The question about whether nuclear power makes a good green option has always been a fought one to answer, and the recent tragedy in Japan certainly doesn’t make it any easier for those on the pro side of the argument. But even without disasters, which thankfully have been few in number, there are still some serious environmental issues that need to be examined.

It’s Not All About Emissions
The first argument that is usually brought up in favour of nuclear power generation is that it is essentially emission-free. At the time of generation, that is clearly true, and the technology has reached the point where containment of anything radioactive is pretty sound too. Bear in mind what it took to damage the facility in Japan, and the age of that technology. The engineering of these plants is undeniably impressive.

While reducing the emissions from power generation is certainly a positive thing for the environment, the fact remains that these nuclear reactors still generate waste, and extremely hazardous waste at that. Some of it can be reprocessed, but eventually there are sealed canisters of nuclear waste that will remain highly radioactive for many years, and needs to be stored somewhere.

Continuing to ignore the nuclear waste issue is essentially trading the immediate emissions problem for what could potentially be a much more serious radioactive waste issue in the future. Our children and grandchildren will need to clean up our mess.

Safety and Security
Inevitably, a disaster like the one in Japan will call into question the safety of nuclear power plants. But the issue is much broader than natural disasters. Even when the risk of earthquakes and/or tsunami is lower, there is often the potential for other kinds of extreme conditions like tornadoes. While good engineering can reduce the risks, the one-in-a-thousand event, like the massive tsunami in Japan, is always a possibility.

In addition to natural disasters, nuclear plants can also fail because of human error (Chernobyl) or be subject to attack by terrorists or during times of war. An attack on a conventional power station disrupts life for those depending on the electricity, and, depending on the fuel, might have short term impact on the air quality, but the longer term effects to the environment are not that serious. The same cannot be said for nuclear power stations. The area around the Chernobyl reactor is still contaminated today, 25 years after the accident.

Alternatives
It is easy to talk about not using nuclear energy, but the fact is that it is a very efficient source of electricity in terms of power per square foot of land. Greener alternatives, such as solar, wind or wave energy need much more space devoted to them today to get anything like the same power. The output from a nuclear power station is also more controllable. It can be increased or decreased to match demand, and it can operate 24/7, and in most weather conditions.

Perhaps the answer to alternative energy sources is to think outside the box a little. Move away from the conventional producer-consumer model where we have a small number of generating facilities feeding a grid that a large number of consumers pull from. We have large areas that we can turn into dual use facilities.

In addition to the environmental benefits, having the power generation distributed so widely also adds protection against disruption from natural disasters, accidents or attacks.

Solar Parking Lots

One of the best ideas I have seen is to add large solar arrays over open air parking lots, or on the roof levels of multi-story parking structures. These large open spaces are ideal for collecting sunlight, and the panels actually provide shade for the parked cars, helping to keep them cool as well as protecting them from the sun’s damaging UV rays. The photo on the right is an installation at Kyocera’s San Diego facility, from EnvisionSolar.

Buildings
Large warehouses, office complexes and even shopping malls could easily house solar arrays on their roofs. High rise towers could incorporate solar panels into their outer glass coverings. New buildings, whether commercial or domestic, should be required to include solar panels where there is sufficient sunlight for this to make sense.

Wind & Wave
Much harder to distribute are wind and wave generation systems. While small wind turbines for use in urban environments have been created, there is still much work to do here before it is practical to have one on every house, or even on every commercial building. Perhaps a chimney mounted wind turbine could become a new use for the chimney on homes in places like California where having a fire is increasingly restricted to protect air quality.

Wave power could be utilized on docks and piers to try to harvest some of the energy from the sea. Obviously, the number of locations for this is much more limited than even those for wind power.

Power Stations
Distributing the generation does not mean we cannot also build larger power generation facilities, like the large solar facilities being built in desert spaces of California and northern Africa. Or wind farms on the hilltops, sharing the land with cattle or crops.

There are some forms of green energy that make more sense in a centralized location than distributed too. Hydro-electric and geo-thermal being two examples that need to be located near the natural resource they depend on.

Conclusions
While nuclear power looks like a quick fix to the emissions problem that coal, oil and even to some extent, gas power stations suffer from, the long term impact of spent fuel and the building materials themselves when the reactor needs to be decommissioned, make any claims for it being a planet-friendly solution hard to believe.

Contrary to what pro-nuclear power generating companies would have people believe, the alternative energy sources are viable. They just need to be integrated into our society in a different, distributed way.

Via our Twitter feed we keep track of all the green news we see that we think might be of interest to our readers. You can always see our latest tweets and retweets in the right sidebar on our home page, even if you miss them in your Twitter app.

Periodically, we’ll try to pull some of the highlights from the articles we’ve retweeted and post them in something we’re calling Green Shorts. Welcome to the first edition of Green Shorts.

Animal Protein & Diabetes
Researchers from Harvard University found that some low-carb dieters were more likely to have type 2 diabetes. Men following a low-carb diet high in animal protein and fat were 75 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who ate moderately, and men eating low-carb while eating vegetable protein and fat were not at a higher risk. Read more at vegnews.com.

Floating Wind and Wave Power
A new Oregon company, Floating Power Inc, is announcing plans to build a floating power plant that generates electricity from both waves and wind. Read more at Sustainable Business Oregon.

Renault Twizy
Renault’s tiny electric two seater (one behind the other) was put to the test by UK based Autocar – you can see the video review of this fun little electric city car.

Kindle vs Books
Treehugger is reporting on a posting at TerraPass about the break-even point, from a carbon footprint perspective, of the Kindle reader. In the case of the post’s author, her break-even point was at around 3 years of use and she classified herself as an above average reader (in terms of number of books, not ability). The twist is that she uses her library to borrow most of the books she reads, or buys used ones (both good ways of sharing the carbon footprint of the physical book between more people).

Eco-Datacenter
Close to our hearts here at Vertography since our servers are running in a 100% solar powered data center, BendBroadband, in Oregon, has opened its own eco-friendly data center. Green features include solar panels, porous cement pavement and a special Kyoto cooling system that uses the outside air to cool the servers 80% of the time. Read more at KTVZ.

Running the data centres that provide the Internet’s content is a power hungry business. Between the power to keep the servers and their associated storage and networking equipment running, and the power to keep them all cool, a lot of energy goes into a reasonable sized data centre.

Unlike your home computer, the servers running in the cloud need to be online 24/7, and running at full speed. You don’t want to have to wait for somebody to boot the server every time you try to access you favourite web site!

With all those racks of computers running at full power all the time, extracting heat and keeping the servers at safe temperatures is one of the biggest problems a data centre faces. Typical data centres run redundant HVAC systems. In the same way that a server that fails needs a backup that can take over transparently, the cooling system in the building needs to have a backup. All that cooling takes energy.

Liquid Cooling
Liquid cooling systems for home PCs, typically aimed at the hard core gaming community, have been around for a while. They are typically replacement heat sinks for the CPU, and sometimes the graphics card, that have cooled water pumped through them. Not ideal for use in a large data centre environment with thousands of rack mounted PCs.

A new idea though changes the cooling fluid to a non-conductive mineral oil, and completely submerge the rack in it. The efficiency of the liquid at removing heat from the systems is much better than cooled air over the fins of a heat sink. Green Revolution Cooling claims their GreenDEF™ based system can save over 90% on cooling energy usage, and 50% on total energy usage (cooler running servers are also more efficient).

Better still, it is much easier to recover the heat energy from a liquid like mineral oil than it is with a conventional air cooling system. So that energy you want out of the data centre’s computer rooms can be used to keep the operator’s control room and any office spaces comfortable when it gets cold outside.

Downsides?
The most obvious problem with submerging your rack, or even individual slices, in mineral oil has to be the added complexity of making any changes to the hardware, or replacing it when it fails. Hopefully, for the operators at least, the more even cooling will help extend the life of the components enough that replacements are rare.

Shopping online? Getting your packages shipped to your door. Saves you driving out to the mall and back, and with companies like FedEx making efforts to use greener vehicles and cut fuel consumption, surely having them handle the delivery must be the environmentally sound thing to do (assuming, of course, you really need what you ordered!).

I thought so too. And keeping fuel costs to a minimum not only makes sense for the planet, but should also help FedEx save some money. Then I saw a tracking record for a package that was being shipped to me from a city around 40 miles from my home:

According to Google Maps, the FedEx Oakland location that the package arrived at last night is 7.5 miles from my home, the package’s destination. Around 6:30am today it left there, and I assumed it would be on one of their delivery trucks heading here. But no, look where they sent it – Memphis, Tennessee!

Somebody at FedEx in Oakland actually loaded a package for delivery to an address less than 10 miles from where they stood on to a plane, and then flew it approximately 1800 miles to their hub in Memphis. At some point today, probably without even considering the stupidity or cost (to the planet and to FedEx) of these actions, another worker at FedEx in Memphis will load the package back on a plane, and send it back to Oakland – another 1800 miles.

So, my little package will have travelled around 3600 extra miles. Nothing green about that, and no matter how fuel efficient your vehicles, this is never going to be the right thing to do.

I actually called FedEx to see whether this was some kind of mistake. Perhaps the web site tracking information was wrong, or perhaps the parcel had accidentally been put in the wrong box. But no, from what the very kind customer service person told me, it seems that it is normal to route packages through their hub in Memphis like this.

Do other shipping companies work this way too?

This morning I was sent a link to an amazing collection of art by Chris Jordan called Running The Numbers. The thumbnail of the detail view to the right really doesn’t do it justice either – you have to see the full size image to understand exactly what this image is. What it represents is 28,000 42-gallon oil drum: the amount of oil consumed in the US every 2 minutes.

And then keep looking at the other images in the collection. Others that stood out for me were:

• One hundred million toothpicks, representing the number of trees cut down to support the junk mail business (what a total waste);
• One million plastic cups: the number used on US airlines every 6 hours;
• Two million plastic bottles: the number used in the US every 5 minutes (that’s an amazing 576 million bottles a day!);
• 426,000 cell phones being “retired” every day in the US (most probably still working perfectly);
• 1.14 million brown paper bags: the number used every hour in the US;
• And finally, 60,000 plastic bags: the number used every 5 seconds in the US (that is over 1 billion every day).

In addition to the environmental issues represented by these numbers I’ve highlighted, there are also other social issues in the collection, including an image representing smoking, healthcare and even the issue of prisoners, both in the US and in US run detention facilities outside the US.

Light Bulbs

One image though I have a slight disagreement with: the image of 320,000 light bulbs floating in space. Said to be equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.). The issue I have with this statement is that it is missing the real solution to this problem. The solution is not for consumers to unplug everything. The solution requires two parts:

1. More equipment designed to really use a lot less power when in sleep mode;
2. More electricity being generated from clean and renewable sources.

The second of those is perhaps the most important. Once we can produce enough electricity from clean renewable resources, why shouldn’t we use it to make our quality of life better? Sure, cutting consumption helps keep the bills low, and in the short term, while the world still depends heavily on dirty coal, and other non-renewable resources for our electricity, will help reduce emissions. But the logical extrapolation of that argument is to say that we should just stop using electricity completely. That’s a stupid argument. Much better to talk about how we can use technology to bring our clean generation levels in line with our consumption needs. Sure, don’t waste electricity unnecessarily, but the Vertography position is one of moderation. Sleep mode, done correctly, is a useful compromise, and better than just leaving the kit on all the time!

While walking through Venice, we noticed an unusual looking public bench being installed. Looking somewhat out of place amongst the very old buildings, this bench has a number of metal stalks coming out from its center and reaching towards the sky. On the top of each of these stalks is installed a small solar panel.

I have no idea what these solar panels are going to be used to power. If I had to guess, I would say that there are batteries under the seating and the power will be used to provide lighting after dark. The lower one of the two collectors in the close-up shot looks like it might have a light fitting there. And if it is light the rest of the Venetian public lighting we saw, it will be using CFL, or perhaps another low power technology (perhaps LEDs).

Have read a couple of articles recently that presented ideas for using our road networks as ways to harness the sun’s energy.

The first article, in Inhabitat, talked about a solution from Australian company Going Solar. Their idea combines solar panels with a sound barrier along the sides of freeways that pass through residential areas. This cuts the noise level in the houses, while at the same time supplying them with electricity.

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As if the environmental record of the oil companies wasn’t bad enough, the World Bank estimates 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas are burnt off at oil fields around the world annually. In addition to being a terrible waste of resources, those gas flares contribute 400 million tons of CO2 emissions too.

Why this incredible waste? Turns out it is simple economics: it is cheaper for these companies to burn this gas, and pollute the atmosphere than it is to transport it to where it can be used. Perhaps some financial penalties for their polluting actions would help, but Synfuels thinks they’ve found another way to get these companies to clean up their act.

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Last week PG&E announced that it had signed two deals for a total of 800MW of photo-voltaic solar power.

One is with High Plains Ranch II, LLC, a subsidiary of SunPower Corporation, for 250 MW of solar power. The other is with Topaz Solar Farms LLC, a subsidiary of OptiSolar, for 550 MW more.

As we commented last week, solar power is currently a very small part of the power mix for PG&E, and in fact for the state of California as a whole, contributing less than 1% today. Investments like these two will go some way to turning that around, and making better use of that environmentally sound solar energy that warms and lights the state every day.

A couple of articles about T. Boone Pickens, the man behind the Pickens Plan in the green media yesterday:

• Earth2Tech is asking about the reported loss from Pickens’ natural gas company, Clean Energy Fuels. A little unfair in the headline perhaps since the company has improved relative to the same quarter last year, and is showing increased revenues too.
• Energy Power Alternatives asks “T Boone Pickens – Visionary Or Profiteer?” Looking at the details of the plan, they seem to be concluding that the main component of the plan is the switch to natural gas for automotive use. It goes on to say that the wind energy component, which at best would supply 20% of the needs of the US, is included to “make his proposal politically more attractive.”

Interesting to see that neither of the articles have anything to say about his water project in Texas, and the controversy surrounding that project and the motives for the wind energy being to make it simpler for him to run a pipeline for his water project that we reported on a while back.