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There’s no place for nuclear in the ‘Clean Power Plan’ Updated for 2026

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Dear Administrator Gina McCarthy,

We strongly support the Environmental Protection Agency’s goals in the Clean Power Plan draft regulation, and we are grateful for the agency’s leadership in setting a critical policy for reducing emissions from the electricity generation sector.

We also appreciate the fact that the Clean Power Plan’s purpose is to create enforceable goals for states to reduce emissions, and a framework (the Best System of Emissions Reduction / BSER) for them to implement and comply with the targets.

The framework must be flexible and adaptable, to account for technological advances and regional differences in energy resources and regulatory systems, but it must also encourage rational and effective policies.

Unfortunately, the treatment of nuclear energy in the draft rule is unsupported by meaningful analysis, and would make it possible for states to implement the rule in ways that are counterproductive to the Clean Power Plan’s purpose of reducing emissions.

The role of nuclear power must be re-evaluated

We are, additionally, very concerned about industry proposals to expand provisions to encourage nuclear. We urge the EPA to conduct a thorough and fact-based analysis of nuclear, and to do the following:

  1. Remove the preservation of existing nuclear reactors from the BSER.
  2. Do not force Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee to finish building new reactors.
  3. Conduct a thorough and accurate analysis of the environmental impacts of nuclear power, from radioactive waste and uranium mining to reactor accidents and water use.
  4. Recognize and incorporate the much greater role renewable energy and efficiency can, will, and must play in reducing carbon emissions and replacing both fossil fuels and nuclear.

We recognize that the EPA has undertaken a monumental task in developing the Clean Power Plan – perhaps the most important single step in setting the U.S. on the path to reducing emissions enough to avert the worst of global warming and climate change.

It is essential that we begin making substantial reductions in emissions immediately, and that the institutional inertia and narrow self-interest of utilities and major power companies do not stand in the way of deploying the most cost-effective and environmentally sustainable energy solutions.

For that very reason, it is important the regulation ensures states do not get off on the wrong foot and implement the rule in ways that are counterproductive.

False and irrational assumptions

Unfortunately, the Clean Power Plan’s treatment of nuclear incentivizes the preservation and expansion of a technology that is and has always been the most expensive, inflexible, and dangerous complement to fossil fuels.

The Clean Power Plan incorporates nuclear into the BSER in two ways:

  • Assumes five new reactors will be completed and brought online in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and irrationally estimates the cost of doing so as $0. In fact, billions more remain to be spent on these reactors and there is a great deal of uncertainty about when, if ever, they will be completed, facing years of delays and billions in cost overruns. The cost assumption would force states to complete the reactors no matter the cost, rather than enabling them to choose better ways to meet their emissions goals. Even though renewables and efficiency could be deployed at lower cost than nuclear, the draft rule would make it look like they are much more expensive because of the zero-cost assumption about completing the reactors.
  • Encourages states to ‘preserve’ reactors economically at-risk of being closed, equivalent to 6% of each state’s existing nuclear generation. While it is true that about 6% of the nation’s operating reactors may close for economic reasons, this provision encourages every state to subsidize existing reactors, greatly underestimates the cost of doing so, and overestimates their role in reducing emissions. Uneconomical reactors have high and rising operating costs, and cannot compete with renewables and efficiency. If anything, EPA should simply recommend that low-carbon energy sources be replaced with other low-carbon resources, but singling out nuclear for ‘preservation’ suggests it is better for states to lock themselves into obsolete and increasingly uneconomical nuclear.

The rule also says states may utilize two other ways of adding nuclear capacity as options for achieving the goals, even though they are not incorporated in the BSER:

  • New reactors other than those currently in construction. EPA recognizes that new nuclear is too expensive to be included in the BSER, so it should not suggest states consider it as a way of meeting their emissions goals.
  • Power uprate modifications to increase the generation capacity of existing reactors. Power uprates are capital-intensive and expensive, and several recent projects have been cancelled or suffered major cost overruns, in the case of Minnesota’s Monticello reactor, at a total cost greater than most new reactors ($10 million/megawatt). [1]

Rather than suggesting states waste resources on nuclear generation too expensive and infeasible to be included in the BSER, EPA should include an analysis of these problems so that states can better evaluate their options and select lower-cost, more reliable means for reducing emissions, such as renewables and efficiency.

Serious nuclear concerns ignored

The Clean Power Plan also considers some non-air quality impacts of nuclear generation, as it is required to do under the Clean Air Act. However, the EPA’s evaluation is both woefully incomplete and alarmingly inadequate. EPA dismisses concerns about radioactive waste and nuclear power’s impact on water resources, simply characterizing them as equivalent to problems with fossil fuel generation.

In fact, radioactive waste is an intractable problem that threatens the environment for potentially hundreds of thousands of years. In addition, nuclear reactors’ use of water is more intensive than fossil fuel technologies, and a majority of existing reactors utilize the most water-intensive once-through cooling systems.

Regardless, however, rather than only comparing them to fossil fuels, EPA should have compared these impacts to the full range of alternatives, including renewables and efficiency, which do not have such problems.

EPA leaves out a host of other environmental impacts unique to nuclear, including uranium mining and nuclear accidents.

There are over 10,000 abandoned uranium mines throughout the US, which are subject to lax environmental standards, pose major groundwater and public health risks, present serious environmental justice concerns, and could entail billions in site cleanup and remediation costs.

The failure to consider the impacts of a nuclear accident is a glaring oversight, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. EPA must consider both the environmental and economic impact of nuclear accidents.

Renewables can do the job!

In general, the Clean Power Plan’s consideration of nuclear appears to be based on a dangerous fallacy: that closed reactors must be replaced with fossil fuel generation, presumably because other low- / zero-carbon resources could not make up the difference.

In fact, renewable energy growth has surpassed all other forms of new generation for going on three years, making up 48% of all new electricity generation brought online from 2011 to July 2014. [2]

The growth rate of wind energy alone (up to 12,000 MW per year) would be sufficient to replace all of the ‘at-risk’ nuclear capacity within two years, at lower cost than the market price of electricity, [3] let alone at the subsidized rate for nuclear the draft rule suggests.

Assuming that closed reactors will be replaced with fossil fuel generation both encourages states to waste resources trying to ‘preserve’ (or even build) uneconomical reactors rather than on more cost-effective and productive investments in renewables and efficiency.

While states are free to develop their implementation plans without using the specific energy sources included in the BSER, the rule should not promote such foolishness.

No amount of spending or subsidies for nuclear has been effective at reducing the technology’s costs nor overcoming lengthy construction times and delays, whereas spending on renewables and efficiency has had the effect of lowering their costs and increasing their rate of deployment.

The economic problems facing currently operating reactors merely underscore the point that nuclear is not a cost-effective way of reducing emissions.

We are hopeful that the Clean Power Plan will be a watershed in setting the country on a path to emissions reductions and climate action, and we are grateful to the EPA for taking this step.

We believe that correcting the problems with the way nuclear is considered in the draft rule, and increasing the role of renewables and efficiency, will make the Clean Power Plan much stronger and lead states to implement it more productively and cost-effectively.

 

 

Action – organizations: Make sure your organization is signed on to our comments on the Clean Power Plan, which expand on the points above. The comments, and current list of endorsers, are here. If your organization is not listed, please sign on now by sending an e-mail to me at nirsnet@nirs.org with your name, title, organization name, city, and state (and country if outside the US – we encourage our international friends to support us in this effort!). Please sign on by midnight, Sunday, November 30, 2014.

Action – individuals: Please send in your comments on our action page here. And please share the action page with your friends and colleagues using the logos at its top, or share our previous Alert on the issue on Facebook and Twitter here. More than 19,000 of you have acted so far; we want to top 20,000 (do I hear 25,000?) comments before the December 1 deadline. Your help in outreach is essential to meet that goal.

Tim Judson is Executive Director of Nuclear Information & Resource Service, Takoma Park, MD.

For full list of signatories see NIRS.

References

1. Shaffer, David. ‘Xcel management blamed for cost overruns at Monticello nuclear plant‘. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 9, 2014.

2. Sun Day Campaign. ‘Renewables Provide 56 Percent of New US Electrical Generating Capacity in First Half of 2014‘. July 21, 2014.

3. Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory. ‘2013 Wind Technologies Market Report‘. US Department of Energy. August 18, 2014.

 




387540

There’s no place for nuclear in the ‘Clean Power Plan’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Dear Administrator Gina McCarthy,

We strongly support the Environmental Protection Agency’s goals in the Clean Power Plan draft regulation, and we are grateful for the agency’s leadership in setting a critical policy for reducing emissions from the electricity generation sector.

We also appreciate the fact that the Clean Power Plan’s purpose is to create enforceable goals for states to reduce emissions, and a framework (the Best System of Emissions Reduction / BSER) for them to implement and comply with the targets.

The framework must be flexible and adaptable, to account for technological advances and regional differences in energy resources and regulatory systems, but it must also encourage rational and effective policies.

Unfortunately, the treatment of nuclear energy in the draft rule is unsupported by meaningful analysis, and would make it possible for states to implement the rule in ways that are counterproductive to the Clean Power Plan’s purpose of reducing emissions.

The role of nuclear power must be re-evaluated

We are, additionally, very concerned about industry proposals to expand provisions to encourage nuclear. We urge the EPA to conduct a thorough and fact-based analysis of nuclear, and to do the following:

  1. Remove the preservation of existing nuclear reactors from the BSER.
  2. Do not force Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee to finish building new reactors.
  3. Conduct a thorough and accurate analysis of the environmental impacts of nuclear power, from radioactive waste and uranium mining to reactor accidents and water use.
  4. Recognize and incorporate the much greater role renewable energy and efficiency can, will, and must play in reducing carbon emissions and replacing both fossil fuels and nuclear.

We recognize that the EPA has undertaken a monumental task in developing the Clean Power Plan – perhaps the most important single step in setting the U.S. on the path to reducing emissions enough to avert the worst of global warming and climate change.

It is essential that we begin making substantial reductions in emissions immediately, and that the institutional inertia and narrow self-interest of utilities and major power companies do not stand in the way of deploying the most cost-effective and environmentally sustainable energy solutions.

For that very reason, it is important the regulation ensures states do not get off on the wrong foot and implement the rule in ways that are counterproductive.

False and irrational assumptions

Unfortunately, the Clean Power Plan’s treatment of nuclear incentivizes the preservation and expansion of a technology that is and has always been the most expensive, inflexible, and dangerous complement to fossil fuels.

The Clean Power Plan incorporates nuclear into the BSER in two ways:

  • Assumes five new reactors will be completed and brought online in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and irrationally estimates the cost of doing so as $0. In fact, billions more remain to be spent on these reactors and there is a great deal of uncertainty about when, if ever, they will be completed, facing years of delays and billions in cost overruns. The cost assumption would force states to complete the reactors no matter the cost, rather than enabling them to choose better ways to meet their emissions goals. Even though renewables and efficiency could be deployed at lower cost than nuclear, the draft rule would make it look like they are much more expensive because of the zero-cost assumption about completing the reactors.
  • Encourages states to ‘preserve’ reactors economically at-risk of being closed, equivalent to 6% of each state’s existing nuclear generation. While it is true that about 6% of the nation’s operating reactors may close for economic reasons, this provision encourages every state to subsidize existing reactors, greatly underestimates the cost of doing so, and overestimates their role in reducing emissions. Uneconomical reactors have high and rising operating costs, and cannot compete with renewables and efficiency. If anything, EPA should simply recommend that low-carbon energy sources be replaced with other low-carbon resources, but singling out nuclear for ‘preservation’ suggests it is better for states to lock themselves into obsolete and increasingly uneconomical nuclear.

The rule also says states may utilize two other ways of adding nuclear capacity as options for achieving the goals, even though they are not incorporated in the BSER:

  • New reactors other than those currently in construction. EPA recognizes that new nuclear is too expensive to be included in the BSER, so it should not suggest states consider it as a way of meeting their emissions goals.
  • Power uprate modifications to increase the generation capacity of existing reactors. Power uprates are capital-intensive and expensive, and several recent projects have been cancelled or suffered major cost overruns, in the case of Minnesota’s Monticello reactor, at a total cost greater than most new reactors ($10 million/megawatt). [1]

Rather than suggesting states waste resources on nuclear generation too expensive and infeasible to be included in the BSER, EPA should include an analysis of these problems so that states can better evaluate their options and select lower-cost, more reliable means for reducing emissions, such as renewables and efficiency.

Serious nuclear concerns ignored

The Clean Power Plan also considers some non-air quality impacts of nuclear generation, as it is required to do under the Clean Air Act. However, the EPA’s evaluation is both woefully incomplete and alarmingly inadequate. EPA dismisses concerns about radioactive waste and nuclear power’s impact on water resources, simply characterizing them as equivalent to problems with fossil fuel generation.

In fact, radioactive waste is an intractable problem that threatens the environment for potentially hundreds of thousands of years. In addition, nuclear reactors’ use of water is more intensive than fossil fuel technologies, and a majority of existing reactors utilize the most water-intensive once-through cooling systems.

Regardless, however, rather than only comparing them to fossil fuels, EPA should have compared these impacts to the full range of alternatives, including renewables and efficiency, which do not have such problems.

EPA leaves out a host of other environmental impacts unique to nuclear, including uranium mining and nuclear accidents.

There are over 10,000 abandoned uranium mines throughout the US, which are subject to lax environmental standards, pose major groundwater and public health risks, present serious environmental justice concerns, and could entail billions in site cleanup and remediation costs.

The failure to consider the impacts of a nuclear accident is a glaring oversight, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. EPA must consider both the environmental and economic impact of nuclear accidents.

Renewables can do the job!

In general, the Clean Power Plan’s consideration of nuclear appears to be based on a dangerous fallacy: that closed reactors must be replaced with fossil fuel generation, presumably because other low- / zero-carbon resources could not make up the difference.

In fact, renewable energy growth has surpassed all other forms of new generation for going on three years, making up 48% of all new electricity generation brought online from 2011 to July 2014. [2]

The growth rate of wind energy alone (up to 12,000 MW per year) would be sufficient to replace all of the ‘at-risk’ nuclear capacity within two years, at lower cost than the market price of electricity, [3] let alone at the subsidized rate for nuclear the draft rule suggests.

Assuming that closed reactors will be replaced with fossil fuel generation both encourages states to waste resources trying to ‘preserve’ (or even build) uneconomical reactors rather than on more cost-effective and productive investments in renewables and efficiency.

While states are free to develop their implementation plans without using the specific energy sources included in the BSER, the rule should not promote such foolishness.

No amount of spending or subsidies for nuclear has been effective at reducing the technology’s costs nor overcoming lengthy construction times and delays, whereas spending on renewables and efficiency has had the effect of lowering their costs and increasing their rate of deployment.

The economic problems facing currently operating reactors merely underscore the point that nuclear is not a cost-effective way of reducing emissions.

We are hopeful that the Clean Power Plan will be a watershed in setting the country on a path to emissions reductions and climate action, and we are grateful to the EPA for taking this step.

We believe that correcting the problems with the way nuclear is considered in the draft rule, and increasing the role of renewables and efficiency, will make the Clean Power Plan much stronger and lead states to implement it more productively and cost-effectively.

 

 

Action – organizations: Make sure your organization is signed on to our comments on the Clean Power Plan, which expand on the points above. The comments, and current list of endorsers, are here. If your organization is not listed, please sign on now by sending an e-mail to me at nirsnet@nirs.org with your name, title, organization name, city, and state (and country if outside the US – we encourage our international friends to support us in this effort!). Please sign on by midnight, Sunday, November 30, 2014.

Action – individuals: Please send in your comments on our action page here. And please share the action page with your friends and colleagues using the logos at its top, or share our previous Alert on the issue on Facebook and Twitter here. More than 19,000 of you have acted so far; we want to top 20,000 (do I hear 25,000?) comments before the December 1 deadline. Your help in outreach is essential to meet that goal.

Tim Judson is Executive Director of Nuclear Information & Resource Service, Takoma Park, MD.

For full list of signatories see NIRS.

References

1. Shaffer, David. ‘Xcel management blamed for cost overruns at Monticello nuclear plant‘. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 9, 2014.

2. Sun Day Campaign. ‘Renewables Provide 56 Percent of New US Electrical Generating Capacity in First Half of 2014‘. July 21, 2014.

3. Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory. ‘2013 Wind Technologies Market Report‘. US Department of Energy. August 18, 2014.

 




387540

There’s no place for nuclear in the ‘Clean Power Plan’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Dear Administrator Gina McCarthy,

We strongly support the Environmental Protection Agency’s goals in the Clean Power Plan draft regulation, and we are grateful for the agency’s leadership in setting a critical policy for reducing emissions from the electricity generation sector.

We also appreciate the fact that the Clean Power Plan’s purpose is to create enforceable goals for states to reduce emissions, and a framework (the Best System of Emissions Reduction / BSER) for them to implement and comply with the targets.

The framework must be flexible and adaptable, to account for technological advances and regional differences in energy resources and regulatory systems, but it must also encourage rational and effective policies.

Unfortunately, the treatment of nuclear energy in the draft rule is unsupported by meaningful analysis, and would make it possible for states to implement the rule in ways that are counterproductive to the Clean Power Plan’s purpose of reducing emissions.

The role of nuclear power must be re-evaluated

We are, additionally, very concerned about industry proposals to expand provisions to encourage nuclear. We urge the EPA to conduct a thorough and fact-based analysis of nuclear, and to do the following:

  1. Remove the preservation of existing nuclear reactors from the BSER.
  2. Do not force Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee to finish building new reactors.
  3. Conduct a thorough and accurate analysis of the environmental impacts of nuclear power, from radioactive waste and uranium mining to reactor accidents and water use.
  4. Recognize and incorporate the much greater role renewable energy and efficiency can, will, and must play in reducing carbon emissions and replacing both fossil fuels and nuclear.

We recognize that the EPA has undertaken a monumental task in developing the Clean Power Plan – perhaps the most important single step in setting the U.S. on the path to reducing emissions enough to avert the worst of global warming and climate change.

It is essential that we begin making substantial reductions in emissions immediately, and that the institutional inertia and narrow self-interest of utilities and major power companies do not stand in the way of deploying the most cost-effective and environmentally sustainable energy solutions.

For that very reason, it is important the regulation ensures states do not get off on the wrong foot and implement the rule in ways that are counterproductive.

False and irrational assumptions

Unfortunately, the Clean Power Plan’s treatment of nuclear incentivizes the preservation and expansion of a technology that is and has always been the most expensive, inflexible, and dangerous complement to fossil fuels.

The Clean Power Plan incorporates nuclear into the BSER in two ways:

  • Assumes five new reactors will be completed and brought online in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and irrationally estimates the cost of doing so as $0. In fact, billions more remain to be spent on these reactors and there is a great deal of uncertainty about when, if ever, they will be completed, facing years of delays and billions in cost overruns. The cost assumption would force states to complete the reactors no matter the cost, rather than enabling them to choose better ways to meet their emissions goals. Even though renewables and efficiency could be deployed at lower cost than nuclear, the draft rule would make it look like they are much more expensive because of the zero-cost assumption about completing the reactors.
  • Encourages states to ‘preserve’ reactors economically at-risk of being closed, equivalent to 6% of each state’s existing nuclear generation. While it is true that about 6% of the nation’s operating reactors may close for economic reasons, this provision encourages every state to subsidize existing reactors, greatly underestimates the cost of doing so, and overestimates their role in reducing emissions. Uneconomical reactors have high and rising operating costs, and cannot compete with renewables and efficiency. If anything, EPA should simply recommend that low-carbon energy sources be replaced with other low-carbon resources, but singling out nuclear for ‘preservation’ suggests it is better for states to lock themselves into obsolete and increasingly uneconomical nuclear.

The rule also says states may utilize two other ways of adding nuclear capacity as options for achieving the goals, even though they are not incorporated in the BSER:

  • New reactors other than those currently in construction. EPA recognizes that new nuclear is too expensive to be included in the BSER, so it should not suggest states consider it as a way of meeting their emissions goals.
  • Power uprate modifications to increase the generation capacity of existing reactors. Power uprates are capital-intensive and expensive, and several recent projects have been cancelled or suffered major cost overruns, in the case of Minnesota’s Monticello reactor, at a total cost greater than most new reactors ($10 million/megawatt). [1]

Rather than suggesting states waste resources on nuclear generation too expensive and infeasible to be included in the BSER, EPA should include an analysis of these problems so that states can better evaluate their options and select lower-cost, more reliable means for reducing emissions, such as renewables and efficiency.

Serious nuclear concerns ignored

The Clean Power Plan also considers some non-air quality impacts of nuclear generation, as it is required to do under the Clean Air Act. However, the EPA’s evaluation is both woefully incomplete and alarmingly inadequate. EPA dismisses concerns about radioactive waste and nuclear power’s impact on water resources, simply characterizing them as equivalent to problems with fossil fuel generation.

In fact, radioactive waste is an intractable problem that threatens the environment for potentially hundreds of thousands of years. In addition, nuclear reactors’ use of water is more intensive than fossil fuel technologies, and a majority of existing reactors utilize the most water-intensive once-through cooling systems.

Regardless, however, rather than only comparing them to fossil fuels, EPA should have compared these impacts to the full range of alternatives, including renewables and efficiency, which do not have such problems.

EPA leaves out a host of other environmental impacts unique to nuclear, including uranium mining and nuclear accidents.

There are over 10,000 abandoned uranium mines throughout the US, which are subject to lax environmental standards, pose major groundwater and public health risks, present serious environmental justice concerns, and could entail billions in site cleanup and remediation costs.

The failure to consider the impacts of a nuclear accident is a glaring oversight, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. EPA must consider both the environmental and economic impact of nuclear accidents.

Renewables can do the job!

In general, the Clean Power Plan’s consideration of nuclear appears to be based on a dangerous fallacy: that closed reactors must be replaced with fossil fuel generation, presumably because other low- / zero-carbon resources could not make up the difference.

In fact, renewable energy growth has surpassed all other forms of new generation for going on three years, making up 48% of all new electricity generation brought online from 2011 to July 2014. [2]

The growth rate of wind energy alone (up to 12,000 MW per year) would be sufficient to replace all of the ‘at-risk’ nuclear capacity within two years, at lower cost than the market price of electricity, [3] let alone at the subsidized rate for nuclear the draft rule suggests.

Assuming that closed reactors will be replaced with fossil fuel generation both encourages states to waste resources trying to ‘preserve’ (or even build) uneconomical reactors rather than on more cost-effective and productive investments in renewables and efficiency.

While states are free to develop their implementation plans without using the specific energy sources included in the BSER, the rule should not promote such foolishness.

No amount of spending or subsidies for nuclear has been effective at reducing the technology’s costs nor overcoming lengthy construction times and delays, whereas spending on renewables and efficiency has had the effect of lowering their costs and increasing their rate of deployment.

The economic problems facing currently operating reactors merely underscore the point that nuclear is not a cost-effective way of reducing emissions.

We are hopeful that the Clean Power Plan will be a watershed in setting the country on a path to emissions reductions and climate action, and we are grateful to the EPA for taking this step.

We believe that correcting the problems with the way nuclear is considered in the draft rule, and increasing the role of renewables and efficiency, will make the Clean Power Plan much stronger and lead states to implement it more productively and cost-effectively.

 

 

Action – organizations: Make sure your organization is signed on to our comments on the Clean Power Plan, which expand on the points above. The comments, and current list of endorsers, are here. If your organization is not listed, please sign on now by sending an e-mail to me at nirsnet@nirs.org with your name, title, organization name, city, and state (and country if outside the US – we encourage our international friends to support us in this effort!). Please sign on by midnight, Sunday, November 30, 2014.

Action – individuals: Please send in your comments on our action page here. And please share the action page with your friends and colleagues using the logos at its top, or share our previous Alert on the issue on Facebook and Twitter here. More than 19,000 of you have acted so far; we want to top 20,000 (do I hear 25,000?) comments before the December 1 deadline. Your help in outreach is essential to meet that goal.

Tim Judson is Executive Director of Nuclear Information & Resource Service, Takoma Park, MD.

For full list of signatories see NIRS.

References

1. Shaffer, David. ‘Xcel management blamed for cost overruns at Monticello nuclear plant‘. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 9, 2014.

2. Sun Day Campaign. ‘Renewables Provide 56 Percent of New US Electrical Generating Capacity in First Half of 2014‘. July 21, 2014.

3. Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory. ‘2013 Wind Technologies Market Report‘. US Department of Energy. August 18, 2014.

 




387540

There’s no place for nuclear in the ‘Clean Power Plan’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Dear Administrator Gina McCarthy,

We strongly support the Environmental Protection Agency’s goals in the Clean Power Plan draft regulation, and we are grateful for the agency’s leadership in setting a critical policy for reducing emissions from the electricity generation sector.

We also appreciate the fact that the Clean Power Plan’s purpose is to create enforceable goals for states to reduce emissions, and a framework (the Best System of Emissions Reduction / BSER) for them to implement and comply with the targets.

The framework must be flexible and adaptable, to account for technological advances and regional differences in energy resources and regulatory systems, but it must also encourage rational and effective policies.

Unfortunately, the treatment of nuclear energy in the draft rule is unsupported by meaningful analysis, and would make it possible for states to implement the rule in ways that are counterproductive to the Clean Power Plan’s purpose of reducing emissions.

The role of nuclear power must be re-evaluated

We are, additionally, very concerned about industry proposals to expand provisions to encourage nuclear. We urge the EPA to conduct a thorough and fact-based analysis of nuclear, and to do the following:

  1. Remove the preservation of existing nuclear reactors from the BSER.
  2. Do not force Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee to finish building new reactors.
  3. Conduct a thorough and accurate analysis of the environmental impacts of nuclear power, from radioactive waste and uranium mining to reactor accidents and water use.
  4. Recognize and incorporate the much greater role renewable energy and efficiency can, will, and must play in reducing carbon emissions and replacing both fossil fuels and nuclear.

We recognize that the EPA has undertaken a monumental task in developing the Clean Power Plan – perhaps the most important single step in setting the U.S. on the path to reducing emissions enough to avert the worst of global warming and climate change.

It is essential that we begin making substantial reductions in emissions immediately, and that the institutional inertia and narrow self-interest of utilities and major power companies do not stand in the way of deploying the most cost-effective and environmentally sustainable energy solutions.

For that very reason, it is important the regulation ensures states do not get off on the wrong foot and implement the rule in ways that are counterproductive.

False and irrational assumptions

Unfortunately, the Clean Power Plan’s treatment of nuclear incentivizes the preservation and expansion of a technology that is and has always been the most expensive, inflexible, and dangerous complement to fossil fuels.

The Clean Power Plan incorporates nuclear into the BSER in two ways:

  • Assumes five new reactors will be completed and brought online in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and irrationally estimates the cost of doing so as $0. In fact, billions more remain to be spent on these reactors and there is a great deal of uncertainty about when, if ever, they will be completed, facing years of delays and billions in cost overruns. The cost assumption would force states to complete the reactors no matter the cost, rather than enabling them to choose better ways to meet their emissions goals. Even though renewables and efficiency could be deployed at lower cost than nuclear, the draft rule would make it look like they are much more expensive because of the zero-cost assumption about completing the reactors.
  • Encourages states to ‘preserve’ reactors economically at-risk of being closed, equivalent to 6% of each state’s existing nuclear generation. While it is true that about 6% of the nation’s operating reactors may close for economic reasons, this provision encourages every state to subsidize existing reactors, greatly underestimates the cost of doing so, and overestimates their role in reducing emissions. Uneconomical reactors have high and rising operating costs, and cannot compete with renewables and efficiency. If anything, EPA should simply recommend that low-carbon energy sources be replaced with other low-carbon resources, but singling out nuclear for ‘preservation’ suggests it is better for states to lock themselves into obsolete and increasingly uneconomical nuclear.

The rule also says states may utilize two other ways of adding nuclear capacity as options for achieving the goals, even though they are not incorporated in the BSER:

  • New reactors other than those currently in construction. EPA recognizes that new nuclear is too expensive to be included in the BSER, so it should not suggest states consider it as a way of meeting their emissions goals.
  • Power uprate modifications to increase the generation capacity of existing reactors. Power uprates are capital-intensive and expensive, and several recent projects have been cancelled or suffered major cost overruns, in the case of Minnesota’s Monticello reactor, at a total cost greater than most new reactors ($10 million/megawatt). [1]

Rather than suggesting states waste resources on nuclear generation too expensive and infeasible to be included in the BSER, EPA should include an analysis of these problems so that states can better evaluate their options and select lower-cost, more reliable means for reducing emissions, such as renewables and efficiency.

Serious nuclear concerns ignored

The Clean Power Plan also considers some non-air quality impacts of nuclear generation, as it is required to do under the Clean Air Act. However, the EPA’s evaluation is both woefully incomplete and alarmingly inadequate. EPA dismisses concerns about radioactive waste and nuclear power’s impact on water resources, simply characterizing them as equivalent to problems with fossil fuel generation.

In fact, radioactive waste is an intractable problem that threatens the environment for potentially hundreds of thousands of years. In addition, nuclear reactors’ use of water is more intensive than fossil fuel technologies, and a majority of existing reactors utilize the most water-intensive once-through cooling systems.

Regardless, however, rather than only comparing them to fossil fuels, EPA should have compared these impacts to the full range of alternatives, including renewables and efficiency, which do not have such problems.

EPA leaves out a host of other environmental impacts unique to nuclear, including uranium mining and nuclear accidents.

There are over 10,000 abandoned uranium mines throughout the US, which are subject to lax environmental standards, pose major groundwater and public health risks, present serious environmental justice concerns, and could entail billions in site cleanup and remediation costs.

The failure to consider the impacts of a nuclear accident is a glaring oversight, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. EPA must consider both the environmental and economic impact of nuclear accidents.

Renewables can do the job!

In general, the Clean Power Plan’s consideration of nuclear appears to be based on a dangerous fallacy: that closed reactors must be replaced with fossil fuel generation, presumably because other low- / zero-carbon resources could not make up the difference.

In fact, renewable energy growth has surpassed all other forms of new generation for going on three years, making up 48% of all new electricity generation brought online from 2011 to July 2014. [2]

The growth rate of wind energy alone (up to 12,000 MW per year) would be sufficient to replace all of the ‘at-risk’ nuclear capacity within two years, at lower cost than the market price of electricity, [3] let alone at the subsidized rate for nuclear the draft rule suggests.

Assuming that closed reactors will be replaced with fossil fuel generation both encourages states to waste resources trying to ‘preserve’ (or even build) uneconomical reactors rather than on more cost-effective and productive investments in renewables and efficiency.

While states are free to develop their implementation plans without using the specific energy sources included in the BSER, the rule should not promote such foolishness.

No amount of spending or subsidies for nuclear has been effective at reducing the technology’s costs nor overcoming lengthy construction times and delays, whereas spending on renewables and efficiency has had the effect of lowering their costs and increasing their rate of deployment.

The economic problems facing currently operating reactors merely underscore the point that nuclear is not a cost-effective way of reducing emissions.

We are hopeful that the Clean Power Plan will be a watershed in setting the country on a path to emissions reductions and climate action, and we are grateful to the EPA for taking this step.

We believe that correcting the problems with the way nuclear is considered in the draft rule, and increasing the role of renewables and efficiency, will make the Clean Power Plan much stronger and lead states to implement it more productively and cost-effectively.

 

 

Action – organizations: Make sure your organization is signed on to our comments on the Clean Power Plan, which expand on the points above. The comments, and current list of endorsers, are here. If your organization is not listed, please sign on now by sending an e-mail to me at nirsnet@nirs.org with your name, title, organization name, city, and state (and country if outside the US – we encourage our international friends to support us in this effort!). Please sign on by midnight, Sunday, November 30, 2014.

Action – individuals: Please send in your comments on our action page here. And please share the action page with your friends and colleagues using the logos at its top, or share our previous Alert on the issue on Facebook and Twitter here. More than 19,000 of you have acted so far; we want to top 20,000 (do I hear 25,000?) comments before the December 1 deadline. Your help in outreach is essential to meet that goal.

Tim Judson is Executive Director of Nuclear Information & Resource Service, Takoma Park, MD.

For full list of signatories see NIRS.

References

1. Shaffer, David. ‘Xcel management blamed for cost overruns at Monticello nuclear plant‘. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 9, 2014.

2. Sun Day Campaign. ‘Renewables Provide 56 Percent of New US Electrical Generating Capacity in First Half of 2014‘. July 21, 2014.

3. Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory. ‘2013 Wind Technologies Market Report‘. US Department of Energy. August 18, 2014.

 




387540

Plan to label tar sands as ‘polluting’ scrapped by EU Updated for 2026

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    The European Commission yesterday proposed legislation to toss out a requirement to label tar sands oil as dirtier than other fossil fuels – a move that is likely to bolster Canada’s bitumen industry as it jockeys to break into European markets.

    Five years ago the Commission agreed to a piece of climate legislation called the ‘Fuel Quality Directive’, which was to be implemented in 2010 with the aim of cutting transport fuel emissions by 6% by the year 2020.

    The Commission previously proposed under this directive to require that that tar sands be reported as a greater carbon emitter than conventional crude, which could have led to a penalty on bitumen, most of which comes from Canada.

    However, following years of heavy industry pressure and government stalling, the plan still has not gone into effect – and now it is being withdrawn

    The price of an EU trade deal with the US and Canada?

    According to a report released this summer by Friends of the Earth Europe, Canada and the United States have aggressively lobbied to weaken the proposal by using negotiations over a ‘free trade’ deal with Europe-the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership-to press for a loosening of protections against tar sands.

    The proposed legislation unveiled Tuesday suggests this lobbying was successful. The submitted rules require refiners exporting fuel to the EU to report only an average of the carbon intensity of the feedstock used in making fuels.

    They do, therefore, not have to single out fuels derived from tar sands as more polluting, though a method is retained for calculating the carbon intensity of different fuel types over their lifecycle. These figures can then be used by states in calculating their mandatory 6% emissions cuts.

    “It is no secret that our initial proposal could not go through, due to resistance faced in some member states”, Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said in a statement.

    “However, the Commission is today giving this another push, to try and ensure that in the future, there will be a methodology and thus an incentive to choose less polluting fuels over more polluting ones like, for example, oil sands.”

    Efforts to keep out tar sands oil ‘weakened’

    Critics charge that the new methodology, which was first revealed to the press in June, weakens efforts to disincentivize tar sands imports into Europe.

    The move by the Commission comes despite the fact that it has officially recognized that tar sands oil extraction is dangerous for the planet.

    Bitumen is one of the dirtiest fuels on earth, produces up to five times more carbon than conventional crude oil, and its extraction process is extremely energy-intensive and destructive to ecosystems and creates large reservoirs of toxic waste.

    “The Commission has recognized the highly polluting nature of tar sands but is going to let this climate killer be used by European oil companies with no penalty at all”, said Colin Roche, extractives campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe.

    “The Commission has clearly seen the problem but – under heavy pressure from the oil industry and the Canadian and US government – chosen not to act on it.”

    Tuesday’s proposal will be put through a two-month fast-track approval process and still must be debated by member states and rubber stamped by the European Parliament.

    In June, the first shipment of tar sands to Europe was met with protests, with demonstrators urging that tar sands must be left in the ground.

    The release of the Commission’s proposal on Tuesday comes the same day 700,000 barrels of tar sands oil are slated to arrive in Italy, marking the second such shipment to Europe.

     

     

    Sources: Common Dreams and EuroActiv. This article is substantially based on the Common Dreams article by Sarah Lazre, but has been changed too much for us to run it under her name.

     

     

     




    385158

A global plan for road expansion that doesn’t cost the earth Updated for 2026

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“The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.” These might sound like the words of an eco-terrorist, but it’s actually a direct quote from Professor Eneas Salati, a forest climatologist and one of Brazil’s most respected scientists.

Many scientists share Salati’s anxieties because we’re living in the most explosive era of road expansion in human history.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2050 we will have 60% more roads than we did in 2010. That’s about 25 million kilometres of new paved roads – enough to circle the Earth more than 600 times.

In new research published today in Nature, we’ve developed a global ‘roadmap’ of where to put those roads to avoid damaging the environment. Our maps are also available to the public on a new website.

Roads today are proliferating virtually everywhere – for exploiting timber, minerals, oil and natural gas; for promoting regional trade and development; and for building burgeoning networks of energy infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams, power lines and gas lines.

Security and development versus biodiversity

Even national security and paranoia play a role. The first major roads built in the Brazilian Amazon were motivated by fears that Colombia or the US might try to annex the Amazon and steal its valuable natural resources.

India’s current spate of road building along its northern frontier is all about defending its disputed territories from an increasingly strident China.

According to the IEA, around nine-tenths of new roads will be built in developing nations, which sustain the most biologically important ecosystems on Earth, such as tropical and subtropical rainforests and wildlife-rich savanna-woodlands.

Crucially, such environments also store billions of tonnes of carbon, harbour hundreds of indigenous cultures, and have a major stabilizing influence on the global climate.

‘Killer roads’ open up forests for logging, farms and hunting

Why are roads regarded as disasters for nature?

Far too often, when a new road cuts into a forest or wilderness, illegal poachers, miners, loggers or land speculators quickly invade – unleashing a Pandora’s box of environmental problems.

For instance, my colleagues and I recently found that 95% of all forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon has occurred within 5 kilometres of roads. Other research has shown that major forest fires spike sharply within a few dozen kilometres of Amazon roads.

Notably, we also found that many Amazonian roads are illegal – for every kilometre of legal road, there were three kilometres of illegal roads.

The Congo Basin is reeling from a spree of forest-road building by industrial loggers, with over 50,000 kilometres of new roads bulldozed into the rainforest in recent years.

This has opened up the forest to a tsunami of hunting. The toll on wildlife has been appalling; in the last decade, for instance, around two-thirds of all forest elephants have been slaughtered for their valuable ivory tusks.

In Peru, a new highway slicing across the western Amazon has led to a massive influx of illegal gold miners into formerly pristine rainforests, turning them into virtual moonscapes and polluting entire river systems with the toxic mercury they use to separate the gold from river sediments.

The first cut is the cruellest

Many road researchers believe the only safe way to protect a wilderness is by ‘avoiding the first cut’ – keeping it road free. This is because an initial road opens up a forest to deforestation, which then spreads contagiously, like a series of tumors.

And that cancer quickly grows. An initial road slicing into a wilderness typically spawns a network of secondary and tertiary roads, allowing deforestation to easily metastasise.

For instance, the first major highway in the Amazon – completed in the early 1970s to link the cities of Belem and Brasilia – was initially just a razor-thin cut through the forest. Today, that narrow incision has grown into a 400-kilometre-wide slash of forest destruction across the entire eastern Amazon.

And yet, for all the environmental perils of roads, they are also an indispensable part of modern societies. Most economists love roads – seeing them as a cost-effective way to promote economic growth, encourage regional trade and provide access to natural resources and land suitable for agriculture.

How do we balance these two competing realities – between road lovers aspiring for wealth and social development, and road fearers hoping to avoid ecological Armageddon?

For those who want to know, a global roadmap

This vexing question has been the focus of a talented group of researchers I‘ve been leading over the past two years, from Harvard, Cambridge, Melbourne, Minnesota, Sheffield and James Cook Universities and the Conservation Strategy Fund.

Our scheme has two components. The first is a map that attempts to illustrate the natural values of all ecosystems worldwide. We built this map by combining data on biodiversity, endangered species, rare habitats, critical wilderness areas, and vital ecosystem services across the Earth.

We added in parks and other protected areas, as these are also high priorities for nature conservation.

The second component is a road-benefits map. It shows where roads could have the greatest benefits for humankind, especially for increasing food production.

Focusing on food is vital because, with continuing rapid population growth and changing human diets, global food demand is expected to double by 2050.

With roads, more food is grown, and reaches those that need it

Roads affect food because large expanses of the planet – especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and expanses of Asia and Latin America – are populated by small-scale farmers who produce much less food than they could if they had new or better roads.

Such roads could give them ready access to fertilizers, modern farming methods and urban markets to sell their crops.

In these regions most of the native vegetation has already been cleared, so intensifying farming shouldn’t have major environmental costs. In these contexts, new or better roads (along with other investments in modern farming methods) are a key way to help struggling farmers to boost their productivity.

A potential bonus of this strategy is that, as farming becomes more productive and rural livelihoods more prosperous, regions with better roads tend to act as ‘magnets’ – attracting people from elsewhere, such as the margins of vulnerable forests.

In this way, investing in better roads in appropriate areas can help to focus and intensify farming, accelerating food production while hopefully helping to spare other lands for nature conservation.

Conflict zones, but reasons to hope

By intersecting our environmental-values and road-benefits maps, we have estimated the relative risks and rewards of road building for Earth’s entire land surface – some 13.3 billion hectares in total.

In our map, green-toned areas are priorities for conservation where roads should be avoided if possible, and red-toned areas are priorities for agriculture.

Dark-toned areas are ‘conflict zones’ – where environmental and agricultural priorities are likely to clash. Light-coloured areas are lower priorities for both environment and farming.

The good news is that there are substantial areas of the planet where agriculture can be improved with modest environmental costs.

But there are also massive conflict zones – in Sub-Saharan Africa, expanses of Central and South America, and much of the Asia-Pacific region, among others. These hotbeds of conflict often occur where human population growth is rapid and there are many locally endemic species – those with small geographic ranges that are especially vulnerable to intensive development.

A global plan for road expansion – in the right places

Our global roadmap is, admittedly, an exceedingly ambitious effort. Yet our hope is that our strategy can be incorporated with finer-scale local information to help inform and improve planning decisions at national and regional scales.

Our effort is a first step toward a vital goal: a global plan for road expansion. We’re not so naïve as to believe everyone will immediately adopt it, but such efforts are unquestionably a crucial priority.

There is precious little time to lose if we don’t want to see the world’s last wild places overwhelmed by an onslaught of roads, destructive development and the roar of fast-moving vehicles.

 

 

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. In addition to his appointment as Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University, he also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands. This chair is co-sponsored by Utrecht University and WWF-Netherlands.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




383322

A global plan for road expansion that doesn’t cost the earth Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




“The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.” These might sound like the words of an eco-terrorist, but it’s actually a direct quote from Professor Eneas Salati, a forest climatologist and one of Brazil’s most respected scientists.

Many scientists share Salati’s anxieties because we’re living in the most explosive era of road expansion in human history.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2050 we will have 60% more roads than we did in 2010. That’s about 25 million kilometres of new paved roads – enough to circle the Earth more than 600 times.

In new research published today in Nature, we’ve developed a global ‘roadmap’ of where to put those roads to avoid damaging the environment. Our maps are also available to the public on a new website.

Roads today are proliferating virtually everywhere – for exploiting timber, minerals, oil and natural gas; for promoting regional trade and development; and for building burgeoning networks of energy infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams, power lines and gas lines.

Security and development versus biodiversity

Even national security and paranoia play a role. The first major roads built in the Brazilian Amazon were motivated by fears that Colombia or the US might try to annex the Amazon and steal its valuable natural resources.

India’s current spate of road building along its northern frontier is all about defending its disputed territories from an increasingly strident China.

According to the IEA, around nine-tenths of new roads will be built in developing nations, which sustain the most biologically important ecosystems on Earth, such as tropical and subtropical rainforests and wildlife-rich savanna-woodlands.

Crucially, such environments also store billions of tonnes of carbon, harbour hundreds of indigenous cultures, and have a major stabilizing influence on the global climate.

‘Killer roads’ open up forests for logging, farms and hunting

Why are roads regarded as disasters for nature?

Far too often, when a new road cuts into a forest or wilderness, illegal poachers, miners, loggers or land speculators quickly invade – unleashing a Pandora’s box of environmental problems.

For instance, my colleagues and I recently found that 95% of all forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon has occurred within 5 kilometres of roads. Other research has shown that major forest fires spike sharply within a few dozen kilometres of Amazon roads.

Notably, we also found that many Amazonian roads are illegal – for every kilometre of legal road, there were three kilometres of illegal roads.

The Congo Basin is reeling from a spree of forest-road building by industrial loggers, with over 50,000 kilometres of new roads bulldozed into the rainforest in recent years.

This has opened up the forest to a tsunami of hunting. The toll on wildlife has been appalling; in the last decade, for instance, around two-thirds of all forest elephants have been slaughtered for their valuable ivory tusks.

In Peru, a new highway slicing across the western Amazon has led to a massive influx of illegal gold miners into formerly pristine rainforests, turning them into virtual moonscapes and polluting entire river systems with the toxic mercury they use to separate the gold from river sediments.

The first cut is the cruellest

Many road researchers believe the only safe way to protect a wilderness is by ‘avoiding the first cut’ – keeping it road free. This is because an initial road opens up a forest to deforestation, which then spreads contagiously, like a series of tumors.

And that cancer quickly grows. An initial road slicing into a wilderness typically spawns a network of secondary and tertiary roads, allowing deforestation to easily metastasise.

For instance, the first major highway in the Amazon – completed in the early 1970s to link the cities of Belem and Brasilia – was initially just a razor-thin cut through the forest. Today, that narrow incision has grown into a 400-kilometre-wide slash of forest destruction across the entire eastern Amazon.

And yet, for all the environmental perils of roads, they are also an indispensable part of modern societies. Most economists love roads – seeing them as a cost-effective way to promote economic growth, encourage regional trade and provide access to natural resources and land suitable for agriculture.

How do we balance these two competing realities – between road lovers aspiring for wealth and social development, and road fearers hoping to avoid ecological Armageddon?

For those who want to know, a global roadmap

This vexing question has been the focus of a talented group of researchers I‘ve been leading over the past two years, from Harvard, Cambridge, Melbourne, Minnesota, Sheffield and James Cook Universities and the Conservation Strategy Fund.

Our scheme has two components. The first is a map that attempts to illustrate the natural values of all ecosystems worldwide. We built this map by combining data on biodiversity, endangered species, rare habitats, critical wilderness areas, and vital ecosystem services across the Earth.

We added in parks and other protected areas, as these are also high priorities for nature conservation.

The second component is a road-benefits map. It shows where roads could have the greatest benefits for humankind, especially for increasing food production.

Focusing on food is vital because, with continuing rapid population growth and changing human diets, global food demand is expected to double by 2050.

With roads, more food is grown, and reaches those that need it

Roads affect food because large expanses of the planet – especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and expanses of Asia and Latin America – are populated by small-scale farmers who produce much less food than they could if they had new or better roads.

Such roads could give them ready access to fertilizers, modern farming methods and urban markets to sell their crops.

In these regions most of the native vegetation has already been cleared, so intensifying farming shouldn’t have major environmental costs. In these contexts, new or better roads (along with other investments in modern farming methods) are a key way to help struggling farmers to boost their productivity.

A potential bonus of this strategy is that, as farming becomes more productive and rural livelihoods more prosperous, regions with better roads tend to act as ‘magnets’ – attracting people from elsewhere, such as the margins of vulnerable forests.

In this way, investing in better roads in appropriate areas can help to focus and intensify farming, accelerating food production while hopefully helping to spare other lands for nature conservation.

Conflict zones, but reasons to hope

By intersecting our environmental-values and road-benefits maps, we have estimated the relative risks and rewards of road building for Earth’s entire land surface – some 13.3 billion hectares in total.

In our map, green-toned areas are priorities for conservation where roads should be avoided if possible, and red-toned areas are priorities for agriculture.

Dark-toned areas are ‘conflict zones’ – where environmental and agricultural priorities are likely to clash. Light-coloured areas are lower priorities for both environment and farming.

The good news is that there are substantial areas of the planet where agriculture can be improved with modest environmental costs.

But there are also massive conflict zones – in Sub-Saharan Africa, expanses of Central and South America, and much of the Asia-Pacific region, among others. These hotbeds of conflict often occur where human population growth is rapid and there are many locally endemic species – those with small geographic ranges that are especially vulnerable to intensive development.

A global plan for road expansion – in the right places

Our global roadmap is, admittedly, an exceedingly ambitious effort. Yet our hope is that our strategy can be incorporated with finer-scale local information to help inform and improve planning decisions at national and regional scales.

Our effort is a first step toward a vital goal: a global plan for road expansion. We’re not so naïve as to believe everyone will immediately adopt it, but such efforts are unquestionably a crucial priority.

There is precious little time to lose if we don’t want to see the world’s last wild places overwhelmed by an onslaught of roads, destructive development and the roar of fast-moving vehicles.

 

 

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. In addition to his appointment as Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University, he also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands. This chair is co-sponsored by Utrecht University and WWF-Netherlands.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




383322

A global plan for road expansion that doesn’t cost the earth Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




“The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.” These might sound like the words of an eco-terrorist, but it’s actually a direct quote from Professor Eneas Salati, a forest climatologist and one of Brazil’s most respected scientists.

Many scientists share Salati’s anxieties because we’re living in the most explosive era of road expansion in human history.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2050 we will have 60% more roads than we did in 2010. That’s about 25 million kilometres of new paved roads – enough to circle the Earth more than 600 times.

In new research published today in Nature, we’ve developed a global ‘roadmap’ of where to put those roads to avoid damaging the environment. Our maps are also available to the public on a new website.

Roads today are proliferating virtually everywhere – for exploiting timber, minerals, oil and natural gas; for promoting regional trade and development; and for building burgeoning networks of energy infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams, power lines and gas lines.

Security and development versus biodiversity

Even national security and paranoia play a role. The first major roads built in the Brazilian Amazon were motivated by fears that Colombia or the US might try to annex the Amazon and steal its valuable natural resources.

India’s current spate of road building along its northern frontier is all about defending its disputed territories from an increasingly strident China.

According to the IEA, around nine-tenths of new roads will be built in developing nations, which sustain the most biologically important ecosystems on Earth, such as tropical and subtropical rainforests and wildlife-rich savanna-woodlands.

Crucially, such environments also store billions of tonnes of carbon, harbour hundreds of indigenous cultures, and have a major stabilizing influence on the global climate.

‘Killer roads’ open up forests for logging, farms and hunting

Why are roads regarded as disasters for nature?

Far too often, when a new road cuts into a forest or wilderness, illegal poachers, miners, loggers or land speculators quickly invade – unleashing a Pandora’s box of environmental problems.

For instance, my colleagues and I recently found that 95% of all forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon has occurred within 5 kilometres of roads. Other research has shown that major forest fires spike sharply within a few dozen kilometres of Amazon roads.

Notably, we also found that many Amazonian roads are illegal – for every kilometre of legal road, there were three kilometres of illegal roads.

The Congo Basin is reeling from a spree of forest-road building by industrial loggers, with over 50,000 kilometres of new roads bulldozed into the rainforest in recent years.

This has opened up the forest to a tsunami of hunting. The toll on wildlife has been appalling; in the last decade, for instance, around two-thirds of all forest elephants have been slaughtered for their valuable ivory tusks.

In Peru, a new highway slicing across the western Amazon has led to a massive influx of illegal gold miners into formerly pristine rainforests, turning them into virtual moonscapes and polluting entire river systems with the toxic mercury they use to separate the gold from river sediments.

The first cut is the cruellest

Many road researchers believe the only safe way to protect a wilderness is by ‘avoiding the first cut’ – keeping it road free. This is because an initial road opens up a forest to deforestation, which then spreads contagiously, like a series of tumors.

And that cancer quickly grows. An initial road slicing into a wilderness typically spawns a network of secondary and tertiary roads, allowing deforestation to easily metastasise.

For instance, the first major highway in the Amazon – completed in the early 1970s to link the cities of Belem and Brasilia – was initially just a razor-thin cut through the forest. Today, that narrow incision has grown into a 400-kilometre-wide slash of forest destruction across the entire eastern Amazon.

And yet, for all the environmental perils of roads, they are also an indispensable part of modern societies. Most economists love roads – seeing them as a cost-effective way to promote economic growth, encourage regional trade and provide access to natural resources and land suitable for agriculture.

How do we balance these two competing realities – between road lovers aspiring for wealth and social development, and road fearers hoping to avoid ecological Armageddon?

For those who want to know, a global roadmap

This vexing question has been the focus of a talented group of researchers I‘ve been leading over the past two years, from Harvard, Cambridge, Melbourne, Minnesota, Sheffield and James Cook Universities and the Conservation Strategy Fund.

Our scheme has two components. The first is a map that attempts to illustrate the natural values of all ecosystems worldwide. We built this map by combining data on biodiversity, endangered species, rare habitats, critical wilderness areas, and vital ecosystem services across the Earth.

We added in parks and other protected areas, as these are also high priorities for nature conservation.

The second component is a road-benefits map. It shows where roads could have the greatest benefits for humankind, especially for increasing food production.

Focusing on food is vital because, with continuing rapid population growth and changing human diets, global food demand is expected to double by 2050.

With roads, more food is grown, and reaches those that need it

Roads affect food because large expanses of the planet – especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and expanses of Asia and Latin America – are populated by small-scale farmers who produce much less food than they could if they had new or better roads.

Such roads could give them ready access to fertilizers, modern farming methods and urban markets to sell their crops.

In these regions most of the native vegetation has already been cleared, so intensifying farming shouldn’t have major environmental costs. In these contexts, new or better roads (along with other investments in modern farming methods) are a key way to help struggling farmers to boost their productivity.

A potential bonus of this strategy is that, as farming becomes more productive and rural livelihoods more prosperous, regions with better roads tend to act as ‘magnets’ – attracting people from elsewhere, such as the margins of vulnerable forests.

In this way, investing in better roads in appropriate areas can help to focus and intensify farming, accelerating food production while hopefully helping to spare other lands for nature conservation.

Conflict zones, but reasons to hope

By intersecting our environmental-values and road-benefits maps, we have estimated the relative risks and rewards of road building for Earth’s entire land surface – some 13.3 billion hectares in total.

In our map, green-toned areas are priorities for conservation where roads should be avoided if possible, and red-toned areas are priorities for agriculture.

Dark-toned areas are ‘conflict zones’ – where environmental and agricultural priorities are likely to clash. Light-coloured areas are lower priorities for both environment and farming.

The good news is that there are substantial areas of the planet where agriculture can be improved with modest environmental costs.

But there are also massive conflict zones – in Sub-Saharan Africa, expanses of Central and South America, and much of the Asia-Pacific region, among others. These hotbeds of conflict often occur where human population growth is rapid and there are many locally endemic species – those with small geographic ranges that are especially vulnerable to intensive development.

A global plan for road expansion – in the right places

Our global roadmap is, admittedly, an exceedingly ambitious effort. Yet our hope is that our strategy can be incorporated with finer-scale local information to help inform and improve planning decisions at national and regional scales.

Our effort is a first step toward a vital goal: a global plan for road expansion. We’re not so naïve as to believe everyone will immediately adopt it, but such efforts are unquestionably a crucial priority.

There is precious little time to lose if we don’t want to see the world’s last wild places overwhelmed by an onslaught of roads, destructive development and the roar of fast-moving vehicles.

 

 

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. In addition to his appointment as Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University, he also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands. This chair is co-sponsored by Utrecht University and WWF-Netherlands.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




383322

A global plan for road expansion that doesn’t cost the earth Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




“The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.” These might sound like the words of an eco-terrorist, but it’s actually a direct quote from Professor Eneas Salati, a forest climatologist and one of Brazil’s most respected scientists.

Many scientists share Salati’s anxieties because we’re living in the most explosive era of road expansion in human history.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2050 we will have 60% more roads than we did in 2010. That’s about 25 million kilometres of new paved roads – enough to circle the Earth more than 600 times.

In new research published today in Nature, we’ve developed a global ‘roadmap’ of where to put those roads to avoid damaging the environment. Our maps are also available to the public on a new website.

Roads today are proliferating virtually everywhere – for exploiting timber, minerals, oil and natural gas; for promoting regional trade and development; and for building burgeoning networks of energy infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams, power lines and gas lines.

Security and development versus biodiversity

Even national security and paranoia play a role. The first major roads built in the Brazilian Amazon were motivated by fears that Colombia or the US might try to annex the Amazon and steal its valuable natural resources.

India’s current spate of road building along its northern frontier is all about defending its disputed territories from an increasingly strident China.

According to the IEA, around nine-tenths of new roads will be built in developing nations, which sustain the most biologically important ecosystems on Earth, such as tropical and subtropical rainforests and wildlife-rich savanna-woodlands.

Crucially, such environments also store billions of tonnes of carbon, harbour hundreds of indigenous cultures, and have a major stabilizing influence on the global climate.

‘Killer roads’ open up forests for logging, farms and hunting

Why are roads regarded as disasters for nature?

Far too often, when a new road cuts into a forest or wilderness, illegal poachers, miners, loggers or land speculators quickly invade – unleashing a Pandora’s box of environmental problems.

For instance, my colleagues and I recently found that 95% of all forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon has occurred within 5 kilometres of roads. Other research has shown that major forest fires spike sharply within a few dozen kilometres of Amazon roads.

Notably, we also found that many Amazonian roads are illegal – for every kilometre of legal road, there were three kilometres of illegal roads.

The Congo Basin is reeling from a spree of forest-road building by industrial loggers, with over 50,000 kilometres of new roads bulldozed into the rainforest in recent years.

This has opened up the forest to a tsunami of hunting. The toll on wildlife has been appalling; in the last decade, for instance, around two-thirds of all forest elephants have been slaughtered for their valuable ivory tusks.

In Peru, a new highway slicing across the western Amazon has led to a massive influx of illegal gold miners into formerly pristine rainforests, turning them into virtual moonscapes and polluting entire river systems with the toxic mercury they use to separate the gold from river sediments.

The first cut is the cruellest

Many road researchers believe the only safe way to protect a wilderness is by ‘avoiding the first cut’ – keeping it road free. This is because an initial road opens up a forest to deforestation, which then spreads contagiously, like a series of tumors.

And that cancer quickly grows. An initial road slicing into a wilderness typically spawns a network of secondary and tertiary roads, allowing deforestation to easily metastasise.

For instance, the first major highway in the Amazon – completed in the early 1970s to link the cities of Belem and Brasilia – was initially just a razor-thin cut through the forest. Today, that narrow incision has grown into a 400-kilometre-wide slash of forest destruction across the entire eastern Amazon.

And yet, for all the environmental perils of roads, they are also an indispensable part of modern societies. Most economists love roads – seeing them as a cost-effective way to promote economic growth, encourage regional trade and provide access to natural resources and land suitable for agriculture.

How do we balance these two competing realities – between road lovers aspiring for wealth and social development, and road fearers hoping to avoid ecological Armageddon?

For those who want to know, a global roadmap

This vexing question has been the focus of a talented group of researchers I‘ve been leading over the past two years, from Harvard, Cambridge, Melbourne, Minnesota, Sheffield and James Cook Universities and the Conservation Strategy Fund.

Our scheme has two components. The first is a map that attempts to illustrate the natural values of all ecosystems worldwide. We built this map by combining data on biodiversity, endangered species, rare habitats, critical wilderness areas, and vital ecosystem services across the Earth.

We added in parks and other protected areas, as these are also high priorities for nature conservation.

The second component is a road-benefits map. It shows where roads could have the greatest benefits for humankind, especially for increasing food production.

Focusing on food is vital because, with continuing rapid population growth and changing human diets, global food demand is expected to double by 2050.

With roads, more food is grown, and reaches those that need it

Roads affect food because large expanses of the planet – especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and expanses of Asia and Latin America – are populated by small-scale farmers who produce much less food than they could if they had new or better roads.

Such roads could give them ready access to fertilizers, modern farming methods and urban markets to sell their crops.

In these regions most of the native vegetation has already been cleared, so intensifying farming shouldn’t have major environmental costs. In these contexts, new or better roads (along with other investments in modern farming methods) are a key way to help struggling farmers to boost their productivity.

A potential bonus of this strategy is that, as farming becomes more productive and rural livelihoods more prosperous, regions with better roads tend to act as ‘magnets’ – attracting people from elsewhere, such as the margins of vulnerable forests.

In this way, investing in better roads in appropriate areas can help to focus and intensify farming, accelerating food production while hopefully helping to spare other lands for nature conservation.

Conflict zones, but reasons to hope

By intersecting our environmental-values and road-benefits maps, we have estimated the relative risks and rewards of road building for Earth’s entire land surface – some 13.3 billion hectares in total.

In our map, green-toned areas are priorities for conservation where roads should be avoided if possible, and red-toned areas are priorities for agriculture.

Dark-toned areas are ‘conflict zones’ – where environmental and agricultural priorities are likely to clash. Light-coloured areas are lower priorities for both environment and farming.

The good news is that there are substantial areas of the planet where agriculture can be improved with modest environmental costs.

But there are also massive conflict zones – in Sub-Saharan Africa, expanses of Central and South America, and much of the Asia-Pacific region, among others. These hotbeds of conflict often occur where human population growth is rapid and there are many locally endemic species – those with small geographic ranges that are especially vulnerable to intensive development.

A global plan for road expansion – in the right places

Our global roadmap is, admittedly, an exceedingly ambitious effort. Yet our hope is that our strategy can be incorporated with finer-scale local information to help inform and improve planning decisions at national and regional scales.

Our effort is a first step toward a vital goal: a global plan for road expansion. We’re not so naïve as to believe everyone will immediately adopt it, but such efforts are unquestionably a crucial priority.

There is precious little time to lose if we don’t want to see the world’s last wild places overwhelmed by an onslaught of roads, destructive development and the roar of fast-moving vehicles.

 

 

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. In addition to his appointment as Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University, he also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands. This chair is co-sponsored by Utrecht University and WWF-Netherlands.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




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