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Will Happer: We need more CO2

By Kennedy Maize
Princeton physicist Will Happer, a prominent skeptic about man-made global warming, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Feb. 25 that the earth is in a “CO2 famine,” and more atmospheric carbon dioxide would be a very good thing indeed.
“Almost never have CO2 levels been as low” as in the current Holocene epoch – around 280 parts per million, he said. “Most of the time,” Happer told the committee, CO2 levels “have been at least 1,000 ppm and it’s been quite higher than that.”
Those past higher carbon dioxide concentrations, Happer noted, were hardly catastrophic. “Earth was just fine in those times,” he said. “The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started.”
Happer argued, “I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind.” Former vice president Al Gore has been crusading on global warming since he was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives and a member of the House Science and Technology Committee in the early 1980. Gore’s widely publicized fears, says Happer, are misplaced. “At least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds,” Happer told the Senate committee. “Carbon dioxide is a bit player.”
The climate is warming, Happer said, but it’s part of a long-term warming trend that began about 1800 at the end of the “little ice age,” and has nothing to do with man-made CO2 emissions. Happer said the ranks of climate warming skeptics are growing as the doubters force advocates to test and prove their claims, tests they largely fail.
Happer was scornful of the global circulation models that have driven the fears of man-made global warming. The models do not reflect empirical reality. “Over the past 10 years,” he said, “there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the … models.”
Happer was director of research at the U.S. Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, a political job. In 1993, Gore fired Happer, because the scientist would not bend to the political views of the Tennessee politician and vice president, who drove Clinton administration environmental policy.
Happer, citing George Orwell’s seminal essay “Politics and the English Language,” told the Senate committee, “CO2 is not a pollutant and is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving ‘pollutant’ and ‘poison’ of their original meaning. Our exhaled breath contains about 4% CO2. That is 40,000 parts per million, or about 100 times the current atmospheric concentration.” Orwell wrote in 1946, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Happer railed against those who argue that there is a scientific consensus on man-made climate change. “The number of those with the courage to speak out is growing,” he said, adding that the warming advocates are attempting to restrict legitimate science and scientific contention. “If you have the power to stifle dissent,” he said, “you can indeed create the illusion of peace or consensus.” He added that he finds it “unnerving to read statements of (NASA scientist) Dr. James Hansen in the Congressional Record that climate skeptics are guilty of ‘high crimes against humanity and nature.’”

Yucca Mountain near death

By Kennedy Maize
Yucca Mountain is stretched out on its deathbed. Earlier this month, the nuclear industry effectively agreed that the plan to bury spent nuclear reactor fuel under the Nevada mountain on federal government property is ready for political last rites.
At meetings with Wall Street analysts and state utility regulators in February, leaders of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Washington lobbying group for the nuclear industry, began describing policy positions for the post-Yucca era, some two decades after an entirely-nasty political process in 1987 stuck a political bulls-eye on the federal government’s Nevada Test Site as a permanent nuclear waste dump. Led by then-chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), it was known as the “Screw Nevada” bill. Nevada refused the honor over the years. It now appears that the state has won.
Marvin Fertel, the newly-installed NEI CEO, told Wall Street, as reported by Energy Daily, that the nuclear industry is ready to bow to “political reality,” and called for a blue-ribbon panel to look at Yucca Mountain alternatives. Those realities include an Obama administration that campaigned against the 27-year-old high level nuclear waste disposal plan; the fact that the Senate Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid of Searchlight, Nev., has made it clear he will use every power at his command (and they are considerable) to kill the project; and a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that, when a new chairman is named (most likely Reid favorite Commissioner Greg Jaczko, who was the Nevada senator’s science policy advisor before he was named to the NRC) and a new Democratic commissioner is appointed to an existing vacancy, will be stacked against the Nevada project.
Reid was jubilant. He told state lawmakers at a meeting of legislature this week, “Now, instead of fighting against the storm, Nevada has the wind at its back. Now with participation of delegation members and state constitutional officers, we should finally see the Yucca project come to a close.”
Fertel in New York was pushing long-term above-ground storage of spent fuel pending an analysis of how chemical reprocessing could be developed to safely recover uranium and plutonium from the fatigued fuel rods from conventional reactors. The Bush administration had proposed a “Global Nuclear Energy Program” that featured a yet-unproved reprocessing technology that would not be vulnerable to nuclear weapons proliferation. That plan, although a White House favorite, never gained political traction.
Fertel told the Wall Street analysts, “This integrated strategy – development of advanced fuel cycles and, eventually, disposal of the waste byproduct, when we know what it will be – makes good sense from every perspective. It reflects that we have ample time to redesign the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle in a way that makes sense for the long term.”
Fertel, a respected 40-year veteran of the nuclear lobbying trench wars in Washington and the states, suggested that either above-ground away-from-rector storage or on-site storage above ground, is “completely safe” as the industry and other interests seek a long-term solution. This is a 180-degree turn from the direction that the nuclear utility industry has been taking for the past two decades. The nuclear utilities have feverishly argued that they were running out of space and time for storing spent fuel on their reactor sites. They would be forced to shut down if Yucca Mountain wasn’t available.
Outside observers of those industry claims, including many at the NRC, never accepted the “sky-is-falling” bleatings. The NRC closely regulates on-site pool and dry-cask storage. The agency has never found any inherent safety problems, undercutting the utilities’ complaints. The utilities have built on-site “dry cask” storage, which the NRC has consistently pronounced safe.
At the same time Fertel was talking to Wall Street, Paul Genoa, NEI policy director, told the winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners in Washington of NEI’s intention to seek a fall-back position on high-level waste storage. NARUC has invested a lot of its political and financial capital in supporting Yucca Mountain, so Genoa’s remarks must have come as a disappointment.
Genoa also floated Fertel’s bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission plan. “I don’t know how we turn back from a 26-27 year policy that is in law without doing some analysis and stakeholder effort to chart a new path forward.” His reference was to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which established the framework that led to the Yucca Mountain project. In retrospect – and some claimed at the time – the 1982 law was fundamentally flawed.
According to a Reuters account, NEI envisions continuing activities at Yucca Mountain during the 12-24 month period it expects for the waste policy review. Whether the Obama administration or Reid would go along with that is unknown.
In a related development, the NRC on Feb. 17, much to the industry’s chagrin, approved a million-year standard for radiation dose rates from Yucca Mountain, should the site ever be approved for spent-fuel storage. Originally, the standard was that the facility would be built to contain significant radiation emissions for 10,000 years, which struck many observers as ridiculously high. But in 2004, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the 10,000 year standard as too lenient.
In response, EPA promulgated a two-tier standard, limiting the radiation dose to 15 millirem for the first 10,000 years after waste is buried and after that to l00 millirem to a million years.
Many in the nuclear industry and elsewhere view that standard as unachievable. The state of Nevada, which has been biting at the nuclear waste program like a terrier with a grip on a pants leg, says it views the million-year standard as lax, and will sue.
That suit might be moot, as the industry and the government moves away from Nevada storage toward a new, but still invisible, nuclear waste disposal strategy.

S.C. Republicans squabble over coal

By Kennedy Maize

Here’s a delicious irony. In South Carolina, an iconic former Republican governor and the current Republican governor, who reportedly has presidential ambitions, are feuding over a coal-fired power plant proposed by the state government’s own electric utility.

Most intriguing is that the former governor, oral surgeon Jim Edwards, 81, Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of energy, is pushing for $600-MW coal plant, with a $1 billion price tag. Edwards is head of a group – financing unknown at this writing – called South Carolina Action for Jobs. “As governor,” said Edwards, “I learned how important it is to create good jobs, and now, with our state’s unemployment rate the third-highest in the nation, that’s more important than ever. We can’t have industry is we don’t have energy.”

Edwards was elected South Carolina governor in 1974, the first Republican voted into the statehouse in the Palmetto State since 1876. Edwards was named secretary of energy in 1981. He was Reagan’s pick for DOE largely because he was enthusiastically pro-nuclear, while the incoming Republicans viewed the Carter administration as anti-nuclear (despite Jimmy Carter’s training as a nuclear engineer under the legendary Adm. Hyman Rickover).

The current Republican governor, Mark Sanford, after dithering for some time, this week came out against the coal plant. He had earlier supported it. The state Department of Heath and Environmental Control (DHEC) earlier gave the project tentative approval for an air permit. But the agency meets this week to review an appeal, brought by local environmentalists. The greens now have Sanford’s support.

Sanford told reporters, “As policymakers, in times of changing situations, we must be willing to change.” Sanford said the declining economy has reduced electric demand and undermined the need for the project, planned for the Great Pee Dee River. He said he favors nuclear power for meeting future electricity needs in the state. He said, “Everyone involved agrees that building this coal-fired plant is a short-term solution to bridge the gap between now and the time more nuclear capacity comes online.” Sanford also cited Obama administration desires to increased controls on mercury and carbon dioxide emissions, claiming the potential new rules could quadruple the cost of the coal-fired plant.

For his part, Edwards said, “The environmental lobbyists were wrong 20 or 30 years ago when they stopped nuclear. And they are wrong today” when the seek to stop coal. Edwards said he was unconvinced about claims of manmade climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. He added, “I’ve been an environmentalist all my life. But the worst environment I can think of is cold, hungry, out of work and in the dark.”

Edwards, who burst onto the South Carolina political scene as an unknown in the 1970s, had a rocky year at the helm of DOE, in part because of his unusual candor. He was open, opinionated, and willing to share his views with reporters (including this one, who came to like him a lot, while often disagreeing with him). When the White House fired him a year later (technically, he resigned to become the president of the Medical University of South Carolina), he famously said, “I can’t wait to get my hands back in spit.” He supported Mitt Romney for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Sanford supported the nomination of Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, the eventual nominee.

Santee Cooper, based in Moncks Corner, is a statewide public power and water system that serves some 800,000 customers in all 46 South Carolina counties. Created in the 1930s by the late Strom Thurmond, then the Democratic governor of the state and fashioned after the Roosevelt Administration’s Tennessee Valley Authority, Santee Cooper has long been a dominant force in utility politics in the state.

The state’s most significant investor-owned utility is SCE&G (nee South Carolina Electric & Gas), a Scana Corp. subsidiary.

SCE&G, which has considerable nuclear generation, and Santee Cooper are collaborating on a planned two-unit 2,000-MW nuclear project, using the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design, to be sited in Fairfield County. The state public service commission this week approved construction work in progress financing for SCE&G’s portion the plant, which would kick in if it gets approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and private-sector financing. Santee Cooper is not regulated by the SCPSC.

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