Five Minutes to Midnight

Each year I wait with anticipation to find out whether the groundhog will see his shadow and winter will continue, or if he won’t see his shadow and spring will come early. Although I know it is just folklore, it is still interesting to see what weather patterns Punxsutawney Phil will predict.

Much like the groundhog tradition, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists conducts its own annual tradition of changing a metaphorical Doomsday Clock based on how well they believe the world is addressing nuclear nonproliferation and climate change. Each minute closer to midnight signals doom and this year the scientists have moved the clock forward yet another minute closer to midnight to 11:55.

The Bulletin explains:

Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.

The scientists point to a nuclear Iran, new leadership within North Korea, the continued threat of climate change, and last year’s Fukushima nuclear accident as some of the main contributors to their decision.

Lawrence Krauss, co-chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, comments on the decision:

As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity's survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons, and in fact setting the stage for global reductions.

Given that nuclear energy is safe, emission free and stimulates the economy, it seems only reasonable that it would be included in energy policies that aim to both reduce the effects of climate change and boost economic development. Bill Sweet at IEEE Spectrum discusses this point with Robert Socolow, one of the Bulletin’s board members.

Together with climate modeler James Hansen of Columbia University's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Socolow emphasized that only nuclear energy can provide baseload electricity as a substitute for fossil fuels. Because of that, he emphasized the importance of keeping the nuclear power open. Yet his insistence on that point was tempered, even to a degree undermined, by his sense that more nuclear power means more proliferation of atomic weaponry.

That attitude, taking nuclear power to be essentially a good thing but dangerous because the technology is dual-use and can be turned to military ends, is characteristic of scientists who have worried about the atom in the post-war era.

Moving forward, Sweet encouraged a more measured look at the reality of the risks involved with nuclear power:

"Worldwide, there have been 582 nuclear power reactors that have operated approximately 14,400 reactor-years. Thus, to date, the historical frequency of core-melt accidents is about one in 1,300 reactor-years," Cochran said. Yet the Nuclear Regulator Commission, working from supposedly scientific probabilistic risk assessments, has put that frequency much lower, in the range of one to five per ten thousand reactor years (1-5/10,000).

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—to some degree—acknowledge Sweet’s point that nuclear reactor designs have been improving and getting safer over the past 60 years of operation, but with time running out on the Doomsday Clock, they still call for more safeguards:

Safer nuclear reactor designs need to be developed and built, and more stringent oversight, training, and attention are needed to prevent future disasters.  A major question to be addressed is:  How can complex systems like nuclear power stations be made less susceptible to accidents and errors in judgment?

Increasing safety at the nation’s nuclear plants is something that the industry aims to achieve each day. However, post-Fukushima safety improvements could result in additional costs to the utilities, The Bulletin said, which may open the door for other energy alternatives to meet the nation’s electricity and climate change goals:

In the United States, increased costs of additional safety measures may make nuclear power too expensive to be a realistic alternative to natural gas and other fossil fuels.    

   
The hopeful news is that alternatives to burning coal, oil, and uranium for energy continue to show promise.  Solar and photovoltaic technologies are seeing reductions in price, wind turbines are being adopted for commercial electricity, and energy conservation and efficiency are becoming accepted as sources for industrial production and residential use. 

Regardless of The Bulletin’s moving target in reducing the effects of climate change and meeting nuclear nonproliferation goals, it is important to keep in mind that the Doomsday Clock serves just about as much utility as Punxsutawney Phil. Although The Bulletin warns us that, “The Clock is ticking,” I am pretty sure that continued research and development and advanced technologies will save us all before the clock strikes 12.

Just so you won’t have nightmares tonight, read this comforting note from The Los Angeles Times:

However, it may be heartening to hear that humanity has been closer to doomsday in the past and managed to come back from the brink of self destruction. In 1953 the board declared the time on the doomsday clock to be two minutes to midnight as the United States decided to pursue the hydrogen bomb, but by 1960 the time had moved back to six minutes to midnight as it became clear that both the U.S. and Russia were eager to avoid a nuclear conflict.

If that doesn’t relieve your anxiety about our impending doom, it may be time to curl up with some popcorn and Dr. Strangelove, or, of course, take a lesson from Tim Tebow…just a thought!

Photo credits: Robert Socolow sits alongside the Doomsday Clock. Courtesy of Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

“Nuclear plants are too inflexible… ?”

A certain cognitive dissonance:

Building new nuclear power stations will make it harder for the UK to switch to renewable energy, said one of the top German officials leading the country's nuclear energy phase-out.

And why might that be?

Jochen Flasbarth, president of the Environmental Protection Agency in Germany, who advises the German government, said: "We are not missionaries, and every country will have to find its own way in energy policy, but it is obvious that nuclear plants are too inflexible and cannot sufficiently respond to variations in wind or solar generation, only gas [power stations] do."

“Too inflexible.” That’s a new one. What Flasbarth is trying to say is that nuclear energy doesn’t give renewable energy enough room to play a significant role in energy policy, but what he actually conveys is that nuclear energy provides many of the benefits of renewable energy, but can run at 90 to 92 percent capacity rather than the 30 to 35 percent capacity managed by renewables.

Leaving aside the other upsides and downsides of nuclear and renewable energy sources for a moment, Flasbarth is saying that nuclear energy, because it works virtually all the time, doesn’t need renewable energy sources. He knows this because Germany has until recently been a big supporter of nuclear energy.

Given Flasbarth’s formulation, you might not want nuclear energy on the same portion of the grid as renewable energy, but you can use natural gas instead and live with some carbon emissions in exchange for being able to use non-emitting renewable energy sources 35 percent of the time. You can then site nuclear energy facilities where renewable energy sources cannot function well. That’s fine.

But here’s the thing: Great Britain can organize its energy policy around these choices and use nuclear energy, wind and solar and gas wherever they work best. Germany, quite famously, can’t do this anymore.

Jochen Flasbarth – making the best of a bad situation. It’s almost a cry for help, isn’t it?

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You may want to know that COP17 is happening in Durban, South Africa right about now. The Guardian has up an informative Q&A about the United Nations’ climate change conference. A taster:

There seems little possibility that the summit will produce an emissions reduction agreement, meaning the world will soon lack any binding CO2 targets when Kyoto's first commitment period expires at the end of 2012. At best, diplomats will agree on other details, such as a "green climate fund" designed to channel billions from wealthy to poor countries to fund environmentally friendly economic development there. But with rich countries facing a financial crisis it is unclear where the money should come from.

But the burning question is: How much criminal activity has there been at this year’s conference? Very little, it turns out,

There were no climate change summit related crimes on Monday, police said on Monday afternoon.

"Everything is going smoothly so far. Not... a single conference-related crime report has been given to me today," Colonel Vish Naidoo said late on Monday afternoon.

Whew! The roving bands of climatologists have been quelled at long last. Their sociopathic behavior almost trashed Cancun last year. Speaking of sociopathic:

Climate scientists have mounted a robust defense of their work and debates over science after more than 5,000 personal emails were leaked onto the internet in an apparent attempt to undermine public support for international action to tackle climate change.

As Rocket J. Squirrel says to Bullwinkle J. Moose when the latter threatens to pull a rabbit out of his hat, “Aw, that trick never works.”

Although the conference is not expected to carry much significance for the outside world – that would take a successor to Kyoto - the issue of climate change is no longer vulnerable to dirty tricks. Denying it at this point is just a self-indulgence.

The COP17 logo. Meant to evoke the big tree in Avatar? That didn’t end well for the big tree.

The Rainfall Every Hundred Years

Earlier this year, the Fort Calhoun nuclear facility in Nebraska was surrounded by the Missouri River, which jumped its banks due to a strong winter runoff and heavy spring rains. That flood was characterized as a 100-year event. 

Is a 100-year event like the cicadas that swarm the Washington area every 17 years? No, not at all. The cicadas arrive on a predictable schedule. Seventeen years elapse and there they are again.

This is a better description of a 100-year event:

Of course, return period doesn’t mean that we won’t see that kind of rain in those locations for several decades (or centuries). A 1 in 100 year rain means that there is a 1% chance of seeing that amount of rain in any given year. A 0.1% chance is true for a 1 in 1000 year event.

I assume that the 1 in 100 number changes every time something similar takes place – obviously, the odds of it happening in a given year drop if it happens more frequently. In any event, what is being discussed here is the rainfall in the Washington area last week.

On Thursday, September 8, Ft. Belvoir [in Virginia] received an astounding 7.03” of rain in three hours. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), that amount of rain in that amount of time was an “off the charts above a 1000-year rainfall (based on precip frequency from Quantico).”

The rain every thousand years – good title for a novel. There’s more (a bit edited – see the link for more):

• The Bowie IFLOWS gauge recorded 4.57 inches in 3 hours, which is about a 200-year rainfall.
• For Upper Marlboro and near Ellicott City, Wednesday’s rains were a roughly one in 50-100 year event.
• For Westview , Wednesday’s rains were a roughly one in 10-25 year event.
• The Kingstowne IFLOWS gauge in Fairfax County recorded 5.47 inches in 3 hours, which is approximately a 500-year rainfall for that timeframe.
• The Reston IFLOWS gauge in Fairfax County recorded 6.57 inches in 6 hours, which is also approximately a 500-year rainfall.

These places are all in Virginia and Maryland.

One might be tempted to ask: Global warming?

Although the ties between climate change and extreme weather events often elicit absolute statements from advocates on various sides of the climate change issue, the reality is that while much can be said, much remains unknown. The challenge for reporters as well as scientists is to accurately convey both the scientific findings and the uncertainties surrounding them.

So perhaps, perhaps not. But:

The physical mechanism behind the link between warming global average land and ocean temperatures and more frequent heavy precipitation events is rather simple to understand - as air warms, it can hold more water vapor, which means that more water can then be squeezed out of the atmosphere as liquid or frozen precipitation.

So, um,maybe more perhaps – in intensity if not frequency – so it may be that a strong rainfall previously thought a 100 year event becomes a 50 year event because the intensity of rainfall generally increases. Or the floods along the Missouri become at least somewhat more frequent. (Tornadoes need not apply – different dynamics.)

A report published by the Bush administration in 2008 (based in part on the work of the U.N. IPCC, but focusing specifically on North America) had already concluded that human activities are associated with changing characteristics of certain kinds of extreme weather events, and the evidence keeps on accumulating.

And keeps on accumulating. The world has not stopped working on this issue, and the United States – industry and government and plain old folks – are still working on mitigating the effects of climate change. While there are countervailing forces, certainly, there is also a strong forward momentum.

Nuclear energy has different parts to play in different issues, but it plays its part in this one just by existing and expanding its share of U.S. electricity generation – if not quite yet, soon. So do solar, wind, hydro and other energy sources.

In the meantime, the river will rise and the rain will fall.