Final Version of Waxman-Markey as Passed by House

The final bill with the amendments collated in is now available. I'll add comments when I have some time.

References:

Bill as Passed by House
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h2454eh.txt.pdf

Last Minutes Amendments to Waxman-Markey

Well it passed. There were over 300 pages of amendments made to the 1200 page bill at the last minute, so it fairly safe to say that no one in the House really knew what they were voting on. I skimmed through the amendments and have a few comments below.

Page 36: High Efficiency Gas Turbine Research. They are shooting for 65% combined cycle efficiency. Not a bad idea, but not exactly something private industry is neglecting. I checked carefully and as far as I can tell they didn't repeal the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Page 42: Authorizes the Secretary of Energy to do a study on thorium fueled nuclear reactors.

Page 64:; there is "Sec 27. Clean Energy Manufacturing Revolving Loan Fund Program". It doesn't say anything about nuclear power, but if you go down to paragraph (J) on page 65 it looks like Secretary Chu could apply it to nuclear power if he wants to.

Page 114: Looks like the feds will help you if you buy a house closer to work (Location-Efficient Mortgages).

Page 133: And help with the landscaping. I'm now totally confused about when you are supposed to protect trees and when you supposed to cut them down and burn them for renewable biomass. Since they use the term "indigenous trees", I assume a Dutch Elm is renewable toast.

Page 170: Sec. 299F. GAO Reports on Availability of Affordable Mortgages. I don't know what this is doing in this bill. Maybe it was a cut and paste error.

Page 210: It looks like Subtitle A is trying to keep manufacturing from moving offshore to countries that don't punish CO2 output. It looks like if you are competing with a foreign company that doesn't have to pay carbon offsets, then you can get some sort of rebate on the offsets. The government offsets the offsets so to speak. It seems to me that it would be cheaper to not make you buy the offset in the first place.

Page 260: Changes to Earned Income Credit. I don't know how they are going to figure out which households have experienced a reduction in purchasing power because of the bill and why doesn't that apply to people with kids also?

Page 268: Carbon offsets for agriculture are administered by the Secretary of Agriculture, not the EPA. This has upset some environmental groups.

Page 271: Ocean fertilization doesn't count as biological sequestration.

Page 276: Insert your own joke about manure management.

Page 289: Section 506 Verification of Offset Practices. When you think about it, The compliance and enforcement costs for carbon offsets are going to cost more than $176 per household. The time filling out the paperwork, the time reviewing the paperwork, the field inspectors to check that what people are doing matches the paperwork. This makes the IRS look simple by comparison.

References:

Amendment Text:
http://www.rules.house.gov/111/SpecialRules/hr2998/waxman1_hr2998_111.pdf

Text of original bill:
http://www.eenews.net/public/25/11457/features/documents/2009/06/23/document_daily_03.pdf

Waxman-Markey Goes to Floor Vote

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 goes to the House Floor for Debate Friday June 26th. I'll probably have more comments when I have a chance to compare the new version to the old.

June 24, 2009 4:30
On page 245, that they have added a clause requiring companies using the Title XVII Loan Guarantee Program created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to pay the "prevailing wage" for the project. Won't this greatly increase the cost of the projects using this program, since I understand the usual interpretation of "prevailing wage" is the union wage?

June 25, 2009 15:00
I just realized that most people don't know Title XVII is. Among other things it has 18 billion for nuclear power plant construction. I've also found analysis of Waxman-Markey at the The Breakthrough Institute, which I have linked below.


Text of Bill
http://www.eenews.net/public/25/11457/features/documents/2009/06/23/document_daily_03.pdf

Ny Times
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/06/23/23climatewire-house-dems-release-revised-climate-bill-as-f-15591.html

Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090622-716255.html

My previous comments
http://www.anupchurchchrestomathy.com/2009/06/waxman-climate-bill-and-war-on-trees.html

The Breakthrough Institute on Waxman-Markey
http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/waxmanmarkey_climate_bill/

The Upchurch American Energy Act

Since the Republicans have proposed the American Energy Act, I thought this is a good time to put forward my own proposal. I think I can safely say that my plan has just as much chance passing in the current Congress as the Republican plan. I'm cribbing most of this from the French, since 78% of their electricity is from nuclear power. If you add in the hydroelectric power, then nearly 90% of their electricity is generated without producing carbon dioxide.

1. Create a Federal Power Authority.

The Federal Power Authority would be have the power to build and operate nuclear power plants anywhere in the United States. They wouldn't be involved in selling electricity to end-users and would sell electricity to the electric power utilities at wholesale, with one possible exception I will note below. If the wholesale pricing is good, then I anticipate little resistance from local power companies, since their focus is on selling power, not on producing it. Power companies focused on sales to other utilities will be less thrilled, since the FPA is going to be an 800 pound gorilla.

I was concerned about how to go about creating such a large federal agency from scratch, when it occurred to me that the nucleus of the FPA already exists in the Tennessee Valley Authority. They have been in the business of generating electricity since the thirties and they already operate 6 nuclear reactors at 3 different locations in two states. We would expand their authority to build nuclear power plants anywhere in the United States and keep the power of eminent domain and to issue bonds they already have. Their authority would be expanded to include the ability to issue tax exempt bonds to build nuclear power. The FPA would retain the other missions of the TVA besides power generation, but only in the Tennessee Valley.

The FPA would stay at their current headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Since the whole purpose of expanding the TVA, is so the FPA can hit the ground running relocating the authority would be counter productive. There is also big advantage in being just down the road from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ORNL is part of the Department of Energy. I haven't figured out exactly what will be the relationship will be between the FPA and the DOE.

2. Spent Fuel Storage and Reprocessing

The FPA would be responsible for accepting spent fuel from their own reactors and from other operators and storing it in their own storage site. They would also have a fuel reprocessing plant at same location and a reactor that would use reprocessed fuel. Colocating the spent fuel storage and fuel reprocessing is just common sense and also putting a power reactor on the same site will create employment for the county that hosts the facility. An ideal candidate would be large and sparsely populated county, with less than 10,000 households.

A lot of the resistance to nuclear storage facilities is that the local residents see it as an all pain/no gain situation. This approach will mean that a large percentage of the local residents will be FPA employees, their families and people providing goods and services to them. Also the FPA will sell electricity to local homes at a rate determined by incremental cost of production for the first 2000KWH and at the wholesale rates over that. Since they are using reprocessed fuel, the incremental cost may be less than 1 cent per KWH. I hope this spurs some competition about which county gets the facility.

Notice I said waste storage not disposal. 95% of spent fuel rods are Uranium or Plutonium which we can reprocess. Most of the remainder can be used in an Integral Fast Reactor which we will also build at the facility. It may be 50 years before we find out what is actually waste and not more fuel and by then we will have the technology to convert that into something harmless.

3. Licensing

The FPA will only use reactor designs approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The FPA will be self-licensing as far as site and operating licenses are concerned. They are already a licensed operator and we can beef up their Inspector General's department to make sure that they observe best practices. The current TVA Inspector General is a presidential appointee and that would be continued in the FPA.

Frankly, with their current workload, there is no way the NRC could process the extra 10 to 12 site licenses that the FPA would generate. It takes the NRC years to turn around the current applications. Adding to their workload wouldn't actually get more plants approved. It will just increase the approval time and cost.

We might also want to try some different ways to encourage good safety practices. For example we might require all managers at a reactor to live within 10 miles of the facility and try to have some of the managers working in inspection during construction.

4. Reactor Selection

One thing the French experience proved is that if you want to keep costs down, pick a single design and build a lot of them. With economies of scale and learning, the last plant is going to cost a fraction of the first plant. With quantity purchases we can get better prices from our vendors and have specialized construction crews moving from site to site during the construction.

I'm inclined to go with the Westinghouse AP1000 for a few reasons.

1. It's already approved by the NRC.
2. It's a generation III+ design which is much simpler and safer than older designs
3. It has a modular design which make it faster and cheaper to build.
4. The Chinese as already building one, so we can take advantage of what they learn while building them.
5. The Chinese plan to build 100 AP1000 reactors. If we build 100 also, then cost of the components should really come down. They should literally be coming off an assembly line.
   

5. Federal Lands

Whenever possible, the FPA should try to build their reactors on land the federal government already owns. This will save billions in purchase costs and cause less PR problems than exercising eminent domain would.

6. Future Plans

There are a lot of things the FPA and the DOE need to work on.

1. Design a nuclear reactor that can be used to retrofit existing coal plants to use nuclear energy.
2. Build an Integral Fast Reactor as mentioned above.
3. Design a reactor that produce electricity as cheaply as coal and is proliferation resistant and transportable for the export market. This will probably use a Thorium fuel cycle.
4. Design a reactor optimized to produce hydrogen for automobiles. #3 should also be able to produce hydrogen.
   
5. Work on all the spent fuel reprocessing I mentioned in #2.

References:

American Energy Act:
http://www.gop.gov/energy

Why the French Like Nuclear Energy
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

Tennessee Valley Authority
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority

Nuclear Fuel Cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle

NRC License Review Budget Constraints
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2009/06/living-renaissance-nrc-license-review.html

Babcock & Wilcox mPower Reactor

Since I was talking about small nuclear reactors in my previous post I thought I might comment on their announcement of the mPower system. The newspaper stories about the announcement made it difficult to heads or tails of what features the mPower reactors had.

The mPower is a light water reactor with a projected output of 125 Megawatts of electricity. This is abbreviated as MWe as opposed to MWt which stands for thermal or the amount of heat the reactor can produce. The MWe number is usually 1/3 to 1/2 the MWt number. This is less than 1/9th what a large reactor like the AP1000 can produce.

Buying a series of small reactors instead of of one large one can have advantages for a utility company. They don't have to make a huge financial commitment upfront and the interest charges that entails and often ending up with more capacity than they require for current demand. Units can be added as needed, while the earlier units are paying down the debt for their construction. This can save years of interest charges.

There is also the advantage that with several mPower units installed, you don't have to take them all offline at the same time for maintenance and refueling, which means much better availability numbers. This can be critical in third world countries where there isn't a large national grid to take up the slack when you have a large reactor offline.

This approach also can have big advantages for B&W. The reactor is small enough that is can assembled in a few major modules which can be transported to the construction site and only the final assembly is done on-site. Not only do you achieve much lower component costs when purchased in quantity, but the quality control can be much more through in a factory setting, which will improve safety and reliability.

The mPower represents an intermediate step between the AP1000, which has modular subunits and the SSTAR that Lawerence Livermore is designing which is assembled prefueled at the factory and only needs to hooked up to the turbines and generators at the site.

This brings me to the most interesting feature of the mPower: All the components will be made in North America. During the long dark night for nuclear power in the United States following Three Mile Island, we lost almost all domestic capacity for making the components for nuclear reactors. The Republican energy bill has a provision to waive tariffs for nuclear reactor components, where there is no domestic manufacturer. B&W just went back into the business of building heavy reactor components a couple of years ago after leaving the business 20 years ago.

Rebuilding our nuclear infrastructure is important not just from a buy American point of view. There is a lot of demand worldwide for reactor components. The last time I looked the lead time for a reactor pressure vessel was three years. Being able to supply their own heavy components gives B&W a big leg up.

The next feature of note is that reactor is designed to be built underground. The picture at the top is a 500MW underground facility with 4 mPower reactors. It looks like the generators and maybe the turbines are above ground. I suspect that the underground design is a reaction to the new rule that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced in February 2009, that new reactors designs must be able to withstand the crash of a commercial jetliner. B&W probably decided it was prohibitively expensive to build an above ground containment for a low cost reactor to meet that specification and that building below ground was cheaper. I have reservations about this requirement. It isn't obvious to me that crashing a jetliner into a nuclear reactor would actually cause more loss of life than doing it to a natural gas storage facility.

I live in Orlando, Florida and I wonder how practical this is for this area. I'm not a civil engineer, but anytime someone digs a hole around here, it fills up with groundwater. It would be a pain to shut down the reactor because the sump pump failed. It also looks like the spent fuel storage is underground. I don't know if this creates a risk of groundwater contamination if there is a leak.

I often find it useful to look at vendor literature and note what they don't say. Since it against human nature to emphasize the weaknesses in your product, silence often speaks louder than words. The thing I notice is not mentioned is the size of the mPower. There aren't any people in the renderings to give a sense of scale. This combined with the vagueness on the construction costs and the fact the they said that they would be submitting their application to the NRC in 2011 indicate that the mPower design is in the early stages.

Overall I think the mPower is a good thing and hope it moves along smoothly.

References:

B&W Modular Nuclear Reactors
http://www.babcock.com/products/modular_nuclear/

Company Calls New Small Nuclear Reactor a 'Game Changer'
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/06/10/10greenwire-company-calls-new-small-nuclear-reactor-a-game-45123.html

New Reactors Must Handle Plane Strike
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/18nuke.html

The Three Stages of Technology

Robert Heinlein wrote a juvenile science fiction novel in 1952 called "The Rolling Stones" where he described the three stages of technology. The first stage is a crude, simple and unsatisfactory gadget. He used an ox cart and a rowboat as examples. The second stage is an extremely complicated gadget or group of gadgets that get much better performance, but are difficult to design, build and maintain. As an example of the second stage he used the automobile. That was in 1952 and I would be inclined to characterize our current automobiles as an even better example of second stage technology. The Space Shuttle is also an excellent example of second stage technology.

The third stage of technology is a simple efficient design. His example was the atomic powered rocket ship of the novel. The power plant was 100% efficient and had no moving parts.

I bring this up because there are signs that nuclear power is starting to move from the second stage to the third stage.

I have been reading the marketing literature for the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design. They brag about how unprecedented levels of safety have been achieved though the use of simple passive safety systems instead of layers of complicated active systems. The NRC apparently agrees. Their assessment rates the AP1000 over 80 times safer than current systems.

Westinghouse goes into great detail about many less components are used in the AP1000:

• 50% fewer safety-related valves
• 80% less safety-related piping
• 85% less control cable
• 35% fewer pumps

The reactor is designed to be built in modules that can brought to the construction site by rail and assembled on site. This will reduce cost and improve quality.

Note that the Chinese have plans to have 100 AP1000 reactors operating or under construction by the year 2020. The Republican energy plan is to build 100 reactors by 2030.

I'm not a shill for Westinghouse. The AP1000 is considered a Generation III+ design. There are Generation IV reactors which will be much better. The difference is that the AP1000 has already been approved by the NRC. The AP1000 isn't the best reactor we can built. It is the best reactor we can build now.

The Chinese are developing Pebble Bed Modular Reactors (PBMR). These also break new ground in passive safety design. They are walk-away safe. If the reactor has a total loss of coolant, the pebbles expand, the reaction weakens and finally shuts down with no damage. This has actually been tested.

This design can also be adapted to use Thorium for fuel. I don't want to go into the details now, but Thorium has a lot of advantages over Uranium as a fuel.

Lastly I would like to mention SSTAR, a small, sealed, transportable, autonomous reactor program at Lawerence Livermore. This design can be up to 500 tons and produce up to 100MWe. An SSTAR is prefueled and can be shipped by rail, barge or even a large truck to the operating site. The reactor is designed to operate from 20 to 30 years on the initial fuel load and when the fuel is consumed the reactor is replaced and sent back for recycling.

Since there are no fuel rods being shipped to refuel the reactor, that means there are no fuel rods to be diverted into nuclear weapons programs, which reduces the proliferation risks. Since the reactor is plug and play, it doesn't need a lot of infrastructure to get it up and running, which makes it ideal for third world countries. 1.6 billion people in the world don't have access to electricity and STAR type reactors would answer a crying need for electricity, desalination and hydrogen production.

I don't think we are going to repairing nuclear reactors in our backyard anytime soon, but the future for simple mass produced reactors is very hopeful.

References:

The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein 1952. Chapter 4: Aspects of Domestic Engineering

Wikipedia Article on Westinghouse AP1000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

Article on SSTAR
https://www.llnl.gov/str/JulAug04/Smith.html

Small nuclear power reactors
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Small_nuclear_power_reactors

American Energy Act
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-6566

Energy from Thorium
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/

How Dangerous are Motorcycles?

I happened to look at motor vehicle accident statistics the other day and noticed that the NHTSA now gives stats on the number of fatalities per 100 million passenger miles for motor vehicles and motorcycles. I was interested, since I looked for these numbers back around 1990 and couldn't find them and attempted to compute my own figures.

The reason I was doing this, is I wanted to calculate how much more dangerous is was to ride a motorcycle than to drive a car. A little Googling and I found a copy of the numbers I posted in rec.autos.driving in 95. The obvious problem with what I did then was that I didn't have any conversion for vehicle miles to passengers miles and I just assumed 1 person per car. I looked around and found a number in commuting statistics of 1.3 people per car and plugged that in.

Here are my numbers and the NHTSA stats:

	Fatality Rate Per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled
Year	Motorcycles	Automobiles	Ratio
83	46.18	1.77	26
84	49.84	1.77	28
85	47.79	1.70	28
86	44.79	1.72	26
87	38.37	1.65	23
Year	Motorcycles	Automobiles	Ratio
1997	20.99	1.64	13
1998	22.31	1.58	14
1999	23.46	1.55	15
2000	27.67	1.53	18
2001	33.17	1.51	22
2002	34.23	1.51	23
2003	38.78	1.48	26
2004	39.79	1.44	28
2005	43.77	1.46	30
2006	39.00	1.42	27

The first thing to notice is that the motor vehicle safety record consistently improved from 1983 to 2006. The fatality rate dropped by 20% during that period.

The motorcycle results aren't so happy. The results from 87 to 97 dropped from 38 to 21, but then climbed back up to 39 per 100 million miles in 2006. This means that by 2006 you were 27 times as likely to be killed driving a motorcycle as a motor vehicle on a mile per mile basis.

Some people would protest that comparing motorcycles to all vehicles is inappropriate and that subcompact cars would be the closest equivalent. The NHTSA doesn't break their passenger miles data by motor vehicle type, but they do have rates per 100,000 registered vehicles. All motor vehicles are 15 per 100,000, while subcompacts are 17 per 100,000. That would reduce the danger ratio above from 27 to 24.

Nothing I have written above should be inferred to mean that I think motorcycles should be outlawed or even to require helmets. I tend to be of a libertarian persuasion and think people should be left alone if they aren't bothering anyone else. Besides hospitals always need more organ donors.

If any of my motorcycling friends should read this and wondering if I'm implying that they are stupid and/or insane: the answer is yes.

References:

Re: safety in cars, speed limits, and motorcycles
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/usenet-arc/sub00073/msg00001.html

NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts 2007 Data: Motorcycles
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810990.PDF

NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts 2007 Data: Overview
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810993.PDF

NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts Research Note January 2006
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809979.PDF

Traumatized Salmon

I was going to write about something else today, but I read an article in the NY Times today titled "As Wind Power Grows, a Push to Tear Down Dams" The article discusses a push by environmentalists to destroy 4 hydroelectric dams on the Snake river in Oregon. They claim that the dams interfere with salmon migration and are traumatizing the salmon. They also said that the dams aren't necessary since many windmills have been built and can be backed up by building natural gas plants.

I decided to go work the numbers on that for a bit. I checked and the 4 dams have a total capacity of 3 GigaWatts. This means the dams have a capacity of 26.3 Terawatts-Hours a year. Dams never run at full capacity, but at a typical 42% capacity factor, these dams would produce 11 TWH.

Oregon has 2 Gigawatts of Windmills. Windmills in the United States run at about 24% of capacity. That means that these windmills should produce about 4.2 TWH or about 38% of what the dams produce. The really big difference is that the dams can turn the power up or down as needed. Windmills can't.

Now consider; these dams don't produce carbon dioxide. If you leave these dams alone and go shut down a coal plant instead that would reduce carbon dioxide production by 11.6 Megatons per year. If you do like the envionmentalists are saying and built natural gas plants instead, you would indeed avoid a lot of pollution that a coal plant produces, but you would still be producing 7.3 Megatons of carbon dioxide a year.

As far as I can see, it doesn't make sense to shut down any hydroelectric dams until we have shut down every coal, natural gas and fuel oil electric plant in the United States.

References:

New York Times Story
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/business/energy-environment/12bonneville.html

Alternate Link
http://www.ocala.com/article/20090612/ZNYT01/906123002?Title=As-Wind-Power-Grows-a-Push-to-Tear-Down-Dams

Wikipedia Article on Windpower
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Annual_generation

Wikipedia Article on Hyroelectricity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity

Wikipedia Article on Snake River
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_River

Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Generation of Electric Power in the United States
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2emiss.pdf

Straining At Gnats

One thing that ticks me off is when people bring up the problem of disposal of nuclear waste as why we can’t use nuclear power. This bugs me because our best hope for dealing with global warming is to switch to nuclear power for electricity generation. We have 300 gigawatts of coal power plants in the United States that we really need to replace with nuclear power to reduce our carbon dioxide production and the air and water pollution produced by these coal fired plants. Below is a table of amount of waste generated by a 1000 megawatt coal plant compared to a 1000 megawatt nuclear plant per year. The numbers are roughly correct, but there a lot of variables depending on the kinds of plants, how they are operated and even what kind of coal they burn. I express the amounts in tons per gigawatt capacity and also pounds per capita to put it on a more human scale. I'm assuming about 13,000 kilowatt-hours per person per year.

Coal Plant
Pollution	Tons per GW	lbs per person
Carbon dioxide	7,400,000	21958
Ash	240,000	712
Sludge	386,000	1145
Sulfur dioxide	20,000	59
Nitrogen oxide	20,400	61
Carbon monoxide	1,440	4.3
Particulates	1,000	3.0
Hydrocarbons	440	1.3
Thorium	13	0.039
Uranium	5	0.015
Nuclear Plant
	Tons per GW	lbs per person	Ratio to CO2
Nuclear Waste	23	0.068	321,739
After Full Reprocessing	1.2	0.003	6,434,783

Nuclear power produces about 1 ounce of nuclear waste per person per year with no fuel reprocessing. The bottom line here is that for each pound of nuclear waste we produce, we could be preventing the release of 322,000 pounds of carbon dioxide! The United States doesn’t do any recycling of spent nuclear fuel. 95% of the spent fuel is Uranium or Plutonium that can be recycled and used for more fuel. France uses partial fuel reprocessing and only produces about 3/10ths of an ounce of waste per person. Better methods exist for reprocessing fuel, which should allow us improve the ratio of carbon dioxide to nuclear waste to 1,000,000 to one! What do you think is the real waste disposal problem: 1 oz of nuclear waste or 11 tons of carbon dioxide?

References:

America's Nuclear Waste and What to Do With It.
http://www.ppionline.org/ndol/print.cfm?contentid=254827

What is nuclear waste?
http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/waste.html

Environmental impacts of coal
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Environmental_impacts_of_coal

Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps Lack Regulation
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/us/07sludge.html?_r=1

Can Coal and Clean Air Coexist in China?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-coal-and-clean-air-coexist-china

Freeman Dyson Interview on Environment 360

I just read an interview with Freeman Dyson on Environment 360. You can check it out here:

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151

I became interested in Mr. Dyson after reading the article about him in the New York Times here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html

The first thing that comes out in E360 that Mr. Dyson was a little too modest about his environmental credentials. It turns out he was working on these problems back in the seventies.
Russell Seitz has posted a copy of a paper Dyson wrote about controlling carbon dioxide back in 1976.

http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/files/Dyson_Energy_1977.pdf

The interesting point of the article is where he talks about working with climate modelers in Oak Ridge in the seventies. Back then it was actually both biologists and physicists trying to understand how the world works. At some point the physicists took over and the biologists went away.

It is important to keep in mind that when you look at climate models today, that you looking at models of a dead planet and not a living one. Maybe that explains why the Waxman climate bill I mentioned below is cutting down trees and burning them for fuel instead of planting more trees to sequester CO2.

http://joelupchurch.blogspot.com/2009/06/waxman-climate-bill-and-war-on-trees.html

Waxman Climate Bill and the War on Trees

I was reading about the Waxman Climate bill and I saw some complaints about the bill not letting them harvest trees from federal land for biomass. My first reaction was: "What do they mean, trees?" I went to look for a copy of the bill and found it here:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h2454/text

Take a look at it and search on "biomass". I discovered you can cut down trees and burn them for energy and get carbon credits for them.

I must have missed something, since I thought the point was to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A live tree is a carbon sink. It takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and converts it to trunks and branches and roots and stuff puts out oxygen for us to breath. Cutting down a tree and burning it and putting the carbon dioxide that it sequestered back in the atmosphere and getting a credit for doing it is perverse.

We should be planting more trees, not cutting them down and burning them for fuel. A tree can sequester carbon for hundreds of years and by then the problem will be solved. We will be out of fossil fuels if nothing else.