The Emperor Has No Clothes A Practical Guide for Environmental and Social Transformation (19 page)

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The total cost: $3.3 Trillion, WOW, WOW! It
would require 36 million hectares (89 million acres). Actually the
amount of land needed would probably be much greater according to
the Harvard climate modeling study. Moreover, this system would
probably produce greater climatic impacts than doubling the current
amount of carbon dioxide (see below).

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Recent research indicates that wide spread
use of windmills would produce large negative climatic impacts. The
reason is that windmills take their energy from the wind by
reducing its speed. By employing wide spread deployment of this
technology the overall reduction in wind speeds would result in
changing the wind circulation patterns according to a recent
Harvard study employing climate modeling.xliv This research
indicates that the effects resulting from the changes in
circulation patterns would produce an impact on the climate greater
than doubling carbon dioxide. Keith and Adams also found in the
same study that mesoscale wind farms (100 square km and above)
diminish the winds velocity from wind shadowing to a much lower
speed than is currently being used for energy estimates. The
corrected lower wind velocities have the effect of reducing its
actual energy potential to only a fraction of current estimates.
Obviously it is not possible to replace a significant portion of
the United States fossil fuel generating capacity with
windmills.

73. So we need 2,622 billion kWh / (364.25
days/ year x 24 hr/day) = 300 million kWh. of electricity.

300 million kWh x $1,750 / kWh x 4 (to bring
it up to rated capacity) = $ 2 Trillion cost for the windmills.

The number of 1 megawatt windmills needed is
300 million kWh / 1000 kWh per windmill x 4 = 1,200,000
windmills.

According to the literature a windmill
requires 30 hectares (74.1 acres) so we need 1,200,000 x 30 hectare
each = 36 million hectares (89 million acres) to site the wind
mills. The cost would be $ 89 billion.

A windmill system would also require the
advanced type of electricity transmission grid that costs $1.2
Trillion.

So if we add all these costs up it comes to
$3.3 Trillion

The cost is prohibitive, the amount of land
required is too great and it probably would have negative
environmental consequences.

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This concludes the first part of this book
which is a survey to identify some of the more prominent problems
that are currently facing us. Because of the great number of
relevant topics that needed to be covered, of necessity I had to
greatly condense a lot of information some of which was highly
nuanced. It is my hope that the condensation that was made is
reasonably reflective of the original authors presentations. I
would urge you to consult the bibliography at the end of this book
to read some of the original materials from which this book is
derived. Of course any errors are my own responsibility.

~~~~~~~~~~

Gold dust is a wonderful thing to have

but when it gets into the eyes, it causes
blindness.

Chinese Proverb

The question is what can we do to correct the
plethora of problems that currently face us as a result of an out
of control economic system that studiously ignores the widespread
negative impacts it produces? In order to solve these problems
within the time horizons likely to be effective (around 15 years)
in preventing a significantly degraded planetary environment it
will require the rapid implementation of
already existing
technologies
. The second more fundamental need is to provide a
social mechanism that can act as a counter balance to eliminate the
negative characteristics inherent in the large scale highly
extractive economic system that is dominant

From the mid 1980's and about 20 years
thereafter, I was not in favor of the expansion of nuclear power.
The problem in my view wasn't the safety of the electrical
generation plants but the accrual of long lived radioactive waste
which didn't have any real safe effective means of disposal. My
views changed because of a lack of viable alternative carbon free
energy sources able to produce the amount of energy we use, and
also because of the advent of new power plant designs.

Let's start by considering what we currently
have. At the present time almost all of our fleet of 104 nuclear
power plants were built between 1969 and 1975 [74] and are
comprised of 2nd generation light water (slow neutron) type
plants.

74. The last one 1978.

These plants were actually designed and
constructed 40 – 50 years ago. Nuclear power plant design has come
a long way since then. The state of the art type of plants now
available are 4th generation (fast neutron) plants. [75] What is
really nice about the 4th generation plants is that they produce 60
times more energy per kilogram (or pound) of fuel. The second great
advantage is that they can use nuclear waste as fuel. The third
great advantage is that they produce miniscule amounts of waste
that will decay away in hundreds of years instead of the hundreds
of thousands of years for waste produced by light water plants.

75. This type of system was developed by the
US government and is currently available from GE / Hitachi and is
called Prism.

At the present time there are three sources
of nuclear waste that can be used as 4th generation reactor fuel
before we would have to mine more uranium. At the present time
about 70,000 tonnes of nuclear waste is being stored on site at the
existing nuclear power plants in temporary storage casks. We also
have approximately 600,000 tonnes of depleted (U238) uranium that
is produced as a byproduct of the enrichment process needed to make
nuclear fuel for 2nd generation reactors. A third source of fuel is
approximately 500 tonnes of weapons grade plutonium produced as a
result of the SALT nuclear disarmament treaties that can be diluted
and used for nuclear fuel in 4th generation reactors (dilution
renders the plutonium useless for bomb making). The amount of
energy that can be produced in 4th generation reactors using
nuclear waste for fuel is great enough to provide the energy needs
of the US for thousands of years while simultaneously eliminating
nuclear waste in addition to the pollution and health problems
originating from fossil fuels!

The safety of nuclear electric energy
generation is the question many people are concerned with so let's
take a look at what the safety record of our current fleet of
plants. How does commercial nuclear electrical generation compare
to current fossil fuel sources? Since nuclear electrical power
generation produces no air pollutants, there are 0 deaths from this
source. It has no negative effects on the environment from acid
rain, smog or heavy metals and does not contribute to global
warming since no carbon dioxide and other warming gasses are
produced.

Nuclear power plant radiation: the average
annual radiation exposure originating from our nuclear power plants
is less than .02 millirems and at the fence line of a nuclear plant
the maximum dose is 10 ( a millirem is a measurement of the damage
done to a human being by radiation). To provide a few comparisons
to other common sources of exposure the average x-ray dose is 95
millirems or 4,750 times more, if you live in a brick house the
bricks produce an average dose of 30 millirems or 1,500 times
greater. In fact if the same radiation exposure standards for
nuclear power plants were applied to coal plants they would all
have to be shut down!

What about nuclear disasters such as
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island (TMI). First it should be noted
that Chernobyl’s design is completely different than western
reactors and the accident that happened to Chernobyl is impossible
in a western reactor. Chernobyl was housed in a regular building
instead of a western type of containment structure. A regular
building was used so that weapons grade plutonium could also be
produced by the reactor which requires the fuel assemblies to be
removed at short time intervals usually every few weeks.
Containment structures makes this process slow and very
inefficient. Western reactors usually replace 1/3 of their fuel
assemblies every year and a half which makes reactor grade fuel
plutonium useless for weapons. Chernobyl moderated the nuclear
reaction with carbon rods which are similar to charcoal. These
carbon rods caught on fire when the reactor overheated and caused a
chemical explosion (it was not a nuclear explosion), which
destroyed part of the building and ejected radioactive material.
Second generation western reactors use water to moderate the
nuclear reaction because water is not a flammable substance. The
actual immediate death toll at Chernobyl was 31 dead. The ultimate
actual number of deaths according to the 2005 United Nations study
indicates there were 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children of
which nine died. An additional 19 people died from direct exposure
to the reactor, and the total number of deaths was 3,960. This
gives an average death rate of 180 each year, .025% of the number
of deaths caused by fossil fuel use. Three Mile Island was the
worst U.S. nuclear power plant accident and also the most severe
type of accident. Most of the core melted down destroying the
reactor. All of the melted material remained in the reactor vessel
( incidentally the “China Syndrome” scenario is an impossibility, a
complete myth). The death toll was 0, the number of people injured
0, and numerous authoritative epidemiological studies have found
that the amount of cancer increase has been 0.xlv What actually
happened; the containment structure worked as designed. The
containment structure of a western light water power reactor
consists of a reactor vessel that is 7.6 – 23 cm (3 to 9 inches)
thick steel. The reactor vessel is surrounded by what is known as
the primary containment which is usually another 20 cm (8 inches)
of steel. The two heavy steel containments are housed in a further
heavily steel reinforced concrete building 1 meter (3 to 4 feet)
thick. For comparison, the armored decks of battle ships are 12.7
cm (5 inches) thick steel or about 1/3 of a nuclear reactor. The
outer building employs a type of concrete construction similar to
what is used for hardened military fortifications. More recently on
11 March 2011 Fukushima Japan suffered a 9 magnitude earthquake
which produced a tsunami that over topped the 5 meter high
protective enclosure which inundated the nuclear reactors causing
great damage and large releases of radioactive materials. A recent
World Health Organization investigation found no increases in the
rates of cancer in the effected areas. There were two cases of
acute radiation poisonings of plant workers and no deaths related
to radiation releases from this disaster. The contamination from
releases of radioactive materials are currently below detectable
limits (in 2014) as a result of the short half lives of some of the
material and also as a result of dilution.

Obviously the information on nuclear power
plant safety that was just presented is almost the opposite of what
is normally found in the popular mass media outlets (I urge you to
check the information presented if you have any doubts). How one
can distinguish true information from false is by reading
independently peer reviewed sources of
information such as journals.
If you are using books or
other types of media such as the internet, look at their sources.
If you have someone presenting information and they are claiming to
be an expert make sure they actually are expert in the area they
are talking about. A sure sign that you are probably getting fed PR
is when y a Medical Doctor who is a specialist in obstetrics is
claiming to be an expert in the medical effects of nonclinical
radiation exposure, or a particle physicist is claiming to be an
expert in epidemiology, etc. The large well moneyed enterprises
routinely hire credentialed people like these to make PR assertions
to cause doubts and confusion about real valid scientific findings
that may have a negative impact on their business activities. Not
only do they hire these people to create bogus information, but
they have also developed an infrastructure comprised of various
organizations to provide a patina of credibility to their PR. Some
of these employ people to provide favorable (not independent) “peer
review” and publication venues. Other organizations act to produce
a provenance of publication history in order to work these articles
into the more reputable mass publications by stages. [76] The
general content of this type of commercial disinformation presents
a supportive case for a special interest and is at odds with the
general consensus shared by experts in the field. As for myself,
I am not an expert in nuclear physics, nuclear
engineering, the effects of radiation exposure or
epidemiology.
When I was a university student studying
chemistry I did take one course in nuclear and radio chemistry
which provided a basic understanding of the science underlying
nuclear power. By having a basic understanding of these processes
it has enabled me to identify at a minimum the more obvious PR,
such as the scaremongering about “the China Syndrome” scenario
which is an impossibility. Another myth is that nothing can be done
to reduce our nuclear power plant waste products which actually can
be reprocessed and reused in our current inventory of light water
reactors for fuel.

76. The major political parties particularly
the Republican Party uses an identical system to push their
agendas. In the 1980's the fundamentalist Christians, right wing,
and conservatives adopted these methods as a strategy to further
their interests.