Likes Alter energy

Following the latest spill of radioactive material at ERAs Ranger uranium mine he ABC has an opinion piece wondering if it is time to decommission the industry - Is time up for Australias uranium industry ?.

IN THE EARLY HOURS of December 7, a crack appeared in a large leach tank in the processing area of the Ranger uranium mine in Kakadu National Park. The area was evacuated, the tank completely failed, the containment system was inadequate and one million litres of highly acidic uranium slurry went sliding downhill — taking Energy Resources of Australias credibility with it.

The spill has left traditional owners who live and rely on creeks only kilometres downstream angry and "sick with worry" and raised profound concerns about the management culture and integrity of infrastructure at the mine.

Operations at Ranger are now halted. The mine operates inside Kakadu National Park — Australias largest park and a dual World Heritage listed region. It, and its people, deserve the highest standards of protection, but sadly Ranger is a long way short of this.

The Australian uranium industry has long been a source of trouble. Now it is increasingly in trouble. The commodity price has collapsed, projects across the country have been stalled, deferred or scrapped and the recent Kakadu spill has again raised community attention and concern.

At least the absence of a nuclear power industry in Australia means we dont have stories emerging like this one from the US - U.S. Dumped Tens of Thousands of Steel Drums Containing Atomic Waste Off Coastlines .

More than four decades after the U.S. halted a controversial ocean dumping program, the country is facing a mostly forgotten Cold War legacy in its waters: tens of thousands of steel drums of atomic waste.

From 1946 to 1970, federal records show, 55-gallon drums and other containers of nuclear waste were pitched into the Atlantic and Pacific at dozens of sites off California, Massachusetts and a handful of other states. Much of the trash came from government-related work, ranging from mildly contaminated lab coats to waste from the country’s effort to build nuclear weapons.

Federal officials have long maintained that, despite some leakage from containers, there isn’t evidence of damage to the wider ocean environment or threats to public health through contamination of seafood. But a Wall Street Journal review of decades of federal and other records found unanswered questions about a dumping program once labeled “seriously substandard” by a senior Environmental Protection Agency official…

The Economist has an article on the possible link between enhanced oil recovery techniques and earthquakes - Pumped Up: Man-made earthquakes.

IN MAY 2011 something routine happened at the Cavone oilfield in northern Italy. Padana Energia, its operator, started pumping more high-pressure water into their wells, to squeeze more oil out. This unremarkable event may, though, have had remarkable consequences. A year later, on May 20th and 29th 2012, two nearby earthquakes killed 27 people and injured hundreds more. A report made public on April 15th by the International Commission on Hydrocarbon Exploration and Seismicity in the Emilia Region (ICHESE), a six-strong panel of geoscientists, says the pumping and the earthquakes may be connected.

Most earthquakes are caused by movements in geological faults, places where two bodies of rock are being pushed in different directions but nevertheless remain (mostly) locked together by friction. When the pushing becomes forceful enough to overcome the friction, however, the fault slips, the pent-up energy is released and the earth quakes.

Seismologists have known for decades that pumping water into the ground near a fault can sometimes make it slip. (Such quakes are different from the small tremors generated by the hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, used to extract shale gas from impermeable rocks. These are caused by stress created by the slurry used to break the rock open and release the gas, not by the slippage of faults.) But until these two quakes, only one person was believed to have been killed in a tremor triggered by the extraction of hydrocarbons—in Uzbekistan in 1984.

TreeHugger has a look at a use for the glut of timber from trees killed by pine beetles - Interlocking Cross Laminated Timber Could Use Up Square Miles Of Beetle-Killed Lumber, and Look Gorgeous, Too.

The Mountain Pine Beetle is killing trees across North America, including up to 44% of Colorados forests. If there was any infrastructure investment to be made right now, I would have thought it would be to set up a pile of cross laminated timber factories fast, and put people to work churning out panels at a standard size and stockpiling them; CLT is strong, fire resistant, it sequesters carbon dioxide and it makes very pretty buildings.

At the University of Utahs Integrated Technology in Architecture Center, (ITAC) they are working on a modification of the design of CLT for the American market, namely figuring out how to make it cheaper.

Mark Lewis has an article at The FT on this years IEA World Energy Outlook - Toil for oil means industry sums do not add up - noting it highlights that high oil prices and massive increases in capital spending by oil firms are not resulting in significant increases in production (probably the best harbinger of peak oil).

Lewis notes this "should be a reality check for those now hyping a new age of global oil abundance".