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Running in reverse: the world’s ‘nuclear power renaissance’ Updated for 2026

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The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear plant is looking increasingly like a dead duck – or possibly parrot.

As the Financial Times reports today, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has abandoned plans to examine the ‘value of money’ Hinkley C offers taxpayers – because no deal has been reached and none is expected before the general election in May.

In other words, all that bullish talk about Hinkley C launching Britain’s ‘nuclear renaissance’ has melted away like a spring frost in the morning sun.

There is no deal on the table for the PAC to examine – indeed it’s looking increasingly as if there may never be a deal, in spite of the astonishingly generous £30 billion support package on offer, at the expense of UK taxpayers and energy users.

Only last week Austria confirmed that it will launch a legal action against the Hinkley C support package, on the grounds that it constitutes illegal state aid. The action looks likely to succeed – and even if it doesn’t, it’s predicted to ensure at least four years of delay.

The nuclear slump has gone global!

But it’s not just in the UK that the ‘nuclear renaissance has hit the rocks. Global nuclear power capacity remained stagnant in 2014 according to the World Nuclear Association:

  • Five new reactors began supplying electricity and three were permanently shut down.
  • There are now 437 ‘operable’ reactors compared with 435 reactors a year ago. Thus the number of reactors increased by two (0.5%) and nuclear generating capacity increased by 2.4 gigawatts (GW) or 0.6%. (For comparison, around 100 GW of solar and wind power capacity were built in 2014, up from 74 GW in 2013.)
  • Construction started on just three reactors during 2014. A total of 70 reactors (74 GW) are under construction.

Thus a long-standing pattern of stagnation continues. In the two decades from 1995-2014, the number of power reactors leapt from 436 to 437.

Ten years ago, the rhetoric about a nuclear power renaissance was in full swing. In those ten years, the number of reactors has fallen from 443 to 437. But despite 20 years of stagnation, the World Nuclear Association remains upbeat. Its latest report, The World Nuclear Supply Chain: Outlook 2030, envisages the start-up of 266 new reactors by 2030.

The figure is implausible – it piles heroic assumptions upon heroic assumptions. If only the World Nuclear Association would take bets on its ridiculous projections, which are always proven to be wrong. Nuclear Energy Insider is a more sober and reflective in an end-of-year review published in December:

“As we embark on a new year, there are distinct challenges and opportunities on the horizon for the nuclear power industry. Many industry experts believe that technology like Small Nuclear Reactors (SMR) represent a strong future for nuclear.

“Yet, rapidly growing renewable energy sources, a bountiful and inexpensive supply of natural gas and oil, and the aging population of existing nuclear power plants represent challenges that the industry must address moving forward.”

Nuclear power’s ever shrinking share of global power generation

Steve Kidd, a nuclear consultant who worked for the World Nuclear Association for 17 years, is still more downbeat:

“Even with rapid nuclear growth in China, nuclear’s share in world electricity is declining. The industry is doing little more than hoping that politicians and financiers eventually see sense and back huge nuclear building programmes. On current trends, this is looking more and more unlikely.

“The high and rising nuclear share in climate-friendly scenarios is false hope, with little in the real outlook giving them any substance. Far more likely is the situation posited in the World Nuclear Industry Status Report …

“Although this report is produced by anti-nuclear activists, its picture of the current reactors gradually shutting down with numbers of new reactors failing to replace them has more than an element of truth given the recent trends.”

Kidd proposes reducing nuclear costs by simplifying and standardising current reactor designs.

Meanwhile, as the International Energy Agency’s World Economic Outlook 2014 report noted, nuclear growth will be “concentrated in markets where electricity is supplied at regulated prices, utilities have state backing or governments act to facilitate private investment.”

Conversely, “nuclear power faces major challenges in competitive markets where there are significant market and regulatory risks, and public acceptance remains a critical issue worldwide.”

Four countries supposedly driving a nuclear renaissance

Let’s briefly consider countries where the number of power reactors might increase or decrease by ten or more over the next 15-20 years. Generally, it is striking how much uncertainty there is about the nuclear programs in these countries.

China is one of the few exceptions. China has 22 operable reactors, 27 reactors under construction and 64 planned. Significant, rapid growth can be expected unless China’s nuclear program is derailed by a major accident or a serious act of sabotage or terrorism. But there are plenty of reasons to be concerned:

In the other three countries supposedly driving a nuclear renaissance – Russia, South Korea and India – growth is likely to be modest and slow.

Russia has 34 operating reactors and nine under construction. Just three reactors began operating in the past decade and the pattern of slow growth is likely to continue. As for Russia’s ambitious nuclear export program, Steve Kidd noted in October 2014 that it “is reasonable to suggest that it is highly unlikely that Russia will succeed in carrying out even half of the projects in which it claims to be closely involved”.

South Korea has 23 operating reactors, five under construction and eight planned. Earlier plans for rapid nuclear expansion in South Korea have been derailed by the Fukushima disaster, a major scandal over forged safety documents, and a hacking attack on Korea Hydro’s computer network.

India has 21 operating reactors, six under construction and 22 planned. But India’s nuclear program is in a “deep freeze” according to a November 2014 article in the Hindustan Times.

Likewise, India Today reported on January 8: “The Indian nuclear programme is on the brink of distress. For the past four years, no major tender has gone through – a period that was, ironically, supposed to mark the beginning of an Indian nuclear renaissance in the aftermath of the landmark India-US civil nuclear deal.”

A November 2014 article in The Hindu newspaper notes that three factors have put a break on India’s reactor-import plans: “the exorbitant price of French- and U.S.-origin reactors, the accident-liability issue, and grass-roots opposition to the planned multi-reactor complexes.”

In addition, unresolved disagreements regarding safeguards and non-proliferation assurances are delaying US and European investment in India’s nuclear program.

What about South Africa and Saudi Arabia?

Last year Saudi Araba announced plans to build 16 reactors by 2032. Already, the timeline has been pushed back from 2032 to 2040. As with any country embarking on a nuclear power program for the first time, Saudi Arabia faces daunting logistical and workforce issues.

Numerous nuclear supplier are lining up to supply Saudi Arabia’s nuclear power program but political obstacles could easily emerge, not least because Saudi officials (and royalty) have repeatedly said that the Kingdom will build nuclear weapons if Iran’s nuclear program is not constrained.

As for South Africa, its on-again off-again nuclear power program is on again with plans for 9.6 GW of nuclear capacity in addition to the two operating reactors at Koeberg. In 2007, state energy utility Eskom approved a plan for 20 GW of new nuclear capacity.

Areva’s EPR and Westinghouse’s AP1000 were short-listed and bids were submitted. But in 2008 Eskom announced that it would not proceed with either of the bids due to lack of finance.

Thus the latest plan for 9.6 GW of new nuclear capacity in South Africa is being treated with scepticism. As academic Professor Steve Thomas noted in a July 2014 report:

“Overall, a renewed call for tenders (or perhaps bilateral negotiations with a preferred bidder) is likely to produce the same result as 2008: a very high price for an unproven technology that will only be financeable if the South African public, either in the form of electricity consumers or as taxpayers, is prepared to give open ended guarantees.”

Nuclear negawatts in North America

Now to briefly consider those countries where a significant decline of nuclear power is possible or likely over the next 15-20 years, patterns of stagnation or slow decline in North America and western Europe can safely be predicted.

Steve Kidd wrote in May 2014 that uranium demand (and nuclear power capacity) “will almost certainly fall in the key markets in Western Europe and North America” in the period to 2030.

The United States has 99 operable reactors. Five reactors are under construction, “with little prospect for more” according to Oilprice.com. Decisions to shut down just as many reactors have been taken in the past few years.

As the Financial Times noted last year, two decisions that really rattled the industry were the closures of Dominion Resources’ Kewaunee plant in Wisconsin and Entergy’s Vermont Yankee – both were operating and licensed to keep operating into the 2030s, but became uneconomic to keep in operation.

The US Energy Information Administration estimated in April 2014 that 10.8 GW of nuclear capacity – around 10% of total US nuclear capacity – could be shut down by the end of the decade.

The most that the US nuclear industry can hope for is stagnation underpinned by new legislative and regulatory measures favouring nuclear power along with multi-billion dollar government handouts.

And in the EU …

In January 2014, the European Commission forecast that EU nuclear generating capacity of 131 GW in 2010 will decline to 97 GW in 2025, mirroring the situation in North America.

The UK is very much a case in point – the nuclear power industry there is scrambling just to stand still, and as noted above, looks increasingly likely to lose its Hinkley C mascot.

France is well known as Europe’s most nuclear country, and that’s likely to be the case for some time. But nuclear’s share of its power generation could be set for a sharp decline.

The country’s lower house of Parliament voted in October 2014 to cut nuclear’s share of electricity generation from 75% to 50% by 2025, to cap nuclear capacity at 63.2 GW, and to pursue a renewables target of 40% by 2030 with various new measures to promote the growth of renewables. The Senate will vote on the legislation early this year.

However there will be many twists and turns in French energy policy. Energy Minister Segolène Royal said on January 13 that France should build a new generation of reactors, and she noted that the October 2014 energy transition bill did not include a 40-year age limit for power reactors as ecologists wanted.

Meanwhile in Germany, the  government is systematically pursuing its policy of phasing out nuclear power by 2023. That said, nothing is certain: the nuclear phase-out policy of the social democrat / greens coalition government in the early 2000s was later overturned by a conservative government.

The Fukushima effect, and ageing reactors

Japan’s 48 operable reactors are all shut down. A reasonable estimate is that three-quarters (36/48) of the reactors will restart in the coming years.

Before the Fukushima disaster, Tokyo planned to add another 15-20 reactors to the fleet of 55 giving a total of 70-75 reactors. Thus Japan’s nuclear power industry will be around half the size it might have been if not for the Fukushima disaster.

Part of Japan’s problem is that of ageing reactors, with many that it will simply be too expensive to bring up to current safety standards. The topic came into global focus in 2014 – and will remain in focus for decades to come with the average age of the world’s power reactors now 29 years and steadily increasing.

Problems with ageing reactors include:

  • an increased risk of accidents (and associated problems such as generally inadequate accident liability arrangements);
  • an increased rate of unplanned reactors outages (at one point last year, less than half of the UK’s nuclear capacity was available due to multiple outages);
  • costly refurbishments;
  • debates over appropriate safety standards for reactors designed decades ago; and
  • the uncertainties and costs associated with reactor decommissioning and long-term nuclear waste management.

Greenpeace highlighted the problems associated with ageing reactors with the release of a detailed report last year, and emphasised the point by breaking into six ageing European nuclear plants on 5 March 2014.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its World Energy Outlook 2014 report: “A wave of retirements of ageing nuclear reactors is approaching: almost 200 of the 434 reactors operating at the end of 2013 are retired in the period to 2040, with the vast majority in the European Union, the United States, Russia and Japan.”

A growing problem – underfunded nuclear decommissioning

IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said: “Worldwide, we do not have much experience and I am afraid we are not well-prepared in terms of policies and funds which are devoted to decommissioning. A major concern for all of us is how we are going to deal with this massive surge in retirements in nuclear power plants.”

The World Energy Outlook 2014 report estimates the cost of decommissioning reactors to be more than US$100 billion up to 2040. The IEA’s head of power generation analysis, Marco Baroni, said that even excluding waste disposal costs, the final cost could be as much as twice as high as the $100 billion estimate, and that decommissioning costs per reactor can vary by a factor of four.

Baroni said the issue was not the decommissioning cost per reactor but “whether enough funds have been set aside to provide for it.” Evidence of inadequate decommissioning funds is mounting.

To give just one example, Entergy estimates a cost of US$1.24 billion to decommission Vermont Yankee, but the company’s decommissioning trust fund for the plant – US$ 670 million – is barely half that amount. As Michael Mariotte, President of the US Nuclear Information & Resource Service, noted in a recent article:

“Entergy, for example, has only about half the needed money in its decommissioning fund (and even so still found it cheaper to close the reactor than keep it running); repeat that across the country with multiple and larger reactors and the shortfalls could be stunning. Expect heated battles in the coming years as nuclear utilities try to push the costs of the decommissioning fund shortfalls onto ratepayers.”

The nuclear industry has a simple solution to the problem of old reactors: new reactors. But the battles over ageing and decommissioned reactors – and the raiding of taxpayers’ pockets to cover shortfalls – will make it that much more difficult to convince politicians and the public to support new reactors.

 

 

This article is reprinted from Nuclear Monitor #797, January 2015, with updates by The Ecologist.

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter. Nuclear Monitor is published 20 times a year. It has been publishing deeply researched, often strongly critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!

 

 




389671

Running in reverse: the world’s ‘nuclear power renaissance’ Updated for 2026

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The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear plant is looking increasingly like a dead duck – or possibly parrot.

As the Financial Times reports today, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has abandoned plans to examine the ‘value of money’ Hinkley C offers taxpayers – because no deal has been reached and none is expected before the general election in May.

In other words, all that bullish talk about Hinkley C launching Britain’s ‘nuclear renaissance’ has melted away like a spring frost in the morning sun.

There is no deal on the table for the PAC to examine – indeed it’s looking increasingly as if there may never be a deal, in spite of the astonishingly generous £30 billion support package on offer, at the expense of UK taxpayers and energy users.

Only last week Austria confirmed that it will launch a legal action against the Hinkley C support package, on the grounds that it constitutes illegal state aid. The action looks likely to succeed – and even if it doesn’t, it’s predicted to ensure at least four years of delay.

The nuclear slump has gone global!

But it’s not just in the UK that the ‘nuclear renaissance has hit the rocks. Global nuclear power capacity remained stagnant in 2014 according to the World Nuclear Association:

  • Five new reactors began supplying electricity and three were permanently shut down.
  • There are now 437 ‘operable’ reactors compared with 435 reactors a year ago. Thus the number of reactors increased by two (0.5%) and nuclear generating capacity increased by 2.4 gigawatts (GW) or 0.6%. (For comparison, around 100 GW of solar and wind power capacity were built in 2014, up from 74 GW in 2013.)
  • Construction started on just three reactors during 2014. A total of 70 reactors (74 GW) are under construction.

Thus a long-standing pattern of stagnation continues. In the two decades from 1995-2014, the number of power reactors leapt from 436 to 437.

Ten years ago, the rhetoric about a nuclear power renaissance was in full swing. In those ten years, the number of reactors has fallen from 443 to 437. But despite 20 years of stagnation, the World Nuclear Association remains upbeat. Its latest report, The World Nuclear Supply Chain: Outlook 2030, envisages the start-up of 266 new reactors by 2030.

The figure is implausible – it piles heroic assumptions upon heroic assumptions. If only the World Nuclear Association would take bets on its ridiculous projections, which are always proven to be wrong. Nuclear Energy Insider is a more sober and reflective in an end-of-year review published in December:

“As we embark on a new year, there are distinct challenges and opportunities on the horizon for the nuclear power industry. Many industry experts believe that technology like Small Nuclear Reactors (SMR) represent a strong future for nuclear.

“Yet, rapidly growing renewable energy sources, a bountiful and inexpensive supply of natural gas and oil, and the aging population of existing nuclear power plants represent challenges that the industry must address moving forward.”

Nuclear power’s ever shrinking share of global power generation

Steve Kidd, a nuclear consultant who worked for the World Nuclear Association for 17 years, is still more downbeat:

“Even with rapid nuclear growth in China, nuclear’s share in world electricity is declining. The industry is doing little more than hoping that politicians and financiers eventually see sense and back huge nuclear building programmes. On current trends, this is looking more and more unlikely.

“The high and rising nuclear share in climate-friendly scenarios is false hope, with little in the real outlook giving them any substance. Far more likely is the situation posited in the World Nuclear Industry Status Report …

“Although this report is produced by anti-nuclear activists, its picture of the current reactors gradually shutting down with numbers of new reactors failing to replace them has more than an element of truth given the recent trends.”

Kidd proposes reducing nuclear costs by simplifying and standardising current reactor designs.

Meanwhile, as the International Energy Agency’s World Economic Outlook 2014 report noted, nuclear growth will be “concentrated in markets where electricity is supplied at regulated prices, utilities have state backing or governments act to facilitate private investment.”

Conversely, “nuclear power faces major challenges in competitive markets where there are significant market and regulatory risks, and public acceptance remains a critical issue worldwide.”

Four countries supposedly driving a nuclear renaissance

Let’s briefly consider countries where the number of power reactors might increase or decrease by ten or more over the next 15-20 years. Generally, it is striking how much uncertainty there is about the nuclear programs in these countries.

China is one of the few exceptions. China has 22 operable reactors, 27 reactors under construction and 64 planned. Significant, rapid growth can be expected unless China’s nuclear program is derailed by a major accident or a serious act of sabotage or terrorism. But there are plenty of reasons to be concerned:

In the other three countries supposedly driving a nuclear renaissance – Russia, South Korea and India – growth is likely to be modest and slow.

Russia has 34 operating reactors and nine under construction. Just three reactors began operating in the past decade and the pattern of slow growth is likely to continue. As for Russia’s ambitious nuclear export program, Steve Kidd noted in October 2014 that it “is reasonable to suggest that it is highly unlikely that Russia will succeed in carrying out even half of the projects in which it claims to be closely involved”.

South Korea has 23 operating reactors, five under construction and eight planned. Earlier plans for rapid nuclear expansion in South Korea have been derailed by the Fukushima disaster, a major scandal over forged safety documents, and a hacking attack on Korea Hydro’s computer network.

India has 21 operating reactors, six under construction and 22 planned. But India’s nuclear program is in a “deep freeze” according to a November 2014 article in the Hindustan Times.

Likewise, India Today reported on January 8: “The Indian nuclear programme is on the brink of distress. For the past four years, no major tender has gone through – a period that was, ironically, supposed to mark the beginning of an Indian nuclear renaissance in the aftermath of the landmark India-US civil nuclear deal.”

A November 2014 article in The Hindu newspaper notes that three factors have put a break on India’s reactor-import plans: “the exorbitant price of French- and U.S.-origin reactors, the accident-liability issue, and grass-roots opposition to the planned multi-reactor complexes.”

In addition, unresolved disagreements regarding safeguards and non-proliferation assurances are delaying US and European investment in India’s nuclear program.

What about South Africa and Saudi Arabia?

Last year Saudi Araba announced plans to build 16 reactors by 2032. Already, the timeline has been pushed back from 2032 to 2040. As with any country embarking on a nuclear power program for the first time, Saudi Arabia faces daunting logistical and workforce issues.

Numerous nuclear supplier are lining up to supply Saudi Arabia’s nuclear power program but political obstacles could easily emerge, not least because Saudi officials (and royalty) have repeatedly said that the Kingdom will build nuclear weapons if Iran’s nuclear program is not constrained.

As for South Africa, its on-again off-again nuclear power program is on again with plans for 9.6 GW of nuclear capacity in addition to the two operating reactors at Koeberg. In 2007, state energy utility Eskom approved a plan for 20 GW of new nuclear capacity.

Areva’s EPR and Westinghouse’s AP1000 were short-listed and bids were submitted. But in 2008 Eskom announced that it would not proceed with either of the bids due to lack of finance.

Thus the latest plan for 9.6 GW of new nuclear capacity in South Africa is being treated with scepticism. As academic Professor Steve Thomas noted in a July 2014 report:

“Overall, a renewed call for tenders (or perhaps bilateral negotiations with a preferred bidder) is likely to produce the same result as 2008: a very high price for an unproven technology that will only be financeable if the South African public, either in the form of electricity consumers or as taxpayers, is prepared to give open ended guarantees.”

Nuclear negawatts in North America

Now to briefly consider those countries where a significant decline of nuclear power is possible or likely over the next 15-20 years, patterns of stagnation or slow decline in North America and western Europe can safely be predicted.

Steve Kidd wrote in May 2014 that uranium demand (and nuclear power capacity) “will almost certainly fall in the key markets in Western Europe and North America” in the period to 2030.

The United States has 99 operable reactors. Five reactors are under construction, “with little prospect for more” according to Oilprice.com. Decisions to shut down just as many reactors have been taken in the past few years.

As the Financial Times noted last year, two decisions that really rattled the industry were the closures of Dominion Resources’ Kewaunee plant in Wisconsin and Entergy’s Vermont Yankee – both were operating and licensed to keep operating into the 2030s, but became uneconomic to keep in operation.

The US Energy Information Administration estimated in April 2014 that 10.8 GW of nuclear capacity – around 10% of total US nuclear capacity – could be shut down by the end of the decade.

The most that the US nuclear industry can hope for is stagnation underpinned by new legislative and regulatory measures favouring nuclear power along with multi-billion dollar government handouts.

And in the EU …

In January 2014, the European Commission forecast that EU nuclear generating capacity of 131 GW in 2010 will decline to 97 GW in 2025, mirroring the situation in North America.

The UK is very much a case in point – the nuclear power industry there is scrambling just to stand still, and as noted above, looks increasingly likely to lose its Hinkley C mascot.

France is well known as Europe’s most nuclear country, and that’s likely to be the case for some time. But nuclear’s share of its power generation could be set for a sharp decline.

The country’s lower house of Parliament voted in October 2014 to cut nuclear’s share of electricity generation from 75% to 50% by 2025, to cap nuclear capacity at 63.2 GW, and to pursue a renewables target of 40% by 2030 with various new measures to promote the growth of renewables. The Senate will vote on the legislation early this year.

However there will be many twists and turns in French energy policy. Energy Minister Segolène Royal said on January 13 that France should build a new generation of reactors, and she noted that the October 2014 energy transition bill did not include a 40-year age limit for power reactors as ecologists wanted.

Meanwhile in Germany, the  government is systematically pursuing its policy of phasing out nuclear power by 2023. That said, nothing is certain: the nuclear phase-out policy of the social democrat / greens coalition government in the early 2000s was later overturned by a conservative government.

The Fukushima effect, and ageing reactors

Japan’s 48 operable reactors are all shut down. A reasonable estimate is that three-quarters (36/48) of the reactors will restart in the coming years.

Before the Fukushima disaster, Tokyo planned to add another 15-20 reactors to the fleet of 55 giving a total of 70-75 reactors. Thus Japan’s nuclear power industry will be around half the size it might have been if not for the Fukushima disaster.

Part of Japan’s problem is that of ageing reactors, with many that it will simply be too expensive to bring up to current safety standards. The topic came into global focus in 2014 – and will remain in focus for decades to come with the average age of the world’s power reactors now 29 years and steadily increasing.

Problems with ageing reactors include:

  • an increased risk of accidents (and associated problems such as generally inadequate accident liability arrangements);
  • an increased rate of unplanned reactors outages (at one point last year, less than half of the UK’s nuclear capacity was available due to multiple outages);
  • costly refurbishments;
  • debates over appropriate safety standards for reactors designed decades ago; and
  • the uncertainties and costs associated with reactor decommissioning and long-term nuclear waste management.

Greenpeace highlighted the problems associated with ageing reactors with the release of a detailed report last year, and emphasised the point by breaking into six ageing European nuclear plants on 5 March 2014.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its World Energy Outlook 2014 report: “A wave of retirements of ageing nuclear reactors is approaching: almost 200 of the 434 reactors operating at the end of 2013 are retired in the period to 2040, with the vast majority in the European Union, the United States, Russia and Japan.”

A growing problem – underfunded nuclear decommissioning

IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said: “Worldwide, we do not have much experience and I am afraid we are not well-prepared in terms of policies and funds which are devoted to decommissioning. A major concern for all of us is how we are going to deal with this massive surge in retirements in nuclear power plants.”

The World Energy Outlook 2014 report estimates the cost of decommissioning reactors to be more than US$100 billion up to 2040. The IEA’s head of power generation analysis, Marco Baroni, said that even excluding waste disposal costs, the final cost could be as much as twice as high as the $100 billion estimate, and that decommissioning costs per reactor can vary by a factor of four.

Baroni said the issue was not the decommissioning cost per reactor but “whether enough funds have been set aside to provide for it.” Evidence of inadequate decommissioning funds is mounting.

To give just one example, Entergy estimates a cost of US$1.24 billion to decommission Vermont Yankee, but the company’s decommissioning trust fund for the plant – US$ 670 million – is barely half that amount. As Michael Mariotte, President of the US Nuclear Information & Resource Service, noted in a recent article:

“Entergy, for example, has only about half the needed money in its decommissioning fund (and even so still found it cheaper to close the reactor than keep it running); repeat that across the country with multiple and larger reactors and the shortfalls could be stunning. Expect heated battles in the coming years as nuclear utilities try to push the costs of the decommissioning fund shortfalls onto ratepayers.”

The nuclear industry has a simple solution to the problem of old reactors: new reactors. But the battles over ageing and decommissioned reactors – and the raiding of taxpayers’ pockets to cover shortfalls – will make it that much more difficult to convince politicians and the public to support new reactors.

 

 

This article is reprinted from Nuclear Monitor #797, January 2015, with updates by The Ecologist.

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter. Nuclear Monitor is published 20 times a year. It has been publishing deeply researched, often strongly critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!

 

 




389671

Warmer world threatens wheat shortages Updated for 2026

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Climate change threatens dramatic price fluctuations in the price of wheat and potential civil unrest because yields of one of the world’s most important staple foods are badly affected by temperature rise.

An international consortium of scientists have been testing wheat crops in laboratory and field trials in many areas of the world in changing climate conditions and discovered that yields drop on average by 6% for every one degree Celsius rise in temperature.

This represents 42 million tonnes of wheat lost – about a quarter of the current global wheat trade – for every degree. This would create serious shortages and cause price hikes of the kind that have previously caused food riots in developing countries after only one bad harvest.

Global production of wheat was 701 million tonnes in 2012, but most of this is consumed locally. Global trade is much smaller, at 147 tonnes in 2013.

Price hikes and food insecurity

If the predicted reduction of 42 million tonnes per 1˚C of temperature increase occurred, market shortages would cause price rises. Many developing countries, and the hungry poor within them, would not be able to afford wheat or bread.

Since temperatures – on current projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – are expected to rise up to 5˚C this century in many wheat-growing regions, this could be catastrophic for global food supply.

Dr. Reimund Rötter, professor of production ecology and agrosystems modelling at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, said that wheat yield declines were larger than previously thought.

He said: “Increased yield variability is critical economically as it could weaken regional and global stability in wheat grain supply and food security, amplifying market and price fluctuations, as experienced during recent years.”

One of the crucial problems is that there will be variability in supply from year to year, so the researchers systematically tested 30 different wheat crop models against field experiments in which growing season mean temperatures ranged from 15°C to 26°C.

Heat tolerant wheat strains are needed

The temperature impact on yield decline varied widely across field test conditions. In addition, year-to-year variability increased at some locations because of greater yield reductions in warmer years and lesser reductions in cooler years.

The scientists say that the way to adapt is to cultivate more heat-tolerant varieties, and so keep the harvest stable.

The results of the study – by scientists from the Finland, Germany, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom, Colombia, Mexico, India, China, Australia, Canada and the United States – are published in Nature Climate Change.

Professor Martin Parry, who is leading the 20:20 Wheat Institute Strategic Programme at Rothamsted Research to increase wheat yields, commented:

“This is an excellent example of collaborative research, which will help ensure that we have the knowledge needed to develop the crops for the future environments.”

 

 

 

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




389180

Leave most fossil fuels in the ground, or fry Updated for 2026

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The sheer scale of the fossil fuel reserves that will need to be left unexploited for decades if world leaders sign up to a radical climate agreement is revealed in a study by a team of British scientists.

It shows that almost all the huge coal reserves in China, Russia and the US should remain unused, along with over 260 billion barrels of oil reserves in the Middle East – the equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s entire oil reserves.

The Middle East would also need to leave over 60% of its gas reserves in the ground.

The team from University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Resources (ISR) says that, in total, a third of global oil reserves, half of the world’s gas and over 80% of its coal reserves should be left untouched for the next 35 years.

This is the amount of fossil fuel, they estimate, that the world must forego until 2050 if governments agree on a realistic programme to ensure that global warming does not exceed the 2°C increase over pre-industrial levels agreed by policy makers.

The authors of the report, which is published in the journal Nature, say some reserves could be used after 2050, so long as this kept emissions within the CO2 budget, which would be only about half the amount the world can afford to use between now and 2050.

They say a factor that might help in the use of fossil fuels is that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is expected to be much more widely deployable by mid-century, assuming it to be a mature technology by then.

No space for any more extreme energy

The study, funded by the UK Energy Research Centre, concluded that the development of resources in the Arctic and any increase in unconventional oil – oil of a poor quality that is hard to extract – are also “inconsistent with efforts to limit climate change”.

For the study, the scientists first developed an innovative method for estimating the quantities, locations and nature of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves and resources. They then used an integrated assessment model to explore which of these, along with low-carbon energy sources, should be used up to 2050 to meet the world’s energy needs.

The model, which uses an internationally-recognised modelling framework, provides what the authors describe as “a world-leading representation of the long-term production dynamics and resource potential of fossil fuels”.

The lead author, Dr Christophe McGlade, research associate at the ISR, said: “We’ve now got tangible figures of the quantities and locations of fossil fuels that should remain unused in trying to keep within the 2°C temperature limit.

“Policy makers must realise that their instincts to completely use the fossil fuels within their countries are wholly incompatible with their commitments to the 2°C goal. If they go ahead with developing their own resources, they must be asked which reserves elsewhere should remain unburnt in order for the carbon budget not to be exceeded.”

The prospects for an amicable discussion between China, Russia, the US and the Middle East on how to share the pain of leaving these reserves unexploited will demand exceptional diplomacy from all parties.

Prudent investors, keep clear of fossil fuels!

The report’s co-author, Paul Ekins, the ISR’s director and professor of resources and environmental policy, said: “Companies spent over $670 billion (£430 billion) last year searching for and developing new fossil fuel resources.

“They will need to rethink such substantial budgets if policies are implemented to support the 2°C limit, especially as new discoveries cannot lead to increased aggregate production.

“Investors in these companies should also question spending such budgets. The greater global attention to climate policy means that fossil fuel companies are becoming increasingly risky for investors in terms of the delivery of long-term returns. I would expect prudent investors in energy to shift increasingly towards low-carbon energy sources.”

After years of halting progress towards an effective international agreement to limit fossil fuel emissions so as to stay within the 2°C temperature threshold, hopes are cautiously rising that the UN climate talks to be held in Paris at the end of 2015 may finally succeed where so many have failed.

But reaching agreement will be only the first step: effective enforcement may prove an even bigger problem.

 

 

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




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Fracking’s future is in doubt as oil price plummets, bonds crash Updated for 2026

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There’s no doubt that US-based fracking – the process through which oil and gas deposits are blasted from shale deposits deep underground – has caused a revolution in worldwide energy supplies.

Yet now the alarm bells are ringing about the financial health of the fracking industry, with talk of a mighty monetary bubble bursting – leading to turmoil on the international markets similar to that in 2008.

In many ways, it’s a straightforward case of supply and demand. Due to the US fracking boom, world oil supply has increased.

But with global economic growth now slowing – the drop in growth in China is particularly significant – there’s a lack of demand and a glut in supplies, leading to a fall in price of nearly 50% over the last six months.

US oil is flooding the market

Fracking has become a victim of its own success. The industry in the US has grown very fast. In 2008, US oil production was running at five million barrels a day.

Thanks to fracking, that figure has nearly doubled, with talk of US energy self-sufficiency and the country becoming the world’s biggest oil producer – ‘the new Saudi Arabia’ – in the near future.

The giant Bakken oil and gas field in North Dakota – a landscape punctured by thousands of fracking sites, with gas flares visible from space – was producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day in 2007. Production is now running at more than one million barrels a day.

Fuelled by talk of the financial rewards to be gained from fracking, investors have piled into the business. The US fracking industry now accounts for about 20% of the world’s total crude oil investment.

But analysts say this whole investment edifice could come crashing down.

Extreme oil is expensive oil

Fracking is an expensive business. Depending on site structure, companies need prices of between $60 and $100 per barrel of oil to break even. As prices drop to around $55 per barrel, investments in the sector look ever more vulnerable.

Analysts say that while bigger fracking companies might be able to sustain losses in the short term, the outlook appears bleak for the thousands of smaller, less well-financed companies who rushed into the industry, tempted by big returns.

The fracking industry’s troubles have been added to by the actions of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which, despite the oversupply on the world market, has refused to lower production.

The theory is that OPEC, led by powerful oil producers such as Saudi Arabia, is playing the long game – seeking to drive the fracking industry from boom to bust, stabilise prices well above their present level, and regain its place as the world’s pre-eminent source of oil.

There are now fears that many fracking operations may default on an estimated $200 billion of borrowings, raised mainly through bonds issued on Wall Street and in the City of London.

In turn, this could lead to a collapse in global financial markets similar to the 2008 crash.

Is fracking a busted flush?

There are also questions about just how big existing shale oil and gas reserves are, and how long they will last. A recent report by the Post Carbon Institute, a not-for-profit think tank based in the US, says reserves are likely to peak and fall off rapidly, far sooner than the industry’s backers predict.

The cost of drilling is also going up as deposits become more inaccessible.

Besides ongoing questions about the impact of fracking on the environment – in terms of carbon emissions and pollution of water sources – another challenge facing the industry is the growth and rapidly falling costs of renewable energy.

Fracking operations could also be curtailed by more stringent regulations designed to counter fossil fuel emissions and combat climate change.

Its backers have hyped fracking as the future of energy – not just in the US, but around the world. Now the outlook for the industry is far from certain.

 

 

Kieran Cooke writes for Climate News Network, where this article was first published.

 




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Oxford Real Farming Conference: power, lies, and agrarian resistance Updated for 2026

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The sad state of Britain’s dairying has the same root cause as the billion worldwide who are undernourished, the billion who are overweight and/or diabetic or in danger of heart disease, global warming, the mass extinction of our fellow creatures.

That is a global agriculture, and indeed a global economy, that is geared not to the wellbeing of humankind and of the planet but to short-term wealth, in the simplistic belief that money per se is good and can solve all our problems no matter how it is produced or what it is used for.

To put things right we have to think deeply – in fact re-think from first principles – and act radically.

The world’s global strategy of food and farming is founded on three great untruths – lies, in effect – which between them are threatening to kill us all, and in practice are well on the way to doing so.

 ‘We must produce more’

Lie no. 1 is that the world needs 50% more food by 2050, and will need 100% more by 2100. This provides the excuse for the agrochemical/ biotech companies to focus ever more energetically on productivity.

In truth, the world already produces twice as much food as the world needs and – since the world population should level out by 2100 if not before – produces 50% more than the world will ever need.

We should be focusing on food quality, social justice, sustainability, and environmental protection. But the pursuit of quality and justice would not be profitable to the corporates, so that is not the prime target if indeed it is seriously on the agenda at all.

‘We can only do it with agro-chemicals and GMOs’

Lie no. 2 is that to produce all this extra food (which in fact we don’t need) we need enormous inputs of agrochemistry, now abetted in particular by GMOs – which in large part are designed expressly to survive in a world drenched in agrochemistry.

Small, mixed, traditional farms are an anachronism which must be done away with ASAP – or so we are told. Opposition to the agrochemical approach springs from superstition and ignorance which must be corrected by public education.

In truth, today’s industrial agriculture – basically now a field exercise in industrial chemistry – produces only 30% of the world’s food, even though is hoovers up 80% of the subsidies and 90% of the research budget.

The small traditional farms that are so despised and routinely swept aside still produce 50% of the world’s food. The remaining 20% comes from fishing, hunting, and people’s back gardens.

Furthermore, much of today’s industrial farming is already hard up against biological possibility and – as shown by the plight of the world’s industrial livestock – is already, often, far beyond what is morally acceptable. To increase the industrial contribution by another 20% would be heroic.

Yet people who know Third World agriculture well tell us that with a little logistic help – better roads, better banking – traditional farmers could generally double or triple their output even with present-day practices.

But the people in power would rather increase the profitable 30% by another 20%, than see the 50% which they do not control increased two or three times; and governments like Britain’s, and compliant academe, go along with this.

On a significant point of detail – GMO technology, which is now seen as the world-saver, has been on the stocks for about 30 years and in that time has produced no new food crops of unequivocal value that could not have been produced in the same time at far less cost and in perfect safety by conventional means.

Yet the collateral damage from GMO technology has been enormous – it includes the irrecoverable loss of genetic diversity in the world’s great crops. But the downside is denied or air-brushed out, through propaganda and lobbying, at great expense, by those in power.

‘We would have a boring diet without meat’

Lie no. 3 is that if we farmed for quality and in ways that keep the biosphere in good heart, then the resulting diet would be too boring to be tolerated. In particular, we are given to understand, we would have little or no meat.

In truth, the kind of agriculture that can feed us well – the kind I am calling Enlightened Agriculture, based essentially on low-input (quasi-organic) mixed farming – would indeed produce plenty of plants, but it would also produce a fair amount of meat (most of the world’s farmland is grass, and there are plenty of leftovers!), and enormous variety.

“Plenty of plants, not much meat, and maximum variety” summarizes all the best nutritional theory of the past 40 years, and also encapsulates the basic structure of all the world’s great cuisines – China, India, Turkey, Lebanon, Provence, Italy – and even traditional Britain though we are more meat-oriented than many because since we have plenty of hills, grass, and rain.

All the great cuisines use meat sparingly – for flavour and texture, as garnish and in stocks, and eat it en masse only in feasts.

In other words, the kind of (enlightened) farming that could provide us all with good food without massive inputs of agrochemistry and GMOs would also provide us with the best possible nutrition and the best possible cuisine.

Present strategies are failing!

All might be forgiven, at least in large part, if present strategies were succeeding. But the failures are all too evident. Worldwide, a billion people out of seven billion are chronically undernourished while another billion are overnourished – the world population of diabetics alone is now more than twice the total population of Russia.

In Britain, over the past few years almost a million people (900,000-plus) resorted to food banks. One billion people worldwide now live in urban slums – about 30% of the total urban population, mostly because industrial farming that is run by foreign corporates with the blessing of governments like ours has displaced them from the land.

Unemployment caused by the industrialization of agriculture is a prime cause of the global poverty that western governments pretend to abhor. At the same time half of all other species (perhaps around four million types) are conservatively estimated to be in imminent danger of extinction.

Demonstrably, industrial farming is a prime cause of all these disaster – and since industrial farming is oil-based, it is a prime cause of global warming too.

Oil is running out but the shale reserves seem endless and by the time the world has run through them we will be lucky if anything at all survives the resulting climate change with all the floods, droughts, and uncertainties.

But why do the people who now dominate the world, including the governments that we elect and the academics who have such status, pursue strategies that are so obviously wrong-headed and so destructive?

Why, when the alternative – mixed, low-input farming with an appropriate distribution network – is already waiting in the wings and is so obviously superior, and indeed could deliver all we need?

The answers are many and complex and have deep historical and social origins but the coup de grace, the last straw that has tipped the world from incipient wrong-headedness into what in effect is suicidal mode, is the economic dogma of neoliberalism and all that goes with it – including a massive shift of power and wealth from the many to the few.

The neoliberal dogma

Neoliberalism became the dominant driver of the world’s affairs about 30 years ago, thanks to Thatcher and Reagan. The economy as a whole is geared entirely to the ultra-competitive global market, the raison d’etre of which is to maximize wealth.

The market is allegedly ‘free’, open even-handedly to all, but in practice, as was always inevitable, it is dominated by the biggest players.

The market has no in-built morality: that would encroach on its ‘freedom’, which is taken to be sacrosanct. The only value it recognizes is that of money. The players must compete to make as much of it as possible – more than anyone else, so as to attract further investment.

Those who take their eye off the ball and fail to compete with the rest go to the wall, because the market knows no compassion. Thus the neoliberal market is neo-Darwinian: ‘survival of the fittest’, meaning (in this context) devil takes the hindmost.

The drawbacks, theoretical and practical, are all too obvious. All human values have become secondary if they feature at all, while the biosphere, known peremptorily as ‘the environment’, is seen merely as a ‘resource’, or as real estate.

For, we have been told, money is the sine qua non and the cure for all our ills. Without great piles of it we can do no good, and with great piles of it we can always buy our way out of trouble by investing in smarter and bigger technology.

In practice, though, as is beyond dispute, in the 30 years of neoliberal dominance, the rich have grown richer beyond all dreams while the poor have grown poorer. All kinds of reasons have been sought but the prime cause is surely that morality and common sense have gone missing.

The world’s most influential governments, none more so than Britain’s, are obsessed with ‘economic growth’ and more ‘growth’, measured entirely in money. Month by month, year by year, GDP – the sum of the nation’s wealth – must be seen to increase.

Less and less does it matter how the wealth is produced, or who gets it, or what it is used for. Wealth per se is the sole desideratum.

The NFU – a fraud perpetuated by the agro-barons

Agriculture is a prime victim of neoliberalism – and alas in Britain in particular has been the all too willing victim. The anomalously titled National Farmers Union in reality is a club of agribusiness people and has rushed to embrace its ideals.

All agricultural produce is seen as a commodity, grown at the lowest possible cost not primarily for food but to sell on the global market for the highest possible price. Wheat has long been a global commodity – and soya, rape, and palm oil.

Milk is rapidly joining the commodity ranks. It can be produced anywhere that the climate is equable and labour is not too dear (though labour is cut to the bone anyway), then dried and powdered and stored more or less indefinitely and sold when the price is right.

Britain’s dairy farmers are now being squeezed out of existence – but they should have seen this coming. The NFU certainly should. Many people did.

The more that Britain’s farmers industrialize the more they get sucked in to the grand global money-fest, and the more they find themselves up against mega-corporates with farms and plantations in the Ukraine or Indonesia or Brazil or where you will that can wipe them off the map.

Of course the whole exercise is oil-based so the price of food will depend more and more on the whims of the oil market – but hey! In the short term quite a lot of people are doing well and they keep all kinds of people in work – chauffeurs, cleaners – according to the principle of ‘trickle down’. So don’t knock it.

This is the mentality that dominates the world’s agriculture and determines humanity’s food supply.

The power of money

An economy geared to the maximization of short-term wealth sets up a positive feedback look. Those who play the neoliberal game most single-mindedly are most likely to succeed in it, and so become richer.

They then use their wealth to reinforce their position: employing people – experts and intellectuals – who will help them both to increase their wealth still further and also to justify their position: arguing indeed in a pastiche of Adam Smith’s ideas from the 18th century that by seeking to maximize their own wealth, by whatever means, for entirely selfish reasons, those who grow rich from the market somehow benefit the rest of us.

The absurd notion of ‘trickle down’ is a part of such thinking. When they are really rich, the richest people can in effect buy the services of government who in turn, perhaps knowing no better, further promote their interests.

Finally, compliant government uses its power to devise a system of education that teaches the virtues of the market economy and those who dominate it. ‘Vocational’ training these days does not imply a calling for medicine or teaching or the church as it did when I was at school. It means to acquire the specific skills and doctrines necessary to get a job with Monsanto or Goldman Sachs.

Britain has seized the neoliberal nettle more eagerly than anyone – all governments since Thatcher have been Thatcherite, even or perhaps especially those that called themselves ‘New Labour’.

Britain, now, is ruled not by its democratically elected government but by a tetrarchy of corporates, banks, government, and their chosen expert and scientific advisers. Some of those chosen advisers are directly employed by the corporates which at least is commendably transparent. Many others claim ‘independence’ and yet rely on the corporates for funding.

Thus an increasing slice of academe is now corporate driven, its efforts geared not to the disinterested pursuit of wisdom or the wellbeing of humankind or the biosphere but to the further enrichment of those who are already rich.

A nexus of corruption has seized our body politic

The trend is all too clear in Britain’s and the world’s agriculture. In Britain, as reflected in the name of the BBSRC, it is seen as a scion of the biotech industry, a jewel in the corporate crown. The international agencies and governments like Britain’s take their lead from those corporates and see it as their role to support them.

The two together – corporates and governments – form a coalition, far more significant than any coalition of political parties. Governments like Britain’s are, in effect, an extension of the corporate boardroom.

The experts and intellectuals – mainly scientists and economists – who support and are supported by the coalition intellectuals now dominate academe, including the universities. Intellectuals and experts who question present strategies are routinely ignored, sidelined, and starved of funds – the official pretence being that they have lost their way in life, or simply don’t exist.

The resulting oligarchy, the corporate-government coalition plus the heights of academe, may seem superficially benign but is as controlling in its way as any dictatorship and far more robust, precisely because it has discovered the secret of self-reinforcement.

It seems bound to grow ever richer because that it controls the heights of the economy and wealth is its principal if not its sole ambition, and the richer it becomes the more it can dig itself in.

The solution: the Agrarian Renaissance

My own mission in life (it’s grown on me these past 40 years, despite my best efforts now and again to break away) is to reverse this nonsense: to spread the idea of Enlightened Agriculture.

That is, the kind of farming that really could feed us all well without wrecking everything else; to help to make it the norm; and to help to create the kind of economy, political structure, and general worldview that will enable Enlightened Agriculture to flourish.

As things stand, any suggestion that farming or anything else might be practiced in ways that are not maximally profitable (at least for a few, in the short term) is wiped off the agenda; and the intelligentsia, to their shame, go along with this, wittingly or unwittingly.

The ambition, to establish Enlightened Agriculture as the norm, is grandiose. But plenty of people worldwide are thinking along the same lines and by teaming up with more and more of them, we’re making progress.

The Campaign for Real Farming exists to promote Enlightened Agriculture and all that goes with it. So does the Oxford Real Farming Conference. So does our new outfit, FEA (Funding Enlightened Agriculture). I am also hoping to found a College for Enlightened Agriculture (and have taken some preliminary steps. Momentum is needed right now). These will form a part of that vast global movement.

Overall, the world needs a Renaissance – to build a different and better world in situ. Agrarian Renaissance is key because agriculture sits right at the heart of all human affairs and if we get it right, then everything else becomes possible (and if we get it wrong then everything else is compromised).

The oligarchs are not going to create the Agrarian Renaissance: they have invested too heavily, in fact they have invested their entire careers, in the status quo. So the necessary Renaissance must be people led.

But this it good news, for it means that everyone can join in, the more the merrier. In broad terms and even in some detail the way ahead is obvious: the kinds of farms we need already exist; so do the kinds of market we need.

So, if we dig them out, do many of the necessary political and legal weapons and – crucially – the financial mechanisms. The financial mechanisms are not revolutionary in nature – we merely have to invoke the acceptable face of capitalism.

This is what the Oxford Real Farming Conference is for: to discuss what really needs to be done and why and – more importantly – to introduce practicing farmers who are already showing what can be done even as things are.

We cannot afford to compromise at this stage of the world’s history – radical must been radical – but there are plenty of serendipities along the way. We have the tools to make the Renaissance happen, in short – and, worldwide, there is no shortage of good will. So let’s bring it into being. 

 

 

Find out more about the Oxford Real Farming Conference, which takes place on Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th January 2015.

Colin Tudge is author of Good Food for Everyone Forever and Why Genes Are Not Selfish and People Are Nice and co-founder of the Campaign for Real Farming and the Oxford Real Farming Conference.

Report: Agriculture at a Crossroads, Report by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. Co-chaired by Professor Hans Herren of the Millennium Institute, Washington, and Judi Wakhungu of the African Centre for Technology Studies. 2009.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

Creative Commons License

 

 




388574

Investors falter as fossil fuels face ‘perfect storm’ Updated for 2026

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The world’s investors – both big and small – think primarily in terms of making good returns on their money. And, over the years, investing in the fossil fuel industry has been considered a safe bet.

Yet maybe, just maybe, attitudes are changing – and fairly profoundly – as financial analysts warn that the industry faces a ‘perfect storm’ in 2015.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), a London-based financial thinktank, analyses the energy industry and lobbies to limit emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

On one side, CTI says, the industry is being buffeted by a crash in oil prices and a drop in demand. On the other, there’s the threat of increasing regulation aimed at cutting GHG emissions and a worldwide growth in renewable forms of energy.

Cool reception

Anthony Hobley, CTI’s chief executive, says investors are realising that the energy world is changing.

“At one stage, when we talked to investment firms about the risks of investing in fossil fuels we were given a cool reception”, Hobley told Climate News Network.

“Now we are being invited to brief the big investment funds. Investors have an enormous amount of power – they are weighing up the risks of investing in fossil fuels and wondering just how safe their money is.”

The CTI has long warned of the dangers of a ‘carbon bubble’, with investments in fossil fuels becoming ‘stranded assets’ due to the imposition of stricter regulatory controls on emissions and the widespread adoption of renewable energy.

“The carbon bubble is not going to burst in 2015”, Hobley says. “The transition from fossil fuels to other forms of energy is going to take place over several decades.

“But a combination of more regulations, new technologies, the falling price of renewable energy, and the need for a more efficient use of resources, is making investors rethink their investment strategies.”

Energy companies are also reconsidering their plans. EON, Germany’s largest power utility, announced earlier this month that it would be reorganising its structure in order to focus on the development of renewables.

Concern in boardrooms

A worldwide campaign calling for divestment in fossil fuels is another factor causing some concern in the boardrooms of the big fossil fuel companies.

The industry is powerful and, despite the problems it’s facing, it is unlikely to collapse anytime soon. But it has been severely damaged by recent events.

Goldman Sachs, the global investment bank, says a trillion dollars of investments in various oil and gas projects around the world are at risk – or stranded – due to the fall in oil prices.

A rapid rise in production from US shale deposits in recent years has caused a glut on the global oil market.

Analysts say a significant slowdown in the rate of economic growth in China is also a major factor behind the present fall-off in oil prices, and in the big declines in coal prices on the world market.

 

 

Kieran Cooke writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




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All over the world, renewables are beating nuclear Updated for 2026

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With many of the UK’s old nuclear power plants off-line due to faults and prospects for their ultimate replacement looking decidedly shaky, it is good that the renewable energy alternatives are moving ahead rapidly.

In 2013 nuclear supplied around 18% of UK electricity but in the third quarter of 2014, nuclear output fell 16.2% due to outages, while renewable output, which had reached 16.8% of electricity in the second quarter of 2014, was up 26%, over the previous year.

Indeed, there were periods in 2014 when wind alone met up to 15% of UK power demand, over-taking nuclear, and it even briefly achieved 24%.

What next? The financial woes of French developers Areva and EDF may mean that their £24 billion 3.4 GW Hinkley nuclear project, despite being heavily subsidised by British taxpayers and consumers, will get delayed or even halted, unless China or the Saudis bail it out.

Meanwhile, wind has reached 11GW, with 4GW of it offshore, solar is at 5GW and rising, with many new projects in the pipeline. By 2020 we may have 30GW of wind generation capacity and perhaps up to 20GW of solar.

Renewables get cheaper, nuclear gets more expensive

It’s true that this will require subsidies, but the technology is getting cheaper and by the time Hinkley is built, if it ever is, the Contact for a Difference (CfD) subsidy for on-land wind, and maybe even for solar, will be lower than that offered to the Hinkley developers (£92.5/MWh).

Indeed some say solar won’t need any subsidies in the 2020s. While offshore wind projects could be going ahead with CfD contracts below £100 / MWh, and without the £10 billion loan guarantee that Hinkley has been given.

The simple message is that renewables are getting cheaper and more competitive, while nuclear remains expensive, and its cost may well rise – requiring further subsidies.

The completion of the much delayed EPR at Flamanville, similar to the Hinkley design, has been put back by yet another year, to 2017, putting it even more over-budget.

The EPR being built in Finland, work on which started in 2005, and which was originally scheduled to go live in 2009, is now not likely to be completed until late 2018. It’s now almost twice over budget.

It’s hardly surprising then that most of the major EU power companies and utilities have backed away from nuclear, including SSE, RWE and Siemens, and most recently E.ON, in favour of renewables.

And globally it seems clear that renewables are winning out just about everywhere. They now supply over 19% of global primary energy and 22% or more of global electricity. By contrast nuclear is at around 11% and falling.

Country by country, renewables are taking over the world

Looking to the future, there are scenarios for India, Japan, South Korea, the USA and the EU, looking to renewables to supply most of their electricity, with Germany and Denmark of course already acting on them – Germany is aiming to get at least 80% of its electricity from renewables by 2050, Denmark 100%.

For example, a WWF report says China could get 80% of its electricity from renewables by 2050, at far less cost than relying on coal, and enabling China’s to cut its carbon emissions from power generation by 90% without compromising the reliability of the electric grid or slowing economic growth. And with no need for new nuclear.

Although renewables are not as developed as in China, India has been pushing them quite hard, with wind at nearly 20GW, on top of 39GW of existing large hydro. PV is at 2.6 GW grid-linked so far, but Bridge to India is pushing for 100GW by 2020.

Funding problems and policy changes have bedeviled the development of renewables in India, as have weak grids, with some saying that off-grid or mini grid community projects ought to be the focus.

The new government in India certainly faces some challenges. But WWF / TERI have produced an ambitious ‘near 100%’ by 2050 renewables scenario, with over 1,000GW each of wind and solar, plus major biomass use.

The US has now gets near 15% of its electricity from renewables, with wind power projects booming, and Obama’s policy of cutting emissions from coal plants by 30% by 2030 should speed that up. The US National Renewable Energy Lab has developed scenarios showing that the US could potentially generate 80% of its electricity from renewables by 2050.

In Japan renewables had been given a low priority, but following Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Japan is now pushing ahead with some ambitious offshore wind projects, using floating wind turbines, and a large PV programme.

Overall, Japan has given the go-ahead to over 70 GW of renewable energy projects, most of which are solar. Longer term, a ‘100% by 2050′ ISEP renewables scenario has around 50GW of wind, much of it offshore, and 140GW of PV.

Rapid progress is being made in South America, although less so as yet in most of Africa. But the International Renewable Energy Agency says that Africa has the potential and the ability to utilise its renewable resources to fuel the majority of its future growth.

Yet the UK remains firmly stuck in a 1950s vision of the future

Back in the UK though, we have our large nuclear programme, with EDF one of the main backers. It can’t build any plants in France (which is cutting nuclear back by 25%), but the UK seems to be willing to host several – and pay heavily for them!

Similarly, Hitachi and Toshiba stand no chance of building new plants in Japan, but the UK is offering significant long-term subsidies and loan guarantees for their proposed UK projects. A far better deal than being offered to renewables.

Here the main focus seems to be on why we can’t afford offshore wind, or accept on-land wind, or live with large solar farms.

We struggle on – now generating over 15% of UK electricity from renewables, but far behind most of the rest of the EU, and especially the leaders, with some already having achieved their 2020 targets, nearly all of which were set higher than that for the UK.

In fact, despite having probably the largest potential of any EU country, we are still only beating Luxembourg and Malta.

It’s embarrassing …

 

 

David Elliott is Emeritus Professor of Technology Policy at the Open University.

Book: David’s latest book, ‘Renewables: a review of sustainable energy supply options’ is available from the Institute of Physics and the Network for Alternative Technology and Technology Assessment.

 

 




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World Bank to focus on ‘all forms of renewable energy’ Updated for 2026

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The World Bank will invest heavily in clean energy and only fund coal projects in “circumstances of extreme need” because climate change will undermine efforts to eliminate extreme poverty, says its president Jim Yong Kim.

Talking ahead of a UN climate summit in Peru next month, Kim said he was alarmed by World Bank-commissioned research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, which said that as a result of past greenhouse gas emissions the world is condemned to unprecedented weather events.

“The findings are alarming. As the planet warms further, heatwaves and other weather extremes, which today we call once­-in­-a-century events, would become the new climate normal, a frightening world of increased risk and instability.

“The consequences for development would be severe, as crop yields decline, water resources shift, communicable diseases move into new geographical ranges, and sea levels rise.”

“We know that the dramatic weather extremes are already affecting millions of people, such as the five to six feet of snow that just fell on Buffalo, and can throw our lives into disarray or worse.

“Even with ambitious mitigation, warming close to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is locked in. And this means that climate change impact such as extreme heat events may now be simply unavoidable.”

‘Only in extreme need will we do coal again’

But the Bank, which has traditionally been one of the world’s largest funders of fossil fuel projects and has been accused of adding to the problem of climate change, said it could not ignore the poorest countries’ need for power.

“We are going to have to focus all of our energy to move toward renewable and cleaner forms of energy”, said Kim.

“But on the other hand we believe very strongly that the poorest countries have a right to energy and that we not ask these energy ­poor countries to wait until there are ways of ensuring that solar and wind power can provide the kind of base load that all countries need in order to industrialise.

“The stakes have never been higher. We cannot continue down the current path of unchecked growing emissions. The case for taking action now on climate change is overwhelming, and the cost of inaction will only rise.”

Kim was backed by Rachel Kyte, World Bank group vice president and special envoy for climate change. “It will only be in circumstances of extreme need that we would contemplate doing coal again”, she said.

“We would only contemplate doing [it] in the poorest of countries where their energy transition as part of their low-carbon development plan means that there are no other base load power sources available at a reasonable price.”

“The focus is on being able to ramp up our lending and the leveraging of our lending into all forms of renewable energy. That’s the strategy. It includes everything from all sizes of hydro through to wind, to solar, to concentrated solar, to geothermal. I think we’re invested in every dimension of renewable energy. That is what we’re concentrating on.”

Now, what about oil, gas and other fossil fuels

The bank’s report showed that with a 2C warming, soya and wheat crop yields in Brazil could decrease 50-70%: “In the Middle east and north Africa, a large increase in heatwaves combined with warmer average temperatures will put intense pressure on already scarce water resources with major consequences for food security.

“Crop yields could decrease by up to 30% at 1.5-2C and by almost 60% at 3-4C. Pressure on resources might increase the risk of conflict.”

Climate change posed a substantial risk to development and cutting poverty, the report said, adding that action on emissions need not come at the expense of economic growth.

But the bank made no commitment to cut funding for oil or other fossil fuel exploration. Analysis earlier this year by Washington-based NGO Oil Change International showed that the bank had funded $21bn (£13bn) of fossil fuel projects since 2008, including $1bn of oil and other fossil fuel exploration in 2013.

“The bank has taken an important first step in essentially stopping its support for coal-fired power plants, but climate change is caused by more than just coal”, said Stephen Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International.

“The vast majority of currently proven fossil fuel reserves will need to be left in the ground if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, but last year the bank provided nearly $1bn in support for finding more of these unburnable carbon reserves.”

 

 

John Vidal is Environment Editor for the Guardian.

This article was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced with thanks via The Guardian Environment Network.

 

 




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World Bank to focus on ‘all forms of renewable energy’ Updated for 2026

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The World Bank will invest heavily in clean energy and only fund coal projects in “circumstances of extreme need” because climate change will undermine efforts to eliminate extreme poverty, says its president Jim Yong Kim.

Talking ahead of a UN climate summit in Peru next month, Kim said he was alarmed by World Bank-commissioned research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, which said that as a result of past greenhouse gas emissions the world is condemned to unprecedented weather events.

“The findings are alarming. As the planet warms further, heatwaves and other weather extremes, which today we call once­-in­-a-century events, would become the new climate normal, a frightening world of increased risk and instability.

“The consequences for development would be severe, as crop yields decline, water resources shift, communicable diseases move into new geographical ranges, and sea levels rise.”

“We know that the dramatic weather extremes are already affecting millions of people, such as the five to six feet of snow that just fell on Buffalo, and can throw our lives into disarray or worse.

“Even with ambitious mitigation, warming close to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is locked in. And this means that climate change impact such as extreme heat events may now be simply unavoidable.”

‘Only in extreme need will we do coal again’

But the Bank, which has traditionally been one of the world’s largest funders of fossil fuel projects and has been accused of adding to the problem of climate change, said it could not ignore the poorest countries’ need for power.

“We are going to have to focus all of our energy to move toward renewable and cleaner forms of energy”, said Kim.

“But on the other hand we believe very strongly that the poorest countries have a right to energy and that we not ask these energy ­poor countries to wait until there are ways of ensuring that solar and wind power can provide the kind of base load that all countries need in order to industrialise.

“The stakes have never been higher. We cannot continue down the current path of unchecked growing emissions. The case for taking action now on climate change is overwhelming, and the cost of inaction will only rise.”

Kim was backed by Rachel Kyte, World Bank group vice president and special envoy for climate change. “It will only be in circumstances of extreme need that we would contemplate doing coal again”, she said.

“We would only contemplate doing [it] in the poorest of countries where their energy transition as part of their low-carbon development plan means that there are no other base load power sources available at a reasonable price.”

“The focus is on being able to ramp up our lending and the leveraging of our lending into all forms of renewable energy. That’s the strategy. It includes everything from all sizes of hydro through to wind, to solar, to concentrated solar, to geothermal. I think we’re invested in every dimension of renewable energy. That is what we’re concentrating on.”

Now, what about oil, gas and other fossil fuels

The bank’s report showed that with a 2C warming, soya and wheat crop yields in Brazil could decrease 50-70%: “In the Middle east and north Africa, a large increase in heatwaves combined with warmer average temperatures will put intense pressure on already scarce water resources with major consequences for food security.

“Crop yields could decrease by up to 30% at 1.5-2C and by almost 60% at 3-4C. Pressure on resources might increase the risk of conflict.”

Climate change posed a substantial risk to development and cutting poverty, the report said, adding that action on emissions need not come at the expense of economic growth.

But the bank made no commitment to cut funding for oil or other fossil fuel exploration. Analysis earlier this year by Washington-based NGO Oil Change International showed that the bank had funded $21bn (£13bn) of fossil fuel projects since 2008, including $1bn of oil and other fossil fuel exploration in 2013.

“The bank has taken an important first step in essentially stopping its support for coal-fired power plants, but climate change is caused by more than just coal”, said Stephen Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International.

“The vast majority of currently proven fossil fuel reserves will need to be left in the ground if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, but last year the bank provided nearly $1bn in support for finding more of these unburnable carbon reserves.”

 

 

John Vidal is Environment Editor for the Guardian.

This article was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced with thanks via The Guardian Environment Network.

 

 




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