Last Updated: Nov 19th, 2009 - 11:07:39 Newsletters : 2005 Newsletters : 17 June 2005 Thought for the Day Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. Buddha (563-483 BC) Indian mystic, founder of Buddhism Jun 15, 2005, 12:08 Newsletters : 2005 Newsletters : 17 June 2005 The Trouble With Power No, this is not a steaming diatribe about politicians and their power-seeking ways. This is a few thoughts on the need for energy, particularly electric energy, in New Zealand in the next 100 years. Modern society runs on power – and lots of it. It is no good just saying, “well it is too expensive”, or “too difficult” to supply because people will always demand the power they need to “do their thing”. This is the very essence of modern society. Imagine how New Yorkers felt when they had their cataclysmic “brown-out” a few years ago. Did they roll over and just do without? Not a bit of it. They all pressured the politicians to make sure that it never happened again. No ifs, buts or maybes. Just do it! The same will happen in New Zealand. It is hard to imagine running businesses without constant electricity. Think about how difficult it must be in Iraq. Yet Carter Holt Harvey has to shut down factories at this time because the power supply is just too expensive at certain peak times. This is not constant supply. This is not the certainty that business needs. Some say that we should close down Comalco and “then we will have enough power”. How ridiculous. The idea of shutting down valuable and profitable businesses so that others may have more power is rather a self defeating action. How do we then employ those who are dependent on Comalco for their livelihood? Perhaps we should have power cuts to households so that businesses have enough to run on. This, of course, is hardly an answer either. The only solution to the current power problem is to provide more power and to do it as cheaply as possible and without too much pollution or disruption to our existing way of life. We need to go back to base principles and find the best way forward. At the moment we have a succession of vested interests and closed minds arguing their case from a position of dogma rather then logical thought from a sound and agreed set of axioms. We need public interaction and an unbiased body to perform the needed research. Look at the current debacle of the power pylons in the Waikato. Two entrenched positions. Like two armies approaching one another – Napoleon and Wellington determined to win at any cost. This approach just gives us increased costs and no result. Time for an open dialogue with all parties and chaired by an independent body set up by the government to produce the best way forward. We want plentiful power as cheaply as possible and with as little pollution as possible. We can build more hydro-electric dams, more wind turbines, more water turbines submerged in rivers, more coal fired stations or more oil fired stations. We can use electric cells as a completely new way of making electrical energy or we can build some nuclear power plants. Which is the cheapest option? Which produces the least pollution? How do we compare the visual pollution of marching pylons with the green house gasses from coal and oil burning stations? How do we compare the visual pollution of wind farms in our natural landscape with the residue from a nuclear power plant? Can we work our way through this thicket of thoughts or will we succumb to the hysterical greenies and their junk science insisting that we do it their way. Just in case you do not think that this will be a problem let us examine what the greenies have achieved with this hysterical approach to science and economics. Firstly, a look at history that we all know but very rarely think about. In the 1960s we were introduced to the idea that DDT was a bad thing and that it must be banned because it could not be good for us. Fair enough. I read Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring and I was suitably impressed about the hazards of DDT. However, the truth seems to be rather different from her assertions. A search of the internet shows that scientists have never been able to find any link between DDT and any health problem. It does not cause cancer and it does not seem to cause any illness at all. It appears to be harmless to mammals. The only death which involved DDT that I could find was when a small toddler drank a few grams of DDT in an ounce of kerosene. It seems that DDT was blamed at the time but that amount of kerosene would have been a major problem for a small kid. As a result of the hysteria DDT was banned all round the world and we, in the temperate zones, got to use other insecticides as they were developed. However in the tropical world things were more problematic. No longer could they use DDT to spray mosquitoes and eliminate malaria from the list of deadly diseases. No. Sorry but we will not supply DDT any longer. You will just have to try and use netting to keep the mosquitoes out. As a result of this hysterical approach to science we have had up to one million children in Africa dying from malaria every year since the 1960s. The total number of deaths must now total over 30,000,000. This is on a par with Mao Tse Tung and the 30 million peasants who died as a result of his agriculture policies in the 1950s. It compares well with Stalin and his policies which killed 20,000,000 peasants. The First World War only managed to kill 15,000,000 people but we did rather better in the Second World War with a death toll of 55,000,000; with Hitler only scoring 5,000,000. Yep, the greens are right up there! How about the greenies and the current “problem” of climate change. We are now very hot about “green house gasses” and have introduced the Kyoto Protocols in an attempt to get everybody to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and so on. The fact the this effort is only calculated to “maybe” reduce the temperature by one degree after a century seems somehow to be lost after all the argument. The fact that the effort will cost at least $150 billion per year and UNICEF estimates that just $80 billion would give ALL Third World inhabitants access to basics like health, water, education and sanitation right here and now seems to be lost on the Kyoto fans. A possible benefit in the far future at twice the price of a very direct benefit to all now seems a strange way of running the world. For a full discussion of this see that ex-greenie Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. But if you want to get hysterical action then just promote the idea of running a nuclear reactor up near Auckland. The fizz and pop of indoctrinated minds is such that most will blanch at the thought of even mentioning the possibility. But, if we are to have a proper understanding of all our energy options we must consider this possibility as well. We must learn to cope with the hysterical and ill-informed. The only way to make the best decision is to ensure that all facts are opened up to the public and all greenie shibboleths are fully discussed in a rational manner. A few recent articles have provided much food for thought on this subject. The Economist on the 30th of April prefaced an article with the statement; “Britain is being softened up for a revival of nuclear power”. They have been subsidising wind farms but they are “expensive, unreliable and increasingly unpopular with the locals”. If more oil and coal stations are built then Britain is even more unlikely to meet its green house gas emission targets and the costs for that will become more onerous. The nuclear industry points out that modern reactors are much cheaper than before; they generate only a tenth as much waste, are cheaper to build and to run and are safer as well. Estimated costs for a KW hour of electricity are 2.3p (including building and decommissioning costs) compared with 2.2p to 3.2p for fossil fuels and 3.7p for wind power. The Finns have approved a new reactor in 2002 – the first in Europe in over a decade. The latest technology uses a system called the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor which has many advantages over older type reactors including the fact that it is impossible to have a “core melt down”. Other major advantages are; It is cheap to build and economic to operate, it can be built in 24 months in an area equivalent to four foorball fields, and does not emit any green-house gases. It is also radiologically safe. China with its massive requirement for energy and its current pollution problem is looking to this technology for power generation in the near future. Using these small safe reactors close to Auckland would certainly make the people in the Waikato faced with the marching army of pylons very much happier. Nuclear Power is having a rebirth. The newer design does away with these cooling tower types of installation. The pebble bed modular reactor lasts about 40 years and is much safer. Inside a PBMR, there is a bed of high temperature silicon graphite balls each about the size of a billiard ball. About 70 % of the balls have flecks of uranium. When they interact, the bed of graphite balls gets hot. The gas carries the heat to a turbine. If the core hits peak temperature of about 1600 deg. C, it starts to cool itself down automatically. There is no uncontained chain reaction to cause a meltdown as in the existing type of plants. Also they are built to store their own waste in the basement with storage space for forty years of operation. In the next 15 years, China will need to generate at least six times what it already generates or at least two of these nuclear reactors per year. India has the same expected growth. You hear a lot about the wind power being so clean, etc., but it is small potatoes. Four of these nuclear reactors could generate more than all of the existing wind power turbines in California and use very little real estate to do so. Surprisingly enough, this rebirth of nuclear does not mean the demise of coal because there also is new coal technology which converts dirty burning coal into cleaner burning oil. The world has about a 300-year coal supply. China now generates about 70% of their power with coal. Coal presents two problems: Transportation and dirty burning. Both of these are being solved by liquefying coal for cleaner burning and it will be a lot easier for the Chinese to get coal via a pipeline from the north of China to where the factories are in southern China. This technology is like turning coal into oil and is feasible when the price of oil reaches $30 per barrel. Uranium has been rising in costs because of the rebirth of nuclear reactors. It is now about $20/lb. At that price, relative present fuel costs are: Coal - $1.25 per million BTU Natural Gas - $3.5 per million BTU Oil - $6.00 per million BTU Uranium - $0.055 per million BTU Let's assume that Uranium increases to 50 times the current price as demand picks up. The new PBMR nuclear plants would provide energy at the equivalent to buying gasoline at 1/2 cent per gallon. Most of the world's untapped coal reserves are in the U.S., northern China, Australia and Canada. The U.S., Canada and Australia have the greatest part of the world's uranium. As oil becomes more expensive and as the pressure (rightly or wrongly) goes on carbon emissions our alternatives for generating electricity increase. We can use technology to convert our coal to much cleaner burning oil or we can build Pebble Bed Modular Reactors which will produce "clean green" power at very competitive prices. The only question is can we look at all the alternatives clearly and scientifically or will we be dragged down into more of the "Junk science" that permeates the Greenie mind? Jun 17, 2005, 13:36 Newsletters : 2005 Newsletters : 17 June 2005 The Old and the Rested One of the biggest political problems of modern times is that of providing pensions. I do not believe that we have anywhere near solved this problem in New Zealand and The Cullen Fund will not solve it either. This debate should not be swept under the carpet or dumped in the "too hard" basket. Our economy and care for the elderly is too important for that. Winston Peters put up a reasoned proposal some years ago which was hooted at by the hysterical non-thinkers of the time but which has been implemented in Chile very successfully by all accounts. America has the same problem as New Zealand and John Teirney writes an interesting article for the New York Times. Why can we not have a reasoned debate focussing on our objectives and then develop plans which will achieve those objectives. Oh, and by the way, perhaps we should include a good dose of understanding of human nature in the process! Follow the incentives. Jun 15, 2005, 11:48