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Texas has been experiencing a terrible heat wave this summer - along with much of the rest of the country. According to the Dallas Morning News, this heat wave has caused more than 20 power plants to shut down, including coal and natural gas plants. On the other hand, Texan wind farms have been providing a steady, significant supply of electricity during the heat wave, in part because wind farms require no water to generate electricity. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) noted on their blog: “Wind plants are keeping the lights on and the air conditioners running for hundreds of thousands of homes in Texas.”

This near-threat of a blackout is not a one-time or seasonal ordeal for Texans. Earlier this year, when winter storms were hammering the Lone Star State, rolling blackouts occurred due to faltering fossil fuel plants. In February, 50 power plants failed and wind energy helped pick up the slack.

Although far from the steady winds of the Great Plains, Cape Wind Associates noted that if their offshore wind farm was already operational, the turbines would have been able to harness the power of the heat wave oppressing the Northeast, mostly at full capacity. Cape Wind, vying to be the nation’s first offshore wind farm, has a meteorological tower stationed off Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts. If Cape Wind had been built, it could have been using these oppressive heat waves to operate New England’s cooling air conditioners. These three examples would suggest that the reliability of fossil fuels and nuclear reactors has been overstated, as has the variability of wind.

So just how much electricity can wind energy realistically supply as a portion of the nation’s energy? A very thorough report completed by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2008 (completed during President George W. Bush’s tenure) presents one scenario where wind energy could provide 20% of the U.S.’s electrical power by 2030. To achieve this level, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates energy costs would increase only 50 cents per month per household. A more recent study, the Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study (EWITS), shows that wind could supply 30% of the Eastern Interconnect’s service area (all of the Eastern U.S. from Nebraska eastward) with the proper transmission upgrades. As wind farms become more spread out across the country, and are better connected to each other via transmission lines, the variability of wind energy further decreases. If the wind isn’t blowing in Nebraska, it may be blowing in North Carolina, or off the coast of Georgia and the electricity generated in any state can then be transported across the continent. A plan has been hatched in the European Union to acquire 50% of those member states’ electricity from wind energy by 2050 - mostly from offshore wind farms, spread around the continent and heavily connected with transmission lines.

With a significant amount of wind energy providing electricity in the U.S., what would happen if the wind ever stops blowing? Nothing really - the lights will stay on, refrigerators will keep running and air conditions will keep working. As it so happens, wind energy has made the U.S. electrical supply more diversified and protects us against periodic shut downs from those pesky, sometimes-unreliable fossil fuel power plants and nuclear reactors.

As the world’s ninth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, it should be (and is) a major priority for Korea to reduce emissions, and realistically that can only be accomplished by increasing the use of nuclear power. As Barack Obama noted with regard to the United States’ energy consumption, “Nuclear energy remains our largest source of fuel that produces no carbon emissions. It’s that simple. (One plant) will cut carbon pollution by 16 million tons each year when compared to a similar coal plant. That’s like taking 3.5 million cars off the road.” Environmentalists have traditionally disdained nuclear power, but even green activists cannot argue with that logic, and increasing numbers of them ― Patrick Moore, James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and the late Bishop Hugh Montefiore being prominent examples ― have become supporters of the smart use of nuclear power.

Second, the immediate dangers to human health of conventional air pollution outweigh the dangers of nuclear radiation. In 2009, the Seoul Metropolitan Government measured an average PM10 (particulate) concentration in the city of 53.8 g/m3, a figure that is roughly twice the level in other developed nations. According to the Gyeonggi Research Institute, PM10 pollution leads to 10,000 premature deaths per year in and around Seoul, while the Korea Economic Institute has estimated its social cost at 10 trillion won. While sulfur dioxide levels in the region have decreased significantly since the 1980s, the concentration of nitrogen dioxide in the air has not decreased, and ground-level ozone levels remain high. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear power does not result in the release of any of these dangerous pollutants that fill the skies around Seoul, creating health hazards that are no less serious for often going unnoticed.

And third, the environmental and safety consequences of extracting and transporting fossil fuels are far greater than those involved with the production of nuclear power. Korea is one of the largest importers of Indonesian coal for use in power plants, for example. This coal is not always mined with a high level of environmental and safety protections, with a predictable result of air, water, and land pollution in one of Asia’s most biologically sensitive ecosystems. Coal mining is also one of the world’s more dangerous occupations, as evidenced by the many tragic disasters involving poorly managed Chinese mines. While natural gas is certainly a better option than coal, its distribution too can be problematic, whether by ship or through the recently proposed pipeline that would slice down through Siberia and North Korea to provide direct access to Russian gas.

What about truly green renewable energy, some might ask ― solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and tidal energy? Of course, Korea would be a safer and more sustainable place if these clean renewable resources were able to cover the country’s energy needs. However, the country is not particularly well suited for hydroelectric projects, while the other forms of renewable energy production are expensive, and are unfortunately likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The fact is that most Koreans will not want to pay the significantly higher energy prices that would result from the widespread use of clean renewables, and in a democratic society, the government is unlikely to force them to do so. Thus, we are left with two realistic options: fossil fuels or nuclear. From an environmental perspective, it would truly be a disaster to abandon the latter.

By Andrew Wolman Andrew Wolman is an assistant professor at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Graduate School of International and Area Studies, where he teaches international law and human rights.

Guenon that in France they have chosen to repossess the fuel, reduce the toxicity level as much a possible by running it through a chemical process (twice) and then putting it into a storage container which can hold it up to 300 years. The concept is that the technology currently is only a few decades old. Hopefully in a few more decades, or longer, research and technology improvements will find a solution to how to completely deal with the built up waste. It wasn’t mentioned if that was the case for the proposal in South Africa, nor was it mentioned what would happen if the container had a leak.

Here in South Africa there is another side to the plant. One proposed site for building the nuclear plant is only a few kilometres outside Cape Town in Bantamsklip Location, location, location Bantamsklip is within 50km of one of Cape Town’s biggest ‘holiday’ towns; Hermanus. Known for its unspoilt natural beauty, the area is the biodiversity core area of the Cape Floral Kingdom and is one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The proposed site contains 800 plant species and 22 red data species, 6 of which grow no where else in the world.

The nuclear power plant will be right by Agulhas National Park, and on the edge of a threatened marine ecosystem. Due to the beauty of the area, it is a high tourist attraction. In another article [Age of Stupid] a woman from the U.K. refused to have wind plants built on her neighbours farm as it ‘spoilt the view,’ which frustrated a lot of the environmentalists in the audience, as if we don’t start investing in renewable energy there won’t be much of a view to enjoy.

In this case, however, ‘spoiling the view’ with a nuclear power plant doesn’t only mean damaging the tourism in the area, but also threatening protected species like Blue Cranes, due to the overhead power line collisions; also threatening the marine sanctuaries of the Southern Right Whales and Great White Sharks. According to Barry Clark who did a review of the Marine Impact Study for the Environmental Impact Assessment [EIA] for the proposed nuclear power station; continuous lowlevel dosing with chlorine is proposed as a means of reducing biofouling on the seawater intake pipes. Clark questions “the impacts of this are dismissed as being ‘very localised and are considered unlikely to have a significant negative impact on the receiving environment’ the source of which is the previous EIA for the Koeberg Power Station.

In 1989 Hanford changed from a nuclear-weapons outpost to a massive cleanup project. Since then, the site has become the largest and most costly environmental remediation the world has ever seen.

despite more than two decades of cleanup efforts and billions of dollars spent, only a tiny fraction of Hanford's radioactivity has been safely contained. And the final costs for the Hanford cleanup process could exceed $120 billion—higher even than the $100 billion tab for the International Space Station.

"We need alternatives to the current plan right now," Dr. Donald Alexander, a high-level DOE physical chemist working at Hanford, says in distress.

"One of the main problems at Hanford is that DOE is understaffed and overtasked," Alexander explains. "As such, we cannot conduct in-depth reviews of each of the individual systems in the facilities. Therefore there is a high likelihood that several systems will be found to be inoperable or not perform to expectations."

Currently, federal employees at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., are evaluating whether Bechtel's construction designs at the site have violated federal law under the Price-Anderson Amendments Act (PAAA). An amendment to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the PAAA governs liability issues for all non-military nuclear-facility construction in the United States, which includes Hanford.