WHILE cost-of-living seems to be the big buzzword for this election, stopping climate warming is more urgent because failure to deal with it will cause endless pain and suffering later.
And that is what makes Anton Gosselin’s anti-renewables, pro nuclear, pro extending the use of coal and gas missive in your April 15 issue so disappointing; that decades of research by bodies like CSIRO and its fellow scientific organisations across the globe just hasn’t penetrated the fossil industry sponsored haze that still surrounds this still vexed subject.
Gosselin cobbles together a farrago of mis and disinformation which looks authoritative until it is inspected more closely.
Finland’s situation is completely different to ours. Yes, they are doing nukes but then it’s dark a lot of the time over the long and very severe winter months and Russian gas is no longer an option for winter back-ups.
Australia has ridiculously abundant renewable resources all year round and a huge and diverse climate continental grid to run it through, from North Queensland to South Australia.
Nuclear plants can do enormous damage if people ever take their eye off the ball (Chernobyl) or if there is a natural disaster (Fukushima) or potentially as a result of war (Zaporozhye).
Wind farms, solar farms and batteries do not ‘take up’ huge tracts of land. Grazing of sheep within solar farms has proved to be particularly beneficial for the operator who doesn’t have to mow, the sheep love the shade/rain cover and the pasture benefits from moisture retention.
Wind turbine bases represent a tiny fraction of the land they are placed on.
Wind turbine bird strike is an ongoing issue that is addressed in terms of siting the turbines. Wind farms are now never sited along major bird flock migration routes. It is still a problem, but in comparison with the damage that burning fossil fuels causes both as direct toxin pollution and indirect CO2 pollution and methane leaks, there is no comparison.
Renew Economy’s quoted identification of endangered species in relation to a major offshore wind farm is part of a report on an environmental approval that has required considerable project redesign and additional conditions in relation to boats and sea mammals, to get the project approved, so that it minimises risks to other species.
Recycling turbine blades and solar panels is a challenge, but the costs are coming down very rapidly, in the same way that turbine technology and particularly solar panel costs, which have been dropping like a stone.
While lithium batteries have proved difficult to recycle, new Chinese recycling technology has already reached 99 per cent recycling and recovery within some companies already.
Gosselin has used a very narrow pro-nuclear definition of carbon footprint that avoids the enormous embedded carbon in building the plant, the electricity necessary to energise it, then the decommissioning process and finally, providing the necessary infrastructure for secure long-term storage of nuclear wastes.
And no, like any other energy plant, nukes aren’t 24/7 x 52 because there is both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance and repair downtime, which requires a lot of backup, because nuke plants are large, and if one is down, it’s a big hole to fill.
And worse, nukes cannot vary output to gell in with renewables during the middle of the day when solar is maxing out at over 100 per cent of the grid on good day, even now in South Australia.
More, if there is a severe drought and the nuke plant is using river water for cooling, the plant has to be turned down or off because the water temperature gets too high to cool it effectively and additional waste heat causes massive bio-kills in the river.
All the stuff about fire risk is pure tosh. There is no connection at all between renewables and any major bushfire event. Gosselin is making it up.
This anti-renewables push is a beat-up to try and delay dealing with global warming as a result of burning fossil fuels, or worse, a barely concealed denial of the scientific facts of life.
Christopher Eastman-Nagle, Grantville
