Martin, you've missed the entire point: like all good Marxists, what is important for BZE and the Greens is not that something is true, only that we *believe* that it's true, because believing will make us more virtuous. Not believing is merely bourgeois and counter-revolutionary.

Er, no Clownfish. What is important is that climate change is real, peak oil is coming, we NEED energy security but fortunately we've got all the energy we need in our own back yard!

Today's GenIII reactors such as the AP-1000 could give us all the energy we need, especially if we start to move our transport off oil and onto electricity. Move trucks onto trains, cars onto electric, and more public transport like trolley buses.

And then when GenIV reactors are finally commercialised, they'll be able to eat all that valuable nuclear waste. We know breeder reactors work because we've had 300 reactor years of experience with them. China and Russia are building a few GenIV reactors, the first commercial versions in the world. We'll soon know how to commercialise them cheaply.

Today's 'waste' could run the world for 500 years!
http://bravenewclimate.com/integral-fast-reactor-ifr-nuclear-power/

So if we build out some AP-1000's, Australia will have lots of fantastic nuclear 'waste' which is really FUEL for GenIV reactors.

We should be importing the world's waste for 'storage' now, and then burn it all in the GenIV reactors when they arrive. Nuclear waste, it's not the problem, it's the SOLUTION!

ABARE is the most notoriously conservative, pro-big-business, status quo agency, so you can be sure they maximise our supposed energy needs.

In fact the quickest and most cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse emissions and oil dependence is by dramatically improving the efficiency of our extremely wasteful energy use. After that, the renewable sources are much more adequate.
See http://betternature.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/real-obstacles-to-greenhouse-action/

Eclipse Now, I said nothing about nuclear reactors, nor did the ZCA report.

What I was referring to was the fanciful assumptions and dubious figures in the ZCA report. Not unlike Lysenko's 'dialectic' science that was going to gloriously transform Soviet agriculture.

As for nuclear, after long opposing it, I've conceded that it looks like our best option 'going forward' (heh heh, couldn't resist it), especially Thorium reactors.

Political pundits tell us that Greens will soon have the balance of power in the Senate. Now that is a worry if it means Australia will be forced into a costly and ultimately futile search for 100% renewable energy. I suspect the practical outcome will reflect the German experience; power prices keep climbing to pay for modest amounts of unreliable power that is really underwritten by coal, nuclear and gas. There may be ways to increase the penetration of wind and solar without expensive and unfair subsidies but they will take decades to develop.

To put it another way we will pay a lot for very little and find that we still can't get the coal monkey off our back. Think of an obese person taking pricey diet pills while eating as much food as ever. In my opinion there is only one affordable long term alternative to coal and we should start implementing it now. If people do indeed give Greens the balance of power they may just be delaying the inevitable.

No Geoff, that just won't do. Who's going to cut our energy use? When? Under what vote, referendum, or enforcement agency?

Don't get me wrong, I love energy efficiency. I love energy efficient CITIES! I hate suburbia with a passion! I wish we could enforce New Urbanism! It would save oil, save ecosystems, create farmland around our cities where we once had good soil and good rainfall.

But these things take time.

The ONLY answer to get ourselves ready for peak oil and climate change is steady, reliable, baseload power from nukes. I really hope in 50 years or so renewables come up with some good cheap baseload energy supply, but right now they're too limited, too unreliable, and far too expensive! We should not gamble our civilisation on the *vague hope* that renewables *might* one day be able to overcome all their limits. We need reliable power despite the weather, time of day or night, or season! As peak oil hits we are going to need far MORE electricity to run our transport systems.

Try this: after 20 years of wind power, Denmark is 'down' to 650 grams Co2 / kWh. After 10 years of nuclear power deployment, France got down to 90grams! Go figure. Most countries with high renewables mixes in their grids hide the fact that they buy heaps of power from France's nukes.

Again, go figure.

Professor Barry Brook just won the Science Educator award. There's a reason for that!

http://bravenewclimate.com/renewable-limits/

I have yet to see any refutation by nuclear power advocates of the arguments put forward by David Fleming in The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy (http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/nuclear/index.html).

All these arguments seem to be predicated on the idea that we will continue to use power in the same way as we currently are doing. Energy depletion will oblige us to live more simply (yes, candles may become de rigueur)and alter our whole manufacturing and agricultural practices.

Spain is at present running at 20% of renewable (solar thermal & PV & wind) and they are a backward foreign country?
Germany has announced that its aim is to be 100% renewable and they have a good chance of achieving this.
The elephant in the room is peak oil. It is here and it will affect all our BAU plans.
I hope that eventually we get a government that will see that the only way to save a vestige of our present life style, is to take draconian steps and nationalize the oils and gas industry, stop or cut back drastically the export of gas, build gas receiver plants in the major coastal cities to take gas shipped around by sea in ships running on gas.
This will enable the truck fleet to convert to gas when diesel gets too expensive to import and also be used as standby power in gas turbines sets as backup to the solar thermal plants with molten salt storage we will depend on for our base load power.
Of course I assume that reason will prevail and the nonsense of exporting the gigantic amounts of coal and using it for generation here will cease.
Go greens. I just hope that they do get the balance of power in the senate and stop the excesses of funneling huge amounts of money to the big polluters will be stopped.

As any reasonable person now knows, global warming is a myth.

That being the case, why are people still considering changing from coal generation of electricity?

Why are people still worried about CO2?

Have the greenies got that myth of CO2 causing some damage, even though we know this is not so? It almost seems that even some of those who know global warming is rubbish still agree with a reduction in coal use. Why?

How on earth could any thinking person even consider power generation from straw?

We tried a power house using the waste biomass from sugar cane. Not only is this a much more dense form of biomass, requiring much less transport, from much smaller areas, it has all ready had it's transport costs of collection paid for by the extraction of it's sugar content.

This project failed, spectacularly, even with these advantages.

The greenies must believe that persistence will win the day for them. Wouldn't it be great if they would just talk sense?

@Malthus "I have yet to see any refutation...of the arguments put forward...in The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy", I don't think you can have looked too hard. One place these arguments (which seem to mainly boil down to uranium scarcity and greenhouse gas emissions incurred in nuclear power production) have been comprehensively shown to be false is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/06/25/take-real-cc-action-p2/#q15

@Sarnian, ever heard of the basket-case PIIGS economies? Guess what the 'S' stands for...The trick is to get past 20-30% renewable without the 70-80% backup from more reliable sources, as the Danish example also demonstrates.

"Germany has announced that its aim is to be 100% renewable and they have a good chance of achieving this." And that's why they're planning dozens more coal-fired power stations, is it? http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,472786,00.html

There are a number of untruths often foisted upon us by the Energy Communists.

One is that people waste energy. Do you know anyone who just simply wastes energy for the heck of it?! I don't. People in Australia rarely waste heating,cooling, petrol or water these days especially considering the cost. This is why putting a price on carbon to decrease energy usage will not decrease energy usage. As a society we can be more efficient but we do not,in general,just 'waste' energy.

The second myth is we require less energy. We will continue to need MORE energy to keep our current lifestyle and health standards simply due to population growth alone.

We need more energy from a reliable source; Lets go Nuclear. Wind and solar are expensive, inefficient and unreliable to be base energy at least for now.

Martin, having read your analysis I think it is quite simplistic. The 'huddling around candles in the dark' claim is simply not true, they are supplying 40% more electricity than we use today, probably even more if necessary. Australia is a needlessly inefficient economy.
Your excessive cost estimates fly in the face of the industrial economy. As a construction engineer, I agree that the economies of scale they are talking about from rolling out large multiple solar thermal towers would definitely lead to cost efficiencies of the order discussed. Your costs seem to assume that they would only build towers of 10-15 MW, whilst the company SolarReserve is already building baseload solar projects of 50, 75MW etc.
I used to think nuclear power would be the lesser of two evils, but I can't see how it is a scaleable solution to meet the world's energy needs. There is not enough uranium, and the Gen IV reactors that proponents talk about are as always 20 years away. A big risk to take when we already have baseload solar.

I look forward to the nuclear zealots putting forward their own detailed and costed Zero Carbon plan - when is it coming out? It seems all you can do is criticise from the sidelines without doing any actual work.

In particular I am eager to see where the nuclear power stations will be located. The ZCA2020 plan has the locations of the solar and wind sites.

trudes "I look forward to the nuclear zealots putting forward their own detailed and costed Zero Carbon plan" .. right after we get a detailed and costed zero carbon plan from the anti-nucelar zealots that will meet base load requirements - put up or shut up.

"In particular I am eager to see where the nuclear power stations will be located.", that's great trudes, we all look forward to the nuclear plants,and the existing sites of coal fired stations is an obvious choice for a bunch of them.

Also, we'll need a nuc plant right beside every desal plant, so sorely needed now because the eco types who can't see further than their own shadow, have made us build them since we can't build dams.

We could possibly find where all the anti dams folks are and build desal and nuc plants there, surely you wouldn't have a problem with that, after all "no dams!"

So water supply has been made risky in Australia, hence we will need lots of nuc power stations to give us surety in supply, for when the population grows yet bigger.

We didn't go nuclear because all the caldicotting and eco/green objections, so we kept building coal power stations, now when it turns out you were wrong, and the coal fired stations are possibly worse than nukes for the climate, how about taking it on the chin for the country? We put it where the majority of anti nuke zealots live?

Do you think that's in line with social justice? Most of us don't want to live your dream, it's our nightmare - no electricity.

it's easy to criticise isn't it - but do you and your mates have any solutions, apart from chanting renewable/sustainable and then hope someone else solves it?

Nuclear is available .. it works, if the likes of caldicott and her ilk had not worked against it, GenIV or even Gen V/VI reactors could have been a reality - just modern day luddites.

mark duffett - well said,thanks for those links, love your work!

Isn't it interesting so many eco types all chant the same little homilies, like they've all been to the same camp and been educated, their knowledge is all so biased one way.

I have been told that if Australias carbon production was calculated on the basis of land mass,

Australias carbon production would be bugger all.

yes James, but that's not the preferred method of self flagellation of Australia's AGW astrologers. (where everything that happens, is as predicted by the IPCC, whoever .. but..everything, a storm here, a temperature there, why even that glacier, or a polar bear .. it's all been predicted you know .. it must be the CO2! Gasp!)

It's preferred to find the best (worst?) way to look at things so as to super size the exaggeration and doom saying.

The ZCA plan is a crock which the most cursory reading will reveal.The 2020 timeline sets the scene for the usual cavort with the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Renewables have a place but it is not in the supply of base load power.Nuclear can do this.It is a proven technology and an improving technology.In fact,the only technology which can consign the coal industry to history relatively quickly and at a reasonable cost.

The trouble with reports and criticisms of reports is that they are commenting on a sector which is changing rapidly and unpredictably. Solar panel prices are falling rapidly at present.

http://myworld.ebay.com/fred480v/

The Greens leader, Bob Brown, Senator Milne, other Greens senators, many members and senators of the Labor party and some in the Liberal party have demonstrated they are gullible and therfore not competent to handle their responsibilities.

These politicians and many senior academics provided enthusiastic endorsements for the “Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan” which advocates Australia could and should replace all fossil fuel used in stationary energy and much of transport energy with solar power and wind energy, and to complete the transition by 2020.

However, apart from the report being grossly misleading in many ways, it appears the authors may have misrepresented their credential for the job. I have received two email in the last two days and I quote them below.

<blockquote>"What's really odd about this report is the difficulty of establishing the credentials of the authors. Try to understand the capabilities within ZCA and you'll see what I mean. Many of the 'team' use only their first names. What's going on? Presumably there are some lead authors from Melbourne Uni but I can't figure out who they are."</blockquote>

The other email is posted below:

The other email said:

"This is not a serious research project. You will see the author list on page viii of the report. Apparently the "researchers" are all PhD students or young recently graduated engineers, some of them participating outside their areas of expertise. There is nothing wrong with that of course. People are entitled to develop their own ideas so long as they are honest about how they present themselves. This report is not honest however. For example on page viii the listed researchers include:

• "Derek Bolton ... Oxford Univeristy" yet there is no one in the Oxford directory with this name;
• "James Bramwell ... ANU" yet there is no one in the ANU directory with this name;
• "Kevin Casey ... formerly Ericsson" yet apparently not affiliated with this company any longer;
• "Dominic Eales ... Swiss Federal Institute of Technology" yet there is no one in their directory with this name, though there is someone with a LinkedIn profile with this name who claims to be a "Wind Data Analysis Engineer" with the "Alternative Technology Association" in Melbourne;
• "Rob Campbell ... RMIT" yet there is no one at RMIT with this name, though there is someone with a LinkedIn profile with this name who claims to be a "solar subject matter expert" at Jemena and who was previously a "home sustainability assessor at ecoMaster".

I think you get the picture. Incidentally, Matthew Wright, the Executive Director of "Beyond Zero Emissions" and one of the lead authors on this plan was previously a technical sales engineer at HP and a climate campaign educator at the non-profit "Climate Positive". This is a report by non-experts, and it shows in stark terms what it is possible to imagine if only you are prepared to come to a massive problem like this without any experience and with the boldness to make those assumptions that wiser and more expert individuals might have shied away from."

I just had a look at the author page of the Zero Carbon Australia plan, and Peter Lang's comments are just false, and a 60 second scan will show this.

No first names are used - only full names and the authors are listed clearly, together with their qualifications.

Wow, the pro-nuke zealots are getting desperate - hilarious. They have to spread lies which can be rebutted with a 60 second internet search. Talk about losing credibility.

Well done Peter - just publish a few more of the mysterious "emails" you get and soon no one will listen to you.

Funny how some good research can drive the pro-nuke zealot crowd crazy and into desperation - I would have thought you had more brains than that, I guess I was wrong.

If coal fired was replaced by CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine) power generation related emissions could be reduced by 60% at a much lower cost than getting the same reduction from renewables. There is no obvious reason why this couldn't be completed by 2015 apart from a lack of will on both sides of politics. A gas fired transition would provide the time for technologies such as geothermal and Gen 4 nuclear to prove that they are really reliable. Gas also makes it easier to introduce more renewables before issues of reliability start escalating the costs.

Hey Trudes,

You're the one who should get a grip & read what people write. Peter did not refer to the report directly when he said the "team". He is referring to this link about first names only >

http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/about/team

e.g.
Our people

Coordinator

Pablo

Research Zero Carbon Australia 2020

Tim

Kevin

Media

Pablo

Public Speaking

Pablo

Admin

Pablo

* * *

And you have not addressed the other comments by Peter.

The ZCA report is clearly a piece of political / handwaving material for wannabee politicians and developers. It is a total piece of fairy land fiction for the urban greenie voting public who don't have a clue about the technology. For a detailed critique and thorough debunking of this fairy story of a report go to ->

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/07/14/zca2020/

&

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/08/12/zca2020-critique/

The ZCA report is nothing more than a little board game with little pictures, its toytown... a Noddy report for uninformed children.

It's deeply disappointing that mainstream politics has completely failed on this issue and only by going to a fringe party can we get policy that recognises the reality that human induced climate change demands real commitment.

The Greens actually have a policy; that it's likely to go over budget is less worrying than facing this with no policy. Behind closed doors it seems this industry has made it clear they won't act and, hoping to avoid the political fallout of forcing them, mainstream politics has caved in. Two full decades after knowing that emissions reductions were coming energy planning is firmly rooted in building more coal plants. No CCS of course. That the costs of power stations being forced to close well ahead of the end of their working life is pure waste of the worst kind will, of course, become yet another reason to not close them, irrespective of the climate consequences. But apparently it's not good enough reason to stop building them.

Martin, there are worse things than the extravagant wastefulness we currently view as a right being curtailed - such as the loss of SE Australian agriculture, the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, heatwaves that make the one preceding the Victorian Bushfires look like an average summer (Barry Brooks wrote on that). As long as this issue isn't faced up to it won't be solved, even by nuclear.

Martin, the greatest block to nuclear for Australia is not the Greens, it's the fossil fuel generation sector and as long as you, Barry Brooks and others spend most of your efforts fighting against renewable solutions there will be none. Go all out to get a serious carbon price that makes coal - and gas as well - too costly and nuclear will indeed look more attractive. But I recall you oppose making the current costs of fossil fuels reflect the unbearable burden of future costs they will heap on us and have advocated increasing their use for as long as Australia doesn't go nuclear. Not a solution at all.

So well said Martin, there really are worse things!

Also, as peak oil hits, we'll need all the cheap abundant electricity we can get to help some of our transport, construction and agriculture move to electricity, or fuels derived from cheap abundant electricity.

And that means nuclear power, which can make jet fuel from air and water.

I can't wait for more details on the costs of this fuel, as it is truly renewable fuel and, with the majority of us getting around on electric transport, sounds like the easiest way to scale up fuel for airlines.

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/12554

Mark Duffett's response viz. '@Malthus "I have yet to see any refutation...of the arguments put forward...in The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy", I don't think you can have looked too hard. One place these arguments (which seem to mainly boil down to uranium scarcity and greenhouse gas emissions incurred in nuclear power production) have been comprehensively shown to be false is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/06/25/take-real-cc-action-p2/#q15'
is not helpful. Just referring to a website that blandly states the opposite of the case being made is hardly showing the case to 'have been comprehensively ... false'. To characterise Fleming's position as boiling down to 'uranium scarcity and greenhouse gas emissions incurred in nuclear power production' suggests a shallow acknowledgement of the problems with nuclear energy production.

Malthus, I read the summary page of your link and when someone else replied didn't bother to debunk it, because that is *exactly* what that argument boiled down to. If not, please don't do the posting equivalent of saying:

"I didn't like your response"

... and do what you suggest, which is being more specific.

*Which* arguments do you think were *substantially* different to the way Mark summarised them? What did Mark miss?

The Green's plans will all come to naught.
They will not survive the onset of energy depletion resulting from
peak everything. It is not just peak oil but peak coal, peak phosphorous, etc etc.

We are facing not just the depletion of energy but the depletion of
capital availability to fund the construction of the zero CO2 economy.
Zero growth will ensure that we build as little as possible and make do
with as much existing systems as we possibly can.
To enable us to build the new energy regime we should immediately stop
the export of natural gas and coal.
The gas will give us a transition fuel for cars and trucks while we
build an electric transport system.
It will give us the energy to build electrified railways, nuclear
power stations, reopen closed rail lines which will be needed to get
grain to the millers and flour to the bakeries.
It is that fundamental.

All these projects will require capital and energy. If it is not done
there will be chaos, no ifs no buts.

Did you say what about aviation ?
Do you mean those metal things that used to fly like a bird ?