On Renewable Energy: False Claims by Switkowski Report and the Nuclear Lobby
The promoters of nuclear power claim that we have to choose between coal and nuclear, that there is no alternative. This is a false choice, between BHP-Billiton and … BHP-Billiton.
Nuclear power: no solution to climate change, Green Left, quoting Mark Diesendorf , 17 April 2010 “………The 2006 Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy Review, chaired by Dr Switkowski.. claimed that “nuclear power is the least-cost low-emission technology that can provide baseload power”. However, there was no basis in the report for such a gratuitous statement, which was outside the terms of reference of the report.
Not one of the authors had research experience in renewable energy. They all came from the nuclear industry or nuclear research. They were ignoring, among other things, the rapid growth of base-load solar power that has been occurring in Spain since 2004.
Another false claim made by nuclear proponents is that renewable energy cannot supply the energy needs of an industrial society. Actually, a square 30km by 30km filled with solar collectors and installed on marginal land could supply all of Australia’s current electricity demand. Beyond 2030, Australia could export vast quantities of renewable energy — stored as hydrogen, ammonia or methanol — to the rest of the world.On a global scale, leading renewable energy researcher Bent Sorensen has shown that, with small improvements to existing technologies, there is more than enough renewable energy available to supply everyone on this planet with sufficient energy for a good standard of living by 2050. Of course, some regions have less potential than average, and other regions have more, just as with fossil fuels and uranium…..
The nuclear lobby is fond of telling us that the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. On this simplistic basis, it claims that renewable energy cannot provide baseload, or 24-hour-a-day, power.However, an ecologically sustainable electricity generating system will not be composed of wind alone or solar energy without storage alone.
Instead it will consist of several different types of power station with different properties: initially wind; bio-electricity, which is baseload; solar photovoltaic without storage; concentrated solar thermal power with thermal storage (potentially baseload); and gas turbines fuelled on sustainably produced ethanol or methanol.All of these sources are commercially available or, in the case of concentrated solar thermal power, pre-commercial and on the brink of becoming commercial.
Taken together, they can form a system that it just as reliable as the dirty and dangerous systems based on fossil fuels and nuclear. Even wind power can be made as reliable as coal by geographic dispersion of wind farms and by adding a little intermittent back-up by means of gas turbines.
It is simply untrue that coal-fired power stations have to be kept running continuously to back-up wind.
Energy efficiency and solar hot water can also substitute for baseload coal. In Australia, 4600 megawatts of coal power are kept running between midnight and dawn for the sole purpose of heating water. As the switch is made to solar and gas hot water, these coal stations could be retired and their daytime generation replaced with gas power and renewable electricity.
Given effective government policies, which are lacking at present, renewable energy could supply at least 40% of Australia’s electricity by 2020.Green Left – Nuclear power: no solution to climate change
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