Nuclear Accidents

February 23, 2008

The following list outlines the main nuclear accidents involving fissile material, fission or a nuclear reactor. This list does not show military accidents and it does not show the radioactive accidents outside of nuclear reactors and fission / fissile matter.

My questions will always be roughly the same regarding nuclear.

Why do we need to introduce more nuclear waste into the equation and the obvious problems relating to it’s storage?

Why do we need to increase the risk of more nuclear accidents by building more reactors.

Given some effort we could create a hugely successful alternative industry, firstly to replace coal and gas and eventually phase out the existing nuclear. I know this will require a big effort, but I really believe it could be done without nukes.

Accidents by decade

1950s

December 12, 1952 Chalk River, Ontario Reactor core damaged

A reactor shutoff rod failure, combined with several operator errors, led to a major power excursion of more than double the reactor’s rated output at AECL’s NRX reactor. The operators purged the reactor’s heavy water moderator, and the reaction stopped in under 30 seconds. A cover gas system failure led to hydrogen explosions, which severely damaged the reactor core. The fission products from approximately 30 kg of uranium were released through the reactor stack. Irradiated light-water coolant leaked from the damaged coolant circuit into the reactor building; some 4,000 cubic meters were pumped via pipeline to a disposal area to avoid contamination of the Ottawa River. Subsequent monitoring of surrounding water sources revealed no contamination. No immediate fatalities or injuries resulted from the incident; a 1982 followup study of exposed workers showed no long-term health effects. Future U.S. President Jimmy Carter, then a nuclear engineer in the US Navy, was among the cleanup crew.

May 24, 1958 Chalk River, Ontario Fuel damaged

Due to inadequate cooling a damaged uranium fuel rod caught fire and was torn in two as it was being removed from the core at the NRU reactor. The fire was extinguished, but not before radioactive combustion products contaminated the interior of the reactor building and to a lesser degree, an area surrounding the laboratory site. Over 600 people were employed in the clean-up.

July 26, 1959 Santa Susana Field Laboratory, California Partial meltdown

A partial core meltdown took place when the Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) experienced a power excursion that caused severe overheating of the reactor core, resulting in the melting of one-third of the nuclear fuel and significant releases of radioactive gases.

POST CONTINUES

1960s

October 5, 1966 Monroe, Michigan Partial meltdown

A sodium cooling system malfunction caused a partial meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration nuclear breeder reactor. The accident was attributed to a zirconium fragment that obstructed a flow-guide in the sodium cooling system. Two of the 105 fuel assemblies melted during the incident, but no contamination was recorded outside the containment vessel.

May 1967 Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland - Partial meltdown
Graphite debris partially blocked a fuel channel causing a fuel element to melt and catch fire at the Chapelcross nuclear power station. Contamination was confined to the reactor core. The core was repaired and restarted in 1969, operating until the plant’s shutdown in 2004.

January 21, 1969 Lucens, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland Explosion

A total loss of coolant led to a power excursion and explosion of an experimental nuclear reactor. The underground location of this reactor acted like a containment building and prevented any outside contamination. The cavern was heavily contaminated and was sealed. No injuries or fatalities resulted.

1970s

February 22, 1977 Jaslovské Bohunice, Czechoslovakia - Fuel damaged

Operators neglected to remove moisture absorbing materials from a fuel rod assembly before loading it into the KS 150 reactor at power plant A-1. The accident resulted in damaged fuel integrity, extensive corrosion damage of fuel cladding and release of radioactivity into the plant area. The plant was decommissioned following this accident

March 28, 1979 Middletown, Pennsylvania - Partial meltdown

Equipment failures and worker mistakes contributed to a loss of coolant and a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. This is the worst commercial nuclear accident in the United States. While the reactor was extensively damaged on-site radiation exposure was under 100 millirems (less than annual exposure due to natural sources), with exposure of 1 millirem (10 µSv) to approximately 2 million people. There were no fatalities. Follow up radiological studies predict at most one long-term cancer fatality.

1980s

March 13, 1980 Orléans, France - Nuclear materials leak

A brief power excursion in Reactor A2 led to a rupture of fuel bundles and a minor release (8 x 1010 Bq) of nuclear materials at the Saint-Laurent Nuclear Power Plant. The reactor was repaired and continued operation until its decommissioning in 1992.

March, 1981 Tsuruga, Japan - Overexposure of workers

More than 100 workers were exposed to doses of up to 155 millirem per day radiation during repairs of a nuclear power plant, violating the company’s limit of 100 millirems (1 mSv) per day. [16]

September 23, 1983 Buenos Aires, Argentina - Accidental criticality

An operator error during a fuel plate reconfiguration in an experimental test reactor led to an excursion of 3×1017 fissions at the RA-2 facility. The operator absorbed 2000 rad (20 Gy) of gamma and 1700 rad (17 Gy) of neutron radiation which killed him two days later. Another 17 people outside of the reactor room absorbed doses ranging from 35 rad (0.35 Gy) to less than 1 rad (0.01 Gy).

April 26, 1986 Prypiat, Ukraine (then USSR) - Power excursion, explosion, complete meltdown

A mishandled reactor safety test led to an uncontrolled power excursion, causing a severe steam explosion, meltdown and release of radioactive material at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant located approximately 100 kilometers north-northwest of Kiev. Approximately fifty fatalities resulted from the accident and the immediate aftermath most of these being cleanup personnel. An additional nine fatal cases of thyroid cancer in children in the Chernobyl area have been attributed to the accident. The explosion and combustion of the graphite reactor core spread radioactive material over much of Europe. 100,000 people were evacuated from the areas immediately surrounding Chernobyl in addition to 300,000 from the areas of heavy fallout in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. An “Exclusion Zone” was created surrounding the site encompassing approximately 1,000 mi² (3,000 km²) and deemed off-limits for human habitation for an indefinite period. Several studies by governments, UN agencies and environmental groups have estimated the consequences and eventual number of casualties. Their findings are subject to controversy. See Chernobyl disaster.

May 4, 1986 Hamm-Uentrop, Germany - Fuel damaged

A spherical fuel pebble became lodged in the pipe used to deliver fuel elements to the reactor at an experimental 300-megawatt THTR-300 HTGR. Attempts by an operator to dislodge the fuel pebble damaged its cladding, releasing radiation detectable up to two kilometers from the reactor.

November 24, 1989 Greifswald, Germany (then East Germany) - Fuel damaged

Operators disabled three of six cooling pumps to test emergency shutoffs. Instead of the expected automatic shutdown a fourth pump failed causing excessive heating which damaged ten fuel rods. The accident was attributed to sticky relay contacts and generally poor construction in the Soviet-built reactor.

1990s

April 6, 1993 Tomsk, Russia - Explosion

A pressure buildup led to an explosive mechanical failure in a 34 cubic meter stainless steel reaction vessel buried in a concrete bunker under building 201 of the radiochemical works at the Tomsk-7 Siberian Chemical Enterprise plutonium reprocessing facility. The vessel contained a mixture of concentrated nitric acid, uranium (8757 kg), plutonium (449 g) along with a mixture of radioactive and organic waste from a prior extraction cycle. The explosion dislodged the concrete lid of the bunker and blew a large hole in the roof of the building, releasing approximately 6 GBq of Pu 239 and 30 TBq of various other radionuclides into the environment. The contamination plume extended 28 km NE of building 201, 20 km beyond the facility property. The small village of Georgievka (pop. 200) was at the end of the fallout plume, but no fatalities, illnesses or injuries were reported. The accident exposed 160 on-site workers and almost two thousand cleanup workers to total doses of up to 50 mSv (the threshold limit for radiation workers is 100 mSv per 5 years).

June, 1999 Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan - Control rod malfunction

Operators attempting to insert one control rod during an inspection neglected procedure and instead withdrew three causing a 15 minute uncontrolled sustained reaction at the number 1 reactor of Shika Nuclear Power Plant. The Hokuriku Electric Company who owned the reactor did not report this incident and falsified records, covering it up until March, 2007.

September 30, 1999 Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan - Accidental criticality

Workers put uranyl nitrate solution containing about 16.6 kg of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass, into a precipitation tank at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura northeast of Tokyo, Japan. The tank was not designed to dissolve this type of solution and was not configured to prevent eventual criticality. Three workers were exposed to (neutron) radiation doses in excess of allowable limits. Two of these workers died. 116 other workers received lesser doses of 1 msV or greater though not in excess of the allowable limit. For more details, see Tokaimura nuclear accident and 5 yen coin.

2000s

April 10, 2003 Paks, Hungary - Fuel damaged

Partially spent fuel rods undergoing cleaning in a tank of heavy water ruptured and spilled fuel pellets at Paks Nuclear Power Plant. It is suspected that inadequate cooling of the rods during the cleaning process combined with a sudden influx of cold water thermally shocked fuel rods causing them to split. Boric acid was added to the tank to prevent the loose fuel pellets from achieving criticality. Ammonia and hydrazine were also added to absorb iodine-131.

April 19, 2005 Sellafield, UK - Nuclear material leak

Twenty metric tons of uranium and 160 kilograms of plutonium dissolved in 83,000 liters of nitric acid leaked over several months from a cracked pipe into a stainless steel sump chamber at the Thorp nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. The partially processed spent fuel was drained into holding tanks outside the plant.

November 2005 raidwood, Illinois - Nuclear material leak

Tritium contamination of groundwater was discovered at Exelon’s Braidwood station. Groundwater off site remains within safe drinking standards though the NRC is requiring the plant to correct any problems related to the release.

March 6, 2006 Erwin, Tennessee - Nuclear material leak

Thirty-five liters of a highly enriched uranium solution leaked during transfer into a lab at Nuclear Fuel Services Erwin Plant. The incident caused a seven-month shutdown and a required public hearing on the licensing of the plant.

We will also be providing a list for all the non reactor accidents. Please stay tuned.

Website: Wikipedia



Written by Craig · Filed Under Energy, Environment, Sustainability 

Comments

9 Responses to “Nuclear Accidents”

  1. Ken on February 24th, 2008 12:38 am

    First of all, is this it? When I worked at ORNL biology division we had a moment of silence for the last death by uncontrolled criticallity. It was user error, not to speak ill of the dead. This is not kid stuff, but that was over 30 years ago. However, if you remove all the Soviet engineered garbage and the experimental reactors (this is only because the discussion is safety of commercial power reactors), the list is damned short and pretty inconsequential, unless you go with the idea that radiation is an other worldly and possibly demonically alien force that we created in the fires of hell, rather than something we are exposed to every day of our lives. If you were to insist on a greater safety record than this for ANY major industry then you would pretty much have to shut modern civilization down as we know it. This is pretty much getting into the area of a Luddite arguement, but maybe this is flattering to you.

    What is the safety record of generation III reactors? The second to the last on the list is a generation II reactor and the problem was that they were supposed to insert a control rod but instead they pulled three while running an experiment on the reactor. They were able to cover it up because the reactor was still fully functional after the incident (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shika_Nuclear_Power_Plant). I don’t see any other Gen II reactors on the list and we are already past them in design. This is more to the point. IF you mentally graph out the incidents here over time and did a parallel graph of number of reactors or a ratio of incidents to number of reactors its a line plunging to zero. Some of these were experimental reactors in the 50’s and 60’s when we didn’t have any experience with the technology at all. Slide rules and drafting boards. This list is also incomplete, I know of at least one reactor fire in Japan a couple years ago that was pretty bad, but they cleaned things up that is not on the list.

    I could site this http://www.johnstownpa.com/History/hist21.html and claim that hydroelectric is too risky, disruptive to the environment etc. The death toll from dam collapse is probably multiples of the death toll from nuclear power.

    If you compile a list of all the things that went wrong in the past as a way to scare people away from building new reactors they should know that you are largely talking about reactor designs from the Soviet Union and Generation I reactors and also point out that in most of the cases the largest damage was expense. One third of everyone living on the planet will get cancer if they are lucky enough not to die of something else. Environment can play a role, but chemical carcinogens are more deadly than the amounts of radiation one would get from the above incidents. Compared to the industrial waste dumped into the environment you are swatting at gnats. True Carter was at the clean-up of one of these reactor accidents, and look at him now, he looks far more frail than he did before he participated, he doesn’t seem as mentally agile, he moves slower with evidence of inflexability in his joints and his skin has become less flexible and wrinkled.. After working in the nuclear power business this man looks like a wreck. Note that these are all true statements proving to some a link between the nuclear power industry and the harm to humans. I would be open to other causes for Jimmy’s current condition, like having to listen to constant slurs from Republicans, who are probably more dangerous to the environment than nuclear waste.

    I know that you didn’t make up the list above, a bunch of people logging onto wikipedia did that, but when you make up a list of non-plant accidents, don’t include military sites, this is apples and oranges, Look at their record on almost anything that industry also handles and it is appalling (not that what GE did to the Hudson river was good). If you include mine and milling incidents, you also have to do a parallel study of at least one comparable operation, say the tin or gold mining industry. I don’t think that coal mining is a fair fight, it is far more dangerous by its mortality rate and I think that issues should be met fairly. You are clearly a propagandist so you might feel differently about this. Better yet, diamonds, how many people have died of been injured not so that we can generate power but so that people can possess bling (not withstanding industrial diamond mining)? Also, the tailings produced from gold mining may be more radioactive than those from uranium mining (no attempt to remove the radioactive U235 is made in the former process) and are similar. Gold mining is far more pervasive than uranium mining.

    This accounting should ease anyone’s mind about the safety record of nuclear power, unless you’re living in a cave.

  2. Ken on February 24th, 2008 5:13 am

    In direct answer to your question, the world is going to require terawatts of electric power. This is not a bad thing or a good thing, its just a fact if we are going to continue to develop. We are know becoming aware of some of the most insidious problems with development the way it has been practice in the past. I say that we are becoming aware of it, not that we are smarter or were dumber in the past. Now that we are aware, smart or dumb can only be projected into the future in terms of how we deal with things. Alternative forms cannot deliver the amount of power we need at the present moment. It really doesn’t matter how many joules of energy in sun light falls on the planet, what matters is the cost of harvesting it, the same goes for tidal, coal, hydro, gas and wind. I will say that your delivery, if not opinion has evolved, since you now propose to use alternatives to first target coal and gas and nuclear is an eventual goal. Clearly, the aggregate effect of the world’s coal fired plants on a daily basis is worse than the Chernobyl disaster. You can dispute this, but if you look into the total mass of heavy metals, which can be as dangerous as many reactor products with the possible exceptions of Sr and Cs, alone and how we are now finding mercury even at the tops of isolated mountains the nuclear danger argument seems much smaller. Mercury stays in the environment for as long as radio-isotopes. Add onto those the CO2 which turns into carbonic acid upon being dissolved in water and a greenhouse gas when it remains in the atmosphere and the uranium that becomes particulate for people to breath. One area I wish people would start putting effort into would be to insist that all coal fired plants reach stringent min. standards for emissions. On a dollar for dollar basis, this may have a larger positive impact than building wind farms (not that I think that is a totally off base thing to do either).

    As far as making more waste, the products of current reactors is the fuel of generation IV reactors. These will be more powerful and yet safer, continuing the trend that we have witnessed over the last few decades. There is a powerful consortium of countries that have a couple hundred years of nuclear experience between them working on these designs in cooperation/competition. Some of these designs are specifically geared to the Thorium fuel cycle. The US currently has a 32,000 ton stock pile of Thorium nitrate that has been collected over the course of mining and processing other metals. Its currently buried in shipping containers in Nevada. It just has to be processed and its life cycle carbon cost can be largely charged to the metals that its ore was originally mined for. Since it can’t be disposed of, there is Thorium sitting in yellow barrels around the world as a potential feedstock. I believe that there will be resistance to its utilization by entrenched uranium interest, but since it is proliferation resistant post power production, it may be adopted by countries like Turkey, Egypt or Jordan, which don’t want the liability of having proliferation sensitive materials on their soil.

    So, given the risk of building new coal fired plants, the risk of building more nuclear plants seems less, at least to me. If alternative forms are able to start doing the heavy lifting in practical terms then they should be aimed at coal, wile old nuclear plants are replaced with safer and vastly more efficient newer plants. The current sites in the US were designed for up to 8 reactors within the exclusion zones and most only have one or two. I say put the 400-700 MW stations in safe store and replace them on site with 1100-1800 MW Gen III+ plants, taking the difference in coal fired electricity off line. The only good thing about coal is that it can respond to demand easier than nuclear, so for grid stability some may still need to be used for a while. For over capacity, its too bad you couldn’t have an aluminum producer down the road that only produces at night to soak up excess capacity. This also means that when nuclear plants are taking up all the needed capacity, the amount of coal burned can be reduced, which is the real issue. Spent fuel stored on site is retained in their original bundles and sealed in individual cases which are stored under regulation. These cases will go into sealed “graves” in Yucca Mt. When technologies for reprocessing are better developed, they will hopefully be retrieved and their products used for future plants that will incinerate then through transmutation and fission. The waste issue pales compared to other issues, like PCBs, CO2 and mercury.

  3. Craig on February 27th, 2008 4:54 pm

    Ken

    Dams might collapse, solar cells might fall off the roof onto someones head, a coal truck might crash into a car. A wind turbine tower might fall and kill someone.

    These are all tragic accidents.

    But after the accident, you or I could walk over and help the injured. Or if these accidents occurred in a lovely peaceful area, then after the accident cleanup we would still have a lovely clean area.

    After a major nuclear accident, you potentially have a tomb covering the reactor and no one can go within cooee of the area for who knows how long.

    Now I am not an expert with nuclear power by any stretch of the imagination, I did read however that re Thorium;

    “Spent blanket fuel also contains U-232, which decays rapidly and has very gamma-active daughters creating significant problems in handling the bred U-233 and hence conferring proliferation resistance”

    Now the above might say that thorium processing is safer, but not completely safe from proliferation risk, but my question is ‘ who wants to be handling products which have significant handling problems’

    Why stuff around pulling uranium, thorium or anything else out of the ground and then creating bi products that are potentially deadly and which may cause who knows what cancers and deformities in people or the people’s children.

    I also read that thorium has some problems as listed below

    The high cost of fuel fabrication, due partly to the high radioactivity of U-233 chemically separated from the irradiated thorium fuel. Separated U-233 is always contaminated with traces of U-232 (69 year half life but whose daughter products such as thallium-208 are strong gamma emitters with very short half lives);

    The similar problems in recycling thorium itself due to highly radioactive Th-228 (an alpha emitter with 2 year half life) present;

    Some weapons proliferation risk of U-233 (if it could be separated on its own); and

    The technical problems (not yet satisfactorily solved) in reprocessing.

    Why not push for Solar Thermal, this technology has huge potential, as a base load power source.

    Unless you manage to get in the path of its concentrators then you are pretty safe.

  4. Ken on February 28th, 2008 12:21 am

    “Now the above might say that thorium processing is safer, but not completely safe from proliferation risk, but my question is ‘ who wants to be handling products which have significant handling problems’”

    This is why a once through process is best for this design. The difficulty with fuel fabrication has been worked out, this is now a dead issue. The US and Russian governments cooperated in making projects to keep former USSR atomic scientist busy, just so they didn’t slip off to the highest bidder etc. One of the projects that they funded on this program worked through the fuel design in cooperation with ORNL and Brookhaven. This is a once through cycle. There is no reprocessing involved, one burns the blanket for 9 to 12 years (that’s a hell of a lot of electricity out of that mass of fuel) and then you put it in a storage facility that only has to be safe for 500 years rather than a 100K. India is hell bent on reprocessing the U233 out of thorium. You could let it rest for a couple dozen years when most of the really hot stuff has died and then let them buy it and recover the U233. Its the properties of the U233 that make this stuff much safer than how we do it now.

    In order to make a bomb with U233 from these reactors one would have to go through such lengths that they would already be a nuclear power. India is probably the only place on earth that is aimed at this goal and they have been working the technology for a decade. The US worked on it during the Carter years but dropped it. Thorium fuel bundles are so cheap, they should just be burned for a decade and then let decay. The difference in mass is significant.

  5. Craig on February 28th, 2008 7:17 am

    “500 years instead of 100k”

    1 employee’s salary ( say 40,000 per year) guarding a nuclear storage facility for a period of 500 years is 20 million dollars.

    Thats just 1 employee. What is it going to cost to keep the storage facility operating.

    I don’t believe that any nuclear organisation would be giving us the true cost to operate these facilities. I don’t think that they would even have accurate figures themselves.

    Leave the uranium, thorium, any other nuclear products untouched and unprocessed in the ground.

    The nuclear waste problem is still a problem even with thorium as the main fuel source. Why not put your efforts into clean power generation.

    500 years.

    That means your; great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren will get to see some thorium that is safe if you were to put some in storage now.

  6. Ken on February 28th, 2008 1:54 pm

    I guess, if that in anyway resembled the real world. 500 years is when the last of it trickles out. A majority of the radioactive species are gone in a couple decades. By the time my kids (assuming they were born today) were out of college it would be considered low level waste. This illustrates your irrational fear of the material more than how untenable the prospect of switching to a low waste proliferation resistant fuel would pretty much do a way with the argument. The point is that if you wanted to make a repository for these cores, it wouldn’t have to be the extravagant production as a Yukka mountain-like facility. You could probably just pour a concrete floor with lined crypts in a disused mine, put the dry waste in the crypts, seal the tops, pour a top floor on top of it and seal the mine. In this context, 500 years is not that long. Also remember that by the time you reach 250 years there isn’t much of anything left because its a geometric decay curve and the final part is half of very little and then half of the half of very little and so on. By the time there was any breach of containment the fuel would be decayed to background. Even if there was a breach sometime before this, the pellets are made of ceramic and the radiation is fixed, if dangerous material did leach, it would be half lived out by the time it migrated anywhere. The only problem I can see is that the cores might be unavailable if in the future someone wanted to extract the remaining uranium for further fuel production. That’s why I think that they should be kept in dry storage for a couple decades for their returned to the fuel stream.

    Lets take India as an example for why I think we should put our efforts here. In the coming couple decades, India will require ten fold more electrical production then she has right now, estimates are 1,340 GW. In the absence of nuclear the Indians will meet this demand by:

    A) Burning Coal

    B) Put up solar, wind, tide

    C) Buy everyone stationary bikes with generators

    You worry about radioactive isotopes buried in crypts deep in caves that will never see the light of day and I’ll continue to worry about mercury in tuna cans on grocery shelves. Meanwhile, delusions of wind mills will dance in your head. I am not making the argument that all viable sources of power shouldn’t be used. There are more options than you are willing to accept. The nuclear option is fast evolving, if you look at the first generation reactors, they put out 100 MWh and produced a lot of nuclear waste. They also cost more than current reactors which put out 1.5GW and produce strikingly less waste. Generation IV reactors like the design that incorporates supercritical steam cycles developed in recent coal fired plants will again produce a dramatic leap in power output while decreasing total fuel requirements and likely costing the same as current designs, maybe less if this trend continues too. These aren’t pie in the sky musings, these trends are all real and arise from real progress due to well placed effort. If in addition the fuel design were switched to Thorium, the waste side of the equation also makes a huge leap to the good.

  7. Craig on March 2nd, 2008 7:12 am

    Hi Ken

    As far as baseload renewables go, I and many other people, including some with plenty of money are taking a serious look at a US company based in Palo Alto called Ausra.

    Their technology and founder originated here in Australia and they have a pilot plant that has been running for a few years at the Liddell coal fired power station in NSW Australia.

    See link here;

    http://www.palebludot.com/2008/03/01/baseload-renewable-power-ausra-solar-thermal-is-the-answer/

    See what you think of the story

  8. Ken on March 3rd, 2008 1:59 am

    I always think that solar is encouraging, the energy density in terms of recovery is an important factor. I’m familiar with the area that they are setting this up in in the central valley. Real estate is cheap as dirt out there. You need a lot of area somewhere to install this and if the land is available then go for it.

    The energy use in buildings account for 50% of global warming gases. The best current use of solar is in the reduction of peak electric demand. The great thing about solar is that it normally operates during the period during the day when peak electrical demand occurs. If we were smart, we would find a way to place PV generated electricity on all (>70%) the office buildings in areas that get their power from coal and natural gas. I would say somewhere like Chicago, but Illinois rivals France in their use of nuclear power so this wouldn’t affect greenhouse gas or heavy metal pollution on an effective cost basis. You need to do it in Atlanta, Sydney and Shanghi. This would probably do more to reduce CO2 emissions than changing over 30% of the cars on the road to plugin hybrids. If you took a large number of large buildings in those same areas that currently use gas for heating air and water and put in co-generation systems it would be even better. Its all good to crusade about these things, you can randomly try to hack off pieces the act of which makes you feel good or you can try to carefully sculpt an answer by landing your blows intelligently. I don’t think that using solar or wind to replace base load is the answer, I think that using them to reduce peak demand makes more sense. Its not just semantics and it comes down to the biggest bang for the buck. You won’t do away with coal plants quickly, but you can rapidly reduce the tonnage of coal burned at those plants, which will actually pay off.

    Ultimately I believe that a good business model is the most important determiner of success. check out these guys, it’s brilliant (no pun intended).

    http://www.sunedison.com/

  9. Ken on March 3rd, 2008 3:09 am

    Now that you guys appear to have a more rational government, maybe you could petition to get targeted tax incentives to facilitate the sunedison business model. With the cost of PV coming down, especially if nanotechnological approaches like nanosolar’s live up to their promise, you could imagine companies putting up solar collectors on all their roofs faster than with alternative approaches and they will pay to do so. I didn’t actually read the site in detail, but I know that sunedison signs a contract whereby the client pays a monthly rate based on a price related to peak electric cost at the point of installation, as I remember its a bit above their present cost of electricity. Since electrical cost will rise this is a hedge against inflation so they are willing to pay it. Companies that were their first clients are likely already paying less on their energy bills than they would have and their operating margins will only get better from here on out. With cheaper panels coming on the market, Sunedison’s profit margins should also increase. With power generation being so cheap in Australia, because no one accurately prices the cost of coal, it may still need a substantial tax break to make businesses see the light. If this could be done legislatively, then someone should adapt the Sunedison model to the Australian market and do well by doing good, instead of self-righteously blogging about the evils of everything globalized, or the bogyman of nuclear power etc. If you are really passionate about this you should take a risk and put your money where your mouth is. With the current shift in power in Australia, this presents an opportunity. I’ve seen interviews with Sunedison’s CEO, he may even be willing to help someone who wants to emulate his business model outside the US market, he wants to make money, but he also appears to be into this because he believes in it as a solution to our larger problems, which I think is the mix that will solve things best.

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