The Greatest (Radioactive) Prize Of All  

BHP is looking at revising the reserves estimates for the world's largest uranium deposit - Olympic Dam in South Australia. In some ways you could consider the simmering nuclear power debate here one example of BHP's efforts to expand the uranium market worldwide.

Stand by for BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam copper/uranium orebody in South Australia's far north to get a whole lot bigger, forcing an increased focus on Australia's strategic role in fuelling the global rush into nuclear power to combat fears of global warming.

A new resource estimate for the deposit is expected to be included in BHP's 2005-06 annual report, due to be released in the week starting September 18. It is expected to show a major increase in the resource estimate, which was last updated in 2004.

Even without the expected increase, Olympic Dam already ranks as the world's fifth biggest copper resource and the number one uranium deposit. While the resource upgrade would push the deposit up the ranks of copper deposits, it is the expected hike in the uranium resources that will create most interest. That is because of the rush to secure long-term uranium supplies for nuclear power, and China and India emerging as new buyers on the block.

Olympic Dam already accounts for 40 per cent of the world's known uranium resources, with 1.524 million tonnes (300 years at present production rates) of the radioactive material. That figure is expected to sharply increase after the September resource upgrade.

Since acquiring WMC last year for $9.2 billion, BHP has carried on with the aggressive drilling program involving 18 drill rigs aimed at determining the size of Olympic Dam.

India is keen to get its hands of some of this mountain of larval radioactive waste, NSW Premier Morris Iemma says we won't be building any nuclear plants in NSW (whether out of a desire to court the green vote or a wish to keep the coal mining industry, and unions, onside is unclear) and Silex are promoting their new laser enrichment process for uranium, which is touted as a way of reducing some of the staggeringly high costs associated with nuclear energy.

The privatisation of Snowy Hydro is generating more renewable controversy, with a range of prominent people speaking out against selling off a such a strategic asset.

A letter signed by 56 prominent Australians will be presented to the federal, NSW and Victorian parliaments today calling on them to suspend the sale of the Snowy Hydro scheme.

Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, Justice Marcus Einfeld, QC, and actor Cate Blanchett are among the signatories to the letter, which was due to be simultaneously handed over in three states at 10.30am (AEST).

"The undersigned citizens appeal to the Commonwealth to suspend the sale of Snowy Mountains Hydro Ltd," the letter reads.

"This iconic enterprise was a stepping stone on our path to nationhood, and was seen by all the world as a marker of our aspirations."

"It is part of the glue that binds us all."

At a time of climate, water and energy uncertainty, the sale of such a central pillar of the nation's power and water supply is "imprudent", the letter said.

The Washington Post has peered north over the border and discovered that "Canada Pays Environmentally for U.S. Oil Thirst" - "Huge Mines Rapidly Draining Rivers, Cutting Into Forests, Boosting Emissions" - which, if you can't guess already, is about the rapidly expanding tar sands industry. Four tonnes of earth moved per barrel of oil extracted (I wonder if that includes an adjustment for the oil used to process the stuff)...

FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta -- Huge mines here turning tarry sand into cash for Canada and oil for the United States are taking an unexpectedly high environmental toll, sucking water from rivers and natural gas from wells and producing large amounts of gases linked to global warming.

The digging -- into an area the size of Maryland and Virginia combined -- has proliferated at gold-rush speed, spurred by high oil prices, new technology and an unquenched U.S. thirst for the fuel. The expansion has presented ecological problems that experts thought they would have decades to resolve.

"The river used to be blue. Now it's brown. Nobody can fish or drink from it. The air is bad. This has all happened so fast," said Elsie Fabian, 63, an elder in a native Indian community along the Athabasca River, a wide, meandering waterway once plied by fur traders. "It's terrible. We're surrounded by the mines."

From her home on the bluff of the river, she can see billowing steam rising from a vast strip mine 10 miles away. There, almost 200 feet below what was once a forest, giant machines cleave the earth into a cratered moonscape. Immense shovels plunge into the ground, wresting out massive chunks. Trucks the size of houses prowl the pit. They deliver the black soil to clanking conveyers and vats that steam the tar from the sand.

The miners have created a marvel of human industry that takes a spongy muck once considered worthless and converts it into oil for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. But the price of that alchemy is high: Each barrel of oil requires two to five barrels of water, carves up four tons of earth, uses enough natural gas to heat a home for one to five days, and adds to the greenhouse gases slowly cooking the planet, according to the industry's own calculations.

...

Critics also question the wisdom of using natural gas to heat and upgrade the oil sands. "We are taking a cleaner energy source and turning it into something that produces a lot of emissions when you produce it and when you burn it," said Dale Marshall, a climate change policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation in Ottawa.

Africa looks to be the latest region headed for (further) devastation courtesy of the "curse of oil".

Experts call it the ‘oil curse’. In Africa’s oil exporting countries, only a tiny fraction of revenues is used to fight poverty, and in many cases black gold has actually become a hurdle to development.

Oil in Africa — from the Gulf of Guinea to northwestern Sudan — lies at the heart of questions of good governance and development, as oil prices and revenues soar but fail to bring better living standards for millions of poor. Across the continent, ‘oil money evaporates into the savannah’, Jean-Marie Chevalier, a professor at Paris-Dauphine University and director of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), told a conference in Paris last week.

Not only does oil wealth fail to translate into economic development, but in many cases it distorts the country’s economy and holds back the development of other export industries, he said. Almost everywhere in Africa, oil has fostered corruption and bureaucracy — without benefiting the poor, according to speakers at the conference, organised by the French Agency for Development.

Africa accounts for 11.4 per cent of global oil production, holding 9.4 per cent of the world’s reserves.

The continent’s output has surged by 40 per cent since 1990 to 10 million barrels per day (bpd), fuelled by demand from importers such as the United States and China looking to diversify their supply outside the Middle East.

Established exporters such as Nigeria, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and Cameroon have been joined by newcomers Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Sao Tome and most recently Mauritania. Yet despite the flow of oil revenues, African producers fare no better than importers in terms of development, according to Chevalier.

Nigeria — Africa’s most populous nation and its largest exporter with 2.5 million bpd — is a prime example of the ‘oil curse’, according to Philippe Sebille-Lopez, of the French Institute of Geopolitics.

TreeHugger takes a look at some clean, cheap and widespread energy options - wave and tidal power.

TreeHugger covers a lot of bases when it comes to alternative energy; solar, wind, biogas, hydrogen and the list goes on. One of our favorite up and coming forms of alternative energy is wave and tidal power. Check out our picks for diving in to the world of wave power.

1) Get started with a primer on the different version of the technology.
2) Germany has plans for a pilot plant targeted to power about 120 households.
3) Wave and tidal power could supply 20% of the UK's needs; Scotland wants to provide 10% of it's energy needs by 2010 with wave energy.
4) The power of the tide is coming to New York as well, with six tide-powered turbines planned for the East River this summer.
5) GE sees enough potential in wave power to invest some big bucks in it. No matter how you slice it, waves aren't just for surfing any more.

Crooked Timber notes that the reprehensible reptiles at the CEI are at it again - this time taking a break from their paranoid fantasies about scientific conspiracies and instead doing some smearing on behalf of Mr 29% and his friends in the oil and coal industries.

Tim Lambert finds Iain Murray engaged in a contemptible bit of smearing. Previously, the CEI falsely claimed that Al Gore was producing 4,000,000 times as much CO2 as the average person in the course of his daily activities, given his heavy use of air travel. This estimate turns out to be way, way off. In addition, it now turns out that Gore is trying to make his promotional tour carbon neutral by purchasing carbon offsets, presumably from organizations like TerraPass. Murray’s response?

Translation: I am rich enough to benefit from executive jets and Lincolns because I pay my indulgences. All you proles have to give up your cars, flights and air conditioning. The new aristocracy; there’s no other way to describe it.

Purchasing carbon offsets is of course a market-based solution to the externalities associated with individual use of cars and air travel and so on. You’d think that the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review would be in favor of that sort of thing. But if Gore is doing it, then it must be the purest form of aristocratic statist elitism.

Back in the day, Murray was the sort of person you could have a reasonable disagreement with. But then he went to work for CEI and he went rapidly downhill. Because he had to follow the CEI line, he began to make stupid mistakes, bad arguments and unsupportable smears. His trajectory is a good illustration of the principle that being paid to follow a certain political line regardless of what the evidence says will turn you into a hack. Taking empty pot-shots at Al Gore is just the latest step down the ladder.

I liked one commenter's take on it - "Another reason I don’t read National Review…always with the class warfare, always bashing the rich. They should move to Russia if they don’t like it here!".

The Energy Blog points to a debate on the "merits" of IGCC vs conventional coal fired power plants. I'm not sure arguing over mediocre versus diabolically awful is a wise use of time, but I guess a move to IGCC is better than nothing (assuming some existing coal plants get replaced by them, rather just feeding the ever increasing demand for cheap, but dirty, energy).

Peabody and other companies remain skeptical that carbon-capture methods, whether for pulverized coal or combined cycle plants, will become commercially or technologically feasible until the next decade.

But it is Peabody's economic argument, not environmental opposition, that is resonating throughout the electricity industry and among energy regulators. In one key decision on the state level, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission rejected a proposal from WE Energies of Milwaukee in 2003 to build a plant with the new technology, saying it was too expensive and would result in higher electricity prices.

Proponents of IGCC plants say they would also emit much lower amounts of other pollutants that contribute to acid rain, smog and respiratory illness.

Bush's new Treasury Secretary nominee obivously isn't all bad - calling Kyoto rejection a "U.S. Economic Blunder".

Bush's prospective next Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, who chairs the board of the Nature Conservancy, in addition to being Chairman of Goldman Sachs, endorsed a statement from the Nature Conservancy decrying the U.S.'s refusal to participate in Kyoto as a serious threat to the nation's competitive abilities in the global market.

Belgium is planning an Antarctic base powered entirely by solar and wind.

Jamais at "Open The Future" is continuing to ponder his futurist matrix, prompted by feedback from David Brin, who has produced some political matrices of his own in the past. Neither of them attempt to place the doombat in their categorisations.

David Brin wrote a provocative and thoughtful response to my futurist matrix idea, and posted it over at his blog. Unfortunately, the system he uses -- Blogger -- has once again broken its comment system. Rather than wait to reply, I've decided to post my response to his response here. (David -- this is an updated version of the email I sent.)

The futurist matrix is clearly a work in progress, and the changes have been slow and evolutionary. The main difference between the first and second versions of the matrix is in the terminology, not the concept -- I dropped the word "realist," and replaced with "pragmatist." More importantly, I tried to make the sub-headings less normative, less apt to appear biased towards one particular option along an axis.

I suspect I'll need to do something similar with "optimist" and "pessimist." The danger of using commonplace terms in a setup like this is that readers' interpretations of the words may not match my use. The present sub-headings of "inclusive success" and "exclusive success or failure" are more accurate than optimist/pessimist, and I'll likely make them the axis labels.

These more expressive terms help to illustrate a seemingly-illogical aspect of the matrix: the combination of ideologically opposed groups in the same philosophical box, such as Marxists and Dispensationalists in the lower-right quadrant. But the matrix is less concerned with a group's ideology than with its eschatology: how do the philosophies see the future unfolding? As Brin points out, neither Marxists nor Dispensationalists would see themselves as particularly pessimistic. But while they may see a happy future world, it's a world limited to the true believers. They may want everyone to become a true believer, but people outside of the circle cannot achieve a successful future.

I'll be mostly offline for a few days, so there won't be a new post until next week (the link bucket may get a deposit at some stage though).

While I'm away I won't be going kayaking...



To close, here's a Solzhenitsyn quote via Bruce Schneier. Who's pulling your threads ?

As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions . .. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider's web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence.... Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.

--Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, 1968.