Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke

Full Article:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/

Hi-lites:

Named for the Norse god of thunder, thorium is a lustrous silvery-white metal. It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm. On the periodic table of elements, it’s found in the bottom row, along with other dense, radioactive substances — including uranium and plutonium — known as actinides.

Uranium is currently the actinide of choice for the industry, used (sometimes with a little plutonium) in 100 percent of the world’s commercial reactors. But it’s a problematic fuel. In most reactors, sustaining a chain reaction requires extremely rare uranium-235, which must be purified, or enriched, from far more common U-238. The reactors also leave behind plutonium-239, itself radioactive (and useful to technologically sophisticated organizations bent on making bombs). And conventional uranium-fueled reactors require lots of engineering, including neutron-absorbing control rods to damp the reaction and gargantuan pressurized vessels to move water through the reactor core. If something goes kerflooey, the surrounding countryside gets blanketed with radioactivity (think Chernobyl). Even if things go well, toxic waste is left over.

When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.

After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

Original Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/science/earth/22carbon.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

Snippets:

Fossil fuel emissions, they say, are like a runaway train, hurtling the world’s citizens toward a stone wall — a carbon dioxide level that, over time, will cause profound changes.

The risks include melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and — perhaps most important — difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food. Many of these changes are taking place at a modest level already, the scientists say, but are expected to intensify....

In an interview on the Scripps campus in La Jolla, Ralph Keeling calculated that the carbon dioxide level at Mauna Loa was likely to surpass 400 by May 2014, a sort of odometer moment in mankind’s alteration of the atmosphere.

“We’re going to race through 400 like we didn’t see it go by,” Dr. Keeling said....

Moreover, scientists say that an increase of five or six degrees is a mildly optimistic outlook. They cannot rule out an increase as high as 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet.

“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “ ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability

Full Book:

http://books.google.com/books?id=_KGWcPH41qYC&lpg=PP1&dq=vegetarian%20myth&pg=PA37#v=onepage&q&f=false

Snippet:

Clean Water at No Cost? Just Add Carbon Credits

Full Article:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/clean-water-at-no-cost-just-add-carbon-credits/

Snippet:

In America, I turn on the faucet and out pours water. In much of the world, no such luck. Nearly a billion people don’t have drinkable water...

Now there’s a new way to save water projects from an early death: make clean water a for-profit business, charging people an unusual price: zero.

Where will the profits come from? Polluters... What will make this work are the global carbon credit markets... By giving people an alternative to boiling water in order to purify it, it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in countries where trees are scarce.

If you are a hiker or camper, you may have heard about Vestergaard Frandsen’s LifeStraw. It’s a hollow stick equipped with a series of filtering membranes. You put the end of the stick in a river or puddle ─ or a toilet, for that matter ─ and suck on it. By the time the water hits your lips, it is clean and safe ─ its filters are fine enough to trap virtually all bacteria, viruses and parasites.

Vestergaard Frandsen will distribute the LifeStraw Family for free. It is helping to sponsor a traveling campaign through the western part of Kenya set for April, 2011, that will reach 4 million families.

The company is on the way to getting approval from one of the carbon credit markets for the LifeStraw Family, and expects to win it in February. Approval will provide a way for Vestergaard Frandsen to recoup its $24 million initial investment and to turn the product into a sustainable business ─ at no cost to users. It will earn credits for preventing greenhouse gas emissions, credits that polluters will then buy. The company will open free repair shops across western Kenya. Every three years, at the end of the units’ lifespan, it will replace them at no charge.

The Sun Also Surprises

Original Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opinion/16joseph.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=sun%20spots&st=Search

Snippet:

Occasionally, a large solar storm can rain energy down on the earth, overpowering electrical grids... Storms don’t have to be big to do damage. In March 1989 two smaller solar blasts shut down most of the grid in Quebec, leaving millions of customers without power for nine hours. Another storm, in 2003, caused a blackout in Sweden and fried 14 high-voltage transformers in South Africa.

The South African experience was particularly telling — the storm was relatively weak, but by damaging transformers it put parts of the country off-line for months. That’s because high-voltage transformers, which handle enormous amounts of electricity, are the most sensitive part of a grid; a strong electromagnetic pulse can easily fuse their copper wiring, damaging them beyond repair.

Even worse, transformers are hard to replace. They weigh up to 100 tons, so they can’t be easily moved from the factories in Europe and Asia where most of them are made; right now, there’s already a three-year waiting list for new ones.

Without aggressive preparation, we run the risk of a disaster magnitudes greater than Hurricane Katrina. Little or no electricity means little or no telecommunications, refrigeration, clean water or fuel. Basic law enforcement and national security could be compromised.

Fortunately, there are several defenses against solar storms. The most important are grid-level surge suppressors, which are essentially giant versions of the devices we use at home to protect computers. There are some 5,000 vulnerable transformers in North America; at $50,000 for each suppressor, we could protect the grid for about $250 million...

It’s not a lost cause... lawmakers can still insert the grid-protection language during conference. If they don’t, there could be trouble soon: the next period of heavy solar activity will be in late 2012.

The Human As Bigfoot

Original Article:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/ecologically-an-overdrawn-bank-account/?hp

Snippets:

If business continues as usual, the report predicts, “humanity will be using resources and land at the rate of two planets each year by 2030, and just over 2.8 planets each year by 2050.”

Then there’s the water footprint, or human activity that consumes freshwater. The report says that global water use “is now well beyond levels that can be sustained even at current demands,” while forecasts indicate that demand will rise in much of the world. Current estimates indicate that by 2025, 5.5 billion people will live in areas facing moderate to severe water stress.

The report closes with proposed solutions: increasing forest acreage and crop yields (if the latter is possible in a warming world), doubling protected areas, managing urbanization to minimize the impact on resources and making changes in diets. It suggests that governments and the private sector factor in the economic value of the services that an ecosystem provides (pollination, for example) when doing cost-benefit analyses or making investment decisions.

“We need to move to a situation where products include the cost of externalities — such as water, carbon storage and restoring degraded ecosystems — in their price,” the report said.

In a concluding section, the authors turn from government and corporate prescriptions and write, “For individuals, there are many personal choices ahead, including purchasing more goods produced in a sustainable manner, making fewer journeys and eating less meat.”

Annie Leonard: The Story of Stuff

Full Article:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/07/the-story-annie-leonard-story-of-stuff.php?campaign=daily_nl

"Potato Creek Johnny" and Energy Independence

Full Article:

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/americas-energy-crossroads/?hp?hp

Snippet:

"The United States use 30 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy a year, a huge amount, and much of it is imported. For nuclear power, Obama has allocated $18.5 billion for new “next generation” nuclear power plants. The United States has 104 nuclear power plants providing 8 percent of our energy. They cost between $5 and $14 billion to build. In the future, with new technology, figure the higher end. That $18.5 billion is equivalent to about two plants. And since it’s for research and development, don’t expect anything; nuclear power plants take a long time to design, site and license.

Biofuels? The Obama administration plans to meet the mandate of Bush’s 2007 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act, to produce 36 billion gallons a year of ethanol and advanced biofuels by 2022. That’s equivalent to 1 million barrels of oil, 13 percent of our current petroleum use, 22 percent of our current imports. But Cornell Professor David Pimentel, one of the world’s experts on agriculture and environment, calculates it would take all our current corn-producing land to provide just 2 percent of the energy America uses. It would also take a huge quantity of water and phosphorus fertilizers, resources we are straining to their limits. Biofuels? Not the way to go."

"That leaves Obama’s March 31 opening of new offshore areas for oil and natural gas exploration and drilling. The largest of these, mid- and south- Atlantic coast waters and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, might provide as little as a year and a half’s replacement for our imported oil (a Mineral Management Service estimate) to as much as 14 years of imported oil (a separate Department of Interior estimate). (Such large ranges in estimates are not that unusual for minerals.) And the high estimates replace only 24 percent of America’s current total energy use.

That high estimate sounds good, but here are the problems: Nobody expects any of this oil to be available soon. Americans might see this new oil around 2030, but it would end before 2050, when, according to petroleum geologists and economists, people had better be free of dependence on petroleum, because petroleum will have become too expensive to use as a fuel. And in 2050, when the U.S. population is forecast to reach 410 million, this would provide only 18 percent of the total energy used that year if there were no change in per-capita use.

Natural gas? The newly opened offshore areas are estimated to have as much as 17 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. At our 2009 rate of use, this could provide about a year and three months of natural gas, less than a year for our 2050 population.

What can and should we do now? At present, wind and solar combined provide less than 1 percent of America’s energy. By 2050, if these are going to replace fossil fuels, they will have to account for 64 percent of our energy. To replace oil alone by 2050 means that solar and wind will have to provide 40 percent of our energy. This takes into account the growth of America’s population and assumes that per-capita energy consumption could drop by 50 percent.

Present investments by the feds in wind and solar are trivial compared to the needs. To make a major transition, we are going to have to start now and spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, either from private sector investment or the government, or some combination. The good news is that the technology to do this exists right now to provide a successful transition. Research is needed to lower the installation (construction) costs, but the energy efficiency of existing wind and solar is great right now. America needs funds to build solar and wind facilities. R and D is always needed, but what we have right now is a great start, and the transition should not be held up by putting all the funding into R and D."

How Much Do We Really Recycle?

A Styrofoam cup takes 7.5 Billion years to decompose.
A Plastic bag will be around for the next 20 human generations.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-1662/How-Much-Do-We-Really-Recycle-Infographic.html

Dirty Coal, Clean Future

Full Article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/dirty-coal-clean-future/8307/1

Snippet:

"Recall the 37 billion tons of worldwide annual carbon-dioxide emissions. On a per capita basis, that would mean about six tons for each of the planet’s 6-billion-plus people. But of course it doesn’t work that way. For the United States, emissions are about 25 tons per person. For Europe as a whole, they’re about 11 tons.... Japan’s level is slightly below Europe’s. For China, the emission level is about eight tons per person... India’s per capita emission level is about three tons per year, less than half of China’s (because India has so many fewer factories). For Kenya and other barely industrialized countries, it’s about one ton per person per year.

The range of these figures suggests the technical challenges ahead. As one climate scientist put it to me, “To stabilize the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the whole world on average would need to get down to the Kenya level”—a 96 percent reduction for the United States."

"Coal will be with us because it is abundant: any projected “peak coal” stage would come many decades after the world reaches “peak oil.” It will be with us because of where it’s located: the top four coal-reserve countries are the United States, Russia, China, and India, which together have about 40 percent of the world’s population and more than 60 percent of its coal. It will be with us because its direct costs are in most circumstances far lower than those of the alternatives—that’s why so much is used. (Prices vary widely from place to place and company to company, but one utility executive said that the lowest-price coal plant might generate electricity for 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, while the same amount of power from a new wind farm in the same area might cost 20 cents.) It will be with us because its indirect costs, in miner deaths, environmental destruction, and carbon burden on the atmosphere are unregulated and “externalized.” Power companies that answer to shareholders or ratepayers have a hard time justifying a more expensive choice. “Coal is so cheap because its dirtiness still doesn’t count against it,” an air-pollution expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council told The Wall Street Journal 10 years ago. In the absence of climate legislation in the United States and international agreements to reduce emissions, the dirtiness still doesn’t count. Coal will be with us because changing a power infrastructure—like building a new transportation system or extending cable or fiber-optic connections through an entire country—is the very opposite of a “virtual” process, and takes many years to complete."

"[Coal] will be with us because of a surprising constraint: after a century in which medical diagnosis and treatment, computer and communications systems, aerospace and nanotech industries, and nearly every other form of technology have routinely achieved the magical, energy production is essentially what it was in the time of James Watt. With the main exception of nuclear-power plants and the hoped-for future exception of practical nuclear-fusion systems, we mostly create electricity by burning something that was once underground—coal, oil, natural gas—to boil water and turn turbines with the steam. (Windmills use the wind’s force, and hydropower systems use falling water, to turn turbines directly.) The computer of 10 years from now will be unrecognizably more powerful than today’s, and its predictably increased capability will make medical, navigation, and other systems better, too. If the power plant of 10 years from now is even slightly more efficient than today’s, that will be a major achievement. The most advanced of today’s “ultra-supercritical” coal-fired plants, which operate at very high temperatures and pressures to maximize the efficiency of combustion, convert up to 48 percent of the coal’s potential energy to electric power; the rest is lost as heat. “Subcritical” plants typically have efficiencies in the mid-30s. The costliest and most advanced technology is an improvement—but not a breakthrough. A breakthrough is what it would take to move beyond reliance on coal."

Purely Educational.

Okay, so what's the point of Purely Educational. Don't you have enough blogs, Adam? Well, I often discover articles that I think are interesting, mostly to do with the environment, but sometimes politics, sometimes opinion, and I lack a place to share them and archive them. HERE IS THAT SPACE. Usually, there's not much I want to say about the articles, since they sort of speak for themselves, and I would rather have people make up their minds, although I might emphasize a paragraph or two. But if you have something you want to comment, please do! I hope you learn something...