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The argument, put forward by a team from Oxford and Sheffield Universities in the journal Geophysical Research Letters,
begins with temperature. Warmer climates mean more vigorous tree growth
and more leaf litter, and more organic content in the soil. So the
tree’s roots grow more vigorously, said Dr. Christopher Doughty of
Oxford and colleagues.
They get into the bedrock, and break up the
rock into its constituent minerals. Once that happens, the rock starts
to weather, combining with carbon dioxide. This weathering draws carbon
dioxide out of the atmosphere, and in the process cools the planet down a
little. So mountain ecosystems—mountain forests are usually wet and on
conspicuous layers of rock—are in effect part of the global thermostat,
preventing catastrophic overheating.
The tree is more than just a
sink for carbon, it is an agency for chemical weathering that removes
carbon from the air and locks it up in carbonate rock.
That
mountain weathering and forest growth are part of the climate system has
never been in much doubt: the questions have always been about how big a
forest’s role might be, and how to calculate its contribution. Keeping climate stable
U.S. scientists recently studied the rainy slopes of New Zealand’s Southern Alps to
begin to put a value on mountain ecosystem processes. Dr. Doughty and
his colleagues measured tree roots at varying altitudes in the tropical
rain forests of Peru, from the Amazon lowlands to 3,000 meters of
altitude in the higher Andes.
They measured the growth to 30 cm
below the surface every three months and did so for a period of years.
They recorded the thickness of the soil’s organic layer, and they
matched their observations with local temperatures, and began to
calculate the rate at which tree roots might turn Andean granite into
soil.
Then they scaled up the process, and extended it through
long periods of time. Their conclusion: that forests served to moderate
temperatures in a much hotter world 65 million years ago.
Former NRC Commissioner: Trying To Solve Global
Warming By Building Nuclear Power Plants Is Like Trying To Solve Global
Hunger By Serving Everyone Caviar
If asked whether we should increase our reliance on
caviar to fight world hunger, most people would laugh. Relying on an
overly expensive commodity to perform an essential task spends too much
money for too little benefit, while foreclosing more-promising
approaches.
That is nuclear power’s fundamental flaw in the search for plentiful
energy without climate repercussions, though reactors are also more
dangerous than caviar unless you’re a sturgeon.
***
Nuclear power is so much more expensive than alternative ways of
providing energy that the world can only increase its nuclear reliance
through massive government subsidy—like the $8 billion loan guarantee
offered by the federal government to a two-reactor project in Georgia
approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission earlier this year.
***
Many more such direct government subsidies will be needed to scale up nuclear power to any great extent.
***
John Rowe, former chief executive of Exelon Corp., an energy company
that relies heavily on nuclear power, recently said, “At today’s
[natural] gas prices, a new nuclear power plant is out of the money by a
factor of two.” He added, “It’s not something where you can go sharpen
the pencil and play. It’s economically wrong.” His successor,
Christopher Crane, recently said gas prices would have to increase
roughly fivefold for nuclear to be competitive in the U.S.
***
Countries that choose power supplies through democratic, transparent and market-based methods aren’t building new reactors.
Since the 1980s, the U.S. Has Secretly
Helped Japan Build Up Its Nuclear Weapons Program … Pretending It Was
“Nuclear Energy” and “Space Exploration” …
As demonstrated below, nuclear energy is expensive and bad for the environment.
The real reason it is being pushed is because it is good for helping countries like Japan and the U.S. build nuclear weapons.
Nuclear power is no longer an economically viable source
of new energy in the United States, the freshly-retired CEO of Exelon,
America’s largest producer of nuclear power [who also served on the
president’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future], said in Chicago Thursday.
And it won’t become economically viable, he said, for the forseeable future.
***
“I’m the nuclear guy,” Rowe said. “And you won’t get better results
with nuclear. It just isn’t economic, and it’s not economic within a
foreseeable time frame.”
After the Fukushima power plant disaster in Japan last
year, the rising costs of nuclear energy could deliver a knockout punch
to its future use in the United States, according to a researcher at the
Vermont Law School Institute for Energy and the Environment.
“From my point of view, the fundamental nature of [nuclear]
technology suggests that the future will be as clouded as the past,”
says Mark Cooper, the author of the report. New safety regulations
enacted or being considered by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
would push the cost of nuclear energy too high to be economically
competitive.
The disaster insurance for nuclear power plants in the United States
is currently underwritten by the federal government, Cooper says. Without that safeguard, “nuclear power is neither affordable nor worth the risk.
If the owners and operators of nuclear reactors had to face the full
liability of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident or go head-to-head with
alternatives in a truly competitive marketplace, unfettered by
subsidies, no one would have built a nuclear reactor in the past, no one would build one today, and anyone who owns a reactor would exit the nuclear business as quickly as possible.”
An authoritative study by the investment bank Lazard Ltd.
found that wind beat nuclear and that nuclear essentially tied with
solar. But wind and solar, being simple and safe, are coming on line
faster. Another advantage wind and solar have is that capacity can be
added bit by bit; a wind farm can have more or less turbines without
scuttling the whole project. As economies of scale are created within
the alternative energy supply chains and the construction process
becomes more efficient, prices continue to drop. Meanwhile, the cost of
stalled nukes moves upward.
Nuclear power is a viable source for cheap energy only if it goes uninsured.
***
Governments that use nuclear energy are torn between the benefit of
low-cost electricity and the risk of a nuclear catastrophe, which could total trillions of dollars and even bankrupt a country.
The bottom line is that it’s a gamble: Governments are hoping to
dodge a one-off disaster while they accumulate small gains over the
long-term.
The cost of a worst-case nuclear accident at a plant in Germany, for
example, has been estimated to total as much as €7.6 trillion ($11 trillion), while the mandatory reactor insurance is only €2.5 billion.
“The €2.5 billion will be just enough to buy the stamps for the
letters of condolence,” said Olav Hohmeyer, an economist at the
University of Flensburg who is also a member of the German government’s
environmental advisory body.
The situation in the U.S., Japan, China, France and other countries is similar.
***
“Around the globe, nuclear risks — be it damages to power plants or
the liability risks resulting from radiation accidents — are covered by
the state. The private insurance industry is barely liable,” said
Torsten Jeworrek, a board member at Munich Re, one of the world’s
biggest reinsurance companies.
*** In financial terms, nuclear
incidents can be so devastating that the cost of full insurance would be
so high as to make nuclear energy more expensive than fossil fuels.
***
Ultimately, the decision to keep insurance on nuclear plants to a minimum is a way of supporting the industry.
“Capping the insurance was a clear decision to provide a
non-negligible subsidy to the technology,” Klaus Toepfer, a former
German environment minister and longtime head of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), said.
See this and this.
This is an ongoing battle, not ancient history. As Harvey Wasserman reports:
The only two US reactor projects now technically under construction are on the brink of death for financial reasons.
If they go under, there will almost certainly be no new reactors built here.
***
Georgia’s double-reactor Vogtle project has been sold on the basis of
federal loan guarantees. Last year President Obama promised the
Southern Company, parent to Georgia Power, $8.33 billion in financing
from an $18.5 billion fund that had been established at the Department
of Energy by George W. Bush. Until last week most industry observers had assumed the guarantees were a done deal.
But the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, has publicly
complained that the Office of Management and Budget may be requiring
terms that are unacceptable to the builders.
***
The climate for loan guarantees has changed since this one was promised. The
$535 million collapse of Solyndra prompted a rash of angry
Congressional hearings and cast a long shadow over the whole range of
loan guarantees for energy projects. Though the Vogtle deal comes from a separate fund, skepticism over stalled negotiations is rising.
So is resistance among Georgia ratepayers.
To fund the new Vogtle reactors, Southern is forcing “construction work
in progress” rate hikes that require consumers to pay for the new nukes
as they’re being built. Southern is free of liability, even if the
reactors are not completed. Thus it behooves the company to build them
essentially forever, collecting payment whether they open or not.
All that would collapse should the loan guarantee package fail.
Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis at
the Vermont Law School … found that the states that invested heavily in
nuclear power had worse track records on efficiency and developing
renewables than those that did not have large nuclear programs. In other
words, investing in nuclear technology crowded out developing clean energy.
Many experts also say that the “energy return on investment” from nuclear power is lower than many other forms of energy. In other words, non-nuclear energy sources produce more energy for a given input.
And decentralizing energy production and storage is the real solution for the environment … not building more centralized nuclear plants.
Mineral weathering by fungi (Credit: Joe Quirk)
UK researchers have identified a biological mechanism that
could explain how the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate
were stabilised over the past 24 million years. When CO2
levels became too low for plants to grow properly, forests appear to
have kept the climate in check by slowing down the removal of carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere. The results are now published in Biogeosciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).
“As CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere fall, the Earth
loses its greenhouse effect, which can lead to glacial conditions,”
explains lead-author Joe Quirk from the University of Sheffield. “Over
the last 24 million years, the geologic conditions were such that
atmospheric CO2 could have fallen to very low levels – but it
did not drop below a minimum concentration of about 180 to 200 parts
per million. Why?”
Before fossil fuels, natural processes kept atmospheric carbon dioxide in check. Volcanic eruptions, for example, release CO2,
while weathering on the continents removes it from the atmosphere over
millions of years. Weathering is the breakdown of minerals within rocks
and soils, many of which include silicates. Silicate minerals weather in
contact with carbonic acid (rain and atmospheric CO2) in a
process that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Further, the
products of these reactions are transported to the oceans in rivers
where they ultimately form carbonate rocks like limestone that lock away
carbon on the seafloor for millions of years, preventing it from
forming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Forests increase weathering rates because trees, and the fungi
associated with their roots, break down rocks and minerals in the soil
to get nutrients for growth. The Sheffield team found that when the CO2
concentration was low – at about 200 parts per million (ppm) – trees
and fungi were far less effective at breaking down silicate minerals,
which could have reduced the rate of CO2 removal from the atmosphere.
“We recreated past environmental conditions by growing trees at low, present-day and high levels of CO2
in controlled-environment growth chambers,” says Quirk. “We used
high-resolution digital imaging techniques to map the surfaces of
mineral grains and assess how they were broken down and weathered by the
fungi associated with the roots of the trees.” As reported in Biogeosciences, the researchers found that low atmospheric CO2
acts as a ‘carbon starvation’ brake. When the concentration of carbon
dioxide falls from 1500 ppm to 200 ppm, weathering rates drop by a
third, diminishing the capacity of forests to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
The weathering rates by trees and fungi drop because low CO2
reduces plants’ ability to perform photosynthesis, meaning less
carbon-energy is supplied to the roots and their fungi. This, in turn,
means there is less nutrient uptake from minerals in the soil, which
slows down weathering rates over millions of years.
“The last 24 million years saw significant mountain building in the
Andes and Himalayas, which increased the amount of silicate rocks and
minerals on the land that could be weathered over time. This increased
weathering of silicate rocks in certain parts of the world is likely to
have caused global CO2 levels to fall,” Quirk explains. But the concentration of CO2
never fell below 180-200 ppm because trees and fungi broke down
minerals at low rates at those concentrations of atmospheric carbon
dioxide.
“It is important that we understand the processes that affect and
regulate climates of the past and our study makes an important step
forward in understanding how Earth’s complex plant life has regulated
and modified the climate we know on Earth today,” concludes Quirk.
This research is presented in the paper ‘Weathering by tree
root-associating fungi diminishes under simulated Cenozoic atmospheric
CO2 decline’ published in the EGU open access journal Biogeosciences on 23 January 2014.
The team is composed of J. Quirk, J. R. Leake, S. A. Banwart, L. L.
Taylor and D. J. Beerling, from the University of Sheffield, UK.
Dr. Joe Quirk
Post Doctoral Research Associate
Department of Animal and Plant Sciences
University of Sheffield, UK
Tel: +44 (0)114 22 20093
Email: j.quirk@sheffield.ac.uk
Prof. David Beerling (Principal Investigator)
Department of Animal and Plant Sciences
University of Sheffield, UK
Tel: +44 (0)114 22 24359
Email: d.j.beerling@sheffield.ac.uk
Bárbara Ferreira EGU Media and Communications Manager
Munich, Germany
Tel: +49-89-2180-6703
Email: media@egu.eu
