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by Paul Brown

UK tops global plutonium league

May 5, 2013 in Energy

EMBARGOED until 2301 GMT on Sunday 5 May

A weapons-grade ring of plutonium: For bombs or for energy, it remains a ptoblem Image: Los Alamos National Laboratory

A weapons-grade ring of plutonium: For bombs or for energy, it remains a ptoblem
Image: Los Alamos National Laboratory

By Paul Brown

The UK Government believes that nuclear power is an essential part of the country’s energy mix in order to help it to cut greenhouse gas emissions. That is partly why it has so much plutonium, with all its attendant problems.

LONDON, 6 May – Britain’s plutonium stockpile is the biggest in the world and has just grown by another three tonnes as the German and Dutch governments have handed over their stores, apparently glad to be rid of it.

This man-made metal was once thought to be the most valuable substance in the world because 10 kg could make a nuclear bomb, or for generating electricity. But plutonium is now widely seen as a major liability, particularly if you have 118 tonnes of it, as the UK now does.

The British Government, however, believing it may still find a peaceful use for the plutonium, still regards it as an asset. It keeps its stockpile under 24-hour armed guard at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria in the north-west of England.

It argues that the energy the plutonium contains should be harnessed to produce low carbon electricity as part of the battle against climate change.

Anyone who comes up with a scheme to do this would make billions of pounds from British taxpayers. But experience has shown that exploiting plutonium is not for the faint-hearted.

Despite previous setbacks there are companies who believe they can provide a solution using techniques similar to past failures. Several nuclear states – Russian, Japan and France – have tried to develop fast breeder reactors using plutonium, but all have abandoned them as unworkable, uneconomic or both.

The British Government ran a successful prototype in the 1980s but concluded a scaled-up version, even if it could be made to work, would be hopelessly uneconomic.

The second option, of burning plutonium in normal reactors by mixing it with uranium to create a fuel called MOX (mixed oxide) is complex. It is always expensive and in Britain has been an economic disaster.

Sellafield’s MOX plant was designed to use up the plutonium stockpiles and produce 120 tonnes of fuel a year, but repeated technical difficulties proved insuperable. After five years the plant had produced only five tonnes of usable fuel.

Writing it off

 

To fulfill the few contracts it had the operator, British Nuclear Fuels, had to pay the French to produce the fuel in their own much older MOX plant. The Sellafield plant’s closure was announced in August 2011 after its major customer Japan no longer wanted any fuel following the Fukushima disaster. Over its short lifetime it lost £1.4 billion.

The alternative to using plutonium as a fuel, which many governments and most environmental groups now favour, is to treat it as waste. This too would involve investing billions of pounds in finding some way of destroying or diluting the plutonium so it could never be used for weapons.

Britain, aware that this process would also render its expensively produced plutonium useless for energy production, has repeatedly rejected this course of action. This is partly because thousands of people are still employed in Cumbria creating yet more plutonium.

Thirty years ago the Government erroneously thought uranium for nuclear reactors would become scarce and plutonium could be substituted. As an insurance against scarcity it sanctioned new reprocessing works to recover plutonium and spent uranium from used fuel for peaceful purposes (previous works had been developed to feed plutonium to the nuclear weapons programme).

To make money out of the new plant, contracts were signed to reprocess spent fuel from Japan, Germany and six other countries, recovering their plutonium as well. The result is the world’s largest stock of plutonium, some of it owned by these customer governments which now, finding they have no use for it, have handed it over to Britain.

Although there is no obvious market for all this plutonium, spent fuel from existing reactors is still being reprocessed to extract yet more plutonium, which is added to the stockpile.

Meanwhile owning 118 tonnes of plutonium is an ever more expensive problem. It is a volatile substance constantly in a state of radioactive decay that can be stored only in small separated amounts to avoid it beginning to react with itself, a process called “going critical.”

A specially built new store has just been commissioned at Sellafield. The annual costs of looking after this much plutonium are currently estimated at £80 million a year.

The Government is convinced that one day it will be an asset despite all the evidence to the contrary. It is waiting for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the government quango (quasi-autonomous NGO) charged with dealing with waste and “end products” of the nuclear industry, to come up with a solution.

No way forward?

 

The three options currently under consideration are new versions of failed technologies. Two involve building a new MOX plant to create a new sort of fuel to burn plutonium and uranium in either Canadian reactors or yet-to-be-built British ones. Both require large investments by British taxpayers, about £6 billion.

The third option is a new fast breeder reactor, different from the old failed type, or so its proposers claim. The GE Hitachi Prism reactor, to be developed by the Japanese, would burn plutonium and also produce new fuel for other reactors. Not yet built, in theory it will work, and its proposers say they will bear the cost of construction.

The NDA says it will come up with a preferred option on what to do with the plutonium soon, burning it as fuel or disposing of it as waste, and then the Government will have to decide.

Campaigners against the UK nuclear industry believe none of the schemes to use plutonium as fuel will work, and that by taking ownership of other countries’ stockpiles Britain is making a bad situation worse.

Martin Forwood, of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE), said successive governments had pledged to ensure that plutonium belonging to foreign governments would be returned to them. Now, as these governments had abandoned using their plutonium as fuel, the UK had agreed to take it.

“Britain is being used as a plutonium dumping ground”, he said. “All those promises and the contracts saying the waste and plutonium would be returned to the country of origin have been put on one side. It is a disgrace.”

As for using plutonium as a fuel, he said: “Lessons have clearly not been learned from the UK’s past MOX mistakes which have already cost the taxpayer a fortune.  Common sense dictates the Government and the NDA should treat plutonium as waste and put it out of harm’s way once and for all.”

Adrian Simper, the NDA’s strategy and technology director, seemed pleased at what he called the “market tension” of alternative ways of using the plutonium. He told the London Financial Times the intention was to tell the Government whether there were “three, two, one – or even no ways forward.” At some point it would have to decide the fate of the plutonium. – Climate News Network

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by Tim Radford

Benign E. coli makes biodiesel

April 24, 2013 in Energy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Filling the tank could become cleaner and cheaper thanks to E. coli Image: Andre Engels

Filling the tank could become cleaner and cheaper thanks to E. coli
Image: Andre Engels

By Tim Radford

 Environmentally-friendly biofuel may have come a step closer with the news that scientists in the UK think they have found how a genetically-modified bacterium can produce diesel oil – on a very small scale so far.

LONDON, 24 April -  British scientists may have found a new way to pump high quality diesel into the tractors, trucks and taxis of tomorrow.

They have demonstrated that, with a little help from one of humanity’s oldest acquaintances, they can produce fuel-quality diesel without benefit of oil well or refinery.

A team from the University of Exeter and from the Shell Technology Centre in Chester report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, with a little help from the genetic engineers, and a bit of patience in the laboratory, Escherichia coli delivered a customised biofuel almost identical to the stuff now hosed in from the petrol pump.

Biodiesel from renewable sources is not new – but nor is it of sufficient quality to go straight into modern, mass-produced engines: biodiesel from plants normally has to be mixed with diesel distilled from petroleum to deliver propulsive power of the right quality. There is a saving on fossil fuels, and therefore on carbon dioxide emissions, but only of between 10 and 20%.

But John Love of Exeter and colleagues turned to a bacterium that has been biology’s good friend – it is in standard use in the laboratory – and industry’s too.

For 6,000 years, microbes of one kind or another have been employed to ferment wine, leaven bread, make cheese and cure bacon; for the last 60 years or so microbes have been routinely making medicines, leaching metals from spoil heaps and delivering complex chemicals for big business.

“…a fuel that is independent of both global oil price fluctuations and political instability is an increasingly attractive prospect”

E. coli has been the experimenter’s favourite for many years. It lives in the human intestine, and some strains have become notorious as infectious diseases, but most are harmless to humans.

Professor Love’s team took genes from several other kinds of bacteria, and pieced them together in E coli to create a particular molecular pathway normally necessary to forge the fats and oils that microbes need for their own tissue.

It worked. The researchers claim that the genetically-engineered E coli produced molecules that are structurally and chemically identical to 10 retail diesel fuel hydrocarbons commonly used in temperate climates.

The quantities produced were tiny. The next challenge is to see if production can be scaled up, and costs kept down, to make microbial manufacture a commercial proposition.

“Replacing conventional diesel with a carbon-neutral biofuel in commercial volumes would be a tremendous step towards meeting our target of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050”, said Professor Love.

“Global demand for energy is rising and a fuel that is independent of both global oil price fluctuations and political instability is an increasingly attractive prospect.” – Climate News Network

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by Paul Brown

Fukushima faces long road to repair

April 21, 2013 in Energy

EMBARGOED until 2301 GMT on Saturday 20 April

Washing down a US aircraft carrier's flight deck off Japan, 2011 Image: US Navy

Washing down a potentially-contaminated US aircraft carrier’s flight deck off Japan, 2011
Image: US Navy

By Paul Brown

Efforts to repair the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan after 2011′s earthquake and tsunami are making slow progress, and an imminent International Atomic Energy Agency report is expected to make depressing reading – for Japan and for other nuclear energy states.

LONDON, 22 April – The cleanup after the catastrophic nuclear accident two years ago at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan is not going well. Radioactive cooling water is leaking into the ground from at least three vast storage tanks, and the vulnerability of the plant to further accidents was revealed when a rat chewed through an electric cable, cutting off vital cooling.

These setbacks come as a 12-man team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna tours the stricken plants to assess the country’s efforts to make safe, clean up and eventually dismantle the crippled reactors.

Within Japan there is alarm at the situation and criticism of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, Tepco.  Even government safety officials say the company is not demonstrating that it is competent in dealing with a problem that will probably take decades to solve, judging by other serious nuclear accidents.

Spent nuclear fuel melted into lumps of unknown size will remain dangerous for hundreds of years, and so far no one has devised a method of retrieving it.

Tepco admits only that the leaks are a “crisis” but says has it has kept the stricken reactors stable by injecting water continuously.  Without the water the spent fuel inside the reactors could overheat, causing another potential radioactive release.

But it is the massive amount of radioactive water that is becoming part of the problem, because it cannot be discharged into the sea without breaching international law and risking contamination of fish stocks.

Instead it is pumped into reservoirs that have been inadequately lined, and it is from three of these that the radioactive leaks of thousands of gallons are continuing. Pumping the reservoirs dry to solve the problem will take weeks.

Still seeking safety

 

Comments by Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, summed up the current situation: “The Fukushima Daiichi plant remains in an unstable condition, and there is concern that we cannot prevent another accident. We have instructed Tepco to work on reducing some of the biggest risks, and we as regulators will step up monitoring.”

Even without the leaks and the rats, just keeping the plant safe following the damage inflicted by the earthquake and tsunami two years ago is keeping 3,000 labourers busy. They work in difficult contaminated conditions in an area isolated from normal life. A large perimeter round the plant is off limits.

The 160,000 people who used to live nearby and were evacuated when the scale of the disaster became apparent are unlikely to be allowed to return for years, if at all. There is still little information about the extent of the contamination.

More information about the perilous state of the four reactors damaged by the tsunami will be released when the IAEA produces its interim report on 22 April, but it is unlikely to be encouraging.

Even without the safety fears, the costs of dealing with the problem will be enormous and a drain on Tepco’s finances for decades. How to bring the reactors to a safe, stable state remains an unsolved problem.

The last serious nuclear accident, Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, is still causing concern, and international efforts to make the reactor safe are continuing. That reactor exploded, spilling radioactive dust over a vast area of Europe. Again an exclusion zone was established while emergency repairs were carried out.

Today there is still a huge area known as the dead zone around the reactor while the international community pays for a scheme to try to keep the reactor safe for another 100 years or so. The initial cap or sarcophagus built to cover the reactor is in danger of crumbling and causing another radioactive release.

50 years of uncertainty

 

The latest plan to avoid this happening involves building a giant concrete arch that will be moved on rails over the stricken reactor to contain any further collapse. The arch is being constructed away from the sarcophagus to avoid the continuing radiation and will be wheeled over it.

At 270 metres across, 150 metres long and 100 metres high it is the largest moveable structure in the world.  There are hopes that it will be completed in 2015, but even this is seen as only a temporary solution. The cost is estimated at around $1.5 billion.

How long completely cleaning up a nuclear accident on the scale of Fukushima will really take is anyone’s guess. In 1957, before Chernobyl had even been built, there was a serious fire at Windscale in the United Kingdom at a reactor built to provide plutonium for Britain’s first generation of nuclear weapons.

The fire burned out of control for only three days before being extinguished. Fifty six years later, the melted fuel remains inside the reactor, or Pile Number One as it is called. Over the years several attempts to remove it and make it safe have been started and abandoned, on safety grounds.

The site remains guarded and monitored inside the Sellafield nuclear plant, as Windscale is now known, its future still uncertain, its lurking danger all but forgotten by the outside world.

That was one small reactor on fire more than half a century ago. The Fukushima accident involved four much larger reactors, but with similar problems – large quantities of melted fuel which have yet to be recovered. The present generation’s grandchildren may still be wrestling with the problem at the end of this century. – Climate News Network

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by Paul Brown

Solar link will bridge Mediterranean

April 16, 2013 in Energy

EMBARGOED until 2300 GMT on Monday 15 April

Concentrated solar power in Hawaii: New technology is opening doors for renewables Image: Xklaim

Concentrated solar power in Hawaii: New technology is opening doors for renewables
Image: Xklaim

By Paul Brown

Renewable energy is rapidly becoming a much more serious possibility, as novel technologies come of age and offer the prospect of a new relationship between Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

LONDON, 16 April – The world’s largest concentrated solar power plant opened in March in the middle of Abu Dhabi’s western region, amid the country’s giant oil fields.

The $600m plant’s hundreds of mirrors direct sunlight towards pipes full of oil to drive steam turbines that in turn provide enough electricity for thousands of homes.

In a country whose vast wealth is generated by oil, adopting a new technology that produces only 100 megawatts of power – about a tenth the amount of a large coal-fired plant – may seem a mere token, but it is part of a much larger industrial strategy for the region.

Serious money and political clout in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa is aimed at building hundreds of similar plants. The potential is so great that all the electricity requirements of these desert countries – and a good slice of Europe’s – could be met by 2050.

European companies are now putting serious investment into a scheme to bring electricity from North Africa across the Mediterranean to their shores.  Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia are among the Saharan countries that could provide all their own power and much of Europe’s.  Morocco and Tunisia are already building plants, and Morocco has an electricity connector to Spain.

It has long been known that harnessing the power of the sunlight that shines on a few hundred square miles of desert would be enough to provide electricity for all of mankind’s needs. How to collect the power and transport it was the problem. Now both technical barriers to development have been solved with a variety of schemes.

The Abu Dhabi plant that uses mirrors is one of a number of similar ideas that arrange reflectors to concentrate the Sun’s rays to make electricity. Several have now been proved to work commercially – and the price of power continues to come down. These plants are in operation in many sunny parts of the world including California, Spain and Australia.

Night light

 

Photo-voltaic cells that make electricity direct from sunlight are even more prevalent, with the price of panels also continuing to fall. Add to the power of sunlight the fact that many desert areas are also windy, and the potential for power production is huge.

A factor that has previously worried investors is that even in the desert the Sun does not shine at night, when much of the electricity is needed. To get round that a system has been developed to store excess heat in molten salt and use it to generate electricity after dark. The wind turbines in the desert built alongside the solar arrays would of course continue to pump out power at night.

The next problem – how to transport electricity from isolated areas with low populations to the cities that need it – is also solvable. Modern super-conducting cables using direct power can transport electricity across 3,000 kilometres, losing only 3% of their power per 1,000 kilometres.

These cables, developed in Europe, are not theoretical: they are already in use in China. Super-conductors could be laid across the Mediterranean so that North African sunshine could power Europe.

The organization that aims to create a super-grid across North Africa, the Middle East and Europe to utilize this resource, Dii, accepts that the problems are not just technical but also political.

Some of the countries with the greatest solar resource that would need to be connected to each other to make maximum gains from the technology are not good friends.

Local use comes first

 

This would make a super-grid difficult to construct, and electricity supplies liable to disruption if disputes broke out. Power plants would also be easy targets for terrorists.

There are other political sensitivities. The European Union, and particularly Germany, which is very keen on the idea of exploiting this renewable resource, are anxious that Africa and the Middle East should feel ownership of the projects rather than that they are being leant on to cooperate.

European politicians feel it is important that these countries should also be the first to get the benefit of the solar power stations with the electricity being used locally, and only surpluses exported across the Mediterranean.

There are now 36 partners in the Dii project, with most of the money and expertise coming from Germany and other large European manufacturers. According to the German Aerospace Centre, investment would need to be €400 billion by 2050 in plants and transmission lines to realize the dream of providing the entire electricity supply for North Africa and 15% of Europe’s needs.

Studies have shown that even with transmission losses it is cheaper to construct solar plants in North Africa than in southern Europe. This is partly because the Sun shines from 3,000 to 3,500 hours a year, with greater intensity than in Europe, but also because there are large tracts of unused land for the construction of fields of mirrors or lenses to concentrate the solar rays.

Lack of water to clean the mirrors, and for cooling, is one of the technical problems still to be overcome. But like all newer renewable technologies, the cost of concentrated solar power is expected to fall because of mass production and to be considerably cheaper than rivals like nuclear power. What is needed is the political will to make it work. – Climate News Network

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by alex kirby

Biofuels cost both rich and poor

April 15, 2013 in Energy

EMBARGOED until 2301 GMT on Sunday 14 April

EU regulations on biofuels raise prices - and pressure to produce more Image: Ramos Keith, US Fish & Wildlife Service

EU regulations on biofuels raise prices – and pressure to produce more
Image: Ramos Keith, US Fish & Wildlife Service

By Alex Kirby

Using biofuels as the European Union demands will force up costs for British motorists, make food more expensive for poorer countries and may increase the greenhouse emissions they are meant to cut, a report says.

LONDON, 15 April – Biofuels, widely seen as the green way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, may in some cases be worse for the climate than fossil fuels, a report says.

Not only will they cost motorists more than ordinary petrol and diesel and increase fuel consumption: they will also make food more expensive.

From 15 April, to meet European Union targets, suppliers in the UK are required to blend 5% of biofuel into the petrol and diesel they sell for transport.

Rob Bailey, the author of the report, entitled The Trouble with Biofuels, says: “Current biofuels are at best an expensive way of reducing emissions.

“At worst they produce more emissions than the fossil fuels they replace and contribute to high and unstable food prices. Policymaking needs to catch up with the evidence base.”

The report is published by the UK’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, a London-based independent policy institute known as Chatham House.

It estimates that as the EU target is reached, biofuels will cost UK motorists about £460 million ($700 million) in the year ahead. This includes the increased cost of the fuel, caused by higher prices at the pumps, and also the need to fill tanks more often because biofuels contain less energy.

The amount of biofuel which the EU requires to be blended in has been rising in the UK by 0.5% annually for some years. The report says further increases to comply with EU targets mean the cost to motorists could almost triple to around £1.3 billion ($2 billion) annually by 2020.

It says biofuels are an expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The cost of emissions reductions achieved by using them is typically several times what the UK Government has identified as an appropriate price to pay.

“You could buy palm oil, cook a single chip in it and then sell it at a profit for biodiesel”

While the Government says carbon abatement costs per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) should be about £56 ($87) for road transport, the report says the cost using the current generation of biofuels ranges from about £105 to £715 ($165-1,100).

It says increasing biofuel use is also forcing up food prices. This threatens food security in poor countries and is also likely to contribute to higher emissions, as farmers respond to higher prices by expanding production, sometimes into rainforest or peatland.

After incorporating these “indirect emission” effects from changes in land use, often into areas valuable as carbon sinks, the analysis found that biofuels produced from vegetable oils are likely to be worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

The report says biodiesel from waste products like used cooking oil or tallow (processed animal fat) is the most sustainable form of biofuel on offer, but even there the risk of indirect emissions may already be substantial.

Rob Bailey told the Climate News Network: “These emissions are even more indirect than those caused by farmers expanding their production of biofuel crops.

“The price of used cooking oil has increased quite considerably because of the demand for biofuel, and it’s started to exceed the price of refined palm oil.

“You could buy palm oil, cook a single chip in it and then sell it at a profit for biodiesel. It’s the same with tallow, and as prices rise the traditional users of both products have to look for oil elsewhere. That drives production up.”

Accounting for emissions from indirect land-use change pushes up abatement costs for agricultural biofuels to between £215 and £5,540 ($330-8,500) per tonne of CO2e depending on the feedstock used, says the report.

There are currently no safeguards in UK or EU policy for dealing with the impact of biofuels on food security (see our story of 31 January, Biofuels needn’t cause hunger) and deforestation (see our story of 30 January, Tropical peatlands ‘haemorrhage’ fossil carbon).. Unless there are, the  report says, the UK will not be able to meet its EU obligations sustainably. – Climate News Network

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by Tim Radford

Renewables burn a little brighter

April 13, 2013 in Energy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Not just portable power, but storable as well: A step forward for renewables? Image: Foncesoulstudio

Not just portable power, but storable as well: A step forward for renewables?
Image: Foncesoulstudio

By Tim Radford

The prospects for some forms of renewable energy look brighter after scientists said they had found ways to store excess power and to take carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere to make fuel.

LONDON, 13 April – Researchers in North America claim to have found two new ways to deliver power to the people – and reduce the global carbon footprint.

One team hopes to produce a low-cost, efficient technique for storing the surplus energy from wind power, or the solar panels on the roof. The other team hopes to deliver biofuels from the carbon dioxide in the air without even troubling the photo-synthesising plants that have, for the last half a billion years, taken on the task.

The first advance is from chemists at the University of Calgary in Canada, who report in the journal Science that they have found new catalysts that could convert electrical energy, which cannot be simply stored, into chemical energy, which can.

This is a serious problem for renewable suppliers. On a sunny day, photo-voltaic cells deliver generous quantities of power, but on a sunny day, fewer people need to turn on the central heating or use the electric lights.

Wind turbines can generate whenever there is wind, but on a still, frosty day, they deliver little or nothing to shivering households. If the turbines could pump water that could be used later for hydro-electric power, that would be a solution, but if the consumers already had generous hydro-electric sources, they wouldn’t need wind turbines anyway.

But Curtis Berlinguette and Simon Trudel at Calgary have thought of another way of using water. Fuel cells use electric current and catalysis to drive a reaction that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen that can be stored separately as fuels and then reconverted back into water at any time, delivering generous quantities of energy that can be turned into electricity.

There would be no exhaust, and no pollution, no carbon dioxide emissions and, in theory, no loss of water in the process.
The catch so far has been that catalysis has depended on rare, expensive and toxic crystalline minerals.

The Calgary team report that they have driven a successful reaction using a new family of electro-catalysts made out of cheap, safe, amorphous mixed metal oxides of iron, cobalt and nickel (an oxide of iron, of course, is also known as rust: never a rare commodity). These, they say, perform as well as any catalysts now on the market, but are a thousand times cheaper.

Still to be proved

 

“We are essentially showing, even with our first generation of catalysts, we are equal to or better than anything that’s sold commercially right now after 30 years of development”, says Trudel. The duo have patented the process and created a university spin-off company called FireWater Fuel Corporation.

They foresee small household energy systems no bigger than a home freezer, running on a few litres of water. They hope to be testing a prototype before 2015.

These are large claims, yet to be tested in the marketplace. An even bigger claim, and still a very long way from the marketplace, comes from the University of Georgia in Athens in the US, where Michael Adams and colleagues have developed a micro-organism that absorbs carbon dioxide and generates stored energy in the form of tissue.

They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have genetically manipulated a new strain of Pyrococcus furiosus that lives on carbohydrates in superheated ocean waters near geothermal vents.

They have adjusted its metabolism to make it capable of feeding on carbon dioxide at much lower temperatures. They believe that they could use it to generate other useful products, including fuel, from carbon dioxide.

Anyone who burned biofuel would be putting back into the atmosphere only the carbon dioxide that had been recently removed from it and stored in the organism’s tissue: that is why ethanol fuel from sugar cane or maize husks is described as carbon-neutral.

“What this discovery means is that we can remove plants as the middle man”, said Adams. “We can take carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the inefficient process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass.” – Climate News Network

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by Tim Radford

Wind power ‘has inescapable limits’

April 9, 2013 in Energy

EMBARGOED until 2301 GMT on Tuesday 9 April

A little too close for comfort? Wind turbines need space Image: Stan Shebs

A little too close for comfort? Wind turbines need space
Image: Stan Shebs

By Tim Radford

Wind power is undoubtedly valuable for generating electricity, but researchers say they have found evidence that the more you use the resource, the less of it there is.

LONDON, 9 April – The wind blows almost everywhere, but its power to turn turbines may have been overestimated, according to US scientists.

Amanda Adams from the University of North Carolina and David Keith of Harvard suggest that large-scale wind farms may create conditions that would ultimately limit their capacity to fulfil demand.

The problem, they warn in Environmental Research Letters, is not one of economics, or engineering: it is one of atmospheric physics. When a steady wind slams into a blade and keeps it turning, it transfers energy to the blade, and thence to the turbine. That slows down the wind.

Because each turbine carries a “wind shadow” beyond it, wind farm entrepreneurs have to compromise: they need to space their turbines as far apart as possible, given that it makes sense to erect as many turbines as possible on the limited land available.

That is, output is going to depend on calculations involving both capacity and density. The usual rule of thumb is that a wind farm could sustain production rates of 2 to 4 watts per square metre. Over a square kilometre, that is 2-4 megawatts.

Adams and Keith calculate that, in wind farms bigger than 100 square kilometres, generating capacity is more likely to be limited to one watt per square metre, because of the local drag on winds. In effect, harvesting the resource also reduces the resource.

There are other problems. Wind farms change the natural wind shear and produce turbulence; they also – consistent with the logic of thermodynamics – affect local temperatures.

“It is easy to mistake the term renewable with the term unlimited when discussing energy”

She and Keith based their findings on a series of simulations involving modest, medium-sized and very large notional wind farms studded with hypothetical turbines at varying intervals, in various regions of the US, and using global forecasting system final analysis data over specific 10-day periods in winter and summer to provide the wind levels.

The results showed that, for large wind farms, it would be difficult to sustain wind power production with a power density of much more than 1.2 watts per square metre.

“It is easy to mistake the term renewable with the term unlimited when discussing energy,” said Adams. “Just because you can keep generating new energy from a source does not mean you can generate energy in an unlimited amount.”

These cautious conclusions run counter to a much more hopeful scenario reported by Climate News Network in January – that, in theory at least, renewable sources could provide more than 99% of American needs.

They are also countered by some positive findings from Germany in the last few days. And the Earth Policy Institute recently reported that Iowa and South Dakota in 2012 got almost 25% of their electricity needs from wind power. Wind provided at least 10% of electricity generation in seven other states.

The US, says the institute, now has 60,000 megawatts online, enough to meet the needs of 14 million homes, and developers scrambled to complete wind farm construction before the end of 2012, to qualify for federal wind production tax credits that were scheduled to expire in December. – Climate News Network

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by Paul Brown

IMF rejects fossil fuel subsidies

April 8, 2013 in Energy

EMBARGOED until 2301 GMT on Sunday 7 April

Fossil fuels keep the wheels turning - but they should not be subsidised, says the IMF Image: Adamantios

Fossil fuels keep us on the go – but they shouldn’t be subsidised, says the IMF
Image: Adamantios

By Paul Brown

Subsidising fossil fuels is bad for us, for our descendants, and for the planet, says the International Monetary Fund – and it damages the global economy.

LONDON, 8 April – Fossil fuel subsidies provided by both rich and poor countries to keep their citizens happy are holding back the world economy, accelerating climate change and damaging the health of current and future generations, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The worst offender of all is the United States, which allows annual subsidies of $502 billion on fossil fuels. China with $279 bn and Russia at $116 bn are the two next largest offenders.

The IMF researched 176 countries to investigate fuel subsidies. These are both direct subsidies, where consumers are sold petrol, oil, gas and coal at below the price of production, and indirect subsidies, where the tax is so low it does not pay for the damage to the planet from climate change, the cost of pollution to health, road damage by lorries, and the cost of accidents.

In developing countries a large part of the subsidy is frequently direct. India is an example, where the price of energy is kept stable by the Government even though the international price of imports is rising steeply.

But aside from India many developing countries are both losing potential revenue and damaging their development prospects. They are at the same time distorting electricity prices with subsidies and selling petrol and diesel to consumers at below cost price.

Worse, says the IMF, some developing countries spend more on subsidies for fossil fuels than they do on health and education for their citizens.  The worst example is Uzbekistan, which spends seven times as much on fuel subsidies as on the combined total for health and education.

The IMF lists the offending countries in a table based on the percentage of their budget they spend on subsidies compared with the welfare of their citizens.

Renewables neglected

 

All of them spend more on providing cheap fuel than on health and education, including some of the poorest nations and some of the richest in per capita income.  Iran, Algeria, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Zambia are among them.

This is a radical document written by economists who have a reputation for imposing harsh budgets on profligate nations. The Fund says in this report that while the subsidies are aimed at protecting consumers they actually do the opposite.

Underpriced energy encourages people to use excessive quantities, reduces incentives for investment in renewable energy, and accelerates the depletion of natural resources.

Increased consumption makes the balance of payments worse and promotes smuggling to neighbouring states which have higher domestic prices.

The benefits of subsidies are also felt most by higher-income households. “Even future generations are affected through reduced growth and the damaging effects of increased energy consumption on greenhouse gas emissions and global warming”, says the IMF.

Although the figures for subsidies in the report run into trillions of dollars worldwide, it says they probably under-estimate the total. The reason for this is the estimate of damage caused by pollution.

Cleaner air to breathe

 

For example, the IMF uses as the price for damage done to the planet the sum of $25 for each tonne of carbon dioxide produced, which it says is “conservative.” The Stern report put the damage per tonne as high as $85.

It is the low American petrol and diesel taxes which take no account of these external costs that make the US the largest fossil fuel subsidizer in the world.

The IMF analysis says that all countries would be better off if they cut fuel subsidies, making themselves more competitive in the process, as well as freeing resources to be spent on more essential development like the education and welfare of their citizens.

It says reform would reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide by 4.5 billion tonnes, representing a 13% reduction in global emissions. It would also generate significant health benefits by reducing local pollution, particularly sulphur dioxide. Another beneficial result would be a reduction in the international price of oil and gas, because demand would fall.

The report studies 22 country cases where energy reform was attempted, sometimes at the insistence of the IMF. In some cases it was a failure because governments increased the price of fuel only to reduce it again because of public unrest. In others energy efficiency and economic advances were achieved. Of 28 reform packages tried in these countries, 12 were classified as a success, 11 as a partial success and five as failures. – Climate News Network

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Avatar of Paul Brown

by Paul Brown

Linked renewables avoid blackouts

April 4, 2013 in Energy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Solar power in Spain: Linked systems mean renewables can deliver Image: Koza1983

Solar power in Spain: Linked systems mean renewables can deliver
Image: Koza1983

By Paul Brown

 German researchers have found a way to overcome one of the problems with renewable energy – the fact that it is not always available – by linking different options in a unified system.

LONDON, 4 April – Critics of renewables have always claimed that sun and wind are only intermittent producers of electricity and need fossil fuel plants as back-up to make them viable. But German engineers have proved this is not so.

By skillfully combining the output of a number of solar, wind and biogas plants the grid can be provided with stable energy 24 hours a day without fear of blackouts, according to the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology (IWES) in Kassel.

For Germany, which has turned its back on nuclear power and is investing heavily in all forms of renewables to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, this is an important breakthrough.

The country has a demanding industrial sector that needs a large and stable electricity supply, and some doubted that this could be achieved in the long term without retaining nuclear or large fossil fuel plants.

Solving the problem is becoming urgent. The latest figures show that on some days of the year the electricity being generated from sun, wind, biomass, water and geothermal production already accounts for more than half of the load required in the country.

The research is funded by the German Federal Ministry of the Environment and is aimed at showing that the entire electricity grid could be run on renewable energy.

Dr. Kurt Rohrig, deputy director of IWES, said: “Each source of energy – be it wind, sun or biogas – has its strengths and weaknesses. If we manage to skillfully combine the different characteristics of the regenerative energies, we can ensure the power supply for Germany.”

The idea is that many small power plant operators can feed their electricity into the grid but act as a single power plant using computers to control the level of power (see our story of 20 January, Renewables: The 99.9% solution).

Sharing the load

 

Scientists linked together 25 plants with a nominal power output of 120 megawatts. Surplus power could be used for charging electric vehicles and for pumped storage (pumping water uphill into a reservoir to produce hydropower later).

When many small producers work together, then regional differences when the wind blows or the sun is intermittent are balanced out in the grid and can be boosted by controllable biogas facilities.

If there is too much surplus energy then the power can also be used to create and store thermal energy to be used later.

Kasper Knorr, the project manager for the scheme, which is known as the Combined Power Plant2 research project, says the idea is to ensure that the consumer is supplied reliably with 230 volts at a frequency of 50 Hertz.

The current system of supplying the grid with electricity is geared to a few large producers. In the new system, with dozens of small producers, there will need to be extra facilities at intervals on the system to stabilize voltage. Part of the project is designed to find out how many of these the country will need.

The project has the backing of Germany’s large and increasingly important renewable companies and industrial giants like Siemans.  Researchers will be demonstrating the system at the Hanover Trade Fair from April 8 to 13. – Climate News Network

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Avatar of Kieran Cooke

by Kieran Cooke

Old King Coal keeps rollin’ along

March 27, 2013 in Energy

EMBARGOED until 0001 GMT on Wednesday 27 March

US coal is big business - and getting bigger, at home and abroad Image: US National Archives and Records Administration

US coal is big business – and getting bigger, abroad if not at home
Image: US National Archives and Records Administration

By Kieran Cooke

Emissions by the US of greenhouse gases are still coming down – within the USA itself. But American exports of coal, and now of shale gas, are on the rise, in effect exporting the pollution which has been avoided at home.  

LONDON, 26 March – The good news is that US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are continuing to decline. “Over the last four years, our emissions of the dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet have actually fallen”, said President Obama in his State of the Union address last month.

The bad news is the US is exporting its polluting gases, particularly in the form of coal, like never before. Figures released earlier this month by the official US Energy Information Administration (EIA) show US coal exports reached a record of more than 115 million tons in 2012, more than double the 2009 figure.

In a report examining the legal implications of increased US coal exports, the Columbia Law School notes that GHG emissions are not just a national issue.

“Because the impacts of CO2 emissions are global in nature, it makes no difference from a climate change perspective whether coal mined in Wyoming is consumed in Chicago or Shanghai”, it says.

Coal is far more polluting in terms of GHGs than either oil or gas, emitting higher levels of CO2 and also other toxic substances such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury.

The drop in US GHG emissions – according to the EIA, total US carbon emissions have now fallen by more than 8% since peaking in 2007 – is in part due to the economic slowdown, but more so to a move from coal-fired electricity generation to less carbon-intensive natural gas, particularly gas produced from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”.

In 2005 coal accounted for half of all electricity generation in the US: now it generates 37% of the country’s electricity, with forecasts that figure will drop to around 20% by 2030.

Attractive to importers

 

The move to gas has been spurred both by tougher regulations on pollution and, with gas production booming, an overall drop in energy prices. There has also been strong growth in renewable energies, particularly in solar power.

US coal giants such as Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Peabody Energy have not let the decline in domestic demand faze them. Instead they’ve gone wholesale into export markets, particularly in Europe, with coal-exporting terminals on the US east coast operating at maximum capacity.

High gas prices within the EU make US coal extremely competitive as an energy source. Bad weather has contributed to an uptake in demand.

The collapse in price on the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme carbon market and a vast oversupply of so-called pollution permits is another reason for the surge in US coal imports. Worries about energy security and an over-dependence on gas supplies from Russia and the countries of central Asia are additional factors driving the trade.

EIA figures show Europe is now by far the biggest customer for US coal, importing more than all other markets combined. US exports to the UK jumped by about 70% in 2012.

Exports to Germany, which phased out nuclear power generation in response to the  the Fukushima accident in Japan, have also increased.

Europe’s energy companies are taking advantage of relatively cheap coal imports while they can. EU regulations, particularly the Large Combustion Plants Directive, stipulate that older coal plants which do not meet stringent targets on lower emissions levels have to be phased out.

All eyes on Asia

While tighter regulations on pollution could result in a decline in US coal exports to Europe in the years ahead, it’s unlikely producers in Pennsylvania or Montana will be cutting back on their activities. Asia, by far the biggest coal-consuming region, where demand continues to grow, is the next target.

At present the US is the world’s fourth largest exporter of coal – after Australia, Indonesia and Russia. US firms are now setting their sights on the big markets in Asia, particularly China and India.

Coal lobbyists are pushing for new coal terminals to be built on the US west coast to provide easier access to Asia. Exports to China – the world’s biggest coal producer and consumer – have been growing rapidly. Last year one US coal company signed a $7 bn export agreement with an Indian conglomerate. Other deals are in the pipeline.

A recent report from the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research looked at the growth of the shale gas industry in the US and questioned whether it had contributed to a global drop in CO2 emissions.

The answer was no. Tyndall’s calculations suggest that more than half of the emissions avoided in the US power sector – through the switch from coal to gas – may have been exported as coal.

“Without a meaningful cap on global carbon emissions, the exploitation of shale gas is likely to increase total emissions”, said the report. “For this not to be the case, consumption of displaced fuels must be reduced globally and remain suppressed indefinitely. In effect displaced coal must stay in the ground.” – Climate News Network

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