Editorial: Time to round up nuclear waste:

The International Atomic Energy Agency has launched a worldwide effort to track stolen, lost or otherwise unprotected nuclear materials.

“Nuclear terrorism is a global threat, not local or regional,” said IAEA official Anita Nilsson.

While the United States is one of 30 countries working with the IAEA to track down and trace radioactive materials internationally, this nation has a disgraceful record of tracking and protecting its own nuclear wastes.

Across the United States nuclear wastes are piling up, often with inadequate protection to the public from leaks and spills, much less from terrorists who could use them to construct radioactive dirty bombs.

Scientists and health experts have been warning since World War II that the United States needs to develop a safe, well-guarded repository for the nuclear waste that keeps piling up month after month and year after year.

With 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States and more on the drawing board, some experts believe that Americans have less to fear from a failure at a nuclear power plant than from the inability of elected officials to control and protect nuclear wastes.

Each nuclear reactor produces roughly 20 tons of nuclear wastes annually.

Without a decision to establish a nuclear repository, wastes from nuclear power plants are housed in temporary shelters in more than 100 locations in 39 states, reports The New York Times.

Sounds great. When can we begin storing this deadly stuff, of which we have over 55,000 metric tons, in your back yard? Oh, what’s that? You don’t want it in your back yard, but in Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, where the locals don’t want it, either, is fine?

So you’re OK with the federal government forcing this facility on a state that doesn’t want it? Funny, that’s not an opinion I would have expected to hear from a newspaper in Waco, Texas. I mean, if the ideal location were just outside of, say, Waco, and the local residents howled about it, I suspect you would side with them and scream bloody murder about the Evil Federal Government Doing Bad Things To A State.

Had enough rampant sarcasm? Yeah, me too. Can we just agree that there is no good answer to this problem, and that we’re stuck with [1] convincing Nevada to accept Yucca Mountain, [2] finding another place to store and manage this waste essentially forever, or [3] find another way to get rid of it, e.g. subduction burial on the sea floor?

One of the key problems with nuclear waste is that it’s forever, so you have to live with and manage the waste from decisions you make now, well, forever. If we never build another nuclear reactor in the US, every one in operation will still be cranking out those 20 tons of waste every year, making the dilemma that much worse.

What would I do, if I awoke tomorrow morning to find out that I was suddenly the nuclear waste czar for the US? I’d probably go back to bed and hide under the covers until the federal government sent armed agents to escort me to my office and forced me to work. I have no bloody idea what to do with this mess.

Are Newspapers Greener than Websites?:

An interesting little controversy has popped up in the last few weeks. It all started with Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of WIRED and inventor of The Long Tail, telling the world that the hard copy of his magazine is greener than the online version.

Now, not to be too much of a skeptic, but the hard copy of WIRED obviously makes more money than the online version, so it’s not surprising that Anderson would promote it. But leaving that aside, his logic goes like this: Magazines and Newspapers Sequester Carbon!

Which, in a manner of speaking, they do. Trees take carbon dioxide out of the air, then the paper industry processes it into paper, and then we lock that carbon away in landfills. So it makes perfect sense until you add in the clear-cutting of Canadian forests, toxic chemicals used to process and bleach the paper, and all of the fossil fuels necessary to power the processing and distribute the paper where it needs to go.

Now a study (PDF) has been released that actually gives numbers to Anderson’s argument. And, at first glance, it looks a bit damning. Even taking into account all of the energy used to process and distribute paper, the numbers seem to show that newspapers produce less carbon than websites by simple virtue of not needing power during viewing.

Here we go again.

Honestly, until we have an agreed upon, standardized, and independently assessed way of measuring environmental impacts, we’re going to see a seemingly infinite number of variations of this article. As annoying as that confusion will be, the real cost is how much it will delay and warp the decision making process of countless consumers, from people buying groceries to large corporations buying a few million widgets at a time. With global warming and other environmental horrors breathing down our neck, and peak oil giving us way more incentive than we need to do yet more stupid things with coal, that’s very bad news.

Disputing the ‘consensus’ on global warming:

Salon liked my post “How do we really know humans are causing global warming?” but wanted something more in-depth and … serious. The result is “The cold truth about climate change: Deniers say there’s no consensus about global warming. Well, there’s not. There’s well-tested science and real-world observations [that are much more worrisome].”

James Hansen read the first draft and wrote me back, “Very important for the public to understand this — why has nobody articulated this already?” I don’t know the answer. All I can say is that while I was writing the article, the central point dawned on me:

The more I write about global warming, the more I realize I share some things in common with the doubters and deniers who populate the blogosphere and the conservative movement. Like them, I am dubious about the process used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to write its reports. Like them, I am skeptical of the so-called consensus on climate science as reflected in the IPCC reports. Like them, I disagree with people who say “the science is settled.” But that’s where the agreement ends.

The science isn’t settled — it’s unsettling, and getting more so every year as the scientific community learns more about the catastrophic consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

The big difference I have with the doubters is that they believe the IPCC reports seriously overstate the impact of human emissions on the climate — whereas the actual observed climate data clearly show they dramatically understate the impact.

A very thoughtful, and thought-provoking item from Joe Romm. Highly recommended.

For some time I’ve been saying something very similar, that the deniers and delayers were right, the climate models are deeply flawed–just look at how much quicker climate change is happening.

I don’t want to sound like I’m beating up the climate scientists. I have some experience in modeling complex systems, albeit of the non-climate persuasion, and I know how horrifically difficult it can be to juggle a whole list of unknowns and semi-knowns and arrive at a virtual representation of a real world phenomenon that reacts to change in a realistic way. But the bottom line is that for all the genuine science being done by climate scientists, we’re still encountering a lot of surprises and scrambling to assemble a coherent big picture that yields reliable answer to questions like, “What happens if we continue on our business as usual CO2 emissions path for another 20 years?”

Florida probes how small mishaps caused massive outages:

Florida authorities are investigating how a small fire and a switch failure at an electrical substation outside Miami triggered a power failure that affected millions of people.

When a nuclear power plant sensed the disruption, it shut down. In turn, the state’s power grid triggered rolling blackouts Tuesday across the state.

More than 2 million people lost power at the peak of the outages, but electricity quickly was restored to most parts of the state.

Authorities said no injuries were reported.

Florida Power & Light President Armando Olivera said a disconnect switch failed at 1:08 p.m. ET Tuesday at an automated substation west of Miami, and a piece of equipment that controls voltage caught fire about the same time. Neither failure by itself would have caused a widespread outage, he said.

…

The substation trouble set off a sequence of events that within two to three minutes had knocked numerous power plants off-line — including the Turkey Point nuclear power plant south of Miami.

Olivera said Turkey Point’s two nuclear reactors and a natural gas-powered generation unit automatically shut down when the plant’s systems detected a fluctuation in the power grid.

“In a fraction of a second, the demand was far greater than the power plants that were online generating electricity could handle,” he said. “When you have that kind of imbalance, we have a system that kicks in and it starts turning people’s lights off, essentially balancing the demand with what’s available.”

I’ve delayed commenting on this until the news reports settled down, which they seem to have done.

I won’t beat up nuclear power for this mess, as it’s clear to me that this was solely a problem caused by an otherwise very minor accident in an electricity grid held together with tape and spit.

Which reminds me–don’t forget the August 2003 blackout in the NE US and SE Canada. A squirrel fell off a tree in Canada and took down the power for millions. My wife and I decided to throw a wine party in our driveway for the neighborhood that night, lit by tiki torches. (I’m kidding about the squirrel part, of course, but the party was actually a fun way to spend a few hours.)

But the real message here is that the US desperately needs to get its act together and fix its damn electricity grid. Or at least decentralize electricity generation to the point where these domino effect blackouts are less likely and more contained when they do happen.