Bird’s Eye: Not only is there no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing as free energy on which to cook it. Grist magazine reports on the imminent death of nuclear power, due to a combination of costs and uninsurability. In Focus has a powerful photo compilation on the effects of oil spills in Nigeria, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune looks at increasing evidence that Corexit is more damaging to the biosphere than BP’s oil would have been alone, and (forwarded by Ontario’s Green Party) a fascinating study suggests taxing resource use rather than products. The world can’t be treated as a free sewer any more.
* Nuclear Power Is Expensive And Uninsurable Grist
The world’s beleaguered nuclear industry continues to take a battering. The “nuclear renaissance” juggernaut that once seemed unstoppable now appears dead in its tracks.
….The CEC’s 186-page report, “Comparative Costs of California Central Station Electricity Generation” [PDF], found that a 1,000-megawatt pressurized water reactor would generate electricity in 2018 from as little as $0.17 per kilowatt-hour to as much as $0.34 per kilowatt-hour. These results are startling: Most renewable technologies today, even solar photovoltaics (PV), generate electricity for less than that. Only a municipal utility could generate nuclear electricity for less than the cost of solar PV.
…In an unrelated study for the German Renewable Energy Association, consultants found that nuclear reactors are effectively uninsurable. The 157-page report by Versicherungsforen Leipzig estimated that the premium necessary to insure a nuclear reactor from accident would cost from $0.20 per kilowatt-hour to a staggering $3.40 per kilowatt-hour.
* Nigeria: The Cost of Oil Alan Taylor In Focus The Atlantic
For over 50 years now, the extraction of crude oil and natural gas from Nigeria’s Niger Delta has meant wealth for a privileged few but has exacted heavy costs on residents and the environment. Nigeria is the world’s 8th largest producer of crude oil, yet remains one of its poorest nations — an estimated 70 percent of its 150 million residents live below the poverty line. The environment is paying a steep price as well. An estimated 500 million gallons of oil have spilled into the delta — the equivalent of roughly one Exxon Valdez disaster per year
* Did BP’s Oil-Dissolving Chemical Make The Spill Worse? Herald–Tribune (via Reddit)
BP succeeded in sinking the oil from its blown well out of sight — and keeping much of it away from beaches and marshes last year — by dousing the crude with nearly 2 million gallons of toxic chemicals. But the impact on the ecosystem as a whole may have been more damaging than the oil alone.
The combination of oil and Corexit, the chemical BP used to dissolve the slick, is more toxic to tiny plants and animals than the oil in most cases, according to preliminary research by several Florida scientists. And the chemicals may not have broken down the oil as well as expected.
* What Should We Tax? Green Conduct (Thanks, Frank)
Resource throughput, beginning with depletion and ending with pollution (both real costs), is something we want less of in a full world economy, so let’s tax it. Even though resources in the ground and waste absorption services are free gifts of nature in the cost of production sense, they are nevertheless increasingly scarce in a full world. They need a price to be efficiently allocated and not overused. So let’s give them the needed price by taxing them, and use the revenue from the tax (or equivalent cap-auction-trade system) to substitute for the revenue lost from no longer taxing value added. The resource tax should be levied at the point of extraction (severance) so that the higher price will stimulate increased efficiency of use at all upstream stages of production, as well as in the final stages of consumption and recycling. Also depletion is spatially more concentrated than pollution, so in most cases a depletion tax is easier to monitor than a pollution tax.
