Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Energy & Nuclear

Wind Farm Kills Eagles

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“For centuries man had employed the power of wind to further his activities and it was not until the advent of the combustion engine that he was released from the constraints of the wind’s fickle nature. Utilising fossil fuels has brought on rapid expansion which some say is having a negative effect on the environment and pressure has been bought to bear on providing alternative methods of energy production,”

wrote Rog earlier today. Following is the rest of the post about a wind farm in Norway and a population of eagles:

“In 1992 Norway formed the State owned Statkraft Group who are now the third largest producer of power in the Nordic region, as well as the second largest producer of power based on renewable energy sources in Europe.

The bulk of Statkraft’s production is based on hydropower, however, they claim that their wind generators are “one of the most environmentally friendly sources of energy for large-scale electricity production.”

Statkraft’s first wind farm went into operation at Smøla in 2002. In 2004 the wind farm at Hitra was opened. Smøla 2 was completed in 2005.

However, bird watchers have found that the turbine blades at Smola had killed nine white-tailed eagles in 10 months, including all of last year’s chicks.

Chick numbers at the species’ former stronghold have plummeted since the wind farm was built, with breeding pairs at the site down from 19 to one. The number of chicks born each year at the site has fallen from at least 10 to three last year, with births outside the borders of the site falling too.

According to BBC News:

“…Only one chick is expected to fledge from the site this year.

Smola, a set of islands 10km (six miles) off the north-west coast of Norway, was designated an Important Bird Area by Birdlife International in 1989 because it had one of the highest densities of white-tailed eagles in the world.

Scientists now fear wind farms planned for the rest of Norway could have a similar impact on the birds.

RSPB conservation director Mark Avery told BBC News more care needed to be taken when choosing a site for wind farms. He said: “The problem is if wind farms are put in stupid places where there are lots of vulnerable birds and lots of vulnerable rare birds.”

He said most wind farms would not cause any harm to birds but that the Smola wind farm had been badly sited in a place where it put white-tailed eagles at risk.

He added: “It seems these birds are flying around a lot of the time and they’re colliding with the wind turbines and being killed in big numbers.

“So this colony that is very important – was very important – has been practically wiped out because this wind farm was built in exactly the wrong place.”

The question has to be asked, if the site was designated as an Important Bird Area by Birdlife International in 1989 and Statkraft’s claim to be generating “environmentally friendly” power what was the reason for Statkraft to construct their windfarm there? What happened to the precautionary principle?“

by Rog [a regular commentator at this blog]

I was interested to read at the Statkraft website that:

“The sea eagle is the country’s largest bird of prey. It lives along the coast, nesting from Sogn og Fjordane to northern Norway. The sea eagle population has risen steadily since 1970, and was estimated at around 1,800 pairs in 2000. This represents around 45 per cent of Europe’s entire sea eagle population. …No dead eagles were found in the Smøla Wind Farm from Phase 1.”

Double the Number, Half the Price: Toyoto’s Vision for Hybrid Cars

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Toyota is reported at CNN to be going to double the number of hybrid cars in its vehicle line-up soon after 2010 meaning it has targetted sales of 1 million hybrid cars annually.

I wonder what percentage of total sales this will make hybrids?

Toyota has also indicated it wants to halve the cost of hybrids.

Competitors including DaimlerChrysler are claiming diesel is the way to go with a 20-30 percent better fuel economy than gasoline cars and they are more affordable. I guess you can also run the diesel cars on biodiesel and in this way move from oil dependence.

And its the move from “oil dependence” and also “reducing pollution” that Toyota claim is driving their “endorsement” of the hybrid tecnology.

… and I wonder how much of the Prius marketing is about positioning the brand ‘Toyota’ as environmentally responsible?

Honda Civic Australia is trying to go one better. The company will guarantee the planting of 18 trees through Greenfleet when you buy your next Civic Hybrid. That’s apparently enough trees to absorb all the vehicle’s greenhouse gas emissions for three years.

I wonder how many trees you would need to plant to cover the emmissions from the manufacture of the car itself?

… and I wonder where they are planting the trees?

Counting Energy Efficiencies: Wooden Verus Cement Floors

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At the recent Timber Communities Australia national conference, prominent federal Labor politician Martin Ferguson called for a rethink of the national energy efficiency standards for residential buildings in Australia. He told conference delegates:

“Whilst we would all support practical measures that increase energy efficiency, it seems to me that the new building standards are underpinned by too many questionable assumptions and too little scientific evidence.

So does the Productivity Commission which reported its concerns about the analytical basis for the standards last October.

The key issue is the focus on reducing household energy running costs and the thermal performance of the building shell.

And, at least at the time the Productivity Commission was undertaking its investigations the Australian Greenhouse Office’s (AGO) home design manual noted that true low energy building design will consider embodied energy and take a broader life-cycle approach to energy assessment – merely looking at the energy used to operate the building is not really acceptable.

Because timber framed construction is lightweight in nature, it does not fit the thermal performance philosophy.
The analytical basis used also means that concrete slab-on-ground comes up trumps for efficiency over suspended timber flooring.

Consequently, $70 million worth of sales a year have been lost in the Victorian timber flooring market since the Victorian rating system was introduced.

This is despite the fact that a 1999 study undertaken for the AGO found it would take 62 years to get a net greenhouse benefit from a concrete floor over a timber floor.

And recent research indicates a concrete slab produces a net increase in CO2 emissions of 15 tonnes per house compared to a timber floor.

The problem is the standards ignore the fact that cement is highly energy intensive to produce while timber is a renewable resource, grown using direct sunlight and processed using relatively little energy in sawmills.
And sometimes, the energy in sawmills is produced using biomass from wood waste itself.

The Productivity Commission has recommended the Australian Building Codes Board commission an independent evaluation of energy efficiency standards to determine how effective they have been in reducing actual – not simulated – energy consumption and whether the financial benefits to individual producers and consumers have outweighed the associated costs.

And the sooner the government ensures this is done, the better because in the meantime the timber industry is suffering and it may well be doing so for no good reason.

I am pleased to see that the industry has successfully lobbied the Victorian government for an amnesty on wooden floors in new homes until April 2007 to allow time to address this issue.

But it is clear that the greens are now much more sophisticated in their attack on the forest industries, directly targeting industry markets to achieve their ends.

The Wilderness Society responded to the Victorian amnesty saying it was a “cynical attempt by the industry to maintain market share” rather than improve energy ratings or environmental sustainability.”

My house is cold in winter, it is wooden, with old wooden floors. But its my choice and I can’t understand why environmental groups don’t support the Australian timber industry so other home owners can appreciate the beauty of wood… wooden floors, wooden furniture, wooden window frames. And as Martin Ferguson said at the conference:

“Australia has 164 million hectares of native forests – 4% of the world’s forests – and 1.7 million hectares of plantations.

About 10% of our native forests are managed for wood production with less than 1% being harvested in any one year. That small proportion of forests harvested annually is regenerated so that a perpetual supply of native hardwood and softwood is maintained in this country.

Australia’s rigorous forestry standard, the AFS, has global mutual recognition under the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, the largest international sustainability recognition framework for forestry in the world.

But the greens are running a duplicitous campaign around the globe to undermine the status of the standard.”

Reflections on World Environment Day 2006

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It’s World Environment Day and I woke to hear Australia’s MInister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer talking up the possibility of the Australian Government building a nuclear power station to run a water desalination plant for Adelaide.

Adelaide is the capital of the driest state on this driest of continents. South Australia has plenty of uranium. Nuclear power is greenhouse neutral. Much of the water for Adelaide has been traditionally piped a couple of hundred kilomtres from the Murray River. It would all seem like a rather sensible idea me, but it is radical and of course the very conservative Australian Labor Party has already condemned it (click here for the response from Kevin Rudd on ABC Online).

Interestingly British Labor PM Tony Blair is talking about the possibility of a second generation of nuclear power stations for the UK, when Australia doesn’t yet have a single nuclear power station. And while the USA gets something like 20 percent of its water from desalination, desalination is also a novel idea for Australia.

My friend Phil Sawyer proposed both a desalination plant for Adelaide and a nuclear power station in his documentary ‘In Flinders Wake’ released in 2002 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the voyage of Matthew Fliners. It was shown on SBS TV about the same time.

Phil Sawyer.jpg
[Phil at the launch, photograph from the ABC SA website]

Phil has been a supporter of new environment group the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) which was launched exactly a year ago in Tenterfield. The group has been fairly quiet over the last year, but there will be a big get together for the first Australian Environment Foundation AGM and conference on 23rd and 24th September at Rydges, Southbank in Brisbane. Mark that date in your diaries. Chances are Phil and copies of his video will also be there.

Worrying About Dragons in the Age of Asia

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I spent yesterday at a conference in Brisbane hearing about “the future” and Australia’s place in “The Age of Asia”.

I enjoyed the talk at lunch by P.P.Shukla, the Indian High Commissioner to Australia, titled ‘The Emergence of Asia from India’s Perspective’. He commented that India only used to consider Australia in the context of cricket, but now people discuss Australia as a potential supplier of uranium.

Michele Levine from Roy Morgan Research Pty Ltd presented a paper titled ‘The Value of Listening to People’ (its almost a 1MB download) earlier in the morning based on polling which indicated 55 percent of Australians believe uranium should be exported for peaceful purposes.

I was fascinated that Roy Morgan Research was the “knowledge partner” for the conference. While i’ts certainly useful to understand what people think, I am not sure that polling people’s perceptions can be a substitute for facts and figures on how things really are.

The polling is interesting and indicates that most Australians consider global warming to be the most significant environmental issue facing Australia and the world. Furthermore, only 23% of Australians consider that “threats to the environment are exaggerated”, only 12% believe global warming concerns are exaggerated and 71% of Australians believe that “if we don’t act now [on global warming] it will be too late”.

Given the various comments at the conference about the extent of the problem of air pollution in China including Hong Kong, it seemed strange to me that there was no reference to the potential problem of global dimming?

The overwhelming concern about global warming was continued in the speech by Acting Queensland Premier Anna Bligh at the dinner. She made three points with respect to global warming:
1. The Queensland government is going to use money from the sale of its energy providers (Energex and Ergon) to fund future research into clean coal,
2. Climate change is the reason we have water restrictions in Brisbane, salinity and drought on farms and also land degradation… all of this under opening comment that the world is getting both “hotter and drier” as a consequence of global warming.
3. As a consequence of the worst drought in Queensland’s history, the Queensland government has no choice but to build a new dam for the south east of the state.

I wonder how the drought is going to fill the dam?

The best speech was the keynote address at the dinner by Rui Chenggang (Director and Anchor, China Central Television, People’s Republic of China). He questioned the perceptions of Australians about China. He made the point that while we in the West (with reference to Britian, the US and us, I think) may have rose to power through aggression and suppression, the same should not be assume of China. He said while you can’t find two leaves the same in the world, so history can not exactly repeat itself. He said that while we in the West associate China with the symbol of a dragon that is aggressive and breathes fire, for the Chinese the dragon breathes water and symbolizes peace and development. He concluded with the comment that “China might be different, if you see if differently”.

20 Years Since Chernobyl

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Twenty years ago, on 26th April 1986, there was a disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. There was no containment building and a plume of radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the eastern United States resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people. It is regarded as the worst accident in the history of nuclear power.

There is, however, on going dispute about how many actually died as a result of the disaster. Michael Crichton puts the figure at just 56, blog post here. Greenpeace claim the death toll was a lot higher. There is some discussion at Wikipedia:

“A 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed 56 direct deaths; 47 accident workers and 9 children with thyroid cancer, and estimated that as many as 9,000 people, among the approximately 6.6 million, will ultimately die from some form of cancer (one of the induced diseases). For its part, Greenpeace estimates a total death toll of 93,000 but cite in their report “The most recently published figures indicate that in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine alone the accident could have resulted in an estimated 200,000 additional deaths in the period between 1990 and 2004.”

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the disaster a WHO report entitled ‘Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident’ was produced, to read the overview click here.

Following are some excerpts:

“In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident. While a large number of these cancers resulted from radiation following the accident, intense medical monitoring for thyroid disease among the affected population has also resulted in the detection of thyroid cancers at a sub-clinical level, and so contributed to the overall increase in thyroid cancer numbers. Fortunately, even in children with advanced tumours, treatment has been highly effective and the general prognosis for young patients is good. However, they will need to take drugs for the rest of their lives to replace the loss of thyroid function. Further, there needs to be more study to evaluate the prognosis for children, especially those with distant metastases. It is expected that the increased incidence of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl will continue for many years, although the long-term magnitude of the risk is difficult to quantify.

… While scientists have conducted studies to determine whether cancers in many other organs may have been caused by radiation, reviews by the WHO Expert Group revealed no evidence of increased cancer risks, apart from thyroid cancer, that can clearly be attributed to radiation from Chernobyl. Aside from the recent finding on leukaemia risk among Chernobyl liquidators, reports indicate a small increase in the incidence of pre-menopausal breast cancer in the most contaminated areas, which appear to be related to radiation dose. Both of these findings, however, need confirmation in well-designed epidemiological studies. The absence of demonstrated increases in cancer risk – apart from thyroid cancer – is not proof that no increase has occurred. Based on the experience of atomic bomb survivors, a small increase in the risk of cancer is expected, even at the low to moderate doses received. Such an increase, however, is expected to be difficult to identify.

… Given the low radiation doses received by most people exposed to the Chernobyl accident, no effects on fertility, numbers of stillbirths, adverse pregnancy outcomes or delivery complications have been demonstrated nor are there expected to be any. A modest but steady increase in reported congenital malformations in both contaminated and uncontaminated areas of Belarus appears related to improved reporting and not to radiation exposure.”

So it would seem the number of people that died as a direct result of the accident has probably been grossly overstated and may be as low as 56. There has been an increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer particularly in individuals under 18 years of age at the time of exposure to the radiation. The thyroid cancer has proven manageable but not curable.