John - you actually need to provide some references for your claims.

Peter Newman quotes the IEA
"The International Energy Agency predicted in 2008 that the world would build 64 GW of coal generation in 2010, but when the dust settled on projects built in 2010, only 14 GW of coal was actually built.

Do you have a source that is more authoritative than the IEA? If so there are many people who would like to know about it.

I suggested that worldwide new capacity in gas fired generation exceeded new wind and solar. I couldn't find a succinct table in the free version of the IEA outlook 2011 but the first graph here suggests the increase was about double (new gas vs new renewables) from 2000-2010
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2011/key_graphs.pdf
Some of that gas may be for heating not power. Intermittent sources like wind and solar need dispatchable backup to maintain their nominal capacity through wind lulls, night and cloud cover.

For a minor hydro country that backup is a mix of open and closed cycle gas plant. Open cycle gas is about as CO2 intensive as supercritical coal. It is thought that integrating intermittent sources will show diminishing returns for both cost and CO2 after 20-30% penetration, the situation we now see in Germany and South Australia.

John - in your first sentence you were questioning the premise of the article - the dethroning of coal.
I do not disagree with you re gas - although the IEA report you linked shows total energy use not just power generation - it is not a suitable transitional fuel. Because of climate change we need to move directly to renewables.

You also claim "wind and solar have caught the imagination in some countries with the help of generous subsidies and penalty backed quotas".

The IEA report you linked to points out that there were
"Renewable subsidies of $66 billion in 2010 (compared with $409 billion for fossil fuels)"
and almost every other chart in the report confirms the premise of the article above.

The following article covers the situation in South Australia.
"Critics of wind will suggest that wind requires huge amounts of expensive gas peaking power as back-up, and that’s where power prices will take a hit. But that hasn’t happened, as the chart below illustrates. South Australia has been using less electricity from gas peakers (open cycle gas turbines and thermal gas) over the period that wind power rose from 7 per cent to 21 per cent market share"

http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/australian-embarrasses-itself-again

If renewables have kept SA power prices down it doesn't seem to be working
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/power-prices-to-be-highest-in-the-world/story-e6frea83-1226305741810

The first chart is quite clear: coal has accounted for nearly half the increase in world primary energy consumptions in the decade 2000 to 2010. Coal accounted for about 50 times more of the increase than renewables.

It is obvious: renewables are going nowhere but costing a fortune.

Peter Newman makes his comparison on the basis of the $ invested. However, all that proves is renewables are high cost and highly subsidised because they produce very little electricity.

The marvellous thing about technology is, it always progresses. The other thing about technological advances are that they cannot be modelled in advance; we cannot predict when solar PV power will be cheap and wearable, for example.

What we can predict with certainty is that continuing as at present is ultimately unsustainable.

We also know that the finiteness of humanity's only life support system sets the limit to expansion of resource exploitation. When we have expanded until no further regions of the planet are available for expansion of human economy, economic growth will consist ONLY of technological advancement.

Hmm ... sounds more like the German model of economic progress rather than the Australian model, doesn't it?

We know nuclear scales.

We know it is safer than sausages (which cause far more cancer than even multiple annual Chernobyls would).

We know it can be cheap and fast based on material requirement and previous history.

We know solar PV or CST is expensive (in sheer material and land use requirements).

The Germans built 150 TWh/yr in one decade with nuclear in the 80s, but they haven't managed even 50 TWh/yr during the past 15 years of solar+wind. The Germans have a declining population but are planning a huge increase in energy use. What does that say about the efficiency mantra?

Ooops. Looking at the wrong table row ... the Germans are NOT planning a big increase in energy use, but are planning a flat energy use by 2032 ... ie.., there is no allowance for any increase in electricity generation for electrification of vehicles. My mistake was caused by thinking that a renewable GW is equal to a nuclear or fossil GW despite knowing full well that it isn't. Germany is planning for a huge increase in capacity to get the same actual energy production. (see the powermag link I posted earlier).

“Safer than sausages” eh? Australians have no reason to expect any higher standards of uranium/nuclear waste management than the clean-up of Maralinga. Wow Maralinga’s cleanup in 1967 was “world’s best practice” and after the public wised up to this dud, an additional clean-up was completed in 2000 costing taxpayers an extra $108 million and deemed “world’s best practice” - like dig a hole and chuck it in:

http://shop.abc.net.au/products/maralinga-australias-nuclear-waste-cover-up

As is customary, the Rum Jungle U mine remains a mess too, despite taxpayers picking up the “rehab” tab for $19 million in the 80s. That was a dud so in 2009, they tipped in another $7 million. As is evident in all abandoned U mines and the tens of thousands of non-uranium abandoned mine sites bequeathed to the Australian taxpayer, the ‘polluter pays’ principle is something that must be weaselled out of at all costs:

http://www.nt.gov.au/d/rumjungle/index.cfm?header=Rum%20Jungle%20Home

The uranium/nuclear industry makes a mockery of the Basel Convention, the London Convention and the Montreal Convention. Every operating uranium mine in Australia and the Lucas Heights reactor is dumping contaminated solutions and radionuclides into the biosphere. Never place your trust in a devious ANSTO whose policy states that disclosure of threats to the health, safety and welfare of staff, and/or the general public is in the public interest.:

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/10/26/ansto-poll-goes-radioactive-quietly-changes-no-to-yes/

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/health/nuclear-reactor-bullying-exposed/story-fn59nokw-1226300909197

Taxpayers object to their living tissue being exposed to random ionizing radiation without informed consent from an arms’ dealing, hit and run industry steeped in human rights violations, environmental abuses and corruption:

http://www.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/u/cartel

Sausages don't just "risk" killing people. They actually kill them. There's a big difference. Australia's cancer rate is much higher than filthy radioactive polluted Ukraine because radiation is a cancer wimp compared
to sausages or cigarettes or alcohol. We agree on many things Shirley, but not
this.

Come on chaps – stop talking in IAEA (UN) tongues. Everybody knows they’re up to their necks colluding with WHO and grossly underestimating radiation contamination.

http://www.chernobylcongress.org/fileadmin/user_upload/pdfs/Baverstock_How_the_UN_works.pdf

http://www.chernobylcongress.org/speakers/artikel/2cc0de2cee21dc8506748b53a7d1e584/keith-baverstock.html

The German boars roam in forests nearly 1,500 kilometres from Chernobyl. Yet, 25 years after the catastrophe, the amount of radioactive cesium-137 within their tissue often registers dozens of times beyond the recommended limit for consumption and thousands of times above normal. Government compensation to hunters whose quarry has to be destroyed has added up to $650,000 in one year.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0401/Radioactive-boars-in-Germany-a-legacy-of-Chernobyl

Only last November did Food Standards Agency UK propose lifting restrictions originally placed on 9,800 upland farms and more than 4 million sheep in north Wales, including in the Snowdonia national park, Cumbria, southern Scotland and Northern Ireland after rain clouds dumped contaminated material from the blast in Ukraine, yet WHO and the IAEA claim that only the mental health of citizens in the Ukraine and Belarus was significantly affected.

What a load of old cobblers. Radiation specialists at Ukraine's Research Centre for Radiation Medicine and the National Commission on Radiological Protection of the Population of Ukraine view this study with “disgust.” I shall take them at their word, considering the nuclear corruption and cover-ups that prevails in Europe (and beyond):

http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)68559-0/fulltext

Further, the US EPA stated in its 2011 radiogenic cancer risk study that although the epidemiological data on radiation-induced carcinogenesis are extensive, calculated risks to members of the US population on doses of radiation, typically received environmentally, occupationally, or from diagnostic medical procedures, suffer from significant sources of uncertainty due to errors in the data so if they don’t know, neither do you. Peddling industry spin and making like experts on radiation-induced cancers is a straw man fallacy.

http://tinyurl.com/7cxrkmu

Your products are giant fish blending, water guzzling, CFC global warming, thermal polluting, ecocidal, war-mongering, radioactive troglodytes. Damn the species, pollute away.

Shirley - in Europe, Asia and the US where nuclear is already part of the energy mix I do not think they can escape needing to continue using if for a while. In Australia it is a different story - it is not the fear of radiation though that would be the main objection for me. Nuclear is uneconomic for Australia and the fuel source finite - we should be looking beyond finite fuel sources when developing new energy technologies.

I agree that Geoff's Sausage proposition is fallacious - just because sausages cause cancer does not mean that radiation is not harmful or come with significant risk. However radiation risk is the victim of both overstatement and understatement and in Europe, the US and Asia they have learned to live with the risk. It comes with a massive cost when there is an accident regardless of whether there are long term cancer outcomes or not.

Parts of the Ukraine, and now Japan are uninhabitable for a long time - I think we can do better.

Fallacious? It was an accurate quantitative comparison. Here's a paper that shows the wave of bowel cancer that swept over Japan as it modified its diet and included more meat.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17059355

Simple calculation will show that the increase in cancers over what would have been expected with population increase is about 90,000 every year. The only part of the dietary change which has been demonstrated to cause cancer is red and processed meat. My use of "safer than sausages" was a little rhetorical but still quite accurate. There are no areas of Fukushima which would yield higher rates of radiation than other areas currently occupied by people and naturally have such rates. You need extremely large doses of radiation to match the cancer causing capacity of very common intakes of sausages or red meat in general.

Far from being a limited resource, you could close all uranium mines down today and still have enough to power the planet for hundreds of years in fast reactors, some of which have run safely for decades. They can run on current waste and depleted uranium

" It was an accurate quantitative comparison"

Geoff my point wasn't that sausages (or meat) don't increase the risk of cancer, but that once does not cancel out the other. It is added risk, not mutually exclusive risk.

"There are no areas of Fukushima which would yield higher rates of radiation than other areas currently occupied by people and naturally have such rates."

Really? That is not what the IAEA are saying, nor why they established a special remediation task force. There are substantial areas of contamination - on land and in the marine environment. Or are you perhaps referring to areas of naturally high radiation elsewhere on the planet? If that is the case then what you need to indicate are comparative cancer rates between those areas and areas of lower radiation exposure. And we are just discussing cancer - the explosion resulted in a widespread panic and the need for the government to evacuate part of the population - people (mostly older people died as a result of the shift from homes to evacuation centers, from stress related conditions such as heart attacks and pneumonia - estimates are around 1300 people. There is substantial economic damage - not just direct damage and loss due to energy shortfalls. Sale of food from the area is nearly impossible and investment in business within the prefecture has plummeted.

" You need extremely large doses of radiation to match the cancer causing capacity of very common intakes of sausages or red meat in general"

Different cancer types. And again - we don't suggest people take up smoking because the risk from asbestos is higher, we say avoid both!

The tragic deaths from stress and panic could have been largely averted if people hadn't been scared witless about what is a quantitatively far smaller risk than many they live with daily. My point is that the degree of panic was out of proportion to the actual risk ... which is very small. Yes indeed, we work to reduce diesel particulates which damage health, but we don't scare people and suggest an evacuation radius of many kilometers around highways used by large trucks on the basis of that perfectly real but small risk. Dr Robert Gale related in a news article the absurd situation of counselling workers on the radiation risks while they nervously puffed their way through a packet of cigarettes. If the size of the risk had been properly explained a great deal of pain could have been averted. The problem of course is that people like Shirley are Caldicott are screaming coverup at such an intensity that many people will no longer trust anybody.

Geoff, Grendels has an accurate handle on the situation. It is you and your nuclear-pushers-in-collusion over at BNC who are covering up the cover-ups.

It is you who is fearful of the documented facts that I have provided which gets in the way of your flawed ideology. This is no more evident when one observes you and your merry band of men evading the evidence published by reputable sources and throwing dead cats (or red herrings) into sensible debate.

a) The San Onofre nuclear units 2 and 3 in San Diego entrains nearly 7 billion fish, eggs and larvae each year. Currently, industrial plants take more than 16 billion gallons of water daily from New York waterways for cooling and in the process, killing more than 17 billion fish and their eggs annually.” (And you, an animal libber? Baloney).

http://www.cacoastkeeper.org/document/entrainment-&-impingement-impacts-at-coastal-plants.pdf

http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/licensedtokill/LiscencedtoKill.pdf

b) Nuclear reactors are larger thermal polluters than a coal fired power plant

c) The US Paducah uranium enrichment plant is the largest industrial emitter of ozone depleting CFCs in the nation (800,000 lbs/1999, 219,000 lbs/2011) and has a stash of the stuff of up to 10,000,000 pounds. CFC-114 has a lifetime of 300 years and a 9,800 GWP:

http://oaspub.epa.gov/enviro/tri_formr_partone.get_thisone?rpt_year=2009&dcn_num=1309207454113&ban_flag=Y

http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v08n2/29.bruce/bruce.pdf

http://cfpub.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Contams&id=0404794

d) It was the US Department of Energy that redefined low dose radiation exposure as harmless. It is the US DOE who has consistently attempted to change the accepted mainstream science on the dangers of radiation:

http://theintelhub.com/2012/01/24/department-of-energy-low-dose-radiation-exposure-study-exposed/

e) Fast reactors? The US SNR-300 reactor commenced construction in 1972 and was cancelled in 1991. The defunct, $12 billion scandalous Monju fast reactor in Japan has generated electricity for one hour since going critical in 1994. Where are these fast reactors that you imply are commercially operational? Thirty years away? Where are your Gen IV reactors? Thirty years away?

f) “Slamming the Japanese response at Fukushima, Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev accused corporations and the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of wilfully ignoring lessons from the world's worst nuclear accident 25 years ago to protect the industry's expansion.

“"This is only a fake organization because every organization which depends on the nuclear industry - and the IAEA depends on the nuclear industry - cannot perform properly. It always will try to hide the reality.””

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/us-chernobyl-clean-up-expert-slams-japan-idUSTRE72E7AL20110315

g) Assuming you are secretly aiming for nuclear energy as a primary source of electricity, the world would require 26,000 1MW nuclear power plants by 2050 to mitigate GHG. Pardon my mirth.

http://www.inderscience.com/storage/f610113945121278.pdf

Your queasy conflation of snaggers and radiation cancers is hilarious when the US population alone is consuming 20 billion hotdogs a year. The world averages a puny two nuclear reactors per nation. Yet here we have an industry, guilty of mass criminal behaviour that is dumping its billion/trillion dollar burden of risks on the world’s citizens and contaminating land, sea and air and wiping out fragile ecosystems around the planet.

An AP-1000 isn't 1MW, it is 1154 MWe.

More than a few fast reactors have run successfully for decades. Your argument is rather like quoting a few unsuccessful mobile phones and saying "See, they don't work".

Which do you prefer a planet which is 5 degrees warmer or a planet with nukes? The Germans are busily demonstrating that there is no third choice.

"More than a few fast reactors have run successfully for decades."

Care to name them. And no I am not interested in demonstration plants - only commercial fast reactors currently operating.

Geoff, can you name those fast reactors that “have run successfully for decades?” Would those AP1000 nuclear reactors you mention be the AP1000 reactors proposed for the state of Georgia US that are set to take more than 17 billion gallons of water a year from the Green River? That’s enough water to service a city of 100,000 households.

“To be sure, a closed-cycle system such as that proposed uses less water than a once-through system - but it's a consumptive use. None of the water withdrawn from the Green River will ever be returned to the river. That means there will be less water for fish. And less water means hotter water.

"The one-two punch of power production and climate change has already made some rivers so hot during the summer that they can no longer provide adequate cooling at power plants without exceeding legal limits on temperature:”

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/dawn-stover/hot-water-the-other-global-warming

The projected price for Georgia's Vogtle AP1000 Double Reactor Project has jumped at least $900 million in just three months and that’s just for starters. President Obama has tagged $8.33 billion in loan guarantees for Vogtle's construction. And Georgia ratepayers are being forced to pay for it in advance.

However, the Office of Management and Budget is still dickering over terms. Vogtle's prime builders want to put up little or no money. They want interest rates lower than what you would pay to buy a new house. They expect you to take primary liability for future disasters. They can't say what will happen to the radioactive waste. And construction there is already defined by faulty concrete and non-spec rebar steel that threaten public safety and could delay completion dates beyond those projected even before construction began.

From the US to Brazil, Japan to France and onto India and everywhere else, the moribund reactor industry is collapsing in tandem. But what other nations will it bankrupt and irradiate before it's finished?

If it wasn't for the obscene subsidies to the nuclear and coal industries, we'd have a whole heap of renewable energy by now. And there you go again, dodging all the irrefutable evidence on the nuclear killing machine, which I provided for your perusal. 'Denialist' comes to mind so I think your horse is dead Geoff. Stop flogging the poor thing.

Gemasola at 22 MW is spruiked as a big deal by renewable advocates,
so I figure that BN-600 at 560 MWe which has been running since 1980 qualifies as does the BN-350 at 150 MWe and EBR-II comes close at 19 MWe and Phenix qualifies at 233 MWe. We don't need lots of designs, just one good one.

The BN-600 reactor is a Soviet design, a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor in operation since 1980.

"In the recent years there has been problems with a leakage of liquid metal, from the BN-600s cooling system. In December 1992 there was a leakage of radioactive contaminated water at the reactor. In October 1993 it was uncovered increased concentrations of radioactivity in the power plant’s fan-system. A leakage the following month led to the shut down of this reactor.
In January and May 1994 there was a fire at the power plant. In July 1995 another leakage of liquid metal from the cooling-elements, caused a two-week shut down of the reactor.
There is an increasing concern about radioactive contamination around the power plant. There has been discovered several “hotspots” in the region that now is monitored."
http://www.bellona.org/english_import_area/factsheet/international/russia/npps/beloyarsk/1140457575.32

Phénix was a French small-scale (gross 264/net 233 MWe) prototype fast breeder reactor. It was shut down in 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ph%C3%A9nix

The BN-350 was another Soviet design. It was shut down in 1999.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-350_reactor

The EBR in EBR-II stands for "Experimental Breeder Reactor" It was shut down in 1994.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_II

Geoff - you are just not a very good BS'er.

I claimed there were fast reactors which had run for decades and all the ones I listed did indeed run for decades. 233 MWe is much bigger than any Solar PV plant in Germany, so calling it "small" is relative. The BN-600 had a couple of problems in 3 decades ... did anybody die? Did anybody get cancer? Oil refineries catch fire and aeroplanes crash, both are regrettable but not adequate reason for dismissing either technology. The EBR-II is about the same size as Gemasola and ran as a production reactor for much of its life. There were long periods when it was used for little else.

Do you back solar/wind? Find me a country which has added more than 50 TWh/yr of wind/solar energy production in a decade There isn't one. But there are more than a few which have added 100 TWh/yr of nuclear in a decade. The French added 200 TWh/yr in the 80s. Once you settle on a design each build produces serious energy. With solar all you get is little pieces which add up to stuff all. The Indians can build a nuke in 5 years as can the Chinese. When they start mass producing fast reactors I'll start feeling more confident of the planet's future, otherwise we will be stuck with catastrophic weather events and a hot planet. Coal's biggest mate at present is the anti-nuke movement.

Yes, nuclear power plants use heatsink water to cool the cold side of the thermal engine.

If you want a power station that is supposed to somehow operate outside the laws of thermodynamics you're not going to get it from any vendor of solar thermal or geothermal energy systems or whatever.

(In fact, since solar thermal or geothermal energy systems typically operate with lower heat source temperatures their thermodynamic efficiencies are lower and they have higher waste heat dissipation, requiring larger heatsinks and larger amounts of water, for the same amount of useful thermal energy output.)

If that's what you want I suggest you go and invest your money in Steorn Orbo magical magnet technology, or something like that.

@ Geoff Russell: “did anybody die? Did anybody get cancer?”

Why don’t you tell us Geoff particularly since you wrote articles for Punch titled:

"Chernobyl conspiracies - where are the bodies?"
“Fukushima was no disaster, no matter how you spin it.”

Even the IAEA refrain from displaying such contempt for the victims of the nuclear behemoth when they write:

< Statistical data revealed that the sickness rate among some 3,000 Moldavian disaster fighters (at Chernobyl) is 2 -3 times higher than general sickness rate of the population in Moldova. Disability in this category is at average of 73 per cent which is 17 times higher than for the population of Moldova. Mortality among the participants of the accident at Chernobyl NPP is 6 times higher of general data.>

After 25 years of censorship, the literature on Chernobyl, originally written in the Slavonic languages is being translated and published in the English speaking world. Authors in more recent and disturbing reports, including those in Ukraine, in conjunction with the U of South Carolina, concluded that “optimism of the UN reports may be based on too few studies published in English, conducted too soon after the event, to be conclusive.”

Meanwhile the US Radiation Exposure Program is compensating sick individuals (or relatives of the deceased) who were employed in aboveground or underground uranium mines or uranium mills located in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, South Dakota, Washington, Utah, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon and Texas.

The US agency provides lump-sum compensation to three defined classes of sick individuals: Uranium Industry Workers ($100,000), Onsite Participants ($75,000), and also Downwinders of atomic test sites ($50,000). As of January 2012, authorized payments in compensation totaled $1.7 billion with the fund not set to expire until 2022.

Diseases covered under the programme are leukemia (other than chronic lymphocytic leukemia), multiple myeloma, lymphomas, primary cancer of the thyroid or any of the following types of cancer: male or female breast, esophagus, stomach, pharynx, small intestine, pancreas, bile ducts, gall bladder, salivary gland, urinary bladder, brain, colon, ovary, liver, lung including primary lung cancer and certain non-malignant respiratory diseases.

Ain’t that great Geoff that it’s not you suffering the pain and misery inflicted by the nuclear grim reaper including the malignancies that you suggest are illusory?

So take the blinkers off, educate yourself on the long-term latencies of radiation-induced cancers and then spin us anotheree, Mate.

Is that all? I could do a better job of cherry picking to support your arguments.

There were 600,000 cleanup workers and plenty of studies on them. In the breakup of the Soviet Union the health system fell apart and alcoholism and despair were rampant ... still are. Added to this for the clean up workers was the fear and terror whipped up by people like yourself. The problem you have is that leukemia rates in the entire region are still much lower than in Australia, despite the few studies which show higher rates in some of the clean up crews. Lumping in any old cancer, even those with little or no linkage to ionising radiation still doesn't get you far because those cancers are generally at lower rates than Australia.

Apart from the morons running a reactor without a containment building the people with the most blood on their hands over Chernobyl are the nuclear fear mongers.

So Chernobyl was due to Soviet era "morons".

But when asked to provide examples of fast breeder reactors, the only working example that you could quote was the BN-600, a Soviet reactor operating since 1980 with a history of leaks.

You say "the people with the most blood on their hands over Chernobyl are the nuclear fear mongers."

That is a ridiculous statement Geoff - when the logic runs out, resort to abuse.

The BN-600 has a containment building. There were perfectly good engineers in the Soviet Union and some morons. Just like there are good and bad engineers anywhere. That's not complex.

I never claimed the BN-600 was perfect, only that it had run successfully for decades. There was a leak found after 12 years. Did anybody die? Or even get sick? Planes crash and people die. All accidents are regrettable. But condemning the world to 5 or 6 extra degrees seems an extreme response.

When people were evacuated from Fukushima, children in their mothers arms were scanned for radiation in evacuation centres by people in big silver suits
and full faced masks. If your goal was to terrify people unnecessarily then that was a great way to do it. Sure testing was sensible but nobody needed those suits. That was a horrible thing to do to children and their parents.

Geoff, I daresay you are becoming more incoherent and spinning out of control since the greatest falsehoods of the twentieth century have been propagated by a criminally negligent nuclear establishment.

And leaving in its wake is an epidemic of ailing and deceased victims and contaminated terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Complicit in this ecocide and crimes against humanity are the IAEA, UNSCEAR and corrupt, ignorant and fawning governments.

And what better way for evil empires to dispose of radioactive junk from their nuclear plants than to dump it on civilians in the form of depleted uranium where in 2010, Iraq’s Minister of Human Rights, Wijdan Mikhail Salim advised he was launching a lawsuit against Britain and the US.

Further, cancers induced by radiation do not differ from cancers due to other causes; therefore I suggest you leave the radiation and medical sciences to ethical experts and researchers.

And that’s a real doozy trying to convince the reader that Australia has a higher rate of cancers than the Chernobyl victims. Dare I say that you are perpetuating a blatant lie since the morbidity rate for all cancers in all regions in Belarus and up to 2004, had increased by 40%? Cancer rates in Gomel, a heavily contaminated area, had increased by 55.9%. Prior to Chernobyl, cancer rates in Gomel were lower than the mean republican level.

Oh so you say cancers are caused by radiophobia? Huh? En guarde Geoff, even the buzzards are circling overhead about to devour your junk science and maniacal BS.:

http://www.smw.ch/docs/smw/archiv/pdf200x/2004/43/smw-10221.pdf

My claims about the current (2008) rates of cancer in Ukraine and Australia are from Globocan: http://globocan.iarc.fr/

The paper you link gives a RR of 1.20 for all cancers in liquidators (p.648). This isn't epidemiology but a comparison of two groups with no corrections for any differences between groups over a bunch of cancers which mostly have no accepted ties to radiation. But even if it does reflect a real increase due to radiation, it still gives the liquidators a much lower age standardised cancer rate than in Australia.

Thanks Geoff, you're right, nuclear can and does scale.

I have a house, and you have a house. In fact, most people each have houses, we don't all live in one Big House. That sounds like a multitude of suitable applications for solar PV installations.

Fine. Put solar PV on each house ... and the flats? The units? Even if we all lived in houses and we all had solar PV ... what are you going to do for the other
70-80% of energy that isn't domestic electricity? The oil? With nukes you can charge vehicles overnight when the sun isn't shining. You can make synfuel, fertiliser and much else beside. And who can afford PV? Will the Indians be able to afford it for a billion Indians? 250,000 children die because they cook with wood in many parts of India. Can they afford the solar subsidies that even the richest country in Europe is balking at?

Hi Geoff,

*Only* 20-30% of our energy problems solved?? Also, flats and units have roofs too. I should know - I live in one. No PV but evacuated tube system provides ~95% of our hot water (yep, it's May and the booster is still stitched off). Installing that took out 33% of our electricity use. So combine PV with efficient solar instead of electric water heaters and you're looking at a conservative 55% reduction in demand.

Then there's the 10% transmission losses (David makes a very good point there - we don't centralise our living arrangements!) - if we save half of that by supplying half our electricity at point of use, that brings us up to 60%

Wind and wave power, and full-scale home insulation plan would make coal more or less redundant.

As for how we'll pay for all this - couldn't be simpler. Just stop paying billions in subsidies to coal. And get Clive Palmer to pay his damn taxes too.

Wood fires in India -where did you get that info Geoff? When I was visiting NGOs there 15 years ago everyone was cooking with dung because the forest-protection laws banned woodcutting. However, you're right about smoke being unhealthy. India (and a lot of Western countries these days) doesn't have our wealth but it does have a lot of sun. They're already onto the problem - have a look at this:

http://www.indiasolar.com/solarcookers.htm

Lorna, There is a 1998 Wilkenfeld study, referred to here:

http://www.communityindicators.net.au/metadata_items/household_electricity_use

The Link is broken, so email me for a copy (geoffrey.russell@gmail.com) which puts the households at 17% of energy related greenhouse gas emissions. The number will wonder round a bit but it won't change too much. Most emissions are done on behalf of households, not actually by them.

The information on what Indian childhood mortality comes form

http://www.who.int/quantifying_ehimpacts/publications/9241591358/en/index.html

and dung cooking is similarly deadly. People have been aware of the problem for decades and electricity is the obvious solution with both India and China making huge in-roads in electrification despite obstructions from European dominated green groups. For more see,

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/05/25/greenpeace-india-spotlight/

In particular have a look at the Kirk Smith link. He's been developing better cookers and spinning off the technology with grad students to India for a long time.

Geoff,

It looks as though you're trying very, very hard to dodge the point, which is that PV and other renewables, as well as direct solar heating, can make significant reductions in our demand for coal-generated electricity - along with other benefits (such as avoiding lung disease and associated morbidity/mortality from coal-fired power stations).

Why so desperate to replace wood/dung stoves with electricity? Solar ovens cook food for FREE - with ZERO pollution. And before you point out that the sun doesn't always shine - the technology is still miles better than coal-fired electricity, which ALWAYS pollutes. So the stoves need backup sometimes. So does my solar hot water - about 12 days a year. The other 353, I'm getting my hot water for free.

Thanks Mr Russell - I'm not asserting that there may not be a place for some nuclear power generation in Australia's future (in other comments, I've suggested it myself).

In my comments to you, I'm trying to point out that nuclear power may not be the optimal solution to all the entire nation's power requirements.

1. For remote and regional Australia, transmission losses, let alone infrastructure costs to meet the power requirements of such sparsely populated regions, should be considered before signing the contracts.

2. Just building nuclear power stations alongside existing coal-fired power stations and utilising the same transmitting infrastructure is also means that GL of inland freshwater will continue to be wasted as cooling water.
Given the large-scale aridification already observed, this would be of questionable wisdom.

Nuclear power stations should therefore be constructed in coastal regions and use sea water cooling.

Some coastal regions are unsuited, however: the environmental impact of elevated water temperature on semi-enclosed embayments such as Spencer Gulf mean that nuclear power plants, as with desalination plants, should NOT be built in such locations.

To avoid runaway reaction and meltdown, uranium reactors should NOT be built; instead, Australia should partner with India to develop unmeltdownable thorium reactors.

The places I think would be suitable for power stations include the Pilbara coast and the Carpentaria coast. My reasons for this are that over the next couple of decades, export markets for coal and LNG are going to decline. Australia is going to need to add value to its remaining commodity exports by smelting ores to get the metal, and export the metals (decreased volume of exports and substantially increased value).

I've made similar arguments elsewhere, such as Geoffrey Brooks's "The Conversation" piece, "Treasure your metal: why we need to respect embedded energy", http://theconversation.edu.au/treasure-your-metal-why-we-need-to-respect-embedded-energy-6802

Mind you, we could utilise either thorium fission power, or that whacking big thermonuclear fusion reactor in the sky.

Sure David. Nuclear may not always be the best option. But my argument is that it shouldn't be ruled out on grounds that are impervious to debate.

Can people build enough thorium reactors soon enough to be useful in avoiding the worst of climate change? I doubt it but I'd be happy to be wrong. Meltdowns aren't a good reason for avoiding uranium based nuclear power. They are obviously costly (very!) but with any half decent containment building, not dangerous. Aeroplanes crash and that is really dangerous, but we still fly in them. There isn't just risk of death with an air crash, there is actual death. These two concepts are frequently confused. Some things are scary but not actually dangerous as measured by actual harm.

I’ve not heard of one objection to the Collgar wind farm near Merredin WA which is set to supply electricity to 125,000 households.

http://www.merredinmercury.com.au/news/local/news/general/wind-farm-energised/2196311.aspx

Sure the Collgar wind project sits on 18,000 hectares of land but so does BHP’s Olympic Dam uranium project. BHP also leases 1,136,000 hectares of public land surrounding the OD mine. Collgar’s wind project is situated on private freehold land.

The Ranger mine is on a 7860 hectare lease. On ‘rehabilitation’, the tailings dam must be monitored for 10,000 years.

Rio Tinto’s Rossing uranium mine licence in Namibia covers an area of 180 km2 of which 25 km2 are currently used for mining, waste disposal and processing. The open pit is 3.5 km by 1.5 and 390 metres deep.

The Jaitapur nuclear reactor project in India is set to consume 968 hectares with around 2,400 families affected by land acquisition and so the Indians are having none of that. Already Indians claim they are sickened, disabled or dead from uranium mine contamination:

http://jadugoda.jharkhand.org.in/2009/05/adivasi-live-under-nuclear-terror-in.html

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page72103?oid=128598&sn=Detail

Land dispossession is a serious global issue. Wind farm lands can be utilized for residentials or farming but I’ve never heard of anyone building a house on an abandoned uranium mine or a decommissioned nuclear plant site. Have you?

Dead zones, contaminated lands, air and water = moribund, terminally ill uranium/nuclear industry.

Jaitapur ... 968 hectares, 2,400 families displaced. Okay, suppose you want to generate the same amount of energy with a concentrated solar thermal plant. How much land would you need? The Jaitapur project is for almost 10 GWe of capacity. To get the same capacity from CST would need ~100,000 hectares and displace about 100 times the population, 240,000 people. This is based on about 100 sq km for a 1 GWe CST with 90% capacity factor.

http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/12/06/tcase7/

One, maybe the father of the green energy movement has something to say on this subject, I believe it has been accurately reflected in this article: http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/9/how-green-is-their-energy

I do find it interesting that nuclear power should also be producing hydrogen.

I also read, and would you believe not in the Murdoch press? Good heavens, I hear you say, not possible, that Germany, as it has closed down its nuclear power industry has bought power from where ever it has been available in Europe and hasn't asked any questions as to how that power was generated. Much of it came from France (oh dear, not France).

You may consider it 'off topic' Ms or Mr Moderator, but isn't this constant knocking of the Murdoch Press getting just a bit tiresome? For all of my life, which I suspect is a few more years than many of the contributors to these pages, there have been press barons and others pushing a particular political philosophy. None more so than the much lamented Bulletin.

If you think we're a bit hard on the Murdoch press here, you should see the mean things they're saying in Britain.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17898029

Oh, sorry, I get it now. The ABC and the BBC are not biased and they are not in competition with Murdoch in all or any forms of the media. They are totally impartial. (Tony Jones please note!)
The only press, which is valid, is the press with which we agree.

Roger,

Sorry mate, but I'm afraid a perceived Left-wing bias (if it exists, it's pretty damn subtle) doesn't equate to the unethical behaviour of the Murdoch press:

Hacking into a murder victim's mobile phone account in order to get material for their stories; interfering with the murder investigation in the process.

The "Gotcha" headline when the General Belgrano was sunk during the Falklands war with significant loss of human life.

The bare-breasted "Page 3 girls" which were a cornerstone of the Sun (conflation between newspaper and soft porn mag?.

The fact that the News of the Screws was infamous for its invasive long-lens photography etc etc....

I suppose one of the benefits of age is that one can remember more than those who are younger. If you wish to study the political influence of newspapers over time then I suggest you look at the British press long before Murdoch bought in. Sixty years ago there was the Daily Mirror and others who were somewhere to the left of Mao, then there was the Daily Express etal (Beaverbrook I think) that was on the other side. In those days the News of the World was known as, if you will excuse the expression, 'The Screws of the World' so it's editorial policy predated Murdoch. Then there was The Times which tried to stand aloof. The Guardian, as it does today, plays to the, or those who like to think of themselves, as the intellectual Left. And so it goes, nothing has changed.
No reasonable person would disagree that the Murdoch press in the UK has behaved reprehensibly, and as far as recent charges are concerned, then there must, surely be the presumption of innocence.
Going back in time with headlines of another time is dangerous, as I have some real doozies from the Australian press in the 1880's
I however, do not believe that the Murdoch press in Australia should be condemned for having a policy, nor do I believe it is fair to promote the notion that they (Murdoch press in Australia) are guilty by association.
Bye the bye, the Daily Mirror had page 3 even page 2 girls long before The Sun. How do I know? As a sixteen year old with coal dust in my veins and the Union in my bones, shuffling to work in the dark I used to buy the bloody thing!

"suppose one of the benefits of age"

You evidently haven't learned much about not making assumptions about other people. There's no upper age limit on doing a PhD you know. There - you learned something new today!

I didn't intend to make an assumption as to your age, heaven forbid! I suppose we are all candidates. What I did attempt to convey is that you are wrong to assume the Murdoch press, of more recent times, are the pioneers of what some may call the scurrilous press.

It's the technology that's changed, nothing else and believe it or not, I learn something every day. Your contribution I regret to inform you, I already knew. Put that down to experience.

Roger,

Sorry if I read your reply wrong - but starting a sentence with "I suppose one of the benefits of age" does tend to give a certain impression.

I thought we were discussing the relative ethical standards of the ABC, BBC and Murdoch press anyway. Just because the Murdoch papers have company in the gutter doesn't put them on a par with national broadcasters.

Pretty much Lorna. I used to use the Australian as my main source of news and very much enjoyed the OpEds. It is rare now that I get any sense of balance from the Oz (as it, it does occur, but rarely) and they have largely shifted to echo-chamber status and lost a critical role they held in the Australian media.