Nuclear energy faces hurdles to be included in clean energy investments

WNN 02 July 2021

Nuclear energy has been excluded from the UK government's Green Financing Framework, while several EU Member States have written to the European Commission to oppose nuclear's inclusion in the bloc's green taxonomy.

The UK's Green Financing Framework describes how the government plans to finance expenditures through the issuance of green gilts and the retail Green Savings Bonds that it says will be critical in tackling climate change and other environmental challenges. The framework, which was produced and published yesterday by the Treasury, sets out the basis for identification, selection, verification and reporting of the green projects that are eligible for such financing.

Under 'exclusions', the document says: "Recognising that many sustainable investors have exclusionary criteria in place around nuclear energy, the UK government will not finance any nuclear energy-related expenditures under the Framework."

It adds: "The UK government, however, recognises that reaching net zero emissions will require all energy to be delivered to consumers in zero-carbon forms and be derived from low-carbon sources. Nuclear power is, and will continue to be, a key part of the UK’s low-carbon energy mix alongside solar and wind generation and carbon capture and storage. All these technologies are important in tackling climate change and diversifying the UK’s supply, contributing to the UK’s energy security and sustainable growth."

The Framework aligns with the 2021 International Capital Market Association Green Bond Principles.

"To enable investors to follow the progress and positive impact delivered," the Treasury said it intends to publish an allocation report on its Eligible Green Expenditures on an annual basis and an impact report setting out the environmental impacts and social benefits at least biennially.

The UK is also in the process of developing its own 'green taxonomy'.

Germany-led opposition

Meanwhile, a group of five EU Member States, led by Germany, have written to the European Commission asking for nuclear energy to remain excluded from the EU Taxonomy on Sustainable Finance.

Their letter follows the assessment of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), whose mission is to support EU policies with independent evidence throughout the whole policy cycle, that nuclear energy does no more harm to human health or the environment than any other power-producing technology considered to be sustainable.

The letter - signed by the environment or energy ministers of Austria, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg and Spain - points to “shortcomings” in the JRC report, which was published in April.

The ministers said the JRC's conclusion was "a misconception" and based on "two grave methodological shortcomings".

The JRC "neglects to address the residual nuclear risk, assessing only the normal operation of nuclear power plants" and "disregards the life-cycle approach", according to the ministers.

"We recognise the sovereign right of Member States to decide for or against nuclear power as part of their national energy systems. However, we are concerned that including nuclear power in the Taxonomy would permanently damage its integrity, credibility and therefore its usefulness," they wrote.

The two expert groups tasked by the European Commission with the review of the JRC report on the sustainability of nuclear energy published their assessments today. They are here and here.

The Article 31 group largely agrees with the conclusions of the JRC report, while the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks recognises its own lack of the requisite expertise to conduct this assessment but raises some concerns about the conclusions of the JRC report.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

Germany leads call to keep nuclear out of EU green finance taxonomy

By Frédéric Simon | EURACTIV.com
Jul 2, 2021 

“We are concerned that including nuclear power in the Taxonomy would permanently damage its integrity, credibility and therefore its usefulness,” warns the letter, signed by German environment minister Svenja Schulze and four colleagues from other EU member states. [EPA-EFE/MAJA HITIJ]

A group of five EU member states led by Germany have sent a letter to the European Commission asking for nuclear energy to be kept out of the EU’s green finance taxonomy.

The letter – signed by the environment or energy ministers of Austria, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, and Spain – points to “shortcomings” in a report by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre published on 2 April, which concluded that nuclear energy is safe.

“Nuclear power is incompatible with the Taxonomy Regulation’s ‘do no significant harm’ principle,” the ministers wrote, urging the Commission to keep nuclear out of the EU’s green finance rules.

“We are concerned that including nuclear power in the taxonomy would permanently damage its integrity, credibility and therefore its usefulness,” they warned.

The letter is undated but EURACTIV understands it was sent to the Commission on Wednesday (30 June). Signatories include: Svenja Schulze (Germany), Leonore Gewessler (Austria), Dan Jørgensen and Simon Kollerup (Denmark), Carole Dieschbourg (Luxembourg), Teresa Ribera Rodríguez and Nadia Calviño Santamaría (Spain).

It argues that the European Commission’s assessment of the safety of nuclear power installations is flawed.

“We were disconcerted to learn that in the opinion of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), there were no indications that the high-risk technology that is nuclear power is more damaging to human health and to the environment than other forms of energy generation, such as wind and solar energy,” the ministers wrote.

“Nuclear power, however, is a high-risk technology – wind energy is not. This essential difference must be taken into account,” they insisted, saying the Commission report deliberately ignored the possibility of a serious incident.

The European Commission’s in-house scientific body, the Joint Research Centre, released its much-awaited report on nuclear power on 2 April, just before the Easter break.

Its conclusions were clear: nuclear power is a safe, low-carbon energy source comparable to wind and hydropower, and as such, it qualifies for a green investment label under the EU’s green finance taxonomy.

“The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies,” the JRC report said.

LEAK: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label

Experts tasked with assessing whether the European Union should label nuclear power as a green investment will say that the fuel qualifies as sustainable, according to a leaked document.

Nuclear energy advocates saw the report as a green light for a potential nuclear renaissance in Europe and called on the European Commission to take the necessary steps to include nuclear in the taxonomy.

A green investment label under the EU taxonomy would lower the cost of new nuclear projects, said Jessica Johnson, communications director at Foratom, the trade association representing the nuclear industry in Brussels.

But the five EU countries dispute this, saying the inclusion of nuclear in the taxonomy would undermine its credibility.

“Many savers and investors would lose faith in financial products marketed as ‘sustainable’ if they had to fear that by buying these products they would be financing activities in the area of nuclear power,” the ministers warned.

In addition, the letter said the JRC report also “disregards the life-cycle approach” to environmental risk assessment when it comes to geological storage of nuclear waste.

“After more than 60 years of using nuclear power, not one single fuel element has been permanently disposed of anywhere in the world,” the letter pointed out, saying there is currently “no operational experience with deep geological repositories for high active waste”.

Nuclear faces ‘a lot of uncertainty’ as EU green evaluation looms

The industry is growing increasingly nervous about European Commission plans to evaluate the safety of radioactive waste handling as an expert report is expected next month on how to classify nuclear energy under the EU’s green finance taxonomy.


The European Commission had three months to submit the JRC report to the scrutiny of two expert committees – the first on radiation protection and waste management under Article 31 of the Euratom Treaty, and the second on environmental impact by the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks.

Those evaluations are expected to be made public today.

They will be “rigorous,” an EU spokesperson told EURACTIV at the time, saying that “the credibility of this assessment is crucial.”

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]


> Read the full letter download here.

Germany, four others oppose classing nuclear as green in EU
Reuters

View of the reactor of the nuclear power plant that will be dismantled in Muelheim-Kaerlich, Germany, May 22, 2017. REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen

BERLIN, July 2 (Reuters) - Germany has gathered support from four European Union countries around its opposition to classifying nuclear energy as "green" and sustainable for investment purposes, a letter to the Commission seen by Reuters on Friday showed.

By making green investments more visible to investors in its new rule book, or taxonomy, Brussels hopes, from next year, to help steer huge sums of private capital into activities that support EU climate goals. read more

Spain, Austria, Denmark and Luxembourg joined Germany in saying investors concerned about nuclear waste storage could lose confidence in financial products labelled green if they included nuclear energy without their knowledge.

"We worry that including nuclear power in the taxonomy will damage its integrity and credibility, and therefore its usefulness," the countries' ministers said, adding that every EU country has the right to choose its own form of energy.

Countries like nuclear-reliant France and some eastern European states favour nuclear because it emits no climate-harming carbon.

The Commission has published climate-related criteria for green investments ranging from building renovations to the manufacture of cement, steel and batteries.

The nuclear issue, which is being dealt with separately, finds mixed responses even inside the Commission. The letter cited the fact that the question of final nuclear waste storage is not yet clarified.

Germany, already committed to phasing out nuclear energy 20 years ago over safety concerns, responded to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan by accelerating its national exit scheme for reactors. read more

Impact of nuclear energy needs more study before getting green label, EU told

Kate Abnett Simon Jessop
July 2, 2021

A mustard field is seen in front of the cooling towers of the Temelin nuclear power plant near the South Bohemian city of Tyn nad Vltavou April 12, 2014. REUTERS/David W Cerny/Files


BRUSSELS, July 2 (Reuters) - The European Union should do more research on the potential harm caused by nuclear power before deciding whether to label it as a sustainable investment, one of the two expert committees tasked with assessing the fuel's green credentials said on Friday.

Brussels is mulling a decision on whether to include nuclear energy in its sustainable finance taxonomy, a list of economic activities that will from next year define which can be labelled as green investments.

The EU's science arm said in March that nuclear power should get a green label.

However, given disagreement among other experts over whether its low CO2 emissions make up for a lack of analysis on the environmental impact of radioactive waste disposal, two expert committees were later tasked with scrutinising its findings.

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On Friday, environment experts on the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks (SCHEER) said they backed many of the initial report's findings, but were concerned about others.

To be considered green, activities must "do no significant harm" to specific environmental aims, yet SCHEER said the original report had instead considered whether nuclear would "do less harm" than other energy technologies.

"It is the opinion of the SCHEER that the comparative approach is not sufficient to ensure 'no significant harm'," it said in its report, posted on the Commission's website.

The second report, from a group of experts on radiation protection and waste management, was broadly supportive of the original findings.

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The Commission said it will now follow up on the findings of both expert reports.

"The inclusion of nuclear in the taxonomy regulation has been subject of intense debate," a spokesperson said in emailed comments.

"While nuclear energy is consistently acknowledged as a low-carbon energy source, opinions differ notably on the potential impact on other environmental objectives, such as the environmental impact of nuclear waste."

EU countries are split over nuclear energy, with some, including France, Hungary and Poland, in favour of the fuel, while others, including Austria, oppose it.
Editing by Jan Harvey

Our Standards: The Thomson

Climate change is killing us

By Max Fawcett | Opinion | July 2nd 2021

NATIONAL OBSERVER

A Salvation Army EMS vehicle is set up as a cooling station as people line up to get into a splash park while trying to beat the heat in Calgary, Alta., Wednesday, June 30, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

The small town of Lytton, British Columbia, has always been one of the hottest places in Canada. But this week, with the temperature hitting a high of 49.6 C, it’s one of the hottest in the world — and it’s giving the rest of the country a preview of what our climate future might look like. In the midst of a brutal heat wave that has engulfed the Pacific Northwest this week, and killed nearly 500 people already in Canada alone, Lytton’s record-breaking heat and the subsequent wildfire that destroyed much of the town and surrounding First Nations stands out as a terrifying reminder of just how deadly-serious climate change can be.

B.C. Premier John Horgan seems to need that reminder more than most. Earlier this week, he told reporters that “fatalities are a part of life,” a comment that he was forced to walk back almost immediately. But this heat wave is another indication that climate-driven fatalities are going to be an even bigger part of our lives going forward. And as bad as it is in places like Kamloops and Lytton, it’s worse in other parts of the world. Take the approximately 200,000 people living in Jacobabad, Pakistan, where, as The Telegraph’s Ben Farmer wrote, “its mixture of heat and humidity has made it one of only two places on Earth to have now officially passed, albeit briefly, a threshold hotter than the human body can withstand.” That list of places is sure to grow in the years and decades to come, and while Canada won’t be on it any time soon, we will have to contend with the impact of hotter and more humid summers.

Vancouver's scorching hot temperatures this week were hard on people and pets. Devon O'Donnell kept her cats cool with wet towels frozen in the fridge. Photo courtesy of Devon O'Donnell


Unfortunately, the worst may be yet to come for Western Canadians with this particular heat wave. That’s because B.C. and Alberta’s forests getting put under the broiler has massively increased the risk of forest fires, which could very quickly send Jason Kenney’s “best summer ever” up in smoke. As Yan Boulanger, a forest ecologist for Natural Resources Canada, told the Canadian Press, Western Canada’s wildfire risk maps are “extremely extreme right now.”

Once this so-called “heat dome” lifts and we can all get back to thinking a bit more clearly, we need to ask some pointed questions about how we’re going to adapt to this new normal — and what it means for climate policy going forward. The federal government’s decision to move up the timeline on the phaseout of fossil fuel vehicle sales by five years, to 2035 from 2040, is a step in the right direction. But it should be clear to all but the most stubborn holdouts that we need to be taking bounds, not steps, if we’re going to get ahead of this slow-motion disaster.



Two bodies discovered in the small town north of Hope
By Nick Wells | News, Politics | July 4th 2021Wildfires

That means a hard stop on catering to climate skeptics who have retrenched from outright denial to now accepting the science but ignoring its conclusions. They will point to China or the United States or some other actor’s behaviour as an example of why we don’t need to act decisively, move quickly or behave boldly. And while it might be tempting to assume the evidence right in front of our sweating faces will be enough to convince them to abandon this sort of climate filibustering, it’s far more likely they will double down on their logical fallacy of choice. If they insist on living in the past, so be it.

It will be left to the rest of us to push the broader climate conversation past promises about net-zero emissions targets that are 20 or 30 years in the future and focus far more on what we can do today to actually reach them. We’re at the point where that doesn’t just mean other people making sacrifices. We all have to entertain the possibility of changes to our own lives, whether it’s giving up some long-distance travel, getting rid of a car, or finding ways to use less energy.

The choice on the table isn’t between making sacrifices and maintaining the status quo, much as some people might want to believe otherwise. It’s between making relatively small sacrifices now or much bigger ones in the future — or worse, saddling our children and grandchildren with our sorry legacy. The sooner we come to terms with the reality we’ve helped create, the better we’ll be able to adapt. If there’s one thing that’s a near-certainty, it’s that the records getting broken this week won’t be the last of their kind.

Scientists call Northwest heatwave the 'most extreme in world weather records'
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
July 04, 2021

U.S. government scientists concluded in a new report that last month was the hottest June on record. (Photo: Angelo Juan Ramos/Flickr/cc)

A pair of climate scientists on Thursday said the record-high temperatures that have ravaged the northwestern U.S. and western Canada over the past week—killing hundreds and sparking dozens of wildfires—represent the "world's most extreme heatwave in modern history."

"It's not hype or exaggeration to call the past week's heatwave the most extreme in world weather records."
—Bob Henson, Jeff Masters

"Never in the century-plus history of world weather observation have so many all-time heat records fallen by such a large margin than in the past week's historic heatwave in western North America," meteorologist Bob Henson and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hurricane scientist Jeff Masters wrote for Yale Climate Connections.
Chris 

"It's not hype or exaggeration to call the past week's heatwave the most extreme in world weather records," they argued. "The only heatwave that compares is the great Dust Bowl heatwave of July 1936 in the U.S. Midwest and south-central Canada. But even that cannot compare to what happened in the Northwest U.S. and western Canada over the past week."

In British Columbia, the chief coroner said her office has received nearly 500 reports of "sudden and unexpected" deaths since last Friday, many of which are believed to be connected to the record temperatures that the region has suffered in recent days.

Residents of the small British Columbia village of Lytton—which on Tuesday recorded Canada's all-time high temperature of 121°F—were forced to evacuate Wednesday as a wildfire ripped through the area and quickly engulfed the small town, destroying homes and buildings.

"Our poor little town of Lytton is gone," Edith Loring-Kuhanga, an administrator at a local school, wrote in a Facebook post. "Our community members have lost everything."
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Henson and Masters called Lytton—90% of which was burned—the "poster community" of the "horrific" heatwave.

Weather historian Christopher Burt told the two scientists that "this is the most anomalous regional extreme heat event to occur anywhere on Earth since temperature records began."

"Nothing can compare," Burt added.


To emphasize the "extremity of this event," Henson and Masters highlighted just some of the temperature records that have fallen in Canada and the United States since late last week.

Portland, Oregon, broke its longstanding all-time record high (107°F from 1965 and 1981) on three days in a row—a stunning feat for any all-time record—with highs of 108°F on Saturday, June 26; 112°F on Sunday; and 116°F on Monday. That 116°F is one degree higher than the average daily high on June 28 at Death Valley, California.

Quillayute, Washington, broke its official all-time high by a truly astonishing 11°F, after hitting 110°F on Monday (old record: 99°F on August 9, 1981). Quillayute is located near the lush Hoh Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula, just three miles from the Pacific Ocean, and receives an average of 100 inches of precipitation per year.

Jasper, Alberta, broke its all-time high of 36.7°C (98.1°F) on four days in a row, June 27-30, with highs of 37.3°C, 39.0°C, 40.3°C, and 41.1°C (99.1°F, 102.2°F, 104.5°F, and 106°F).

All-time state highs were tied in Washington (118°F at Dallesport) and set in Oregon (118°F at Hermiston, beating the reliable record of 117°F), and provincial highs were smashed in British Columbia (49.6°C [121.3°F] at Lytton, beating 39.1°C [102.4°F]) and Northwest Territories (39.9°C [103.8°F] at Fort Smith, beating 31.7°C [89.1°F]).

"Preliminary data from NOAA's U.S. Records website shows that 55 U.S. stations had the highest temperatures in their history in the week ending June 28," Henson and Masters wrote. "More than 400 daily record highs were set. Over the past year, the nation has experienced about 38,000 daily record highs versus about 18,500 record lows, consistent with the 2:1 ratio of hot to cold records set in recent years."

Scientists have long predicted that heatwaves of the kind that are scorching the Northwestern U.S. and Canada will become more frequent and intense across the globe as the planet continues to warm due to the continued emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

"Nowhere is safe... who would have predicted a temperature of 48/49°C [118.4°F/120.2°F] in British Columbia?" Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser in the United Kingdom, said in an interview with The Guardian. "The risks have been understood and known for so long and we have not acted, now we have a very narrow timeline for us to manage the problem."

 

Scientists reconstruct Mediterranean silver trade, from Trojan War to Roman Republic

GOLDSCHMIDT CONFERENCE

Research News

IMAGE: A HACKSILBER HOARD DATED TO THE MIDDLE OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY BCE FOUND BY THE LEON LEVY EXPEDITION TO ASHKELON. view more 

CREDIT: WE ARE GRATEFUL TO L. E. STAGER AND D. MASTER, DIRECTORS OF THE LEON LEVY EXPEDITION TO ASHKELON, AND TO D. T. ARIEL, FOR ALLOWING US TO PUBLISH THESE PHOTOGRAPHS....

Scientists have reconstructed the Eastern Mediterranean silver trade, over a period including the traditional dates of the Trojan War, the founding of Rome, and the destruction of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. The team of French, Israeli and Australian scientists and numismatists found geochemical evidence for pre-coinage silver trade continuing throughout the Mediterranean during the Late Bronze and Iron Age periods, with the supply slowing only occasionally. Silver was sourced from the whole north-eastern Mediterranean, and as far away as the Iberian Peninsula.

The team used high-precision isotopic analysis to identify the ore sources of minute lead traces found in silver Hacksilber. Hacksilber is irregularly cut silver bullion including broken pieces of silver ingots and jewellery that served as means of payment in the southern Levant from the beginning of the second millennium until the fourth century BCE. Used in local and international transactions, its value was determined by weighing it on scales against standardized weights. It has been discovered in archaeological excavations in the region usually stored inside ceramic containers and it had to be imported as there was no silver to be mined in the Levant.

Presenting the research at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference, Dr. Liesel Gentelli said "Even before coinage there was international trade, and Hacksilber was one of the commodities being exchanged for goods".

The team analysed Hacksilber from 13 different sites dating from 1300 BCE to 586 BCE in the southern Levant, modern-day Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The samples included finds from 'En Gedi, Ekron, and Megiddo (also known as Armageddon). They matched their findings with ore samples, and have shown that most of the Hacksilber came from the Southern Aegean and Balkans (Macedonia, Thrace and Illyria). Some was also found to come from as far away as Sardinia and Spain.

Lead researcher Liesel Gentelli (École normale supérieure de Lyon, France) said:

"Previous researchers believed that silver trade had come to an end following the societal collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but our research shows that exchanges between especially the southern Levant and the Aegean world never came to a stop. People around the Eastern Mediterranean remained connected. It's likely that the silver flowed to the Levant as a result of trade or plunder.

We do see periods of silver scarcity around the time of the Bronze to Iron Age transition, around 1300-1100 BCE. Some hoards from this period show the silver displaying unusually high copper content, which would have been added to make up for the lack of silver.

We can't match our findings on the silver trade to specific historical events, but our analysis shows the importance of Hacksilber trade from before the Trojan War, which some scholars date to the early 12th century BCE, through the founding of Rome in 753 BCE, and up to the end of the Iron Age in 586 BCE, marked by Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. After that, we see the gradual introduction of coinage, first as finds of several archaic coins and later a transition to a monetary economy in the southern Levant circa 450 BCE which made the trade of Hacksilber less relevant. However, this work reveals the ongoing and crucial economic role that Hacksilber played in the Bronze and Iron Ages economies".

Commenting, Dr Matthew Ponting, Senior Lecturer in Archaeological Materials at the University of Liverpool said:

"This is important new work that confirms our understanding of trade and exchange routes in the Early Iron Age Levant. The fact that all silver found in the region would have had to have been imported presents exciting possibilities to investigate trade routes more generally as well as to learn more about alloy use and preference during this important period of history".

###

Dr Ponting was not involved in this work, this is an independent comment.

The Goldschmidt Conference is the World's main geochemistry conference. It is hosted alternately by the European Association of Geochemistry (Europe) and the Geochemical Society (USA). The 2021 conference (virtual) takes place from 4-9 July, https://2021.goldschmidt.info/. The 2022 conference takes place in Hawaii.

The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy infrastructure woes

A controversial dam project could be avoided (and save billions) by merely replacing water heaters en masse

By EVAN MILLS

SALON
PUBLISHED JULY 4, 2021

Water Heater | Grand Coulee Dam (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)


There's widespread agreement that in order to wean humanity off of climate-altering fossil fuels, we should switch over to renewable sources of electricity. Yet one of the biggest problems with renewables is logistical: unlike a gas power plant, you can't simply turn the flow of wind or solar energy on or off; those energy sources come and go as nature pleases.

As a result, the question of how to store surplus wind and solar power for when it's needed is more timely than ever. Unfortunately, many of the solutions being advanced only create new problems, and frequently cost more than necessary. And perhaps the best solution for energy savings — and one that would avoid having to build any new dams to facilitate energy storage — is sitting right under noses. Or, more accurately, it is sitting in our closets and basements.

The big battery problem

One flashy idea for storing energy goes something like this: dam a river, use "free" surplus green power to pump that water up to another higher dam; then, when electricity is needed, release that water back down to the lower dam, spinning a generator along the way. The industry jargon for this set-up is "pumped-storage hydro". It is, in effect, a big, big battery.

At first blush, this sounds almost elegant: Use clean energy to store more clean energy. Even some environmental groups are getting seduced.

But there are several snakes in the garden. First, these dams are destructive: physically, ecologically, and culturally. Making matters worse, about a quarter of the energy is cannibalized to do all that pumping.

Adding insult to injury, immense amounts of precious water are lost by evaporation from the idling reservoirs. Climate change is making this worse. On the Arizona/Nevada border, water levels at Lake Mead — which is the downstream collection point for the Colorado basin — have fallen to less than a third of its capacity; hence, officials are looking at hydroelectric disruptions due to severe drought going into this summer and beyond. More water withdrawals, especially into enormous reservoirs that experience significant evaporation, accelerate the problem.

Ironically, this situation pushes the electric grid back toward costlier and dirtier gas-fired power plants. And these projects cost a fortune.

One high-profile proposal initially sought to dam the Little Colorado River upstream from its breathtaking confluence with the main Colorado, submerging a popular spot in the heart of Grand Canyon country.

About 30,000 people float "The Canyon" each year, and a few days into the trip many pause where these rivers meet to cool off and marvel at the layer cake of cinnabar cliffs sandwiched between azure sky and turquoise pools. I've had the good fortune to visit this hallowed place, twice, first with my father and later in life with my son. More importantly, this site has deep significance to the Hopi and Navajo peoples.

A "lower-impact" variant of the project, known as Big Canyon, was offered after the initial proposal met stiff resistance. It entails 4 miles of dam and other water-retention structures (9 reservoirs in all), 6 miles of water transport infrastructure, and two 14-mile-long high-voltage transmission lines to shunt the power gridward.

The project's estimated 3.6 billion watts is a pile of power. The National Hydroelectric Power Association predictably calls such projects "affordable." Yet the projected price tag for the Big Canyon project $10 to $20 billion. Even repurposing existing infrastructure, as has been proposed for the Hoover Dam, would cost many billions.

A dam mistake?

The technological enthusiasm underpinning this undertaking is reminiscent of a stubborn syndrome that existed until the 1970s, before OPEC woke the world up to the problems of energy dependency. In those days, energy planners reflexively gravitated towards huge, capital-intensive supply-side solutions, bypassing more elegant and dispersed "demand-side" options for instead proactively reducing the energy needed to get the job done.

A central pillar of the early energy efficiency movement of the 1970s was the idea of avoiding the construction of new electric power plants by instead deploying scores of efficient light bulbs, refrigerators, etc. One such project, dubbed "Merlin," sought to make a California power plant disappear by making the rest of the state more energy-efficient. And it cost a fraction of a new power plant.

Fast forward 50 years and we have succeeded. Energy use per unit of economic activity is down by more than half, compared to 1970s practices. Power plants were indeed cancelled.

And now, in service of the goal of decarbonizing the remaining energy needed to meet our needs, we're producing lots and lots of renewable power to fill the remaining gap. We're even beginning to have a surplus, meaning that we sometimes generate more than can be instantly consumed. Hence the big dams.

Again today, there is a better way ... with a twist: trim and shift the demand for energy and target storage to where it's needed. It's Merlin 2.0.

Enter the humble water heater. Pulling about 5,000 watts of power, conventional electric water heaters use a lot of power. They are, in other words, a prime target for reforming the grid.

Here is how such an energy-saving reform might work: First, by nudging the operating times for water heaters from peak hours in a coordinated manner; second, by switching residents over to energy-efficient heat pump water heaters. Heat pump water heaters have been around for decades, but are just now catching on in the United States.
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Here's how it works. The heat pump water heater is like a refrigerator running in reverse. Instead of taking heat out of the unit (cooling) and dumping it into the nearby room air, the heat pump water heater dumps heat from the air around it into the water. This is vastly more efficient than heating water in the old way, with a high-wattage electric coil.

There is actually a little-known tradition, going back to the late 1930s, of electric companies managing water heaters to avoid short-squeezes on the grid during times of peak consumption. Because water can be kept hot so long, consumers don't even notice. Originally this was done with timers, later via radio signals, and today through the cloud. And, thanks to smart meters that track energy use by the minute, demand-shifts can be very precisely targeted and valued. Water heaters, reborn as big thermal batteries, are an excellent means by which lots of clean power can be strategically banked for later use. Hundreds of thousands of water heaters have already been quietly hooked up this way.

 This is just the tip of the potential iceberg.

Deploying one million more "flexible" water heaters in the United States would spare the Little Colorado. (Notably, around 10 million water heaters are purchased nationwide each year; one million water heaters is just 10 percent of that). The price tag would be a tiny fraction of that to build the disruptive Big Canyon hydro project, and also less costly than deploying enormous banks of batteries into the grid. Using far more efficient heat pump water heaters would still cost less (particularly the less-costly plug-in units coming to market this year, which avoid the need for electrical upgrades) and spread the benefits to four-times as many homes, displacing proportionately more carbon emissions and saving more people more money on their power bills.

As a thought experiment, were all U.S. homes converted to heat pump water heaters, reductions of 135 million metric tonnes of CO2 each year would be achieved (equivalent to that of about 30 million cars) and enough energy storage capacity would be available to avoid 20 Big Canyon projects.

This approach can be deployed far faster than dam construction, and free of protest (except perhaps from dam builders). It's also more resilient. During last winter's megastorms, the Big Canyon project would have provided no relief to those isolated in power networks such as the one that vexed Texas. And now this summer, we're reminded that heatwaves can boost demand beyond the grid's capacity even in less isolated power networks. The resulting grid congestion has already become an impediment to renewable energy development in many parts of the country. Water heaters are always local.

As we continue to decarbonize our energy systems, other flexible customer-side strategies can be supported using cash incentives for consumers who are willing to voluntarily flex their demand. Among these, usage can be shifted to times when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing via dynamic electric-vehicle charging, smart thermostats, and timed pool pumps, sending even more renewable electrons to homes while enhancing the power network's reliability.
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It's the smart grid in action.

EVAN MILLS
 is an energy and climate analyst who participated in the work of the Nobel-Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is an Affiliate and retired Senior Scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Research Affiliate at U.C. Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group.

Remaining Surfside condo building demolished before storm

 

Murder of the Dead by Amadeo Bordiga 1951 - Marxists

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/murder.htm

• When the catastrophe destroys houses, fields and factories, throwingthe active population out of work, it undoubtedly destroys wealth. Butthis cannot be remedied by a transfusion of wealth from elsewhere, aswith the miserable operation of rummaging around for old jumble, wherethe advertising, collection and transport cost far more than the valueof the worn out clothes. The wealth that disappeared was th…

The Surfside condo disaster: Critical structural dangers were ignored

Niles Niemuth@niles_niemuth
28 June 2021

The official death toll climbed to nine Sunday as the search for bodies and possible survivors continued amid the rubble of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Florida, located on the Atlantic coast just north of Miami Beach.

Eight bodies have been recovered and one person has died in hospital. Over 150 residents remain unaccounted for more than four days after a significant portion of the 40-year-old, 12-story oceanfront residential tower suddenly collapsed in the early hours of Thursday.

Among the identified victims are retirees Antonio and Gladys Lozano, married for 59 years, who died together, asleep in their ninth-floor apartment. The body of Manuel LaFont, 54, was recovered on Friday. LaFont, originally from Houston, Texas, was a businessman who worked with companies in Latin America. Stacie Dawn Fang, 54, the first victim identified on Thursday, died of blunt force trauma as her apartment crumbled around her. Fang’s teenage son, Jonah Handler, is among the handful of residents rescued from the rubble by first responders.

Workers search in the rubble at the Champlain Towers South Condo, Saturday, June 26, 2021, in Surfside, Fla. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

The search effort was slowed by a smoldering fire beneath the rubble, which was finally suppressed on Saturday. A 40-foot-deep, 20-foot-wide, 125-foot-long ditch is being dug into the heap of concrete, steel, furniture, clothing and other personal effects to facilitate the recovery effort.

Reports continue to emerge indicating that the building was known for several years to be structurally unsound, pointing to criminal neglect in connection with the beachfront catastrophe. However, any official investigation is certain to be a whitewash, with no one facing serious consequences for their role in the deaths of potentially more than 150 people.

Structural engineer Frank Morabito delivered a report to the treasurer of the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association, the building’s owner and operator, in October 2018 that warned of “major structural damage” to the concrete slab underneath the pool deck and entrance drive caused by the failure of waterproofing. “Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially,” he explained.

The report, released by the city of Surfside Friday night, also found that concrete columns and walls in the parking garage levels under the building were cracking and had lost entire chunks, with some areas so eroded that they showed corroded steel rebar reinforcements.

Morabito noted that repairs were needed to “maintain the structural integrity” of the building but gave no indication that there was any concern of a collapse. The report’s main conclusion was that the roof needed to be replaced before hurricane season to prevent rain and wind damage.

At the time of the collapse, the building was undergoing roof repairs as part of the recertification process required by Miami-Dade County for buildings that are 40 years old, but nothing had yet been done about the deteriorating concrete. The building needed approximately $15 million in repairs and upgrades in order to achieve recertification.

Donna DiMaggio Berger, an attorney for the condo association, told the Daily Mail on Friday that Morabito had not looked at the foundation or the ground underneath the building, as this is not required in the recertification process. A 2020 study of satellite data from the 1990s by an engineer at Florida International University found that the building had been sinking at a rate of two millimeters per year. It is possible that the building had subsided more than three inches in the last four decades, undermining its structural integrity. Despite these concerning findings, no official warnings were issued.

The Champlain Towers South Condominium was built on reclaimed wetlands on one of the many barrier islands that bear the brunt of wind and storm surge from hurricanes and other tropical storm systems. Starting in the late 1920s, speculators divided up the sandbar between the Atlantic Ocean and North Biscayne Bay, developing it into the city of Surfside.

Two Champlain Towers, South and North, were the first new buildings built in Surfside after a moratorium on new construction implemented by Miami-Dade County in 1979 due to concerns about the city’s degraded water and sewage system. The developers, led by Polish-born Canadian attorney Nathan Reiber, paid $200,000 to the city, half the cost of a new sewage system on the property, in order to get the project off the ground.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that Reiber had been charged by Canada with tax evasion during the 1970s and was fined $60,000. Reiber and a partner ran an apartment operation in Canada where they were accused of skimming tens of thousands of dollars from coin-operated laundries and pocketing $120,000 in a fraudulent construction scheme.

A year after the approval of the project, the developers of the Champlain Towers were compelled to ask two members of the City Council to return campaign contributions the former had made after Reiber and his associates were accused of trying to buy off the local government.

The construction of the Champlain Towers came at the beginning of the deregulation of the savings-and-loan industry. President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts further encouraged the development of real estate as a tax shelter. Accordingly, money was flooded into commercial real estate development, resulting in an explosion of construction in Florida and throughout the US, with buildings often being quickly and cheaply constructed.

Both US political parties share responsibility for the Champlain Towers disaster. Between 1971 and 1999, the Democratic Party controlled the governor’s office for all but four years, overseeing an explosion of residential and commercial construction in Florida with little effective oversight. Most recently, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has been pushing to cut regulations further, seeking to remove any obstacles to the extraction of profit from the working class while funneling tens of millions of dollars in state funds to private developers.

Just hours after the collapse of the Surfside condo, President Joe Biden announced a bipartisan infrastructure deal providing a fraction of his original proposal, omitting any funding for childcare, health care, or tax credits for families, and leaving out his promised increase in corporate taxes. The entire $579 billion in new investments in physical infrastructure will be handed out to private companies under the guise of “public-private partnerships.”

Exactly how many other residential towers on the Florida coast and throughout the United States are at risk of collapsing like Champlain Towers South is unknown, but it is known that thousands of others were built under similar conditions and on unstable ground and are now being subjected to increased flooding and inclement weather thanks to human-induced global warming. A thorough survey of every housing development is needed to determine the risks posed to their residents.

As one engineer noted, the disaster in Surfside is a “canary in the coal mine.” It is indicative of the abysmal state of basic social infrastructure across the country, under conditions where every aspect of life is subordinated to the drive for ever greater profit. This is on display most monstrously in the COVID-19 pandemic, in which a “herd immunity” policy pursued by the ruling class has allowed the disease to spread, resulting in the deaths of at least 600,000 Americans and 4 million people globally.

With increasing frequency in the United States bridges collapse, factories explode and dams fail, killing workers and destroying their homes and livelihoods, yet nothing is done to address these life-and-death problems. In Detroit, Michigan last weekend, 2-6 inches of rain in a matter of a few hours flooded the freeway system as critical pumps failed, stranding thousands of people in their cars. Hundreds of homes were flooded, destroying the belongings of families.

In every case, capitalism is unable to address and resolve these basic issues. The need for rational planning in the organization of society is clear. However, it is impossible under the anarchy of the capitalist system. A solution to these basic problems will be found only through the expropriation of the corporate-financial oligarchy and democratic reorganization of society under the control of the working class so as to marshal the world’s resources to meet the needs of humanity. Guaranteeing safe housing, safe workplaces, high quality education and health care requires the establishment of socialism.

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1. Murder of the Dead by Amadeo Bordiga 1951

   https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/murder.htm

   Murder of the Dead. First Published: Battaglia Comunista No. 24 1951; Source: Antagonism's Bordiga archive; HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden 2003. In Italy, we have long experience of “catastrophes that strike the country” and we also have a certain specialisation in “staging” them. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, rainstorms ...