here they acknowledge that we will need:

...increased electric system flexibility, needed to enable electricity supply-demand balance with high levels of renewable generation, can come from a portfolio of supply- and demand-side options, including flexible conventional generation, grid storage, new transmission, more responsive loads ...

But most of these things would improve the efficiency of conventional power generation as well. Storage will have to increase 400% above their baseline to compensate for wind and solar intermittency. Again, if that assumption turns out to be significantly off, the percentage of renewable takes yet another hit.



The study assumed that nuclear can't ramp up and down fast enough to compensate for wind and solar. In reality, there is no reason energy from a nuclear plant can't be stored in a similar manner to wind and solar energy for rapid release when needed when the wind stops or clouds arrive. Energy storage is rarely done today because it is expensive, regardless of whether it comes from wind, solar, or nuclear. If new technology arrives in the future to make storage cheaper, it will enhance nuclear's cost effectiveness to vary power output as well as other energy sources.

The next time you hear a commenter claim that all of our energy must eventually be renewable because we will eventually run out of fossil fuels and uranium ore, point back to this article and explain that it can't all be renewable, nor does it have to be. What it has to be is affordable, with enough reserve to last long enough for humanity to find a replacement, and relatively environmentally benign. New hydro (which doesn't even fit my definition of renewable) and biomass are worse than most fossil fuels when it comes to ecosystem impact.

If it were not for climate change and ocean acidification, fossil fuels would fit that bill. That leaves only three energy sources on the table: wind, solar, and nuclear (baseload, load following, and peaking versions--with storage and air cooled options available at extra cost).

Hydropower: Dammed If You Do

No, that is not a picture of cooling ponds inside a nuclear reactor. Those are dust covers on the turbines at the Grand Coulee dam. According to the photographer, you have to pass through a metal detector to get this far into the power plant. Come to think of it, the nuclear power industry could probably improve their public image with similar tourist photo ops of their spent fuel cooling ponds.

There’s an article over on Mongabay about a protest of the  Belo Monte Dam project in Brazil:

 Belo Monte will flood more than 40,000 hectares of rainforest and displace tens of thousands of people. The project will impede the flow of the Xingu, which is one of the Amazon’s mightiest tributaries, disrupting fish migrations and potentially affecting nutrient flows in a section of the basin.

They will of course lose in the end like all native people have always lost. You will be hard pressed to find a more environmentally destructive power source yet here we have a very upbeat article titled Hot dam: Hydropower continues to grow  on an environmental website:

Brazil, the second-largest producer of hydropower worldwide, gets 86 percent of its electricity from water resources. It is home to an estimated 450 dams, including the Itaipu Dam, which generates more electricity than any other hydropower facility in the world — over 92 billion kilowatt-hours per year.

The article also mentions Grand Coulee dam and the fact that the United States gets about seven percent of its electricity from hydro. It didn’t mention that:

 Kettle Falls, once a primary Native American fishing grounds, was inundated. The average catch went from a historical average of over 600,000 salmon a year to nothing. In one study, the Army Corps of Engineers estimated the annual loss was over a million fish. The environmental impact of the dam effectively ended the traditional way of life of the native inhabitants. The government eventually compensated the Colville Indians in the 1990s with a lump settlement of approximately $52 million, plus annual payments of approximately $15 million.

Interestingly enough, the above link also says:

 In 2007, Grand Coulee generated the second-most energy among US power facilities, after the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant at 26.78 TWh. Palo Verde has a lower nameplate capacity but operates at a higher capacity factor, giving it slightly more annual output.

Which got me to thinking. There are over 1400 hydroelectric power plants in the U.S. compared to 105 nuclear power plants. The 105 nuclear power plants produce almost three times more energy …without destroying a single ecosystem or native culture. I then read a little bit about the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant:

Due to its location in the Arizona desert, Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating facility in the world that is not located adjacent to a large body of above-ground water. The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. 20billion US gallons (76,000,000m³) of treated water are evaporated each year. This water represents about 25% of the annual overdraft of the Arizona Department of Water Resources Phoenix Active Management Area. At the nuclear plant site, the wastewater is further treated and stored in an 80 acre (324,000 m²) reservoir for use in the plant’s cooling towers.

You will be hard pressed to find an more environmentally friendly power source.

(Photo credit theslowlane via the Flickr Creative Commons license)

First Vehicle to Home Power System in North America

Cross-posted from Consumer Energy Report

Nissan issued a press release earlier this month to announce that Power Stream will be using the V2H system with its fleet of Leafs in Canada. This device acts as a charger and as a power inverter, allowing 4 hour charges instead of 8 hours as well as the capacity to power a home for a couple of days in the event of a power outage. Apparently your Leaf has to have the CHAdeMO protocol quick charge port which was an option on the 2012 cars.

The price seems about right to me costing roughly twice as much as the charge stations now installed in homes but that’s still cheaper than a charge station and a backup generator system. And if you live where there is a significant price difference for night electricity use it can defer some of its cost as well.
From the press release:

• The EV communicates directly with the utility or with the home energy manager to help manage electricity consumption;
• The EV acts as a back-up power source in the event of a power outage;
• Time-of-Use demand response scenarios where devices in the home like the refrigerator, washer/dryer and EV charger react to changes in the prices of electricity based upon the time of day.

Click here to see a video presentation.

I’ve got this on my wish list when they become available in the States. Combine this with solar panels to keep the car charged and you could weather a power outage for as long as you can get enough sunshine. I could also see these units being sold at car dealerships. Instead of opting for leather seats, you might opt for a home power system.

 Something else I have on my wish list.

 

Will Fukushima Save the Bluefin Tuna?

Cross-posted from Consumer Energy Report

From a story well worth reading in Forbes titled Fukushima Radiation May Actually Save Bluefin Tuna:

If the governments can’t help, maybe bad publicity will [save the bluefin tuna]. Nicholas Fisher, the study’s co-author and a marine biologist at Stony Brook University in New York, says when he first saw the levels of radiation in the fish, caught off of San Diego, “my first thought was ‘this will do more for the conservation of this endangered animal than nearly anything else could.’”

Which is also the first thing I thought when this story first broke. And yes, I know that isn't a picture of a bluefin tuna. On the other hand, the Pacific blue fin is not the subspecies in trouble. It is the Atlantic version. Beware the laws of unintended consequences. When one species collapses we tend to increase pressure on what remains. If the public won't eat Pacific tuna, the pressure on Atlantic tuna may just get worse. From Wikipedia:

Global appetites for fish, especially Japanese appetite for sushi, is the predominant threat to Atlantic bluefin.

On the other hand, the public doesn't know one tuna variety from another, and few are going to bother memorizing which is which. If they get the mistaken impression that tuna has unsafe levels of radiation in it, to play it safe, they may chose to not eat tuna, regardless of type.One can only hope.

There are natural levels of radioactivity in the tuna, and Fukushima has only added the slightest amount more. (The report can be found here.) “But people are often anxious about radioactivity,” says Fisher. And this may be what ultimately benefits the Bluefin. The fish, Madigan points out, is not harmed by the radiation that they collected while swimming through the spill waters off the coast of Japan after the tsunami.

I listened to a story called "Radioactive tuna!" on NPR a few days ago. They had interviewed the head of a research team that identified Fukushima as the source of ceisum-134 and cesium-137 in Tuna caught off the coast of California. To be fair, they also mentioned that you would have to eat thousands of pounds of this tuna in one year to exceed a safe dose. They also mentioned that pregnant women have been warned for decades not to eat tuna because it contains elevated levels of mercury. Not mentioned was the source of much of that mercury--coal-fired power plants.

The researcher said that he'd been getting a phone call (including one from Al Jazeera) about every thirty seconds or so from media outlets looking for a story.

The NPR story elicited a very short retort titled Nuclear Tuna and Media Trivialization by a relatively high profile anti-nuclear activist. It's only a few hundred words long, conflates nuclear energy with nuclear weapons, contains numerous out of context quotes, and is devoid of a single source (not worth a read if you're considering it).

Radiation stories attract readership. I suspect that we're attracted to stories about danger and mayhem because at some level of consciousness, we are looking for information that may help protect ourselves and our loved ones from potential harm. This proclivity has no doubt served our species well for millennia, but in today's hopelessly complex technological world we are barraged with this kind of information and are often unable to sift the wheat from the chaff.

On the other hand, just last week a man went on a shooting spree and killed several innocent people a few blocks from my home, one of which was the mother of one of my daughters' classmates. Two years ago a man was murdered with an ax on the street one block from where my daughter was sitting in a classroom. Several years ago a bus driver was shot dead causing the bus to careen off a bridge, landing on the street I live on, just three blocks away. I could see why someone might develop a fear of going outside, sometimes called agoraphobia, but to get a case of radiophobia, you would need a lot of help from the media.

A lot of Americans have an excessive fear of flying, bugs, snakes, radiation, you name it, anyone one of which can kill you but the odds of any of them killing you are vanishingly low. How is it that we come to fear some things more than others? Fear is easily teachable. Parents can pass on a fear to their children, or not. My children have no fear of snakes, although they certainly know better than to handle a venomous one. I know people who are terrified of insects. My daughters love insects.

I suspect that the excessive fear of radiation started with nuclear weapons and was parlayed into a fear of nuclear energy by association thanks to anti-nuclear activists, some of which are likely motivated by personal phobias (an excessive, irrational fear).

Before the nuclear test ban treaty the United States alone detonated over 330 nuclear weapons (submerged in the ocean, buried underground, shot from canons, launched into space, you name it). The realization that all of the nuclear powers were repeatedly releasing all of that radiation into the environment is sobering but at the same time it puts into perspective just how out of perspective the public’s concerns are over radiation from nuclear power plants.

We've all read about the effects of massive doses of radiation on the victims of nuclear weapons on Japanese citizens. I recall reading the book Hiroshima by John Hersey when I was in grade school. After being told that the gods would favor anyone who made a thousand origami cranes, a little girl (just my age at the time of the reading) who was dying of leukemia made 600 of them before succumbing.

People have been taught to fear it by decades of post-apocalyptic science fiction (books and movies). My favorite (among many) post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories is A Canticle for Lebowitz. Anyone remember the movie On the Beach (1959 or 2000 versions)?

Note at this point that we're talking about radiation effects from nuclear weapons and other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's all fiction. Anti-nuclear activists learned early on the effectiveness of conflating nuclear weapons with nuclear energy. That's why just about every anti-nuclear article you read will mention nuclear weapons.

But then Chernobyl happened. The amount of concentrated radiation released by that accident dwarfed that released by a nuclear bomb, yet in the end it created Europe's largest nature preserve. Wildlife in the exclusion zone is thriving quite simply because the radiation is keeping people away.

I thought what biologists learned from Chernobyl was going to be the death knell for stories about mutants. However, the latest mutant horror flick, Chernobyl Diaries, has just been released.

It has been proposed by some (but not by me) that we could use this fear to keep humanity out of critical ecosystems by sewing them with low levels of radiation and posting warning signs around their periphery. Not a good idea. Profit motive will trump fear in this case and poor workers will be the ones used to exploit these areas, radiation or no radiation.

There are many carcinogens in our environment that can increase the incidence of cancers, including many viruses. Click here and scroll down to see the very extensive list.

When the quake hit Japan there was a virtual eruption of carcinogens into their environment from fires, exploding chemical plants, failed dams, polluted ocean sediments heaved up on the land, radiation from the stricken power plant, and on and on. Fukushima was just one of the thousands of sources. There may very well be a modest uptick in cancer rates from this quake from the many sources of carcinogens, but the latest research suggests that the contribution from Fukushima alone will be too small to detect.