What Fukushima means for energy policy

by | Mar 14, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan have important implications for energy policy – partly, of course for nuclear, but also for oil, gas and coal too. Three initial observations:

First, the immediate nuclear issues. The media hasn’t exactly played a blinder at walking the public through a quick course in reactor design 101, so bravo to Nature for pulling together this excellent primer. Here’s the layout of the BWR design installed at Fukushima, and a succint description of what went wrong and how:

…without emergency cooling, the temperature at the core of both reactors began to rise. As it did, what water that remained began to boil off, increasing the pressure inside the pellet-shape pod.

When temperatures reached around a thousand degrees Celsius, the zirconium alloy holding the fuel pellets probably began to melt or split apart. As it did, it reacted with the steam and created hydrogen gas, which is highly volatile. Operators may or may not have known what was happening when they decided to release some of the pressure from Unit 1 on Saturday. The hydrogen apparently caused a massive explosion which blew the roof off of the fuel hall, though the reactor’s outer containment vessel appears to have remained in tact (see diagram).

If, as it appears, the zirconium came apart, then some of the uranium and plutonium pellets in the fuel rods may have also melted and sunk to the bottom of the pressure vessel. In that case, the cores of units 1 and 3 are now a volatile test tube filled with radioactive fuel, melted zirconium and water.

The real danger is the melted fuel. If enough melted fuel gathers at the bottom of the reactor, it could burn through the concrete containment vessel. In a worse case scenario, the fuel could again gather to form a critical mass outside the fuel assembly. The loose fuel would restart the power-producing reactions, but in a completely uncontrolled way. This, if it happened, would lead to a full-scale nuclear meltdown.

For detailed and technically sound updates of what’s currently happening at Fukushima, the go-to site is World Nuclear News.

Second, what it means for commodity prices – above all oil, which was, of course, spiking strongly last week amid concerns about risks to production in Libya and the wider Middle East. The immediate impact has been a sharp drop in prices, to $99 a barrel according to AP (though Brent is still up at $112): AP continues that,

Three of Japan’s five largest refineries have been shut down, which will immediately crimp demand for crude. Japan is the world’s third-largest crude consumer at 4.5 million barrel a day, the second-largest net oil importer and the biggest importer of liquefied natural gas and coal.

That’s consistent with the prediction made earlier today by the FT’s Commodities Editor Javier Blas, who reckoned that

The impact of the disaster will drive prices lower in the very short term as Japanese economic activity comes to a halt – big companies such as carmakers have said they will not open on Monday, and with the country’s power supply severely disrupted, some others – particularly big electricity consumers – may not be able to open even if they try.

But, he continues,

Over the medium term, Japan is going to need huge amounts of commodities to rebuild the areas hit by the quake and tsunami. This will boost Asia’s regional demand. Besides, global energy markets are braced for a big shake-up as Japan replaces a large chunk of its nuclear power capacity – if not all of it, if Tokyo is forced to undertake big safety checks after serious problems in two of the country’s reactors – with electricity generated by burning oil, natural gas and coal…

…The International Energy Agency, the western countries’ oil watchdog, estimates that it takes about 38.8 barrels of crude oil to replace 1MW of idled nuclear power generation capacity in Japan. If the country were to replace its missing nuclear capacity with oil alone, it would have to import a further 375,000 barrels a day, on top of expected purchases this year of about 4.25m b/d. Japan is more likely to opt for a combination of oil, LNG and thermal coal, however.

Third, to pick up from where Javier leaves off, there are the longer term questions. Is the world about to back away from nuclear power (as, for instance, David Pilling suggests) – and if so, what will pick up the slack?

My own guess is that the prospects of such a global U-turn on nuclear power will recede – if the primary containment layers hold. That would allow the nuclear industry to argue, as the media moves on to other stories, that a) this was a freak event in an unusually seismically active zone and that b) even then, the reactor design prevented disaster. Whether those arguments really stack up is, of course, another question.

But if we do see a global retreat from nuclear, then the question of what new global fuel mix we head towards – and above all, the balance between natural gas and coal – will be of absolutely crucial importance to climate change, given coal’s far higher carbon intensity. But either way, emissions would rise strongly, given that nuclear is (for all its other issues) carbon-free.

Aid 2.0: What does aid look like with drastically fewer poor countries?

by | Mar 11, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Global system, Latin America and the Caribbean

There’s a new paper out from the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, on the ever declining number of poor countries.

Moss and Leo estimate that more than half of the 68 countries currently eligible for concessional World Bank lending (under the IDA -the International Development Association) will ‘graduate’ by 2025.

Most (80%) of the remaining countries eligible for concessional World Bank lending will be sub-Saharan African countries (25 of 31). The only non-African countries will be Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Haiti, and Timor-Leste. Countries currently defined as fragile will account for sixty percent (18 of 31 countries) of the countries.

In a recent post one of the authors, Todd Moss suggests that aid agencies as currently orientated are not ready for the world of non-aid tools and global public goods that flow from the decline in poor countries, new donors and weak public support for large increases in aid budgets (UK aside maybe).

I couldn’t agree more – and as they note the implications for the aid system are enormous.

(more…)

Rumblings of discontent in Burkina Faso

by | Mar 11, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security

The convulsions in North Africa have in the past three weeks found an echo south of the Sahara.

The death in custody of a student in Burkina Faso has sparked a series of student protests against the brutality of Blaise Compaoré’s regime. At first these protests were limited to Koudougou, where the student died. Koudougou is traditionally a hotbed of Burkinabe agitation, and the government assumed it could confine the protest within the city boundaries by closing schools and clamping down on demonstrators.

But by extending school closures to the whole country, the government seems to have fanned the flames. The protests have spread to at least seven other cities, with police stations burned down, prisoners freed from jails and in one city the headquarters of the ruling party set on fire. The students, moreover, have been joined by hawkers and ordinary citizens.

Compaoré, as is his wont, has responded forcefully. When early concessions did not work – the Koudougou chief of police and regional governor were fired to placate the students – his security forces opened fire on protesters, killing four so far, with one policeman lynched in return. A peaceful march is planned for today in Ouagadougou, the capital, with student unions demanding the removal from office of the minister of security as a condition for halting the demonstrations.

There are many similarities between Burkina Faso and her Middle Eastern counterparts. Compaoré, like Mubarak, Ben-Ali, and his close friend Gaddafi, runs a dictatorial government that brooks no dissent (Western governments count Burkina as a democracy because it holds occasional rigged elections, but few in the country share that view). There are hordes of underemployed young men whom the population explosion has deprived of a livelihood (and if war breaks out in the Ivory Coast their numbers will be swollen by many of the three million Burkinabes currently living there). Food price rises are exacerbating hunger and poverty (the main cities were rocked by food riots in 2008). And the older generation has sequestered the nation’s resources, creating great resentment among the youth.

So far, the protests have focused on police brutality rather than on the repressive government as a whole (in a similar way to Saudi Arabia’s day of rage yesterday and the early rallies in Tunisia and Egypt), but they may become more wide-ranging. Compaoré assuaged the 2008 food riots by subsidising staple foods, but his latest concessions have not been so effective. It would be a stretch to predict that the discontent will harden into a revolutionary movement, but it is not impossible, and given the underlying conditions in the country (and indeed in West Africa as a whole), Compaoré might have to get used to a rougher ride.

Maybe if we just make stuff up about climate change instead?

by | Mar 9, 2011 | Influence and networks

From the Boston Globe:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.