By Risto Isomaki
HELSINKI, Jul 19 2016 (IPS)

According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the production of meat and other animal-based products is responsible for around 18 to 20 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Risto Isomäki

Our total emissions of carbon dioxide currently amount to slightly more than 35 billion tons, in addition to which we also produce at least 350 million tons of methane and 9 million tons of nitrous oxide.

Many governments, municipalities and private companies have already started to implement programs aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a fraction of their current levels in the coming decades. In 2015, more than 90 percent of new energy investments have shifted to renewables, with fossil fuels and nuclear power struggling to attract the remaining 10 percent.

Similarly, new technological solutions for reducing vehicular emissions as well as industrial production, construction, lighting, and the heating and cooling of buildings are either being developed or already implemented. Even airlines and shipping companies have accepted the challenge. Some sectors have embraced these challenges with more enthusiasm than others, but there seems to be a general consensus that considerable changes are needed to prevent a full-scale environmental catastrophe.

The exception to the general shift toward environmental sustainability appears to be food production. Governments, and intergovernmental organizations like FAO are still discussing ways of increasing the global meat production from 200 million to 470 million tons by 2050.

This is of great concern even if meat, dairy and other animal products really were responsible for only 20 per cent of our combined greenhouse gas emissions. Even then, doubling the industry’s contribution would probably make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, as agreed in Paris.

It is possible that the role of the livestock industry has been seriously underestimated. According to current estimates, natural lakes and ponds probably produce about 85 million tons and man-made reservoirs between 20-100 million tons of methane each year. While methane from reservoirs is considered to be a by-product of the energy industry, emissions from natural lakes, ponds and rivers are classified as “natural emissions”.

Research has shown that there are significant variations in the methane levels produced by bodies of freshwater. Heterotrophic lakes whose water and sediments only contain trace amounts of nutrients and organic matter produce very little methane. The smallest measured annual per hectare emissions from such lakes have been as little as 0.78 kilograms. At the other end of the spectrum, seriously eutrophic or nutrient-rich lakes with vast quantities of dead aquatic plants and algae, can release up to 190 tons of methane per hectare per year. In other words: there is a 243,590-fold difference between the largest and the smallest measured per hectare emissions, a spectrum covering almost six full orders of magnitude.

Can we therefore, really assume that the runoff from livestock and fertilizers has nothing to do with these emissions? Most of the methane released into the air from eutrophic lakes and reservoirs cannot really be considered natural emissions, and should not be counted as such. Similarly, much of the nitrous oxide currently defined as natural emissions from oceans or from natural soils should probably be re-classified as livestock-related.

Besides, there are many agricultural practices likely to reduce the amount of organic carbon stored in the trees and soils, as well as tropical deforestation which has historically been the centre of attention. According to studies made in China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Argentina, Brazil, Britain and the USA, vast tracts of pasture that used to be natural grasslands are still losing significant amounts of organic carbon due to overgrazing.

According to one assessment, humans annually burn 4.3 billion tons of biomass, classified as carbon. Of this, wood for fuel and the use of other biofuels account for 1.3 billion tons, whereas the remainder is linked to the livestock industry. This means that we could, at least in theory, reduce our carbon emissions by almost three billion tons by eliminating the biomass burning that is not related to energy production and by using the saved biomass to replace fossil fuels. Current biomass burning practises also produce very large amounts of soot, which has a strong impact on the global rise in temperatures, as well as creating an additional 40-50 million tons of methane and 1.3 million tons of nitrous oxide.

Currently, 3.5 billion hectares of permanent grazing lands and hundreds of millions of hectares of farmlands are being exploited for the cultivation of animal feed used for meat and dairy industries. If we reduced the consumption of animal products and replaced them with alternatives made from soy, wheat, oat or mushroom proteins or by culturing animal stem cells, we could convert huge areas of land to protected forests. These reclaimed forest can in turn absorb vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Alternatively, we could use the same land for growing biofuels.

This means, today we should be focusing on the environmental degradation caused by the livestock industry, which itself is under pressure from an ever increasing demand for meat and dairy. Much of what has been mentioned deserves urgent and extensive attention and further research worldwide.

It may be impossible to stop global warming without reducing the consumption of meat. However, if we are able to replace a substantial portion of real meat with alternatives, reaching the goals adopted in Paris might actually become much easier than anybody could have ever imagined.

Excerpt:

By Risto Isomaki
HELSINKI, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

At the height of the Cold War the world’s total arsenal of nuclear weapons, counted as explosive potential, may have amounted to three million Hiroshima bombs.  The United States alone possessed 1.6 million Hiroshimas’ worth of destructive capacity.

Since then, much of this arsenal has been dismantled and the uranium in thousands of nuclear bombs has been converted to nuclear power plant fuel.

Risto Isomäki

Future historians are likely to offer some stingy comments on how 20th century governments first used thousands of billions of dollars to laboriously enrich natural uranium to weapons grade uranium with gas centrifuges, and then reversed the process, diluting their weapons grade uranium with natural uranium.

This declining trend has led many people and governments to believe that nuclear disarmament is no longer an important issue.

It is true that the probability of a nuclear war is currently immensely smaller than during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 or during the other hair-raisingly dangerous moments of the Cold War.

In spite of this, it could be a grave mistake to assume that the danger is now over, forever.

We have not really been able to push the evil genie back into the bottle, yet. The remaining U.S. and Russian inventories might still amount to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs. This is approximately forty times less than at the height of Cold War’s nuclear armament race, but still much more than enough to destroy the world as we know it.“The remaining U.S. and Russian [nuclear] inventories might still amount to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs. This is approximately forty times less than at the height of Cold War’s nuclear armament race, but still much more than enough to destroy the world as we know it”

While the world’s nuclear arsenal has become smaller, the remaining nuclear weapons are more accurate and on average smaller than before.  This might, some day, lower the threshold for using them.

Besides, it now seems that we have seriously underestimated the destructive capacity of all kinds of nuclear weapons.

In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear bombs ignited large firestorms that burned all the people caught inside the fire perimeter to death.  However, U.S. military scientists regarded fire damage as so unpredictable that for fifty years they concentrated only on analysing the impact of the blasts.

The story has been beautifully documented by Lynn Eden, a researcher at Stanford University, in an important book important book entitled Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge & Nuclear Weapons Devastation.

When, in 2002, the United States was afraid of a nuclear war between Pakistan and India, it warned their governments that a nuclear war in South Asia might kill twelve million people.

The figure was absurdly low because it only took the impact of the nuclear blasts into consideration. According to recent research, the fire damage radii of nuclear detonations are from two to five times longer than those determined by the blast effects.  In practice, this means that the area destroyed by the fire is typically 4 to 25 times larger than the area shattered by the blast.

The Second World War firestorms in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg and Dresden caused very strong rising air currents and hurricane-speed winds blowing towards the fire from the edges of the fire perimeter.

Nuclear detonations in modern cities created even fiercer firestorms because they contain very large quantities of hydrocarbons in the form of asphalt, plastic, oil, gasoline and gas.

According to one study, the firestorm ignited by even a small, Hiroshima-size explosion in Manhattan would produce incredibly strong super-hurricane winds blowing towards the fire at the speed of 600 kilometres per hour. Most skyscrapers have been designed to withstand wind speeds amounting to 230 or 250 kilometres per hour.

The worst-case scenario is a nuclear detonation happening far above the ground.  According to the so-called ‘Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack’ – or EMP Commission for short – of the U.S. Congress, between 70 and 90 percent of the country’s population might die within one year if somebody detonated a megaton-sized nuclear weapon at the height of 160 kilometres above the continental United States.

A nuclear explosion always produces a very strong electromagnetic pulse ­ or, to be more precise, three different electromagnetic pulses, which can fry all unprotected electronic equipment within a line of sight.  From the height of 160 kilometres, everything in the continental United States is within a line of sight. Everything works with electricity and practically nothing has been protected against an EMP.

In other words, a single nuclear weapon could wipe out health care, water supplies, waste-water treatment facilities, agricultural production and the factories and laboratories making pharmaceuticals, vaccines and fertilisers – among many others.

Europe is equally vulnerable and most other countries, including India and China, are doing their utmost to become as vulnerable as the old industrialised countries already are. 

According to the EMP Commission, the cost of electronic equipment would only rise by 3-10 percent if it were hardened against an electromagnetic pulse, and protecting the key 10 percent of everything with electronics would be enough to secure the crucial functions of an organised society. However, in practice, nothing like this has been done, in any country.

We should not forget nuclear disarmament, because it could still be the most important thing there is.

It would probably be wise to utilise the periods of relative calm as efficiently as possible for further reducing our nuclear weapons arsenals and for developing better alternatives for nuclear electricity. Otherwise, tensions between declining and rising great powers may one day again create new nuclear armament races, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The spread of nuclear reactors increases the risks. Every country that acquires the ability to construct a nuclear reactor also acquires the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Nuclear reactors were originally developed for making better raw material for nuclear weapons, and all our reactors are still making plutonium, every second they operate.

The weapons grade uranium used in nuclear bombs is enriched by the same gas centrifuges that produce the fuel for our power-producing nuclear stations.

The stakes will rise higher if we also begin to construct fourth-generation nuclear power plants or breeder reactors.  Breeders need, in one or more parts of the reactor, nuclear fuel in which the percentage of the easily fissile isotopes has been enriched to 15, 20 or 60 percent, or to even higher levels. This kind of fuel can already be used for making crude nuclear weapons, without any further enrichment.

It is often said that when a technology has been developed it can no longer be forced back into the Pandora’s box from which it came.  However, when it comes to nuclear technologies, we just have to try. The long-term survival of our species may depend on this choice. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Risto Isomaki
HELSINKI, Jun 16 2014 (IPS)

Germany has now become the world’s first modern renewable energy economy, according to the experts. The Federal Republic of Germany already obtains 29 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, meaning photovoltaic, hydro and wind power, and power produced by burning wood or other biomass.

Perhaps even more importantly, the national average hides significant regional differences. German states have strong identities and quite a lot of independent decision-making power.

Risto Isomäki

The state of Saarland only produces 15 percent of its electricity from renewables and Rheinland-Pfalz only 21 percent, while the figures for Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are 54 and 56 percent respectively.

The most impressive case is the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, the capital of the Federal State. In Brandenburg, 78 percent of all electricity now comes from wind turbines, photovoltaic panels or from burning biomass.

What makes the case of Brandenburg especially important is the fact that it is an inland state and a part of the vast North European Plain. In other words, it has very little hydropower to supplement the other renewables and it cannot construct any off-shore wind parks. In spite of these deficiencies, Brandenburg will most probably soon be producing more renewable electricity than it consumes and will be exporting a growing share of its production.“A key element in Germany’s energy revolution or Die Energiewende, the energy turn-around, has been a system of feed-in-tariffs that was introduced by the German Renewable Energy Act in 2000.” – Risto Isomäki

It has often been said that it is next to impossible to have an energy system in which 100 percent of the power production –­ or even 50 percent – could be based on renewables. According to conventional wisdom, renewables will always need a large amount of wasteful and expensive spare power based on fossil fuels.

Because wind turbines only produce electricity when the wind blows and photovoltaic panels only when the sun is shining, wind and solar power need so much supporting power that this power cannot come from ordinary or pumped storage hydropower alone.

In the light of the above statistics, it seems that these worries have been exaggerated. In Brandenburg and in the other German states wind, solar and biomass energy have actually complemented each other better than most experts predicted.

The northern parts of Germany can produce very little photovoltaic power during the winter. However, most of the wind power is produced during the winter months, because in Germany winters are windier than summers. Winter air is also colder and denser than summer air, which means that a stream of air contains more energy. The burning of wood and other biomass in the heat and power co-generation plants also concentrates in the winter months.

A key element in Germany’s energy revolution or Die Energiewende, the energy turn-around, has been a system of feed-in-tariffs that was introduced by the German Renewable Energy Act in 2000. Feed-in tariffs guarantee a relatively high, fixed price for the producers of wind and solar power.

After the adoption of the Renewable Energy Act, the installed solar power capacity in Germany increased from 114 megawatts to 36,000 megawatts and wind power capacity from 6,000 to 35,000 megawatts, by the end of 2013.

The final targets are even higher. According to the official plan, the share of renewables in power production should increase to 35 percent by 2020 and to 80 percent by 2050.

The success of the solar energy programme has also created a number of new political problems. An estimated 1.4 million residential buildings have already installed their own, grid-connected solar power stations on their roofs. This has expanded the cost of the feed-in-tariff system to 18 billion euros per year. Because the costs are covered by energy surcharges and not by public subsidies, the electricity bills paid by private households have increased.

German export companies, on the contrary, have benefitted because they have been freed from the surcharge and due to the new energy system they now obtain part of their electricity almost for free. The market price for power in Germany has already become very low during very sunny or very windy days.

Germany has not really decided, yet, what is the best way to increase the production of solar and wind power further without treating its citizens too unequally. The low capacity of Germany’s main power transmission lines is also slowing things down.

Still, it would be wrong to assume that Germany’s energy revolution has begun to stagnate, as many commentators have remarked. According to a recent opinion survey, an astonishing two-thirds of Germany’s commercial enterprises are planning to produce at least part of their own power using photovoltaics.

The world has not really acknowledged the most important aspect of Die Energiewende. Germany has almost single-handedly made photovoltaic panels economically attractive for most of the world’s people. Orders from Germany – and from Italy and Spain – have increased the production series of photovoltaic panels to such an extent that their average price dropped from about 5 euros in 2003 to approximately 0.7 euros in 2013.

Even though solar power is now becoming economical even in North Europe, the sunniest parts of the Earth receive two times more solar radiation and have significantly lower salary levels and installation costs than Europe.

In the South, photovoltaic panels could be used almost as much as the covering materials of patios and terraces attached to houses. When photovoltaic panels are installed on roofs in the South, the cooling effect, ­ due to their shading the part of the roof that receives the largest amount of sunlight, should be more valuable than in Europe.

In the South, photovoltaic electricity will be even bigger and better than in northern Europe, and the sector is likely to explode soon in a large number of countries. (END/ IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

For half a century cardiovascular disease has been the largest killer in Western countries, but recently it has started to dominate the health statistics in the South as well. In India coronary heart disease is already the biggest killer, and strokes are about to rise to second place. Globally, cardiovascular disease now kills about 17 million people a year, and a growing number of people are having heart attacks or strokes as early as their 40s or 50s.

Risto Isomaki

This global pandemic has a number of complementary causes. People live longer, eat less healthy food, smoke more, and do less manual labour. More and more people are commuting to their jobs by metro, train, bus, or car instead of walking or cycling. The majority of the world’s population is breathing seriously polluted air from which small inhaled particles can move from lungs to other parts of the body, including the walls of our arteries where they become a part of the plaque built by bacteria. Reduced exposure to sunlight could also be a factor, because it reduces the amount of cholesterol that our skin will convert into to vitamin D.

However, the most important single reason for the global cardiovascular epidemic could be the growing use of unhealthy dietary oils and fats. The world currently consumes about 150 million tonnes of edible oils and fats per year. Of this, one-third is produced by a single species: the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), a prolific source of vegetable oil.

Unfortunately, almost 50 percent of palm oil is palmitic acid, which is one of the unhealthiest fatty acids for the heart and veins. Coconut oil, which provides another five percent of our edible oil, is even less healthy. According to official predictions, world consumption of edible fats and oils will rise to 300 million tons by 2030.

Most of the new demand comes from Asia, where the current per capita consumption of edible oils is only 50 percent of the present average in North America and Europe. At the moment it looks as if the vast majority of this increase will come from palm oil. Huge areas of clear-cut rainforest areas have been converted to oil palm plantations in Malaysia, Indonesia, and a number of other countries. Indonesia already has nine million hectares planted with oil palms, and companies have applied for permission to expand this to 35 million hectares.

Environmentalists have been horrified by these developments. Without the oil palms many of the logged areas could regenerate and grow back into rainforest. More than two million hectares of oil palm plantations have been established on deep peat soils, which causes significant carbon dioxide emissions from the oxidizing peat.

Yet the most significant public health aspect of the situation has received much less attention. If humanity triples or quadruples its consumption of palm oil, our present cardiovascular pandemic will explode. This could overload public healthcare systems and leave them far less time and fewer resources for dealing with poor people’s diseases.

The world needs vast quantities of healthier food oils to prevent what could otherwise become the worst public health disaster in human history. The healthiest food oils contain very little saturated and a high percentage of monounsaturated fatty acids. Polyunsaturated fats are, of course, healthier than saturated fats, but they are less stable than monounsaturated fats.

Many plants produce oil which has a lot of monounsaturated and only a little saturated fat, but two of them are especially important: the olive and the avocado. Up to 80 percent of olive oil consists of monounsaturated fat, which helps to keep the levels of good cholesterol up and the levels of bad cholesterol down.

According to some studies olive oil might even reduce women’s risk of getting breast cancer by 45 percent. Unfortunately, the world currently produces only three million tonnes of olive oil. The average yield is only 200 or 300 kilograms per hectare per year, but this hides huge production differences between countries and even farms.

Olive cultivation requires relatively cold winter temperatures. Because of this, the avocado tree could, or should, become the leading food oil plant in the tropical and subtropical regions. It originally comes from Mexico and the Amazon region, but has a very wide range. For example, in India avocados have been grown successfully both in the north, in the Himalayan foothills, and in the south, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

We already know that avocados grow well in many parts of Africa. According to Chinese agricultural scientists, the tropical and subtropical parts of China and Vietnam also contain tens of millions of hectares of hilly land that would be eminently suitable for avocados. Avocado oil is exceptionally stable and resists high temperatures even better than olive oil. In countries where people often fry food in oil, avocado oil might be the healthiest option. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Risto Isomaki is an environmental activist and awarded Finnish writer whose novels have been translated into several languages.

By Risto Isomaki
HELSINKI, Dec 13 2011 (IPS)

The U.S. oil geologist Marion King Hubbert predicted, already in 1956, that the global production of oil will reach its all-time high roughly when we have used one half of the world’s oil reserves. This is because geologists tend to find the biggest fields first, and because oil wells become tired during the production phase. The more is taken out, the more difficult it gets to bring the remaining oil to the surface.

The world’s production of crude oil may have peaked in July 2008, at 74,666 barrels per day. In other words, we may already have passed the feared Peak Oil, without almost anybody noticing the event. This is because the production of natural gas is still increasing, and growing amounts of gas have been converted to various oil-replacing products.

Things will only get serious when we hit the global peak in combined oil and gas production. After this, the supply of hydrocarbons can no longer satisfy the demand, and the prices will skyrocket.

This could cause a series of severe depressions and intermittent, short recoveries. Food production will also suffer. Eighty percent of our food is now produced by nitrogen fertilizers, the prices of which depend on the price of natural gas.

Governments and companies have recently become very aware of the problem, and large sums of money are being invested in various alternative solutions.

One option is to expand the accessible natural gas reserves with a technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In fracking, tens of millions of litres of chemically treated water is pumped at high pressure into deep formations of relatively impermeable sedimentary rocks known as shales. The fluid cracks the shale rocks or expands existing cracks, and frees hydrocarbons so that they can flow toward a well.

Another option is a method known as underground coal gasification, or UCG. In UCG deep coal seams are converted to syngas, a mixture of methane, hydrogen and carbon monoxide, by the injection of oxidants into the deep ground.

The concept was originally proposed by Dmitri Mendelejev, the famous Russian scientist who is best remembered as the father of the periodic table of elements. First major projects were carried out in Uzbekistan in the 1930s when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Many governments have recently become interested in reviving the idea.

It is easy to understand why they are so excited. There are only limited amounts of coal relatively close to the Earth?s surface, but the reserves deeper in the crust are enormous. For example, the bottom of the Norwegian Sea has been estimated to contain 3,000 billion tons of coal. The deep coal deposits cannot be mined economically with conventional means, but they could be converted to syngas by UCG.

The negative side is that fracking and UCG could together form a receipt for an ultimate ecological nightmare. They would multiply the recoverable fossil fuel resources and enable us to produce many times more carbon dioxide than would otherwise have been possible. This would have disastrous consequences for the climate, because carbon dioxide is a strong greenhouse gas. Moreover, one-third of the carbon dioxide we produce currently dissolves into the ocean as carbonic acid. A growing number of scientists say that the acidification of the oceans could, on a long run, be an even more serious problem than global warming.

Another danger is that part of the methane produced by fracking or UCG would almost inevitably escape the collecting systems and seep into the atmosphere. When both direct and indirect impacts are taken into account, one molecule of methane heats our planet 33 times more than a molecule of carbon dioxide, during the next one hundred years.

According to a study by U.S.-based Cornell University, even now, up to eight percent of natural gas escapes into the atmosphere during the production phase or during transportation and end use. It is reasonable to assume that UCG and fracking would produce still higher losses than the present methods.

But how do we replace natural gas and oil, if UCG and fracking are too dangerous for our climate and for the oceans?

A third often mentioned option is to use shale oil and tar sand as raw materials for oil-substituting products, but this also produces very large carbon dioxide emissions.

Electric cars could, at least in theory, replace cars using gasoline and diesel oil. But they are still spreading very slowly and it may be impossible to design electrical freight ships or jet planes.

This leaves us with only two realistic solutions. Part of the problem can and must be solved with energy-saving measures and by improved energy efficiency, but it seems that we also need to increase our production of biofuels.

Biofuels have their own problems. They often require heavy doses of nitrogen fertilizer. This produces nitrous oxide, which is a strong greenhouse gas. Large-scale conversion of forested areas and tropical peat lands to biofuel plantations would have catastrophic consequences both for biodiversity and for climate.

However, biofuels can also be produced in ecologically and socially sustainable ways. We have millions of hectares of seriously eroded fields and grazing lands that have lost most of their organic carbon and fertility. Such lands could be distributed to landless families and converted to multi-storey home gardens producing food and timber as well as raw materials for biofuels. This might be an excellent way to solve the problems related to peak oil and peak gas in a way that also provided a decent livelihood for hundreds of millions of rural families. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Risto Isomaki is an environmental activist and awarded Finnish writer whose novels have been translated into several languages.

Excerpt:

By Risto Isomaki
HELSINKI, Mar 17 2011 (IPS)

In the 1970s Japan, the United States, France, Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China were all developing major breeder reactor programmes. Breeder reactors are nuclear power plants that produce more nuclear fuel than they consume generating electricity.

All of these programmes were later abandoned because there were too many problems and too many potentially dangerous situations. The only partial exception was China, which never officially abandoned its breeder reactor programme. But even in China such plans entered a practical standstill.

More recently the idea has been re-awakened by concerns related to global warming. Many governments have started to see nuclear power as a partial solution to our carbon dioxide problem. Our present nuclear reactors, however, can only provide for a minuscule part of our energy needs: two percent if only the power is counted and six percent if we also classify the waste heat as energy.

This cannot be expanded much with the present reactor types. Even though the Earth’s crust contains a lot of uranium, rich uranium ores are relatively rare, and many of them exist in densely populated areas. The natural deposits that are concentrated enough to be harnessed might last for eighty or one hundred years for the present number of nuclear reactors.

Natural uranium contains 140 atoms of uranium 238 for each atom of uranium 235. Nuclear reactors can only utilise uranium 235, but breeder reactors can convert uranium 238 to plutonium 239, which can be used as a nuclear fuel. Besides this, they can convert thorium to uranium 233, and thorium is five times more abundant than uranium.

In practise this means, that if we want to multiply the production of nuclear power, we have to use breeder reactors.

However, all the breeder reactors which have been constructed, thus far, have used liquid sodium or lithium as their coolant. Both metals explode when they contact water or air. It is very difficult to construct the cooling pipes of a breeder reactor in such a way that they cannot be damaged by a very large tsunami. On land the pipes can be protected by concrete, but at some point they must be contact with sea water so that the superheated sodium inside the pipes can be cooled down before it goes back to the reactor.

The underwater parts of the system are almost inevitably vulnerable to a tsunami wave, which first makes the water withdraw and then comes back with a vengeance. One small tear in one of the pipes and the whole cooling system would be utterly devastated by a series of sodium explosions. More complex cooling arrangements are of course possible, but they do not really solve the problem.

In our present water-cooled reactors, the production of heat drops to a small fraction almost instantly if the coolant is lost. But, at least in the Indian fast breeder designs the production of heat increases if the supply of coolant is interrupted. Expressed in technical jargon, many breeder reactors have a positive and not a negative coolant void coefficient. This multiplies the risks in dangerous situations.

Above all, breeder reactors use highly-enriched nuclear fuels. The fuel of our present nuclear reactors contains 2-4 percent of uranium 235. This kind of fuel can only produce tiny nuclear explosions, even in extreme situations. The first explosion in Chernobyl was technically a nuclear detonation, but it was not much larger than the following hydrogen and steam explosions, because the fuel only contained 1.8 percent uranium 235.

In contrast breeder reactor fuel typically contains 15 to 30 percent and sometimes up to 60 percent fissile isotopes like uranium 235, uranium 233 or plutonium 239. This means that if a breeder melts, we cannot exclude the possibility that a steam or hydrogen explosion would produce a small nuclear detonation and vaporise the whole reactor. The radioactive fallout produced by such an accident would be incredibly lethal and might cause continent-wide devastation.

The construction of breeder reactors would also multiply the risks related to nuclear terrorism. Weapons-grade uranium contains 93 percent uranium 233 or 235, but it is possible to make a crude nuclear weapon from breeder reactor fuel containing 10 percent uranium 233 – and most designs would use a far higher percentage. Thus every shipment of fuel to a breeder reactors will give the terrorist organisations a new chance of acquiring a nuclear weapon.

A few years ago, Japanese nuclear companies and research facilities produced scary proposals about mass-producing tiny, lithium-cooled nuclear reactors. The idea was that these Rapid-L reactors – containing uranium 235 enriched to 60 percent- would act as the power sources for individual office buildings and large blocks of flats.

After the recent devastation in several Japanese nuclear power plants, it is unlikely that these programmes will ever be carried out.

But India is already constructing a 500-megawatt sodium-cooled breeder reactor to Kalpakkam, on the coast of Tamil Nadu. The final goal of India’s nuclear programme is to construct 600 gigawatts of breeder reactors by 2050. This would assumedly mean either 1200 Kalpakkam-sized reactors or 600 larger ones.

These breeders would have to be located in coastal areas because they need huge amounts of cooling water and India already has a growing problem with its freshwater resources.

If the programme is carried out, the human species will soon have an official expiry date, for the first time in our history. That will be the day the next giant tsunami hits a major stretch of India’s coastline. You can’t get any farther from the teachings of the Mahatma. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS) (*)

(*) Risto Isomaki is an environmental activist and awarded Finnish writer whose novels have been translated into several languages

Excerpt:

By Risto Isomaki
HELSINKI, Sep 7 2010 (IPS)

The year 2010 has, like previous years, produced an impressive array of climate-related news, much probably related to global warming. Numerous global and national heat records have been broken: 37.2 degrees Celsius in Finland, 35 degrees in Yakutia, and 54 degrees in Pakistan. Forest and peat fires have done enormous damage in Russia, and Pakistan has been swept by floods and mudslides. A huge ice floe broke free from the Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, and the extent of marine ice in the Arctic Ocean is the second smallest ever recorded, in spite of a cool and cloudy July. Such news becomes even more worrying when viewed in a slightly longer perspective.

In 1994 it was estimated that there was approximately 25,000 cubic kilometres of floating pack ice at the Arctic Ocean. Since then the amount has been reduced by at least 80 percent. Open water has a very low reflectivity. Whereas ice and snow typically reflect between 70 and 90 percent of solar radiation straight back to space, watery surfaces only reflect between 4 and 10 percent. Thus the loss of sea ice could thus greatly accelerate the warming of the polar areas.

In addition, there are enormous natural reserves of organic carbon and methane in the Arctic. The terrestrial permafrost areas alone have been estimated to contain 1.5 trillion tonnes of organic carbon. Much of this could be released into the atmosphere in the form of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, if the permafrost melts.

About one half of the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is covered by submarine permafrost; there are also methane hydrate fields, mysterious underwater mixtures of ordinary ice and methane gas trapped inside and under the ice. The melting of the submarine permafrost and the hydrate fields could, in theory, release so much methane and carbon dioxide that our own greenhouse gas emissions would seem insignificant in comparison.

There are now signs that something like this is already starting to happen. In August 2009 a team of the University of Southampton discovered around the Arctic archipelago known as Spitzbergen 250 sites at which submarine hydrate fields had started to melt and release methane.

In the present situation, it is of utmost importance to halt the melting before things really get out of hand. However, while there has been little advance in the negotiations to reduce our globe-warming greenhouse gas emissions, the efforts to cut our cooling emissions have proceeded with lightning speed.

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) decided in October 2008 that the maximum allowable sulphur content in the fuel used by ocean-going ships should be reduced to 0.5 percent by 2020 from the present average of 2.7 percent.

According to the best estimate currently available, ship sulphur emissions now cool the planet with an efficiency of 0.58 watts per square metre. The tiny sulphur droplets assist the formation of low-lying clouds, which have a cooling impact on our planet. In addition, sulphur droplets make clouds whiter and more reflective and increase their life-span. The effect is especially important over the oceans, where there is often a scarcity of tiny particles that can act as condensation nuclei for clouds.

According to a widely-quoted assessment, enforcement of the IMO treaty would reduce the ships’ cooling impact by 0.31 watts per square metre. This may not sound like much but according to measurements conducted by NASA using satellites and other instruments, our planetary heat imbalance –also known as global warming– currently amounts to 0.85 watts per square metre.

In other words the enforcement of the IMO treaty might increase global warming by 36 percent, from 0.85 to 1.16 watts per square metre. This could be dangerous, especially because the impact would not be evenly distributed. It would concentrate over the oceans, especially at the North Atlantic and at the Arctic Ocean.

Sulphur is harmful to human health, so it does make sense to cut maritime emissions close to densely populated areas, like the Baltic and the Mediterranean. But sulphur emitted in the middle of the ocean can hardly be an important health issue.

Is this really the time to invest up to USD 200 billion per year to cut ocean-going ships’ sulphur emissions? The IMO treaty is well-meaning, but it might push us over the edge. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Risto Isomaki is an environmental activist and awarded Finnish writer whose novels have been translated into several languages

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