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D'coda Dcoda

Climategate part 2? A worrying conflict of interest [17Jun11] - 0 views

  • a press release for the report which suggested that renewable sources alone, without nuclear power, could provide 77 per cent of the world’s energy supply by 2050.
  • The supporting documents, which weren’t released until over a month later, reveal that this claim was based on a large real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years (highly unrealistic as India and China grow their economies).
  • Now it appears that there are more apparent conflicts of interest in the IPCC’s energy report
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  • eter Bosshard, Policy Director of the campaign group International Rivers, contacted me to point out that the scenario for 77 per cent renewables included (against standard practice) large hydropower projects among the technologies to be promoted.
  • Most environmentalists believe that more large scale dams are not the right approach to generating electricity in a sustainable way.
  • While water is a renewable resource, the ecosystems that are destroyed by hydropower projects are not. Not least due to dam building, rivers, lakes and wetlands suffer from a higher rate of species extinction than any other major ecosystem.
  • Not only this but because of the decomposing organic matter found in reservoirs, dams emit greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2. In some cases, it is claimed, these emissions can be higher than those of thermal power projects with the same electricity output.
  • Ivan Lima of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research  estimate that the total methane emissions from large dams at 104 million tons per year.
  • Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and Lima’s figure amounts to more than 4 per cent of the total warming impact of human activities – roughly equal to the climate impact of the global aviation sector
  • So why is the IPCC contravening international standard practice to promote hydropower?
  • Well this may be total coincidence but in addition to several independent scientists, the IPCC selected a number of authors to write the section of hydropower who have a vested interest in growing the sector.
  • Of the nine lead authors there are representatives of two of the world’s largest hydropower developers, a hydropower consultancy, and three agencies promoting hydropower at the national level.
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    The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been compromised again.
Jan Wyllie

Midwest Floods: Both Nebraska Nuke Stations Threatened [17Jun11] - 0 views

  • Continued flooding does threaten the plants, however. As nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen explains in the above video, cooling pumps must operate continuously, even years after a plant is shut down. One group, the Foundation for Resilient Societies, has proposed solar panels and other high-reliability power sources to supply backup cooling for the fuel pools at nuclear plants.
  • While hindsight might be 20/20, the lack of foresight can be blindingly deadly when it comes to radioactive waste that lasts tens of thousands of years for the measly prize of 40 years of electricity.
  • “Ft. Calhoun is the designated spent fuel storage facility for the entire state of Nebraska…and maybe for more than one state. Calhoun stores its spent fuel in ground-level pools which are underwater anyway – but they are open at the top. When the Missouri river pours in there, it’s going to make Fukushima look like an x-ray.
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