Coal
I have every intention of bloging something here properly one day……….. but for the time being here are a couple of links:
Oxfam come out against coal, Kinsnorth
Time to bury the ‘clean coal’ myth
Fred Pearce exposes how energy companies and governments are trying to rebrand coal as a clean fuel of the future despite the evidence.
Who came up with the term “clean coal”? It is the most toxic phrase in the greenwash lexicon. George W Bush, by promising to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the pursuit of advanced “clean” coal technologies, certainly popularised it. But I’d love to know where it came from. Any thoughts out there?
It is, of course, oxymoronic. Coal is about acid rain and peasouper smogs, asthma and mercury contamination, radioactive waste emissions and ripping apart mountains, killing trees, lung cancer and, of course, global warming.
George Monbiot has gone nuclear! (not)
Back in 2004 (?) Amanda Roll-Pickering (now Amanda Starbuck, my wife) was the media officer at C.A.T. when, as I remember events, Peter Harper, a C.A.T. employee, publicly made reference to the idea that, depending on the way you look at it, nuclear may be bad but not be as bad as the worst effects of climate change.
This was picked up by the Guardian’s environmental colonist George Monbiot (a man who’s writing I adore) and reported as “C.A.T. has gone pro-nuclear”. Amanda asked George to print an apology / retraction but he refused on the grounds that Peter had said it, which he had.
Since then George has moved near to C.A.T. and is, I presume, friends with Peter; they are both very nice charming guys with similar politics who live about a mile apart.
George recently made reference to the idea that we should not be looking at electricity in terms of financial cost per kilowatt-hour but at the environmental cost of co2-production per kilowatt-hour and if (and as George points out, it is a very big if) nuclear compares favourably maybe we should go with it.
Guess what is happening now? Everyone is shouting “Monbiot has gone nuclear!”. Of course he has not done anything of the sort, but am I wrong to find it rather funny?
Burning coal produces more radiation than nuclear!
Sounds absurd, does it not? But in this article in the Guardian George Monbiot points out a fascinating fact that coal powered plants produce much more radiation than nuclear plants!
The odd and widely-ignored truth is that routine radioactive discharges from coal-burning are greater than those produced by nuclear plants. Coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium. Though these are present at much lower levels than in nuclear fuel, a lot more coal is burnt, which means that total emissions are greater.
An article in Scientific American last year maintained that levels of ionising radiation in the bones of people living around coal plants are up to six times higher than the levels in people living around atomic power stations.
Fascinating but irrelevant because, of course, as I am sure George would point out too, the CO2 emissions from both coal and nuclear are enormous, and cutting these emissions must be a top priority. Most, if not all, forms of renewable energy production are much cheaper than either coal or nuclear and, of course, renewables produce no CO2 emissions and no radioactive emissions what so ever.
