Rocketing oil prices and global warming are making nuclear power fashionable, drawing a once-demonized industry out of the shadows of the Chernobyl disaster as a potential model of clean energy.
Britain is the latest nation to announce support for the construction of new nuclear power plants. Nuclear plants produce about 20 percent of Britain’s electricity and all but one are expected to close by 2023, Latimes.com reported.
However, some countries hopping on the nuclear bandwagon have abysmal industrial safety records and are seen as burdened by corruption.
China has 11 nuclear plants and plans to bring at least 30 more online by 2020. And a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report projects that it may need to add as many as 200 reactors by 2050.
Of the more than 100 nuclear reactors being built, planned or on order, about half are in China, India and other developing nations. Argentina, Brazil and South Africa plan to expand existing programs; and Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt and Turkey are among the countries that are considering building their first reactors.
The concerns are hardly limited to developing countries. Japan’s nuclear power industry has yet to recover from revelations five years ago of dozens of cases of false reporting on inspections for cracks in reactors.
The Swedish operators of a German reactor came under fire last summer for delays in informing the public about a fire at the plant. And a potentially disastrous partial breakdown of a Bulgarian nuclear plant’s emergency shutdown mechanism in 2006 went unreported for two months until whistle-blowers made it public.
Nuclear transparency will be an even greater problem for countries such as China that tightly control information. Those who mistrust the current nuclear revival are still haunted by the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor and the Soviet Union’s attempts to hide the full extent of the catastrophe.
The revival, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates, means nearly a doubling of nuclear energy within two decades to 691 gigawatts, or 13.3 percent of electricity generated.
“We are facing a nuclear renaissance,“ said Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of the French nuclear energy firm Areva. “Nuclear is not the devil anymore. The devil is coal.“
Philippe Jamet, the IAEA’s director of nuclear installation safety, described the industry’s record as “second to none.“ Still, he said, countries new to or still learning about nuclear power “have to move down the learning curve, and they will learn from [their] mistakes.“
Vienna-based IAEA, a United Nations body, was set up in 1957 in large part to limit such trial and error, providing quality controls and expertise to countries with nuclear programs and overseeing pacts binding them to high safety standards.
But the agency is already stretched with monitoring Iran and North Korea over their suspected nuclear arms programs, and IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said his organization could not be the main guarantor of safety. The primary responsibility, he said, rests with the operators of nuclear facilities and their governments.
Developing nations insist that they are ready for the challenge. But worries persist that bad habits of the past could reflect on operational safety.
In China, for instance, hundreds die annually in the world’s most dangerous coal mines and thousands more in fires, explosions and other accidents often blamed on insufficient safety equipment and workers ignoring safety rules.
A Finnish study published in 2005 said India’s annual industrial fatality rate was 11.4 people per 100,000 workers and the accident rate 8,700 per 100,000.
Overall, Asian nations excluding China and India have an average industrial accident fatality rate of 21.5 per 100,000 and an accident rate of more than 16,000 per 100,000 workers, according to the report by the Tampere University of Technology in Finland. The study lists a fatality rate of 5.2 people per 100,000 for the U.S. and 3 per 100,000 for France.
Nuclear nations are obligated to report all incidents to the IAEA. But the study said most Asian governments vastly underreport industrial accidents to the UN’s International Labor Organization--fewer than 1 percent in China’s case.
Separately, China and India shared 70th place in the 2006 Corruption Perceptions index, published by the Transparency International think tank. It ranked 163 nations, with the least corrupt first. Vietnam occupied the 111th spot, and Indonesia--which, like Vietnam, wants to build a nuclear reactor--came in 130th.
“Are there special concerns about the developing world? The answer is definitely yes,“ said Carl Thayer, a Southeast Asia expert in Australia.
Corrupt officials in licensing and supervisory agencies in the region could undermine the best of IAEA guidelines and oversight, Thayer said.
“There could be a dropping of standards, and that affects all aspects of the nuclear industry, from buying the material to processing applications to building and running the plant.“
Permanent storage of radioactive waste--which can remain toxic for tens of thousands of years--is another major problem, as is shutting unsafe plants.

The only practical way to prevent CO2 levels from going far into the dangerous range is to phase out use of coal except at power plants where CO2 is captured and sequestered.

It is safe to say that most Americans are not up to speed on global warming. They may be aware of the problem and some--a relative few--may even be taking steps to help out, to cut their carbon footprint. But most are doing nothing, Green-energy-news.com reported.
Some politicians, state and federal, are speaking out of course and making some headway legislatively. Many companies, too, are doing at least something such as cutting their own emissions, investing in green technologies and offering products that promise lower emissions. Overall, the green energy industry is growing.
An effort is now underway to bring the nation’s college campuses and other organizations together to begin a national dialogue on global warming. The effort, Focus the Nation, a project of the Green House Network, is to educate, discuss, and generally encourage large numbers of students and members of organizations of all kinds, including churches, to bring the issue to the full attention of the nation’s leaders, as well as the people who put them in office.
The event will begin on January 30 and continue through the 31st with 1960’s style teach-ins at participating campuses. A teach-in is a day when an entire school turns its attention to a single issue. Faculty, students and staff put aside business as usual, and focus the full weight of campus engagement on one topic, in this case global warming. So far more than 1,300 schools and organizations have signed up, but there is no number yet as to how many will actually participate. (Schools may also chose alternative dates.)
The day before, January 30, Focus the Nation will kick off on the Internet.
The organization’s team, directed by Dr. Eban Goodstein, Economics Professor at Lewis and Clark College, will offer a webcast of The 2 percent Solution, a documentary that shows how we need to cut greenhouse gases by 2 percent each year for the next forty years to hold global warming to the low end of 3-4 degrees F and bring emissions more than 80 percent below current levels by 2050.
In another web event to begin the Focus the Nation dialogue, the nonprofit research organization Architecture 2030 will be hosting another nationwide webcast, called Face It: There is a Solution to Global Warming.
Within that webcast Architecture 2030 will unveil two competitions centered about the solution to global warming.
For $20,000 in prize money students will be asked to create something (you’ll have to tune in to the webcast to learn what) that will reverberate throughout their campus and society at large.
The solution, incidentally, is to go after coal.
As Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York put it in October 2007 in testimony to the Iowa Utilities Board, “The only practical way to prevent CO2 levels from going far into the dangerous range, with disastrous effects for humanity and other inhabitants of the planet, is to phase out use of coal except at power plants where CO2 is captured and sequestered.“
That is, begin with a moratorium on the construction of new coal powerplants unless carbon capture is installed and, as quickly as possible, close down and phase out plants that don’t or can not have carbon capture.
Unfortunately--and other testimony from Dr. Hansen makes it clear--a moratorium requires government action and the nation’s leaders--as well as candidates for office in this Presidential election year--don’t have the stomach for action that strong.
Up to now efforts to reduce emissions from coal have been somewhat timid--a switch to renewables and energy-efficiency measures--and greenhouse gases from coal continue to rise in the US, in Europe and in developing nations.
Either energy from coal gets stopped, or its emissions sequestered, or the planet gets warmer and warmer with exact consequences scientists can not possibly predict.
The nation certainly needs to focus. Focusing on coal would be a good start.

Second generation biofuels involve the breakdown of inedible crops and even municipal waste by enzymes to create liquid motor fuel.

Governments may be getting a clearer picture of the shortcomings of current biofuel policies but the likelihood they can remedy any wrongs looks far from certain, a senior OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) official said.
Loek Boonekamp, a division head in the OECD’s Agro-food Trade and Markets Division, singled out price-supporting trade barriers, erected by Europe and the United States, as one example of “wasteful“ and “distorting“ steps taken to date, Enn.com reported.
But even governments aware of policy weaknesses would find it very hard to backtrack on such supportive policies in the face of powerful lobby groups.
“I’m not very optimistic that because we say that the policies are bad and wasteful that governments will go away and do something else,“ he told the Reuters Global Agriculture and Biofuel Summit in Paris.
“Support policies generate vested interests...once these vested interests are there and these support policies are well entrenched, it is incredibly difficult to get rid of this,“ he said.
Governments need to free up trade conditions for biofuels and the ingredients used to make them to ensure production on a global scale makes more economic sense, he said.
They should also spend less public funds on supporting the development of traditional biofuels, made of grain, oilseed and beets, because they contribute to lofty food prices and have adverse impact on the environment.
“It might be better use, once everything is said and done, of government funds to stimulate the research and development of second generation technologies,“ he said.
Second generation biofuels involve the breakdown of inedible crops and even municipal waste by enzymes to create liquid motor fuel.
That would be better than investing in first generation technology which soon could be out of date, he said.
It was not a given that second generation biofuels would be a force to be reckoned with in the next 10 years, he said, adding that what was needed was to find more rapid and less expensive ways to break down the enzymes.
Debate also needed to focus more on the demand side of the energy picture than on looking to biofuels as a solution, with the OECD believing bigger gains could be secured at lower cost through other means.
Greater efforts to develop fuel efficient cars and the introduction of an energy tax on all fuels would do more to address imbalances on energy markets than by mandating the use of biofuels in transportation, he said.
In September, the OECD published a report suggesting that biofuels had far fewer environmental and economic benefits than many people think.
Titled “Biofuels: Is the cure worse than the disease?,“ the report called into question the extent to which biofuels can increase the security of energy supplies and pointed to their role in pushing up food prices.