The Nuclear Regulatory Commission Thursday approved the first Early Site Permit for a nuclear power plant - demonstrating a new and previously untested licensing process for locating new nuclear plants in the United States. Critics say new nuclear plants are not needed if energy conservation is implemented. The approval - for Exelon Generation Company's Clinton site, in central Illinois - was hailed by U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman as "a major milestone" in the Bush administration's plan to expand the use of nuclear power. "NRC approval of the Clinton Early Site Permit represents a major accomplishment in this administration's effort to address the barriers and stimulate deployment of new nuclear power plants in the United States," Bodman said. "By demonstrating effectiveness and predictability in the licensing process, utilities will have the information they need to make sound business decisions that can lead to the construction of new nuclear power plants," he said.
The Early Site Permit resolves environmental, site suitability and emergency planning issues with regard to the possible construction and operation of a new nuclear plant next to the Clinton Power Station in Clinton, Illinois. Exelon has not decided to move forward with building a new nuclear plant.
President Bush's Fiscal Year 2008 budget requests $874.2 million, a 38.2 percent increase over the FY'07 request, for theOffice of Nuclear Energy. Of that request, $114 million has been allocated to complete the remaining Early Site Permit demonstration projects and continue the New Nuclear Plant Licensing Demonstration projects.
Paul Leventhal, the long-time head of the nongovernmental Nuclear Control Institute, NCI, says there is "ample evidence" that "conservation alone could eliminate the need for the existing fleet of nuclear power plants, let alone new ones." Before establishing NCI, based in Washington, DC, Leventhal held senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate on nuclear power and proliferation issues. He served as co-director of the bipartisan Senate Special Investigation of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident, and helped to draft the 1974 legislation that established the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The public has yet to be heard from," said Leventhal. "The NRC is going to grant permits at existing sites assuming that these commmunities have already accepted nuclear power plants. If there was an accident, that could change overnight." He is critical of the NRC's close working relationship with the nuclear industry, saying that the "NRC could be perceived as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Nuclear Energy Institute," a nuclear industry association.
Nuclear Energy Institute's president and chief executive officer, Frank "Skip" Bowman, said Thursday, "History will record this day as one of the early milestones in the era of new nuclear power plant construction in the United States. Approval of the Clinton early site permit application by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - the first such siting permit in the agency's history - is a momentous occurrence." "Site pre-approval provided through the early site permit process holds the potential to shorten the time required to bring a new nuclear power plant to market," said Bowman. "As our nation seeks to increase its reliance on nuclear energy to strengthen U.S. energy diversity and security with a reliable electricity source that keeps the air clean, today's action marks a promising day for a brighter energy future for the American people," he said.
Leventhal said, "The nuclear renaissance is in the eyes of the beholder. The administration has tried to build a solid case for nuclear power based on global warming and electricity needs beyond current capacity." But, in his view, the risks outweigh the benefits. "I'm not anti-nuclear, and I have taken a neutral position on nuclear power," Leventhal said. "It can be acceptable if it is operated as safely as humanly possible." "But nuclear power plants in today's security environment should be regarded as strategic targets in the United States with the fullest protection the federal government can provide," Leventhal said. "They should be protected with ground to air missiles integrated into both the military and the Federal Aviation Administration systems with careful command and control systems. There may have to be permanent troops or special federal protection forces." But Leventhal says the industry opposes the federal government stepping in because it might alarm the public into recognizing that nuclear power plants are vulnerable. "So you have nuclear power plants protected by rent-a-cops."
Energy Secretary Bodman characterizes nuclear power as "clean" and "safe" and says "nuclear power will play an increasingly important role as the demand for electricity grows worldwide." "Government's role is to create an environment in which clean energy can flourish, and I'm proud to say that we're helping doing just that," said Bodman Thursday.
But Leventhal is not reassured. "There's lots of loosey, goosey stuff that makes plants vulnerable to attack," he said. "The public doesn't want to know, they're in denial." "We cannot today protect against an attack like 911," Leventhal warned. "If plants are hit in the big metropolitan areas such as Chicago or New York, the effects would be catastrophic, rendering these cities uninhabitable."
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Climate Change: Could It Be Random?
Severe climate changes during the last ice-age could have been caused by random chaotic variations on Earth and not governed by external periodic influences from the Sun. This has been shown in new calculations by a researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen University.
Several large international projects have succeeded in drilling ice-cores from the top of the Greenland inland ice through the more than 3 km thick ice sheet. The ice is a frozen archive of the climate of the past, which has been dated back all the way to the previous interglacial Eem-period more than 120.000 years ago. The ice archive shows that the climate has experienced very severe changes during the glacial period. During the glacial period there were 26 abrupt temperature increases of about 7-10 degrees. These glacial warm periods are named Dansgaard-Oeschger events after the two scientists first observing them.
The global warming we experience presently will cause a temperature increase of perhaps 2-5 degrees in the next century if greenhouse gas emissions continue, researchers claim. This will lead to increased sea levels and more severe weather with terrible consequences. The temperature rise during the glacial period were much larger and happened much faster. Temperature increased by 10 degrees in less than 50 years with changes to the ocean currents and the whole ecosystem. These changes have caused sea level rises up to perhaps as much as 8 meters and large changes to the vegetation.
The 26 climate shifts are apparently periodic. They seem to occur with a period of 1470 years. Every now and then a period is skipped and the shifts occur 3-4000 years apart. Professor Peter Ditlevsen at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen University wanted to investigate the periodicity of the climate shifts. He asked: "Could it be that the shifts are chaotic and random, they just look periodic by pure coincidence. How probable is that?"
Using mathematical models of the climate shifts he calculated the probability of the periodicity. He focused on the time intervals between the climate shifts. How regular are they really? As a baton, periodically beating, how far from the beating are the climate shifts? If the distances are perfectly periodic 100% is obtained. It turned out that the climate shifts hit the beats of the baton by 70%. He then had the computer spreading the shifts over the ice age randomly. He did this 1000 times with different random time intervals. In this he got between 40% and 90% right hits. The major part of the calculations was between 55% and 75%. Then he calculated the opposite assumption, that the climate shifts has a period. Again he made 1000 calculations, but this time the numbers came out between 80% and 100%. The major part came out above 90%. But 90% is not the regularity for the real climate changes, they occur with 70%.
The conclusion drawn by Peter Ditlevsen is that the probability of hitting 70% is less if the climate shifts are periodic than if they are random. This is very important for understanding the cause of the climate changes and especially for predicting climate shifts. If they are random and chaotic they are fundamentally unpredictable.
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Death Threats for climate skeptic Tim Ball
Warning: Debating global warming from science rather than politics could be a challenge to your health. In fact death threats come in fives to scientists who write that global warming is not man-made. Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball, who has been questioning man-made global warming for 30 years, has received five death threats by email.
Resentment toward Ball escalated when his Canada Free Press (CFP) February 5th column, "Global Warming: The Cold Hard Facts?" was posted by the Drudge Report. "We're worried about him," Ball's wife told CFP on Thursday. Her husband continues with his speaking engagements and will be in Washington next week to address a group of American senators prior to Al Gore's appearance before Senator Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee.
"Man-made Global Warming crusaders don't tolerate dissent. There's billions of dollars at stake," says Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg.
While Ball--who was told in one email that if he continued to speak out would not live to see another global warming--takes the threats to his life in stride, CFP thinks the IPO addresses of the email writers should be forwarded to the police.
While the proponents of man-made global warming have made it the new religion, Ball and some of his colleagues remember when global cooling was all the rage. His prediction that the United Nations authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be soon making wildly alarmist statements came true over the weekend. Within just a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people will die for lack of water, scientists on the panel intend to declare in Belgium next month.
"Things are happening and happening faster than we expected," said Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., one of the many co-authors of the new report. "The draft document says scientists are highly confident that many current problems--change in species' habits and habitats, more acidified oceans, loss of wetlands, bleaching of coral reefs, and increases in allergy-inducing pollen--can be blamed on global warming." (My Way News, 11/03/07.) "And co-author Terry Root of Stanford University said: "We truly are standing at the edge of mass extinction of species."
While the UN body is doing its best to spread its alarmist theories, Hollywood will weigh in by making the environmental villain the quintessential "Bad Guy" of the silver screen with movies like James Cameron's Avatar.
"Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist," Ball wrote in his Drudge pick up CFP column. "And I am not the only one trying to make people open their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was one of the first Canadian PhDs in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition," Dr. Ball wrote. "Few listen, even though I have a PhD, (Doctor of Science) from the university of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why."
"Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science."
Things are so hot on the global warming front, scientists who question mankind's impact on climate change have been thrown into the category of Holocaust deniers. "Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened," says Ball. "I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has really got nasty and personal."
The proverbial cat seems to have been sent in with the pigeons last week when Ball and his colleagues appeared in "The Great Global Warming Swindle", a British Channel 4 documentary in which several scientists, claimed the theory of man-made global warming had become a "religion", forcing alternative explanations to be ignored.
Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also appeared on the documentary recently claimed: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges." (Telegraph.co.uk, 11/03/07). "Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science.
"Dr. Myles Allen, from Oxford University. Agreed. He said: "The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do."
"Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said: "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."
Meanwhile, CFP staff is currently collalting the more than 2,000 emails sent to Dr. Ball and will publish the death threats with their email and IPO addresses.
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Arrogant and aggressive Greenies
I have myself seen many examples of similar cyclist aggressiveness towards others
I resent the sentiments expressed in the Herald's letters pages that cyclists are all lovely, patient, clean, green folk generally entrusted with saving the planet - and that people are trying to kill them. I think they are trying to kill us. Enjoying a pleasant moonlight after-dinner stroll around the bay with three friends, I heard a strange chirruping noise. Looking back into the gloom, we saw a flashing Christmas tree bearing down on us at great speed. We scuttled out of the way but the rider expressed displeasure that we hadn't moved uniformly to the left as he powered between us. Foolishly, I suggested it might have helped if he'd slowed down.
Suddenly brakes - which until then he had he appeared reluctant to use - were employed in an emergency stop and he returned to inform us angrily that we were on a cycleway. I pointed out it was a shared footpath. Unfortunately, this led to such spittle-spraying vituperation that it became impossible to add that, not 50 metres back, he had passed a sign which stated: "Cyclists must give way to pedestrians." Perhaps he was going too fast to notice, or maybe there was a literacy problem. There was certainly a safety issue.
There's a pleasant park in our municipality. One side has a dogs-off-leads exercising area, the other a well-equipped children's playground. You'd have to have the brain of a gnat to cycle at high speed through either. Well, it happens every day. There's a switch in some cyclists' brains which flips to "everyone must get out of my way" mode as soon their buttocks touch those little triangular seats.
Recently on the Iron Cove Bridge, as I stepped from the stairwell onto the footpath, I was nearly T-boned by a bicycle rider travelling at more than 80 kmh (he had a strong tail wind). If he'd cleaned me up (there were only millimetres in it), I would have been slammed into the wall and he would have been thrown out into the path of the traffic. It was a very, very close call.
During my many kilometres of walking each week I find competitive, risk-taking, goal-fixated cyclists are more common than ever before, and that's a big worry for someone who takes most of his exercise on foot. Cycling far too close to walkers, dogs, children; not offering fair warning of their approach; travelling ridiculously fast in the company of people on foot; and generally assuming that they have the right to exclusive use of the byways is not only arrogant, it is totally contrary to the concept of saving the planet. And I hold the (probably forlorn) hope that I'd still like to be around to see it saved.
Source
Something else the climate "experts" don't understand
But it will be blamed on global warming, of course
A massive whirlpool has developed off the coast of NSW, dragging down the sea surface by almost a metre, diverting a mighty ocean current and chilling Sydney beachgoers. The mysterious whirlpool is 200 kilometres across and 1000 metres deep, reaching the ocean floor, CSIRO oceanographers say. The centre is 100 kilometres from the coast and could stay there for several months. And another eddy of similar proportions is sitting further off the coast.
CSIRO satellite oceanographer Dr David Griffin said that, while cold-water eddies regularly appeared off Sydney, scientists knew very little about what causes them or the influence they have in the Tasman Sea ecosystem. "What we do know is that this is a very powerful natural feature which tends to push everything else aside - even the mighty East Australian Current," said Dr Griffin.
The sea level has dropped 70 centimetres at its centre while the water 400 metres below the surface is 6 degrees centigrade colder than normal. The colder water has helped bring down the average water temperature at Sydney beaches by several degrees. At the eddy's centre, cold water from 400m is raised about 200m. The sea surface, conversely, is lowered by 70cm. This dip in the surface of the ocean is invisible to the eye, but it can be accurately measured by satellites and a robotic Argo float deployed by the CSIRO. The eddies are invisible to the human eye but would contribute to cooler beach swimming conditions, said Dr Griffin.
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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