Last month the Wall Street
Journal (8/18/12) published a breakdown of federal subsidies for
electric power production, citing the U.S. Dept. of Energy and the
Institute for Energy Research as sources. Here is the comparison of
subsidy costs per megawatt hour:
Fuel Type $
Subsidy per megawatt hour
Oil and Gas $0.64
Coal 0.64
Hydropower 0.82
Nuclear 3.14
Wind 56.29
Solar 775.64
Solar and wind are
horrendously more expensive, but they are the fuels favored by the
Obama administration. The fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) are by
far the most economic. Nuclear power is the next most efficient
power source, but no new nuclear power plants have been build in the
U.S. for thirty years. Obama says nuclear power has a place in his
energy program, but he has effectively eliminated it. One of his
first acts as president was to emphatically announce his elimination
of the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada for storing highly radioactive
nuclear waste. He said his administration would be quick to offer an
alternative, but he has been president for almost four years now and
has failed to live up to his word.
In 1982 Congress directed
the government to assume responsibility for commercial nuclear waste.
In 1987 it singled out Yucca Mountain for evaluation as the
repository because of its remote and dry location. After years of
research, Congress in 2002 endorsed the Yucca Mountain site. The
$13.5 billion spent there since 1987 included boring a five-mile
tunnel into the mountain, along with numerous niches for testing, and
hundreds of studies to determine the safety of storage there for
thousands of years. The industry was also forced to pay $22 billion
to the Energy Department for establishment of the repository. Obama
is not a scientist, and his decision was not made from a review of
the scientific research. His Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a
scientist but had been on the job only a few weeks, and in that time
couldn't possibly have read more than a tiny fraction of the
hundreds of studies before announcing his support for Obama's
decision. Obama flouted decades of study and countermanded the
explicit decisions of Congress. He called for more study of the
issue. (Over 20 years of study was not enough?) Government contracts
obligated the government to begin taking wastes in 1998. Obama
apparently thinks nothing about abrogating a government contract, but
the industry may sue for return of the $22 billion utility companies
paid for the repository plus extra storage costs of the wastes. The
New York Times says, “Lawyers are predicting tens of billions of
dollars from suits by utilities that must pay to store their wastes
instead of having the government bury them, with the figure rising by
about a half-billion dollars for each year of additional delay.” As
usual, Obama shows little concern for another extravagant waste of
taxpayers' money.
Until a deep permanent repository is
established, the 104 nuclear plants operating in the U.S. are
required to store their radioactive wastes temporarily in steel and
concrete casks near their reactors. Plants running short of
temporary storage space would like to vitrify the wastes, which would
turn them into a stable glass form—which is highly desirable—but
the Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires that high-level waste be
disposed of in a deep geologic repository after the vitrification
plant starts operating. So plants can't start vitrifying until there
is a repository. The lack of on-site storage space for nuclear
wastes is now being used as an argument for denying license renewals
for existing nuclear plants. Re-licensing of existing plants is
crucial just to maintain our current nuclear generating capacity,
which provides 22.5 percent of the nation's electricity.
The most ridiculous aspect of the
government fiasco regarding nuclear waste disposal is that the whole
problem was precipitated by government. It need never have occurred
at all. France has 59 nuclear plants, which produce 80 percent of its
energy—and it stores all its 30 years of nuclear waste beneath the
floor of one room in Le Hague. No problem.
France and other nations with nuclear
plants recycle their spent nuclear fuel. To them, it is not nuclear
“waste” but a resource. France even imports this
resource from Italy (Caorso) and United Kingdom (Sellafield) for
reprocessing, which recycles about 98 percent of the material in
spent nuclear fuel rods. One percent is the fissionable uranium
isotope U-235. Ninety-five percent is non-fissionable U-238 and can't
be used for bombs; it's no different than the U-238 in 1 percent of
the earth's crust. Plutonium 239, which is fissionable, is formed
when small amounts of U-238 absorb neutrons; it is one percent of
spent fuel. It is reprocessed and put back into a reactor as “mixed
oxide fuel” of uranium plus plutonium.
Why doesn't the U.S. reprocess spent
fuel as other nations so successfully do? Because in 1977 President
Jimmy Carter foolishly established a permanent ban on reprocessing,
in the belief he was reducing the risk of bomb-making material being
stolen. President Obama has flatly refused to allow reprocessing,
saying it is “not an option.” But the risk of theft from nuclear
waste is misguided. Uranium 235 in a reactor is only 3 percent. You
couldn't blow up a reactor with it if you tried. To make a weapon
from it, it would have to be enriched to 90 percent, an extremely
difficult industrial operation. The concern is over the 1 percent of
nuclear waste that is plutonium 239. Reprocessing allows this to be
consumed by putting it back into a reactor as fuel.
In spite of the fact the Obama
administration has effectively shut down nuclear power development,
it spends far more on subsidies for it than for the economical fuel
sources. Another waste of taxpayers money. And it spends still more
on subsidizing the most inefficient sources, solar and wind. An even
greater waste.
Fuel Type Subsidy $ in
millions
Hydropower 215
Oil and Gas 654
Solar 968
Coal 1,189
Wind 4,986
Obama seeks to create jobs in wind and
solar industries, but without subsidies they can't compete with the
more efficient forms of energy. Furthermore, the latter pay
billions of dollars in taxes while solar and wind energies are
draining taxpayers' money from the U.S. Treasury. Obama preaches
about creating jobs, but you can't create lasting, profitable jobs
and competitive industries with uneconomic energy. All
of the energy subsidies are a waste and should be terminated. The
inefficient solar and wind industries are obvious wastes, and the
fossil fuels and hydropower are efficient and thus do not to need them.
The argument is made that solar and
wind energies must be used even if uneconomic in order to save the
planet from global warming. Almost every month new scientific
research emerges to further discredit the whole idea of
anthropogenic global warming. Almost as often a new baseless scare
is voiced not just that the climate is warming but that man is the
cause.
The latest concerns the widely
publicized stories about the melting of Arctic ice. These usually
say the ice is the lowest it has ever been in recorded history. That
sounds really serious, doesn't it? They don't tell you that
“recorded history” they refer to began in 1979 with the advent of satellite
photography. Nor do they tell you that the area they bemoan for having melted recently was open water in 1904 and 1905, when Roald
Amundsen as well as other Arctic explorers sailed their ships there.
Nor do they tell you that there have been many times in the past when
Arctic ice completely disappeared and always returned.
Nor do they tell you that while Arctic
ice has been melting, Antarctic ice has been growing at a record
rate. How can there be global warming when at one pole the ice is
melting while at the other it is increasing? Which pole should be
used for evidence of global temperature change? You could make as
good a case for global cooling by looking solely at one pole as you
can for global warming by looking solely at the other.
Far more convincing is evidence that
earth's temperature changes are due to the sun. Orbital changes
produce long-term climate cycles by varying the distance of the earth
from the sun; shorter-term cycles are determined by changes in the
surface of the sun itself. The sun's radiation is not uniform but
varied by disturbances on the surface of the sun, called “sunspot
cycles.” Magnetic fields rip through the sun's surface, producing
holes in the sun's corona, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and
changes in the “solar wind,” the stream of charged particles
emanating from the sun. The solar wind, by modulating the galactic
cosmic rays which reach the earth, determines both the formation of
clouds and the carbon dioxide level in the earth's
atmosphere—which has nothing to do with emissions from
factories or automobiles! Sunspot cycles cause only slight changes in
the sun's radiation, but these changes are amplified many fold by
interaction 1) with ozone in the upper stratosphere, and 2) with
clouds in the lower troposphere.
Mars is experiencing global warming and
so are Jupiter, Pluto, Neptune, and Triton, the largest moon of
Neptune. These heavenly bodies have never had humans to create
man-made global warming, and the warming they are experiencing
correlates not with carbon dioxide changes but with solar cycles—as
does the warming of the earth. (The correlation is much
better than with the earth's carbon dioxide levels.) How can the sun
be causing global warming elsewhere in our solar system but not on
earth? And if the earth's warming is not caused by solar activity,
what explains the warming of Mars, Jupiter, Neptune and its moon
Triton, and even distant Pluto?
In any case, the overwhelming portion
of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is produced by nature, not man.
Joseph D'aleo, first director of meteorology, the Weather Channel,
has stated, “If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our annual
anthropogenic (man-made) contribution today would be equivalent to
the linoleum on the first floor.”
Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, has said, "You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide."
Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, has said, "You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide."
Claims that temperature records for the
past century, which show a slight warming of about 1 degree, cannot
be taken as evidence of global warming, for this assumes no warming
at all without humans. Australian researcher John McClean, who has
spent more than 25 years studying global climate, says “No century
has ever had such a stable climate, but for the [computer models to
show anthropogenic forcing], this assumption must be made. The
probability of a flat background natural climate is less than one in
a million; hence, the statistical significance of these apparently
successful models is also less than 1 in a million.”
Over the last several years I have made
more than twenty blog postings on global warming. I'm sure you are
unlikely to read them all, but if you read only one, let it be this
one:
http://amlibpub.blogspot.com/2010/06/ippc-led-global-warming-hoax-implodes.html
