Germany shuts down atomic plant as nuclear phase-out enters final stretch | News | DW | 31.12.2019
Germany shuts down atomic plant as nuclear phase-out enters final stretch
The Philippsburg power station is one of the only plants still operating in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg. Germany has vowed to start decommissioning every nuclear power facility by the end of 2022.
Operators began shutting down the Philippsburg nuclear power plant in southern Germany on Tuesday, as the country puts into motion its plan to begin decommissioning all 17 of its atomic energy facilities by the end of 2022.
After 35 years on the grid, Block 2 of the Philippsburg station was fully turned off. Neckarwestheim 2, the other remaining nuclear plant in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, is not set to be turned off until the end of the nuclear phase-out plan.
Philippsburg had previously supplied 6% of Baden-Württemberg's energy. However, nuclear power has long been unpopular in the region, which has a Green party leader in State Premier Winfried Kretschmann.
The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan led to widespread anti-atomic-power protests across Germany. Two months after the accident, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that all plants would be closed over the next decade, making Germany the second country after Italy to shut down all of its atomic energy stations.
The German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) welcomed the news. A BUND spokesman said the group hoped to see the end of nuclear power being "conjured up again and again as a supposed healing charm and climate savior."
From the point of view of safety, Wolfram König — who heads the German government's office for the phase-out — welcomed the fact that more nuclear power stations were being taken offline. However, König also warned that the country still faced a great "challenge" in trying to phase out both coal and atomic energy at the same time.
es/rc (dpa, AFP)
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Germany demolishes cooling tower of former nuclear power plant
A cooling tower emblematic of Germany's nuclear aversion has been toppled near Koblenz. Seven reactors are still operational in Germany, with the last due to be phased out in late 2022 amid a drive to renewables. (09.08.2019)
Date 31.12.2019
Related Subjects Fukushima, Germany
Keywords Germany, nuclear power plant, Fukushima
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3 Reasons Why Nuclear is Clean and Sustainable | Department of Energy
3 Reasons Why Nuclear is Clean and Sustainable | Department of Energy
Office of Nuclear Energy
3 Reasons Why Nuclear is Clean and Sustainable
APRIL 30, 2020
Home » 3 Reasons Why Nuclear is Clean and Sustainable
When you hear the words “clean energy,” what comes to mind?
Most people immediately think of solar panels or wind turbines, but how many of you thought of nuclear energy?
Nuclear is often left out of the “clean energy” conversation despite it being the second largest source of low-carbon electricity in the world behind hydropower.
So, just how clean and sustainable is nuclear?
Try these quick facts for starters.
1. Nuclear energy protects air quality
McGuire Nuclear Station located in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
Duke Energy
Nuclear is a zero-emission clean energy source.
It generates power through fission, which is the process of splitting uranium atoms to produce energy. The heat released by fission is used to create steam that spins a turbine to generate electricity without the harmful byproducts emitted by fossil fuels.
According to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the United States avoided more than 476 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2019. That’s the equivalent of removing 100 million cars from the road and more than all other clean energy sources combined.
It also keeps the air clean by removing thousands of tons of harmful air pollutants each year that contribute to acid rain, smog, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease.
2. Nuclear energy’s land footprint is small
A 25 megawatt solar power system in DeSoto County, Florida
NREL
Despite producing massive amounts of carbon-free power, nuclear energy produces more electricity on less land than any other clean-air source.
A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space.
To put that in perspective, you would need more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines (capacity factor not included).
See more comparisons here.
3. Nuclear energy produces minimal waste
Graphic by Sarah Harman | U.S. Department of Energy
Nuclear fuel is extremely dense.
It’s about 1 million times greater than that of other traditional energy sources and because of this, the amount of used nuclear fuel is not as big as you might think.
All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!
That waste can also be reprocessed and recycled, although the United States does not currently do this.
However, some advanced reactors designs being developed could operate on used fuel.
The NICE Future Initiative is a global effort under the Clean Energy Ministerial that makes sure nuclear will be considered in developing the advanced clean energy systems of the future.
Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution - Yale E360
Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution - Yale E360
Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution
BY RICHARD RHODES • JULY 19, 2018
Many environmentalists have opposed nuclear power, citing its dangers and the difficulty of disposing of its radioactive waste. But a Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that nuclear is safer than most energy sources and is needed if the world hopes to radically decrease its carbon emissions.
In the late 16th century, when the increasing cost of firewood forced ordinary Londoners to switch reluctantly to coal, Elizabethan preachers railed against a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement. Coal was black, after all, dirty, found in layers underground — down toward Hell at the center of the earth — and smelled strongly of sulfur when it burned. Switching to coal, in houses that usually lacked chimneys, was difficult enough; the clergy’s outspoken condemnation, while certainly justified environmentally, further complicated and delayed the timely resolution of an urgent problem in energy supply.
For too many environmentalists concerned with global warming, nuclear energy is today’s Devil’s excrement. They condemn it for its production and use of radioactive fuels and for the supposed problem of disposing of its waste. In my judgment, their condemnation of this efficient, low-carbon source of baseload energy is misplaced. Far from being the Devil’s excrement, nuclear power can be, and should be, one major component of our rescue from a hotter, more meteorologically destructive world.
Like all energy sources, nuclear power has advantages and disadvantages. What are nuclear power’s benefits? First and foremost, since it produces energy via nuclear fission rather than chemical burning, it generates baseload electricity with no output of carbon, the villainous element of global warming. Switching from coal to natural gas is a step toward decarbonizing, since burning natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal. But switching from coal to nuclear power is radically decarbonizing, since nuclear power plants release greenhouse gases only from the ancillary use of fossil fuels during their construction, mining, fuel processing, maintenance, and decommissioning — about as much as solar power does, which is about 4 to 5 percent as much as a natural gas-fired power plant.
Nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source.
Second, nuclear power plants operate at much higher capacity factors than renewable energy sources or fossil fuels. Capacity factor is a measure of what percentage of the time a power plant actually produces energy. It’s a problem for all intermittent energy sources. The sun doesn’t always shine, nor the wind always blow, nor water always fall through the turbines of a dam.
In the United States in 2016, nuclear power plants, which generated almost 20 percent of U.S. electricity, had an average capacity factor of 92.3 percent, meaning they operated at full power on 336 out of 365 days per year. (The other 29 days they were taken off the grid for maintenance.) In contrast, U.S. hydroelectric systems delivered power 38.2 percent of the time (138 days per year), wind turbines 34.5 percent of the time (127 days per year) and solar electricity arrays only 25.1 percent of the time (92 days per year). Even plants powered with coal or natural gas only generate electricity about half the time for reasons such as fuel costs and seasonal and nocturnal variations in demand. Nuclear is a clear winner on reliability.
Third, nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source. This statement will seem paradoxical to many readers, since it’s not commonly known that non-nuclear energy sources release any radiation into the environment. They do. The worst offender is coal, a mineral of the earth’s crust that contains a substantial volume of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. Burning coal gasifies its organic materials, concentrating its mineral components into the remaining waste, called fly ash. So much coal is burned in the world and so much fly ash produced that coal is actually the major source of radioactive releases into the environment.
Anti-nuclear activists protest the construction of a nuclear power station in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977. AP PHOTO
In the early 1950s, when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission believed high-grade uranium ores to be in short supply domestically, it considered extracting uranium for nuclear weapons from the abundant U.S. supply of fly ash from coal burning. In 2007, China began exploring such extraction, drawing on a pile of some 5.3 million metric tons of brown-coal fly ash at Xiaolongtang in Yunnan. The Chinese ash averages about 0.4 pounds of triuranium octoxide (U3O8), a uranium compound, per metric ton. Hungary and South Africa are also exploring uranium extraction from coal fly ash.
ALSO ON YALE E360
Industry Meltdown: Is the era of nuclear power coming to an end? Read more.
What are nuclear’s downsides? In the public’s perception, there are two, both related to radiation: the risk of accidents, and the question of disposal of nuclear waste.
There have been three large-scale accidents involving nuclear power reactors since the onset of commercial nuclear power in the mid-1950s: Three-Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.
Studies indicate even the worst possible accident at a nuclear plant is less destructive than other major industrial accidents.
The partial meltdown of the Three-Mile Island reactor in March 1979, while a disaster for the owners of the Pennsylvania plant, released only a minimal quantity of radiation to the surrounding population. According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission:
“The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area’s natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year… In spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.”
The explosion and subsequent burnout of a large graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 was easily the worst nuclear accident in history. Twenty-nine disaster relief workers died of acute radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the accident. In the subsequent three decades, UNSCEAR — the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, composed of senior scientists from 27 member states — has observed and reported at regular intervals on the health effects of the Chernobyl accident. It has identified no long-term health consequences to populations exposed to Chernobyl fallout except for thyroid cancers in residents of Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia who were children or adolescents at the time of the accident, who drank milk contaminated with 131iodine, and who were not evacuated. By 2008, UNSCEAR had attributed some 6,500 excess cases of thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl region to the accident, with 15 deaths. The occurrence of these cancers increased dramatically from 1991 to 1995, which researchers attributed mostly to radiation exposure. No increase occurred in adults.
The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, located near Avila Beach, California, will be decommissioned starting in 2024. PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC
“The average effective doses” of radiation from Chernobyl, UNSCEAR also concluded, “due to both external and internal exposures, received by members of the general public during 1986-2005 [were] about 30 mSv for the evacuees, 1 mSv for the residents of the former Soviet Union, and 0.3 mSv for the populations of the rest of Europe.” A sievert is a measure of radiation exposure, a millisievert is one-one-thousandth of a sievert. A full-body CT scan delivers about 10-30 mSv. A U.S. resident receives an average background radiation dose, exclusive of radon, of about 1 mSv per year.
The statistics of Chernobyl irradiations cited here are so low that they must seem intentionally minimized to those who followed the extensive media coverage of the accident and its aftermath. Yet they are the peer-reviewed products of extensive investigation by an international scientific agency of the United Nations. They indicate that even the worst possible accident at a nuclear power plant — the complete meltdown and burnup of its radioactive fuel — was yet far less destructive than other major industrial accidents across the past century. To name only two: Bhopal, in India, where at least 3,800 people died immediately and many thousands more were sickened when 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide plant; and Henan Province, in China, where at least 26,000 people drowned following the failure of a major hydroelectric dam in a typhoon. “Measured as early deaths per electricity units produced by the Chernobyl facility (9 years of operation, total electricity production of 36 GWe-years, 31 early deaths) yields 0.86 death/GWe-year),” concludes Zbigniew Jaworowski, a physician and former UNSCEAR chairman active during the Chernobyl accident. “This rate is lower than the average fatalities from [accidents involving] a majority of other energy sources. For example, the Chernobyl rate is nine times lower than the death rate from liquefied gas… and 47 times lower than from hydroelectric stations.”
Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem, is not any longer a technological problem.
ALSO ON YALE E360
In Fukushima, a bitter legacy of radiation, trauma, and fear. Read more.
The accident in Japan at Fukushima Daiichi in March 2011 followed a major earthquake and tsunami. The tsunami flooded out the power supply and cooling systems of three power reactors, causing them to melt down and explode, breaching their confinement. Although 154,000 Japanese citizens were evacuated from a 12-mile exclusion zone around the power station, radiation exposure beyond the station grounds was limited. According to the report submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency in June 2011:
“No harmful health effects were found in 195,345 residents living in the vicinity of the plant who were screened by the end of May 2011. All the 1,080 children tested for thyroid gland exposure showed results within safe limits. By December, government health checks of some 1,700 residents who were evacuated from three municipalities showed that two-thirds received an external radiation dose within the normal international limit of 1 mSv/year, 98 percent were below 5 mSv/year, and 10 people were exposed to more than 10 mSv… [There] was no major public exposure, let alone deaths from radiation.”
Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem in the U.S., is not any longer a technological problem. Most U.S. spent fuel, more than 90 percent of which could be recycled to extend nuclear power production by hundreds of years, is stored at present safely in impenetrable concrete-and-steel dry casks on the grounds of operating reactors, its radiation slowly declining.
An activist in March 2017 demanding closure of the Fessenheim Nuclear Power Plant in France. Authorities announced in April that they will close the facility by 2020. SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
The U.S. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico currently stores low-level and transuranic military waste and could store commercial nuclear waste in a 2-kilometer thick bed of crystalline salt, the remains of an ancient sea. The salt formation extends from southern New Mexico all the way northeast to southwestern Kansas. It could easily accommodate the entire world’s nuclear waste for the next thousand years.
Finland is even further advanced in carving out a permanent repository in granite bedrock 400 meters under Olkiluoto, an island in the Baltic Sea off the nation’s west coast. It expects to begin permanent waste storage in 2023.
A final complaint against nuclear power is that it costs too much. Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide, but there is no question that a full accounting of the external costs of different energy systems would find nuclear cheaper than coal or natural gas.
ALSO ON YALE E360
Rocky Flats: A wildlife refuge confronts its radioactive past. Read more.
Nuclear power is not the only answer to the world-scale threat of global warming. Renewables have their place; so, at least for leveling the flow of electricity when renewables vary, does natural gas. But nuclear deserves better than the anti-nuclear prejudices and fears that have plagued it. It isn’t the 21st century’s version of the Devil’s excrement. It’s a valuable, even an irreplaceable, part of the solution to the greatest energy threat in the history of humankind.
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Richard Rhodes is the author of numerous books, including the recently published Energy: A Human History, and is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Appearing as host and correspondent for documentaries on public television’s Frontline and American Experience series, he has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford University. MOREABOUT RICHARD RHODES →
TOPICS
Energy
GREENHOUSE GASES
NUCLEAR
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Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution
BY RICHARD RHODES • JULY 19, 2018
Many environmentalists have opposed nuclear power, citing its dangers and the difficulty of disposing of its radioactive waste. But a Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that nuclear is safer than most energy sources and is needed if the world hopes to radically decrease its carbon emissions.
In the late 16th century, when the increasing cost of firewood forced ordinary Londoners to switch reluctantly to coal, Elizabethan preachers railed against a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement. Coal was black, after all, dirty, found in layers underground — down toward Hell at the center of the earth — and smelled strongly of sulfur when it burned. Switching to coal, in houses that usually lacked chimneys, was difficult enough; the clergy’s outspoken condemnation, while certainly justified environmentally, further complicated and delayed the timely resolution of an urgent problem in energy supply.
For too many environmentalists concerned with global warming, nuclear energy is today’s Devil’s excrement. They condemn it for its production and use of radioactive fuels and for the supposed problem of disposing of its waste. In my judgment, their condemnation of this efficient, low-carbon source of baseload energy is misplaced. Far from being the Devil’s excrement, nuclear power can be, and should be, one major component of our rescue from a hotter, more meteorologically destructive world.
Like all energy sources, nuclear power has advantages and disadvantages. What are nuclear power’s benefits? First and foremost, since it produces energy via nuclear fission rather than chemical burning, it generates baseload electricity with no output of carbon, the villainous element of global warming. Switching from coal to natural gas is a step toward decarbonizing, since burning natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal. But switching from coal to nuclear power is radically decarbonizing, since nuclear power plants release greenhouse gases only from the ancillary use of fossil fuels during their construction, mining, fuel processing, maintenance, and decommissioning — about as much as solar power does, which is about 4 to 5 percent as much as a natural gas-fired power plant.
Nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source.
Second, nuclear power plants operate at much higher capacity factors than renewable energy sources or fossil fuels. Capacity factor is a measure of what percentage of the time a power plant actually produces energy. It’s a problem for all intermittent energy sources. The sun doesn’t always shine, nor the wind always blow, nor water always fall through the turbines of a dam.
In the United States in 2016, nuclear power plants, which generated almost 20 percent of U.S. electricity, had an average capacity factor of 92.3 percent, meaning they operated at full power on 336 out of 365 days per year. (The other 29 days they were taken off the grid for maintenance.) In contrast, U.S. hydroelectric systems delivered power 38.2 percent of the time (138 days per year), wind turbines 34.5 percent of the time (127 days per year) and solar electricity arrays only 25.1 percent of the time (92 days per year). Even plants powered with coal or natural gas only generate electricity about half the time for reasons such as fuel costs and seasonal and nocturnal variations in demand. Nuclear is a clear winner on reliability.
Third, nuclear power releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source. This statement will seem paradoxical to many readers, since it’s not commonly known that non-nuclear energy sources release any radiation into the environment. They do. The worst offender is coal, a mineral of the earth’s crust that contains a substantial volume of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. Burning coal gasifies its organic materials, concentrating its mineral components into the remaining waste, called fly ash. So much coal is burned in the world and so much fly ash produced that coal is actually the major source of radioactive releases into the environment.
Anti-nuclear activists protest the construction of a nuclear power station in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977. AP PHOTO
In the early 1950s, when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission believed high-grade uranium ores to be in short supply domestically, it considered extracting uranium for nuclear weapons from the abundant U.S. supply of fly ash from coal burning. In 2007, China began exploring such extraction, drawing on a pile of some 5.3 million metric tons of brown-coal fly ash at Xiaolongtang in Yunnan. The Chinese ash averages about 0.4 pounds of triuranium octoxide (U3O8), a uranium compound, per metric ton. Hungary and South Africa are also exploring uranium extraction from coal fly ash.
ALSO ON YALE E360
Industry Meltdown: Is the era of nuclear power coming to an end? Read more.
What are nuclear’s downsides? In the public’s perception, there are two, both related to radiation: the risk of accidents, and the question of disposal of nuclear waste.
There have been three large-scale accidents involving nuclear power reactors since the onset of commercial nuclear power in the mid-1950s: Three-Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.
Studies indicate even the worst possible accident at a nuclear plant is less destructive than other major industrial accidents.
The partial meltdown of the Three-Mile Island reactor in March 1979, while a disaster for the owners of the Pennsylvania plant, released only a minimal quantity of radiation to the surrounding population. According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission:
“The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area’s natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year… In spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.”
The explosion and subsequent burnout of a large graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 was easily the worst nuclear accident in history. Twenty-nine disaster relief workers died of acute radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the accident. In the subsequent three decades, UNSCEAR — the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, composed of senior scientists from 27 member states — has observed and reported at regular intervals on the health effects of the Chernobyl accident. It has identified no long-term health consequences to populations exposed to Chernobyl fallout except for thyroid cancers in residents of Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia who were children or adolescents at the time of the accident, who drank milk contaminated with 131iodine, and who were not evacuated. By 2008, UNSCEAR had attributed some 6,500 excess cases of thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl region to the accident, with 15 deaths. The occurrence of these cancers increased dramatically from 1991 to 1995, which researchers attributed mostly to radiation exposure. No increase occurred in adults.
The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, located near Avila Beach, California, will be decommissioned starting in 2024. PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC
“The average effective doses” of radiation from Chernobyl, UNSCEAR also concluded, “due to both external and internal exposures, received by members of the general public during 1986-2005 [were] about 30 mSv for the evacuees, 1 mSv for the residents of the former Soviet Union, and 0.3 mSv for the populations of the rest of Europe.” A sievert is a measure of radiation exposure, a millisievert is one-one-thousandth of a sievert. A full-body CT scan delivers about 10-30 mSv. A U.S. resident receives an average background radiation dose, exclusive of radon, of about 1 mSv per year.
The statistics of Chernobyl irradiations cited here are so low that they must seem intentionally minimized to those who followed the extensive media coverage of the accident and its aftermath. Yet they are the peer-reviewed products of extensive investigation by an international scientific agency of the United Nations. They indicate that even the worst possible accident at a nuclear power plant — the complete meltdown and burnup of its radioactive fuel — was yet far less destructive than other major industrial accidents across the past century. To name only two: Bhopal, in India, where at least 3,800 people died immediately and many thousands more were sickened when 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide plant; and Henan Province, in China, where at least 26,000 people drowned following the failure of a major hydroelectric dam in a typhoon. “Measured as early deaths per electricity units produced by the Chernobyl facility (9 years of operation, total electricity production of 36 GWe-years, 31 early deaths) yields 0.86 death/GWe-year),” concludes Zbigniew Jaworowski, a physician and former UNSCEAR chairman active during the Chernobyl accident. “This rate is lower than the average fatalities from [accidents involving] a majority of other energy sources. For example, the Chernobyl rate is nine times lower than the death rate from liquefied gas… and 47 times lower than from hydroelectric stations.”
Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem, is not any longer a technological problem.
ALSO ON YALE E360
In Fukushima, a bitter legacy of radiation, trauma, and fear. Read more.
The accident in Japan at Fukushima Daiichi in March 2011 followed a major earthquake and tsunami. The tsunami flooded out the power supply and cooling systems of three power reactors, causing them to melt down and explode, breaching their confinement. Although 154,000 Japanese citizens were evacuated from a 12-mile exclusion zone around the power station, radiation exposure beyond the station grounds was limited. According to the report submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency in June 2011:
“No harmful health effects were found in 195,345 residents living in the vicinity of the plant who were screened by the end of May 2011. All the 1,080 children tested for thyroid gland exposure showed results within safe limits. By December, government health checks of some 1,700 residents who were evacuated from three municipalities showed that two-thirds received an external radiation dose within the normal international limit of 1 mSv/year, 98 percent were below 5 mSv/year, and 10 people were exposed to more than 10 mSv… [There] was no major public exposure, let alone deaths from radiation.”
Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem in the U.S., is not any longer a technological problem. Most U.S. spent fuel, more than 90 percent of which could be recycled to extend nuclear power production by hundreds of years, is stored at present safely in impenetrable concrete-and-steel dry casks on the grounds of operating reactors, its radiation slowly declining.
An activist in March 2017 demanding closure of the Fessenheim Nuclear Power Plant in France. Authorities announced in April that they will close the facility by 2020. SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
The U.S. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico currently stores low-level and transuranic military waste and could store commercial nuclear waste in a 2-kilometer thick bed of crystalline salt, the remains of an ancient sea. The salt formation extends from southern New Mexico all the way northeast to southwestern Kansas. It could easily accommodate the entire world’s nuclear waste for the next thousand years.
Finland is even further advanced in carving out a permanent repository in granite bedrock 400 meters under Olkiluoto, an island in the Baltic Sea off the nation’s west coast. It expects to begin permanent waste storage in 2023.
A final complaint against nuclear power is that it costs too much. Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide, but there is no question that a full accounting of the external costs of different energy systems would find nuclear cheaper than coal or natural gas.
ALSO ON YALE E360
Rocky Flats: A wildlife refuge confronts its radioactive past. Read more.
Nuclear power is not the only answer to the world-scale threat of global warming. Renewables have their place; so, at least for leveling the flow of electricity when renewables vary, does natural gas. But nuclear deserves better than the anti-nuclear prejudices and fears that have plagued it. It isn’t the 21st century’s version of the Devil’s excrement. It’s a valuable, even an irreplaceable, part of the solution to the greatest energy threat in the history of humankind.
Richard Rhodes is the author of numerous books, including the recently published Energy: A Human History, and is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Appearing as host and correspondent for documentaries on public television’s Frontline and American Experience series, he has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford University. MOREABOUT RICHARD RHODES →
TOPICS
Energy
GREENHOUSE GASES
NUCLEAR
PUBLIC HEALTH
ACTIVISM
POLITICS
REGIONS
North America
Asia
Europe
Join the conversation: Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy SolutionShow comments →
Never miss a feature! Sign up for
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy? | Let's Talk Science
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy? | Let's Talk Science:
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy?
Digital Development Team
January 23, 2019
Format
Video, Text, Images
Readability
9.1
Subjects
Environmental Science, Pollution, Climate change, Physics, Nuclear Energy, Technology & Engineering
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy?
Digital Development Team
January 23, 2019
Format
Video, Text, Images
Readability
9.1
Subjects
Environmental Science, Pollution, Climate change, Physics, Nuclear Energy, Technology & Engineering
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy? | Let's Talk Science
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy? | Let's Talk Science:
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy?
Digital Development Team
January 23, 2019
Format
Video, Text, Images
Readability
9.1
Subjects
Environmental Science, Pollution, Climate change, Physics, Nuclear Energy, Technology & Engineering
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy?
Digital Development Team
January 23, 2019
Format
Video, Text, Images
Readability
9.1
Subjects
Environmental Science, Pollution, Climate change, Physics, Nuclear Energy, Technology & Engineering
Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy - Conserve Energy Future
Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy - Conserve Energy Future
Nuclear Energy Pros and Cons
As of today, nuclear energy is considered as one of the most environmentally friendly source of energy as it produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions during the production of electricity as compared to traditional sources like coal power plants. Nuclear fission is the process that is used in nuclear reactors to produce high amount of energy using element called uranium. It is the energy that is stored in the nucleus of an atom.
While being environmentally friendly is the big plus of nuclear energy, disposal of radioactive waste and protecting people and environment from its radiations is a big cons of nuclear energy. Therefore, expensive solutions are needed to protect mother earth from the devastating effects of nuclear energy.
When we think about this resource, many of us think about nuclear bombs or the meltdowns that have happened at a number of nuclear plants around the world. That being said, nuclear energy is definitely a type of renewable energy that we need to look at. In this article, we’re going to explore the pros and cons of nuclear energy.
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Pros of Nuclear Energy
1. Low Pollution: Nuclear power also has a lot fewer greenhouse emissions. It has been determined that the amount of greenhouse gases have decreased by almost half because of the prevalence in the utilization of nuclear power. Nuclear energy has the least effect on nature since it doesn’t discharge any gasses like methane and carbon dioxide, which are the primary “greenhouse gasses.” There is no unfavorable impact on water, land or any territories because of the utilization of nuclear power, except in times where transportation is utilized.
2. Low Operating Costs: Nuclear power produces very inexpensive electricity. The cost of the uranium, which is utilized as a fuel in this process, is low. Also, even though the expense of setting up nuclear power plants is moderately high, the expense of running them is quite low low. The normal life of nuclear reactor is anywhere from 40-60 years, depending on how often it is used and how it is being used. These variables, when consolidated, make the expense of delivering power low. Even if the cost of uranium goes up, the impact on the cost of power will be that much lower.
3. Reliability: It is estimated that with the current rate of consumption of uranium, we have enough uranium for another 70-80 years. A nuclear power plant when in the mode of producing energy can run uninterrupted for even a year. As solar and wind energy are dependent upon weather conditions, nuclear power plant has no such constraints and can run without disruption in any climatic condition.
There are sure monetary focal points in setting up nuclear power plants and utilizing nuclear energy in lieu of traditional energy. It is one of the significant sources of power all through the country. The best part is that this energy has a persistent supply. It is broadly accessible, there is a lot in storage, and it is believed that the supply is going to last much, much longer than that of fossil fuels that are used in the same capacity.
4. More Proficient Than Fossil Fuels: The other primary point of interest of utilizing nuclear energy is that it is more compelling and more proficient than other energy sources. A number of nuclear energy innovations have made it a much more feasible choice than others. They have high energy density as compared to fossil fuels. The amount of fuel required by nuclear power plant is comparatively less than what is required by other power plants as energy released by nuclear fission is approximately ten million times greater than the amount of energy released by fossil fuel atom.
This is one the reason that numerous nations are putting a lot of time and money into nuclear power.What’s nuclear power’s greatest benefit, above any other benefit that we may explore? It doesn’t rely on fossil fuels and isn’t influenced by fluctuating oil and gas costs. Coal and natural gas power plants discharge carbon dioxide into the air, which causes a number of environmental issues. With nuclear power plants, carbon emissions are insignificant.
5. Renewable?: Nuclear energy is not renewable resource. Uranium, the nuclear fuel that is used to produced nuclear energy is limited and cannot be produced again and again on demand. On the other hand, by using breeder and fusion reactors, we can produce other fissionable element. One such element is called plutonium that is produced by the by-products of chain-reaction. Also, if we know how to control atomic fusion, the same reactions that fuel the sun, we can have almost unlimited energy.
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Cons of Nuclear Energy
1. Environmental Impact: One of the biggest issues is environmental impact in relation to uranium. The process of mining and refining uranium hasn’t been a clean process. Actually transporting nuclear fuel to and from plants represents a pollution hazard. Also, once the fuel is used, you can’t simply take it to the landfill – it’s radioactive and dangerous.
2. Radioactive Waste Disposal: As a rule, a nuclear power plant creates 20 metric tons of nuclear fuel per year, and with that comes a lot of nuclear waste. When you consider each nuclear plant on Earth, you will find that that number jumps to approximately 2,000 metric tons a year. The greater part of this waste transmits radiation and high temperature, implying that it will inevitably consume any compartment that holds it. It can also cause damage to living things in and around the plants.
Nuclear power plants create a lot of low-level radioactive waste as transmitted parts and supplies. Over time, used nuclear fuel decays to safe radioactive levels, however this takes a countless number of years. Even low level radioactive waste takes hundreds of years to achieve adequate levels of safety.
3. Nuclear Accidents: The radioactive waste produced can pose serious health effects on the lives of people as well as the environment. The Chernobyl accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine was the worst nuclear accident in the history. Its harmful effects on humans and ecology can still be seen today. Then there was another accident that happened in Fukushima in Japan. Although the casualties were not that high, but it caused serious environmental concerns.
4. High Cost: At present, the nuclear business let waste cool for a considerable length of time before blending it with glass and putting away it in enormous cooled, solid structures. This waste must be kept up, observed and watched to keep the materials from falling into the wrong hands and causing problems. These administrations and included materials cost cash – on top of the high expenses needed to put together a plant, which may make it less desirable to invest in. It requires permission from several international authorities and it is normally opposed by the people who live in that region.
5. Uranium is Finite: Just like other sources of fuel, uranium is also finite and exists in few of the countries. It is pretty expensive to mine, refine and transport uranium. It produces considerable amount of waste during all these activities and can result in environmental contamination and serous health effects, if not handled properly.
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6. Hot Target for Militants: Nuclear energy has immense power. Today, nuclear energy is used to make weapons. If these weapons go into the wrong hands, that could be the end of this world. Nuclear power plants are prime target for terrorism activities. Little lax in security can be brutal for humankind.
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Rinkesh
A true environmentalist by heart ❤️. Founded Conserve Energy Future with the sole motto of providing helpful information related to our rapidly depleting environment. Unless you strongly believe in Elon Musk‘s idea of making Mars as another habitable planet, do remember that there really is no 'Planet B' in this whole universe.
Nuclear Energy Pros and Cons - Energy Informative
Nuclear Energy Pros and Cons - Energy Informative
Nuclear Energy Pros and Cons
Below you will find a nuclear energy pros and cons list, which covers the most important aspects of typical nuclear power plants.
There are 104 commercial nuclear power plants in the United States producing a whopping 806.2 TWh of electricity, in other words about 20 % of the entire electricity generation (2008). There is no doubt that the potential of nuclear energy is huge, but there are also downsides.
Before we get further into the pros and cons list, what exactly is nuclear energy? The basic gist is this: By separating an atom into two lighter atoms, there is a net loss of mass. This mass is not exactly lost, but rather transformed into massive amounts of energy. This is what is referred to as nuclear fission. By controlling these reactions we can harness the energy.
I’ve made a separate article going deeper into how we harness nuclear energy called Nuclear. If this is not entirely clear yet; you might want to consider reading this before you start with the pros and cons list below.
Advantages of Nuclear Energy
1 Relatively Low Costs
The initial construction costs of nuclear power plants are large. On top of this, when the power plants first have been built, we are left with the costs to enrich and process the nuclear fuel (e.g. uranium), control and get rid of nuclear waste, as well as the maintenance of the plant. The reason this is under advantages is that nuclear energy is cost-competitive. Generating electricity in nuclear reactors is cheaper than electricity generating from oil, gas and coal, not to speak of the renewable energy sources!
2 Base Load Energy
Nuclear power plants provide a stable base load of energy. This can work synergistic with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. The electricity production from the plants can be lowered when good wind and solar resources are available and cranked up when the demand is high.
3 Low Pollution
It is in most cases more beneficial, in terms of the climate crisis, to replace other energy harnessing methods we use today with nuclear power. The environmental effects of nuclear power are relatively light compared to those. However, nuclear waste is potential harmful for both humans and the environment.
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4 Thorium
Reports show that with the yearly fuel consumption of today’s nuclear power plants, we have enough uranium for 80 years. It is possible to fuel nuclear power plants with other fuel types than uranium. Thorium, which also is a greener alternative, has lately been given an increased amount of attention. China, Russia and India have already plans to start using thorium to fuel their reactors in the near future.
It looks like nuclear fuel is of good availability if we combine the reserves of the different types together. In other words, hopefully enough time for us to find cost-competitive greener ways of harnessing energy.
5 Sustainable?
Is nuclear energy renewable or non-renewable? This is a good question. By definition, nuclear energy is not a renewable energy source. As I mentioned above, there is a limited amount of fuel for nuclear power available. On the other hand, you could argue that nuclear energy is potentially sustainable by the use of breeder reactors and fusion reactors. Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of harnessing energy. If we can learn to control atomic fusion, the same reactions as those that fuel the sun, we have practically unlimited energy. At the moment, these two methods both have serious challenges that need to be dealt with if we are to start using them on larger scale.
6 High Energy Density
It is estimated the amount of energy released in a nuclear fission reaction is ten million times greater than the amount released in burning a fossil fuel atom (e.g. oil and gas). Therefore, the amount of fuel required in a nuclear power plant is much smaller compared to those of other types of power plants.
Disadvantages of Nuclear Energy
While the advantages of using nuclear energy seem to be many, there are also plenty of negative effects of nuclear energy. The following are the most important ones:
1 Accidents Happen
The radioactive waste can possess a threat to the environment and is dangerous for humans. We all remember the Chernobyl accident, where the harmful effects of nuclear radiation on humans can even be witnessed today. Estimates conclude that somewhere between 15 000 and 30 000 people lost their lifes in the Chernobyl aftermath and more than 2.5 million Ukrainians are still struggling with health problems related to nuclear waste.
Just last year, on March 18, a major nuclear crisis happenend again in Japan. While the casualties were not as high as with the Chernobyl accident, the environmental effects were disasterous.
History shows that we can never really protect us 100% against these disasters. Accidents do happen.
2 Radioactive Waste
Does nuclear power cause air pollution? The nuclear power plants emit negligible amounts, if any, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, the processes in the nuclear fuel chain such as mining, enrichment and waste management does.
There are many arguments both for and against nuclear power. All in all I would say that the future of nuclear power looks promising. With new generations of reactors, potential major breakthroughs such as nuclear fusion, the methods we use to harness nuclear energy will get better in the next coming years. The question is: Do we need nuclear power or are the renewables a better choice?
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If you want to read more on nuclear energy, go to the nuclear category in the top menu. To get a broader picture on the non-renewables and their importance in today’s society read Non-Renewable Energy Sources – Advantages and Disadvantages. Feel free to leave comments below.
Looking for lists of pros and cons for more types of energy sources?
Solar Energy Pros and Cons
Wind Energy Pros and Cons
Geothermal Energy Pros and Cons
Biomass Energy Pros and Cons
Tidal Energy Pros and Cons
Wave Energy Pros and Cons
Fossil Fuels Pros and Cons
Hydroelectric Energy Pros and Cons
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy? | Let's Talk Science
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy? | Let's Talk Science
What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy?
Digital Development Team
January 23, 2019
Format
Video, Text, Images
Readability
9.1
Subjects
Environmental Science, Pollution, Climate change, Physics, Nuclear Energy, Technology & Engineering
2020/05/12
Resurrection (novel) - Wikipedia
Resurrection (novel) - Wikipedia
Resurrection (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to searchThis article is about the Tolstoy novel. For other uses, see Resurrection (disambiguation).
First US edition | |
Author | Leo Tolstoy |
---|---|
Original title | Воскресеніе |
Country | Russia |
Language | Russian |
Genre | Philosophical novel, political fiction |
Publisher | First published serially in Niva then Dodd, Mead (US) |
Publication date | 1899 |
Published in English | 1900 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) and English-language Audio Book |
Pages | 483 (Oxford World's Classics edition) |
Resurrection (pre-reform Russian: Воскресеніе; post-reform Russian: Воскресение, tr. Voskreséniye), first published in 1899, was the last novel written by Leo Tolstoy. The book is the last of his major long fiction works published in his lifetime. Tolstoy intended the novel as an exposition of the injustice of man-made laws and the hypocrisy of the institutionalized church. The novel also explores the economic philosophy of Georgism, of which Tolstoy had become a very strong advocate towards the end of his life, and explains the theory in detail. It was first published serially in the popular weekly magazine Niva in an effort to raise funds for the resettlement of the Doukhobors.
Plot outline[edit]
The story is about a nobleman named Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, who seeks redemption for a sin committed years earlier. When he was a younger man, at his Aunts' estate, he fell in love with their ward, Katyusha (Katerina Mikhailovna Maslova), who is goddaughter to one Aunt and treated badly by the other. However, after going to the city and becoming corrupted by drink and gambling, he returns two years later to his Aunts' estate and rapes Katyusha, leaving her pregnant. She is then thrown out by his Aunt, and proceeds to face a series of unfortunate and unpleasant events, before she ends up working as a prostitute, going by her surname, Maslova.
Ten years later, Nekhlyudov sits on a jury which sentences the girl, Maslova, to prison in Siberia for murder (poisoning a client who beat her, a crime of which she is innocent). The book narrates his attempts to help her practically, but focuses on his personal mental and moral struggle. He goes to visit her in prison, meets other prisoners, hears their stories, and slowly comes to realize that below his gilded aristocratic world, yet invisible to it, is a much larger world of cruelty, injustice and suffering. Story after story he hears and even sees people chained without cause, beaten without cause, immured in dungeons for life without cause, and a twelve-year-old boy sleeping in a lake of human dung from an overflowing latrine because there is no other place on the prison floor, but clinging in a vain search for love to the leg of the man next to him, until the book achieves the bizarre intensity of a horrific fever dream. He decides to give up his property and pass ownership on to his peasants, leaving them to argue over the different ways in which they can organise the estate, and he follows Katyusha into exile, planning on marrying her. On their long journey into Siberia, she falls in love with another man, and Nekhludov gives his blessing and still chooses to live as part of the penal community, seeking redemption.
Popular and critical reception[edit]
The book was eagerly awaited. "How all of us rejoiced," one critic wrote on learning that Tolstoy had decided to make his first fiction in 25 years, not a short novella but a full-length novel. "May God grant that there will be more and more!" It outsold Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Despite its early success, today Resurrection is not as famous as the works that preceded it.[1]
Some writers have said that Resurrection has characters that are one-dimensional and that as a whole the book lacks Tolstoy's earlier attention to detail. By this point, Tolstoy was writing in a style that favored meaning over aesthetic quality.[1]
The book faced much censorship upon publication. The complete and accurate text was not published until 1936. Many publishers printed their own editions because they assumed that Tolstoy had given up all copyrights as he had done with previous books. Instead, Tolstoy retained the copyright and donated all royalties to the Doukhobors, who were Russian pacifists hoping to emigrate to Canada.[1]
It is said of legendary Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi that he was of the opinion that "All melodrama is based on Tolstoy's Resurrection".[2]
Adaptations[edit]
Operatic adaptations of the novel include the Risurrezione by Italian composer Franco Alfano, Vzkriesenie by Slovak composer Ján Cikker, and Resurrection by American composer Tod Machover.
Additionally, various film adaptations, including a Russian film Katyusha Maslova of director Pyotr Chardynin (1915, the first film role of Natalya Lisenko); a 1944 Italian film Resurrection; a 1949 Chinese film version entitled "蕩婦心" (A Forgotten Woman) starring Bai Guang; a Russian film version directed by Mikhail Shveitser in 1960, with Yevgeny Matveyev, Tamara Semina and Pavel Massalsky, have been made. The best-known film version, however, is Samuel Goldwyn's English-language We Live Again, filmed in 1934 with Fredric March and Anna Sten, and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani released their TV film Resurrezione in 2001. The Spanish director Alberto Gonzalez Vergel also released his TV film "Resureccion" in 1966. Kenji Mizoguchi,s film "Straights of love and hate" (1937) was also inspired by "Resurrection".
A 1968 BBC mini-series Resurrection, rebroadcast in the US on Masterpiece Theatre.[3] The Indian movie Barkha Bahar (1973) was based on this novel.
Notes[edit]
- ^ Jump up to:a b c Ernest J. Simmons, Introduction to Tolstoy's Writings http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap12.htm
- ^ Shindo, Kaneto (1975). Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director.
- ^ Resurrection on IMDb.
External links[edit]
Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- Resurrection at Project Gutenberg translated by Louise Maude
2020/05/10
알라딘: [전자책] 나와 가족을 살리는 기전수
알라딘: [전자책] 나와 가족을 살리는 기전수
[eBook] 나와 가족을 살리는 기전수
이용설 문광호 (지은이)유페이퍼2012-09-26
기본정보
제공 파일 : ePub(948 KB)
TTS 여부 : 지원
책소개
[책소개]
명상(瞑想)으로도 많이 알려진 참선(參禪)과 뇌 호흡을 통한 신체의 리듬과 상태가 어떻게 변하는가를 관찰하기 위해 한국과학기술원 물리학과 뇌 연구실에서 기 수련자 14명의 뇌파를 측정한 결과,
[eBook] 나와 가족을 살리는 기전수
이용설 문광호 (지은이)유페이퍼2012-09-26
기본정보
제공 파일 : ePub(948 KB)
TTS 여부 : 지원
책소개
[책소개]
명상(瞑想)으로도 많이 알려진 참선(參禪)과 뇌 호흡을 통한 신체의 리듬과 상태가 어떻게 변하는가를 관찰하기 위해 한국과학기술원 물리학과 뇌 연구실에서 기 수련자 14명의 뇌파를 측정한 결과,
무드 증대 및 통증 완화와 관련이 있는 호르몬인 베타엔돌핀이
수련 전에는 평균 11.21pg/ml이었다가 수련 중에는 25.08로 약 2.3배 늘어나고,
스트레스에 민감한 부신피질 자극 호르몬(ACTH)은 평균 46pg/ml에서 44로 줄어든다는 놀라운 사실이 관찰되었습니다.
이는, 1997년 1월 15일 미국 하버드대학교 의과대학 심신의학연구소에서 열린 학술세미나에 발표된 바 있습니다.
2020/05/09
『반일 종족주의와의 투쟁』을 출간했습니다.
25:0
여운택 이야기
이발사, 무학, 일본인 고객이 소개
끌려간 것이 아니라 연고를 동원하여 일본제철소에 취직
그러나 강제로 끌려갔다, 한푼도 받지못했다, 혹사당했다, 하고 이야기 하고 있다.
How did Michael Moore become a hero to climate deniers and the far right? | Michael Moore | The Guardian
How did Michael Moore become a hero to climate deniers and the far right? | Michael Moore | The Guardian
How did Michael Moore become a hero to climate deniers and the far right?
George Monbiot
The filmmaker’s latest venture is an excruciating mishmash of environment falsehoods and plays into the hands of those he once opposed
@GeorgeMonbiot
Thu 7 May 2020 20.28 AEST
---
Denial never dies; it just goes quiet and waits. Today, after years of irrelevance, the climate science deniers are triumphant. Long after their last, desperate claims had collapsed, when they had traction only on “alt-right” conspiracy sites, a hero of the left turns up and gives them more than they could have dreamed of.
Planet of the Humans, whose executive producer and chief promoter is Michael Moore, now has more than 6 million views on YouTube. The film does not deny climate science. But it promotes the discredited myths that deniers have used for years to justify their position. It claims that environmentalism is a self-seeking scam, doing immense harm to the living world while enriching a group of con artists. This has long been the most effective means by which denial – most of which has been funded by the fossil fuel industry – has been spread. Everyone hates a scammer.Climate denial is the latest hobby horse of the German far right | Bernhard Pötter
And yes, there are scammers. There are real issues and real conflicts to be explored in seeking to prevent the collapse of our life support systems. But they are handled so clumsily and incoherently by this film that watching it is like seeing someone start a drunken brawl over a spilled pint, then lamping his friends when they try to restrain him. It stumbles so blindly into toxic issues that Moore, former champion of the underdog, unwittingly aligns himself with white supremacists and the extreme right.
Occasionally, the film lands a punch on the right nose. It is right to attack the burning of trees to make electricity. But when the film’s presenter and director, Jeff Gibbs, claims, “I found only one environmental leader willing to reject biomass and biofuels”, he can’t have been looking very far. Some people have been speaking out against them ever since they became a serious proposition (since 2004 in my case). Almost every environmental leader I know opposes the burning of fresh materials to generate power.
There are also some genuine and difficult problems with renewable energy, particularly the mining of the necessary materials. But the film’s attacks on solar and wind power rely on a series of blatant falsehoods. It claims that, in producing electricity from renewables, “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place”. This is flat wrong. On average, a solar panel generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil energy required to build and install it. For wind turbines the ratio is 44 to one.
Planet of the Humans also claims that you can’t reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy: coal is instead being replaced by gas. Well, in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuel used for power generation has halved since 2010. By 2025, the government forecasts, roughly half our electricity will come from renewables, while gas burning will drop by a further 40%. To hammer home its point, the film shows footage of a “large terminal to import natural gas from the United States” that “Germany just built”. Germany has no such terminal. The footage was shot in Turkey.
There is also a real story to be told about the co-option and capture of some environmental groups by the industries they should hold to account. A remarkable number of large conservation organisations take money from fossil fuel companies. This is a disgrace. But rather than pinning the blame where it lies, Planet of the Humans concentrates its attacks on Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, who takes no money from any of his campaigning work. It’s an almost comic exercise in misdirection, but unfortunately it has horrible, real-world consequences, as McKibben now faces even more threats and attacks than he confronted before.Once again Michael Moore stirs the environmental pot – but conservationists turn up the heat on him
But this is by no means the worst of it. The film offers only one concrete solution to our predicament: the most toxic of all possible answers. “We really have got to start dealing with the issue of population … without seeing some sort of major die-off in population, there’s no turning back.”
Yes, population growth does contribute to the pressures on the natural world. But while the global population is rising by 1% a year, consumption, until the pandemic, was rising at a steady 3%. High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low. Where population growth is highest, consumption tends to be extremely low. Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people. When wealthy people, such as Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, “it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them breeding.” It’s not hard to see why the far right loves this film.
Population is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through. Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down.
We have been here many times before. Dozens of films have spread falsehoods about environmental activists and ripped into green technologies, while letting fossil fuels off the hook. But never before have these attacks come from a famous campaigner for social justice, rubbing our faces in the dirt.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Topics
Michael Moore
Opinion
Climate science denial
Climate change (Science)
Climate change (Environment)
Fossil fuels
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