Monthly Archive for April, 2011

China Rethinks Nuclear Power

Published on April 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Photo Courtesy of Idea go

From Lucia Green-Weiskel, The Nation

In the wake of the partial meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant in Japan, China announced it would shelve plans for vast expansion of its nuclear power capacity, at least temporarily, until more stringent safety checks are performed. Construction will eventually resume, but with a potentially scaled-back role for nuclear power and with solar and wind energy picking up some of the slack. If nuclear remains a small fraction of China’s total energy mix (just 2 percent today, compared with America’s 20 percent), and Beijing looks to solar and wind for future energy growth in the era of climate change, the boost to those industries could make renewables cost-competitive with fossil fuels much earlier than previously projected.

The announcement marked a significant policy change. As recently as January, after reporting a breakthrough in nuclear fuel reprocessing technology, China reaffirmed its commitment to an expansion of its nuclear energy capacity that would be greater than that of all other countries combined. Construction began on twenty-seven reactors, adding to the existing thirteen. Another fifty-two were planned.

Just days after the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, China passed into law its Twelfth Five Year Plan, which will serve as the country’s economic blueprint until 2015. The primary theme of the plan is sustainable development, with a high priority on securing nonfossil fuel energy sources. New policies include reducing carbon intensity by 17 percent by 2015. That means manufacturing entities would need to emit at least 17 percent less carbon in 2015 than they emitted in 2010 for the same amount of economic output. The plan also mandates ambitious energy-cutting targets, implementation of market mechanisms like cap and trade, and generation of 11.4 percent of total energy from nonfossil fuels by 2015, up from the current 8 percent. Pre-Fukushima, a sizable portion of that 11.4 percent was to come from nuclear sources. That target is being reconsidered.

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The Shores of Recovery

Published on April 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

The hand-scrawled signs advertise houses for sale, boats for sale, garage sales. There are fresh strawberries, fresh eggs, fresh shrimp and crayfish, either fresh or boiled. Other families are selling heifers, chicks and rabbits. These are the traditional products of the small towns in south Louisiana, sold along narrow roads that wend their way through land so low it seems to sag into the water. But there is something new on offer to workers totting up their recent losses: signs are popping up saying “Spill Claims Denied?”

It has been a year since the blowout at Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico some 50 miles from south-east Louisiana. Eleven workers were killed and the platform burned for two days before it sank to the sea floor, 5,000 feet below. Oil gushed from the well for 87 days. Workers at the rig tried to contain it, while responders scrambled to corral it, burn it or disperse it. By the time the well was capped, on July 15th, the government estimates that nearly 5m barrels of oil had escaped, making the disaster the largest accidental offshore oil spill in history. Vast tracts of fisheries were closed. People who drew their livings from the waters, by fishing or tourism, feared devastation.

A year on, it is too early for a full account of the long-term impact. The Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a process mandated for oil spills, is still in its injury-assessment and restoration-planning phase. Detailed research into what happened and what it means awaits the full flowering of the Gulf Research Initiative, independently managed but to be paid for by BP to the tune of $500m over ten years. So far $40m of this has been dispensed, and requests for proposals on how to spend a fair chunk of the rest may be announced as soon as the end of April.

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Grey Is the New Green

Published on April 18, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Phil Patton, I.D.

In his 1937 song “Me and the Devil Blues,” Robert Johnson imagined his ghost on a Greyhound. “You can bury me down by the highway,” he sang. “Let my old evil spirit take a Greyhound bus and ride.”

In Johnson’s time, buses were emblems of speed, adventure, and escape. But a few generations later, most Americans wouldn’t be caught dead on a long-distance bus. From 1960 to the current decade, intercity bus travel saw steady declines. With the rise of car ownership and affordable airfare, buses came to be seen as slow and down-market, the province of post-traumatic vets and single moms with noisy infants. And bus stations became synonyms for seedy, dangerous urban spaces.

But now, astonishingly, long-distance bus travel is showing signs of a comeback. Of course, it never really went away: Greyhound alone makes some 13,000 daily ?departures in North America, carrying 25 million passengers a year to more than 2,300 destinations, many too small or out-of-the-way for air or rail. Total intercity bus ridership rose by 9.8 percent last year in the U.S., according to a DePaul University study, after a 7.6 percent increase in 2007, suggesting that the trend is about more than just the recession.

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