Nuclear energy: It’s not easy being green

Nuclear energy has an image problem. For decades, it has been the energy source that dares not speak its name.

Small Nuclear Reactor. image: Foro Nuclear

No wonder, with the disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the problem of what to do with the radioactive waste. Then there’s the high building costs.

While nuclear energy is dirty in many respects, it is clean in another: it produces electricity without producing the greenhouse gases that are contributing to our climate emergency.

Environmentalists deplore nuclear energy, even at a time when the world desperately needs more power that doesn’t come from burning fossil fuels. If only nuclear energy could find a way to become “green.”

Well, there is a way. Europe has found a way to make nuclear green. You just say it’s so. The European Commission has labeled nuclear as sustainable by placing it in a taxonomy that includes other green energy sources. The Commission describes this taxonomy as, “a classification system, establishing a list of environmentally sustainable economic activities.”

The European Commission is determined to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. The commission’s chief described the European Green Deal as “Europe’s man on the moon moment.” She has called climate neutrality “our European destiny” and solemnly proclaimed that no effort will be spared for Europe to become the world’s first continent with net-zero emissions.

However, Germany and France are on opposite sides of the greening of nuclear energy. Germany is against nuclear power. They plan to shut down all its nuclear power plants by the end of 2022 following the Fukushima disaster in 2011.

But Germany’s plan to use natural gas as a transition fuel is in jeopardy. With Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine, Germany placed sanctions on Russia this week by stopping the certification of Nord Stream 2 gas line from Russia. The price of natural gas, already high, is about to go higher.  

Pro-nuclear France gets 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear plants and its pro-nuclear allies include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Finland. France wants to invest in new nuclear power plants, particularly in new generation called small modular reactors (SMR).

Canada has a role to play in nuclear reactors. Canada is the world’s second-largest producer of uranium. Our reliable Candu reactors pioneered nuclear-power generation. Ontario gets 57 per cent of its electricity from them.

Ontario Power Generation intends on building more reactors. This time, the Crown Corporation plans to build SMRs that are smaller and simpler to build.

 In the International Energy Agency’s plan “Net Zero by 2050”, wind and solar power are the cornerstones. The IEA says they could provide 70 per cent of global electrical generation in 2050. But they say nuclear and hydro are an “essential foundation” in the decades of transition.

Wind and solar are clean and safe, too, but even with falling costs and advances in battery storage, they alone can’t get us to our emissions goals. If we are serious about the climate-change problem, nuclear has to be part of the solution.

Calling nuclear energy “green” may be a stretch. But there’s no way we are going to avert the climate emergency without it.

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Languishing: the malaise of our pandemic times

Our journey through this pandemic is unprecedented in modern times.

image: NBC News

We won’t know what the exact effects of the pandemic will be until it’s over.

Meanwhile, psychologists suggest that if we can find words that describe how we feel now it helps us cope; words like “grief” and “languishing.”

I thought it might be helpful if I could find the expanded use of commons words during the last pandemic of 1918. But I couldn’t.

Instead, I did find some technical terms in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu epidemic. We know that fifty million people died globally in four waves during the pandemic. And, similar to this third wave of this COVID pandemic, it hit young people hard. Many died within three days of showing symptoms.

One diagnosis from the Spanish flu pandemic was “encephalitis lethargica.” It was characterized by excessive sleepiness, abnormal eye movements, fever, and movement disorders, although virtually no neurological sign or symptom could be found. The chronic phase was characterized by Parkinson-like signs that could last months, even a year, after the pandemic ended.

“Grief” is one of those words for which the meaning can be expanded to describe the way we now feel. One dictionary meaning is: “deep sorrow, especially that caused by someone’s death.” But more recently, the definition of grief has been expanded to mean “mourning the loss of normalcy.” Psychologist Adam Grant says that the expanded meaning of grief gives a sense of familiarity:

“[The expanded meaning of grief] gave us a familiar vocabulary to understand what had felt like an unfamiliar experience. Although we hadn’t faced a pandemic before, most of us had faced loss. It helped us crystallize lessons from our own past resilience — and gain confidence in our ability to face present adversity (New York Times, May 4).”

Languishing is another useful word. Dictionary meanings include: to be or become feeble, weak, as in Plants languish in the drought. Adam Grant expands the definition:

“It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.”

Languishing is the “blah” feeling we have during the pandemic.

I originally read Adam Grant’s column in the New York Times after my cousin sent me a link. She added: “I think these days I’m languishing. Seems I’m putting in time until we can travel and see people again. Melancholy isn’t the right word.”

Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of your drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.

If this pandemic is like the last, we will experience depression and anxiety disorders for years, even if we aren’t suffering from symptoms today.

One power grid solves the green energy problem

Solar and wind energy suffer from a storage problem. They produce in abundance, often too much, when the wind blows and the sun shines. Storage of that abundance is one solution but it’s expensive and inefficient. You don’t get as much out as what you put in; like a bank account that gives you negative interest.

image: HowStuffWorks

The sun takes a long time to cross the four and one-half time zones of our big country. The advantage of that is when the sun shines on Canada’s largest solar farms in Ontario at ten o’clock, surplus electricity could be used to make breakfast in B.C. and lunch in Newfoundland.

Great idea, except that we have no way to get the excess power across Canada.  B.C. is connected to western Alberta by a major (345 Kilovolt) line and stops. There is nothing between Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. One connects Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime Provinces; none connects Newfoundland.

While there are few east-to-west Canadian connections, there are 34 lines connecting Canada to the U.S. The problem with north-south connections is that the sun shines on all solar panels in the same time zone at once.

Those gaps in Canada’s transmission lines create a challenge for green energy sources -wind even more than solar. Whereas solar power is fairly predictable, wind can be a problem. Sudden storms can wreak havoc with a power grid, dumping huge amounts of power into the system with nowhere for it to go. Some power utilities, such as in Germany and Texas, pay customers to consume electricity just to rid of it.

Climate change is creating increased demand on air conditioners in some areas of North America, while creating storms and wind in other parts. One big grid would link the wind power to where it’s needed.

The fragmentation of power grids is a problem says science writer Peter Fairley of Victoria:

“This balkanization means each region must manage weather variability on its own (Scientific American, July, 2018).”

Since we are already connected to the U.S., if the States were connected, so would Canada. It would be one big continental grid -something like the internet. The U.S. solution is simpler because they have only three major grids, the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection and the ERCOT Interconnection in Texas.

A big grid would soak up all the power you can pump into it but it requires weather reports. We need to know where the sun is shining and where the wind is blowing to determine where sources are. We already have that. The U.S. Department of Energy and National Renewable Energy Laboratory maps the potential energy areas of four kilometre squares, updated every five minutes throughout the year. Couple that weather information with a huge single grid and you can send surplus power to where it’s needed.

Fairley continues:

“What we need is a weather-smart grid design, directed by meteorology and built on long-distance transmission lines that can manage the weather’s inconsistencies. Such a system could ship gobs of renewable power across North America to link supply with demand, whatever the weather throws at it.”

Just think, the tidal power generated in the Bay of Fundy could heat a toaster in Moose Jaw faster than the rate at which photos of kittens are shared on Facebook.

 

The future of blockchain mining in B.C.

Blockchain mines look nothing like copper mines. They are banks of computer that toil away at solving complex calculations. Blockchain is the digital ledger used by many cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Because the computers generate heat, they could be used to warm the greenhouses to grow the tonnes of marijuana needed for Canada’s budding legal market.

  image: coindesk.com

Blockchain is a revolutionary way of tracking secure, indelible transactions of any sort not just cryptocurrencies. Experts say it will revolutionize businesses in every field. Manav Gupta, chief technology officer of IBM Cloud Canada, is enthusiastic:

“We view blockchain as having the potential to change all of technological interactions the same way that the internet changed communication in the nineties (Walrus magazine, Jan/Feb, 2018).”

Where the value of Bitcoins is highly speculative, the value of blockchain is solid. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop blockchain from being caught up in a goldrush mentality. Irrational investors are madly rushing into some dodgy speculations. Convinced that anything with “blockchain” in the title is “the next big thing,” investors threw $2 billion into blockchain startups worldwide. One company saw shares rise 394 per cent by just adding “blockchain” to its name.

Blockchain can be used to secure any vital records such as medical files, business deals, legal agreements, tracing shipping containers, farm-to-market food security; even professional and academic records which are now open to fraud. Walmart and Nestle have already invested in blockchain.

Bitcoin miners loan their computers to solve the complex blockchain calculations required for each transaction. Miners are paid in Bitcoins in return. Drew Taylor has a Bitcoin mining operation in his Montreal house. He earns about $3,000 a month and pays additional costs of $200 for electricity. The computers generate a lot of heat. “But essentially it is free heat for at least one room,” he told CBC Radio’s The Current.

The amount of power used for each Bitcoin transaction is shocking high. Alex de Vries monitors the power used in Bitcoin mining. Just one transaction uses as much energy as the average B.C. household uses in 13 days. That’s 300 kilowatt-hours for each transaction. Researchers are looking for ways to reduce the power consumption.

The best place to locate Bitcoin mines is in places where the electricity is cheap. Montreal has relatively cheap hydroelectricity. Iceland has a large mine because the majority of their energy comes from geothermal and steam. Unfortunately, not all cheap energy is as green. China and India do most of the mining where the electricity is cheap but produced by burning dirty coal.

Once B.C.’s Site C dam is completed we will have lots of cheap, surplus electricity that could be put to use in blockchain mining.

Blockchain mining is comparable to copper mining because both use a lot of electricity. Highland Valley mine near Kamloops uses as much electricity as 60,000 homes, about twice what Kamloops uses.

An advantage of blockchain mining is that a secondary industry could use the waste heat. Marijuana greenhouses could use the computers as heaters so that not one kilowatt hour would be wasted. In addition, blockchain mines could be located near the dam to avoid the cost of transmitting electricity.

The digital mine would employ workers close to home in small towns in B.C. Instead of using our dam power to run LNG compressors, we could put people to work mining digital dollars and growing marijuana for Canadian’s burgeoning market.