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With fuel-efficient stoves alone, the rate of deforestation can be cut by half

Trees Water & People is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping communities protect and manage natural resources.

Their work is based on, in their own words, two core beliefs: (1) That natural resources are best protected when local people play an active role in their care and management; and (2) Preserving local trees, wetlands, and watersheds is essential for the ongoing social, economic, and environmental health of communities everywhere.

Trees, Water and People… from the beginning, it sounds like this NPO, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, has got its priorities straight. And the more we learned about the work they are doing in the American West and around the world, the more we were convinced.

We’re not the only ones, either– this year, TWP, along with their partner group ADHESA (Honduran Association for Development), won one of eight internationally coveted Ashden Awards, also known as the green Oscars. The British Ashden Trust gives the awards, which recognize organizations who have excelled in bringing sustainable energy solutions to
the developing world.

Indoor cooking in much of Central America is over open fires with poor ventilation

Of their many projects, it is the Honduran Micro-Enterprise Stove Project in particular that caught the eye of the Ashden Trust, and earned TWP co-founder and international director Stuart Conway the honor of shaking the hand of Prince Charles, not to mention a grant of £30,000– about $54,000– for the program.

For the last 20 years, Conway has been working with indigenous and low-income communities throughout Latin America. TWP’s innovative community-based reforestation and development programs focus on environmental as well as financial sustainability, in one stroke helping communities move towards empowerment and independence and addressing the needs of the environment.

The ecological problem that the stoves address is the fact that most families in Central America – about 80% – cannot afford electric or gas stoves, and while their kitchens may be indoors, they have to cook on open wood fires. When entire communities and cities are considered, the rate at which the forests are destroyed for firewood is phenomenal. In the last thirty years, more than 2/3 of Central American forests have been destroyed, and the rest would be gone by 2050 if nothing were being done to save them.

People are suffering from this cooking situation too, almost as much as the trees are. The smoke that is inhaled by women, equivalent on average to smoking about two packs of cigarettes a day, leads to respiratory infections, tuberculosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, eye disease and complications like low birth weight in pregnancy.
Their young children, who also spend a lot of time in the kitchen, are even more vulnerable– lung disease is the number one cause of death for children under five, and they are also constantly at risk for burns from the fire.

According to the World Health Organization, about 1,600,000 women and children around the world die each year from the toxic smoke of indoor biomass-burning stoves used for cooking and heating; in Honduras, these are the stoves that 90% of rural families and 50% of urban families still use. 90% of the potential wood energy is wasted, and the burning contributes to global warming as well. What TWP did, with the help of ADHESA and the Aprovecho Research Center, was develop the Justa stove.

The Justa stove uses half the fuel and burns far cleaner than open cooking fires

Built of bricks or adobe, the Justa stove uses 50% less firewood than an open cookstove, with a chimney to carry 95% of the smoke out of the house.

Because they burn hotter than traditional stoves, they also save up to 70% on cooking time. For villagers, it also saves hours spent searching for and carrying firewood, and for urbanites, the money spent on it. Those whose livelihoods depend on cooking, like women who make and sell tortillas, have less overhead and see a jump in profit. Or, for an ordinary laborer, the stove can mean about 20% of the family’s income no longer going up in smoke.

In Nicaragua, another version, called the Ecostove, has been developed with the Wood Energy Development Association (PROLENA), with similar results. The main difference is that these are made of metal and assembled in workshops ready to install, rather than being literally built in the kitchen like the Justa model.

The Honduras program, however, has gotten the most attention– the Ashden Award, of course, and also a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of $132,000. The money has been used to start a micro-credit program in Honduras, allowing families to pay back the cost of the stove with monthly installments over the course of a year. At $65-70 per stove, the cost of a Justa stove may not look like much, but if, like an average Honduran laborer, your monthly income is about $100, it remains out of reach, no matter what the savings will be. The micro-credit program will make the stoves available to families like these.

The goal of TWP in this and their other international and domestic projects is to create self-sustaining programs, and they are slowly getting there. Although the Honduran Micro-Enterprise Stove Project is a commercial enterprise, 70% of its funding was
originally coming from TWP, Rotary Clubs and other local NPO’s.

Now, however, TWP and ADHESA, with technical support from the Aprovecho Research Center, are training four stove producers to make 720 new stoves in urban areas this year. “There is more incentive to build the stoves in urban areas, where people have to pay for
firewood,” said Conway. “Now farmers and companies are getting interested, too.”

26 vendors will sell the stoves to the public in markets, bus stations, and shops. ADHESA is also promoting the stoves and spreading awareness of their advantages with demonstrations, TV and radio ads, and brochures.

The Ashden award is only given to projects that are up and running, not to good ideas. To date, the Stove Project has installed over 8,000 stoves in Central America– Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala alone. In 2003, the program expanded to include Mexico, Brazil, and Bolivia. The total, since TWP was founded in 1998, is over 14,000 stoves. Conway said one of the most rewarding experiences of the project has been visiting the people.

Stuart Conway TWP Co-Founder & Director International Programs

“If I go back and visit a woman’s home after she’s had the new stove for a month or six months, it’s a day-night difference, she’s not coughing… it’s a great joy to go down and talk to them.”

The most difficult thing, Conway said, has been getting people convinced to try something new. “How food is made is central to culture; it’s not easy to change. The best way we have found is to find women who are community leaders, and they convince the others.”

As part of the publicity surrounding the Ashden Awards, the BBC aired a 5-minute video this August about the Honduran Stove Project, which can be seen online at http://www.handsontv.info/series6/programme_4.html.

As TWP’s international director, the other program Conway is involved with is community reforestation, a fitting piece to Central America’s ecological puzzle.

In Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua combined, the reforestation projects currently contribute to the planting of about 250,000 trees each year; the total since 1998 is over 1,000,000 trees (just see the momentum).

The programs are different in each country, but all of them involve working with local people and NPO’s, establishing nurseries, replanting trees in deforested areas and moving towards self-sustaining enterprises.

In Nicaragua, working again with PROLENA, three Forest Replacement Associations (FRA) have been developed since 2000. The model of FRA’s came from Brazil, where there are now many successful programs.

Stuart Conway in a new grove of Leucaena trees

An FRA is basically a legal partnership between farmers and commercial builders, like lime producers or brickmakers, who depend on large amounts of firewood for their business. The way it works is that seedlings raised in nurseries are given to farmers for free (paid for by the builders), with a guarantee that the builders will buy it at market price when the wood is harvested. Farmers generally have some amount of land and labor to spare, so it is not a big investment for them, which returns a profit. The farmers are furthermore not obligated to sell the wood to the industry, but can keep it or sell it to the highest
bidder. In times of flood, drought or other emergency, the cash crop of wood provides valuable insurance to the farmers.

FRA’s have many obvious benefits for the farmers, but the difference between Brazil and Nicaragua is this: in Brazil, the government requires commercial industries to be financially responsible for the deforestation they cause. These laws are enforced, and
the industries were forced to pay fees for replacing the trees they had destroyed; thus the FRA system was born, which was less expensive than the government fees, and the FRA’s flourished.

The problem with duplicating the system in Nicaragua is that the Nicaraguan government has no resources to enforce forest sustainability policies, and thus there is no financial incentive for the commercial builders to participate in the program. Although the forestry authorities are slowly gaining interest, commercial responsibility for deforestation is not yet a reality. For this reason, international aid, NPO’s and TWP have been essential to getting the FRA’s off the ground.

Over the next year, Conway said, two Nicaraguan nurseries will be moving toward privatization, and TWP’s goal is to establish 2-3 more Forest Replacement Nurseries.

In the community reforestation project in Guatemala, fast-growing, nitrogen-fixing seedlings are not given but rather sold to farmers in a particular package– one fruit tree and three forest trees for only about US$1.00. The fruit (generally citrus fruits like orange, lemon or mango) can be kept for the family or sold, like the wood from the forest trees.

In all the Central American reforestation programs, TWP provides training and micro-enterprise loans to establish self-sufficient tree nurseries with local
seedlings and replant them in deforested areas.

The other co-founder of TWP, veteran arborist and environmentalist Richard Fox, directs TWP’s domestic projects. He and Conway, both Colorado natives, met in Washington, D.C., and decided to move their families back to the Rockies and start the NPO together.

Richard Fox TWP Co-Founder & Director United States Programs

One of Fox’s main projects is called the Tribal Lands Renewable Energy Program.

Similar in spirit to the Latin American projects, the program gives Native American communities a practical way to lower their bills, create industry, beautify their land, and practice their ancient tradition of honoring the Earth.

“The program has two main approaches,” Fox explained. “One is treeplanting in the springtime, and the other is building solar heaters to help lower utility bills
in winter.”

The work started in 2002, on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in South Dakota. In the sweltering summers and freezing winters on the barren prairie, residents were spending up to 70% of their income on heating and cooling their homes. Because electricity is so
expensive, many people have to heat their homes with firewood, which is scarce, or propane, a pollutant.

Communities apply for the program. In the spring, at the home of an individual or family who has been selected, a half-dozen 5-7 foot-tall trees are planted on the Northwest side as a windbreak; in the fall, Cottonwoods are planted on the Southwest side for shade. These trees alone lower utility bills by about 20%.

With partners Oglala Lakota College, the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce, Youth Build, and the Youth Opportunity! Organization, the goal of the project is to provide the idea and technical training so that the community can carry on the work on its own after TWP is gone. This provides a great experience for young people, and employment opportunity, which is scarce on the Reservation. The trees are bought from a Lakota tree farm, so that money stays in the community, too.

Richard Herman and his solar heater installation

The other part of the program is installing a supplemental solar heater, which saves up to 30% more on winter heating costs ($100- 200 per year). The heater, which runs on a 12-volt fan, pumps hot air whenever the sun is out; its lifespan is about 20 years, and it currently costs about $1000.

Even though the heaters save money, it is too much for most people to spend up front, and TWP is still trying to find more funds for the project. So far, funding has come from individuals and grants from the Bush Foundation (no relation to the presidential family) and others. The Alternative Gifts Catalog, which makes it possible for an individual to make a donation to the program in someone’s name as a gift, provided $46,000 in funding this year.

“We are building up the Lakota crew,” Fox said. “It will be a business operation for them. By next summer, they will be building the solar units on Pine Ridge. The cost will go down to $700 per unit; they will take over, and TWP will move on to Rosebud[another
Reservation].”

“In three years, we did 12 workshops and demonstration projects,” Fox said. “It takes time to build up respect. You have to start off slow, and do one thing at a time.”

Slowly but surely, it has worked. So far, TWP has been involved in planting over 200 large trees at five different reservation communities, and has installed about 30 solar heaters. The momentum is growing: by June 2007, TWP hopes to put in at least 200 more, and other Native American communities, like the Shoshone and Arapaho, have given permission to put in demonstration models on their reservations as well.

The Tribal Lands Renewable Energy Program was recently the cover story for Worldwatch Magazine (read it online at http://worldwatch.org/pubs/mag/2005/184, and in early October, CNN did a video shoot at Pine Ridge for their environmental show “Earth Matters.”

TWP has also received funding from the U.S. Forest Service to make a video about how to establish a tree-planting program on a Native American Reservation. 400 distribution copies of the video, called, “Honoring the Earth: Planting Trees in Native American Communities” will be out in the summer of 2006.

TWP’s biggest effort in the “water” category is their Rocky Mountain Watershed Training Program. This program answers the call to protect the “Headwaters of America,” the runoff from the snowy mountains of the West that provide drinking water for over a million people.

As the area has developed and the population quickly increased, many small watershed protection groups have sprung up to try to protect the supply and quality of the water, most with small staffs and limited funding. What TWP is doing is providing them with technical and organizational training, so they have a better chance of succeeding at protecting water at its source.

“This is the cutting edge of democracy,” Fox said. “These watershed protection groups are the most important thing that has happened for natural resource management since the formation of the U.S. Forest Service– it is about how people work with the
government.”

The groups are mostly NPO’s made of stakeholders: federal, state and local government agencies, landowners, ranchers, environmentalists, and any other interested individuals. Their goal is to seek cooperative ways to approach watershed problems and potential problems.

“There is less separation between the government and the people, “Fox continued. “They work together in a collaborative process.”

In Colorado alone, there are more than 40 of these groups, each with their own individual goals and projects. TWP is helping them become sustainable by teaching them tricks of the NPO trade– how to go about fundraising, find and use volunteers, form a board of directors, etc. They also provide technical training in areas like water quality analysis: how to get samples, analyze watershed data, and turn it into usable information.

The National Watershed Health Project, funded by the EPA and managed at the national level by Rivernetwork.org, is basically an extension of the same work. There are four pilot sites, in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Mexico and Colorado; TWP manages the Colorado pilot.

“It has given us access to more experts, and more training. We are able to learn from the other pilot states, and since it’s a project on the national level, it has the potential to grow even more,” Fox said.

Planting trees in Ft. Collins, Colorado

Finally, TWP’s Community Resource Protection Program is literally rooted in their own backyard of Fort Collins, Colorado. Over the last seven years, they have helped put together 160 different natural resource volunteer events in the town and around Northern Colorado, ranging from tree-planting and wetland restoration to riverbed cleanups; between 20 and 120 youth and other volunteers per day show up for
the events.

Partnered with the City of Fort Collins, Larimer County, and the Poudre School District, TWP has created four outdoor science labs called “living laboratories.” This project has transformed local storm water detention ponds, which were before just breeding grounds for mosquitoes and disease, dangerously located in suburban neighborhoods.

Trees and berry bushes are planted and walkways are built. Eggs are nestled in the grass. Even a “bat box” is brought in and placed in a dead tree, 30 feet in the air. Suddenly, the cesspool is a tiny wetland teeming with life– ducks, foxes, other birds (who eat mosquitoes), and even the occasional mountain lion.

Schools are also near the living labs. Children come to take samples for water quality analysis, see the bugs and monitor wildlife. By participating in these and other local environmental projects, kids get a hands-on experience of the natural world, and a sense
of responsibility for it, that can go deeper in them than the dirt under their nails. These feelings and impressions can benefit them, and the Earth, long after we are gone.

To conclude, Trees, Water and People’s complex and innovative programs, which span the spectrum from local to global involvement, can all be summed up in this simple, heartfelt statement from Richard Fox: “When local people can see progress, they’re absolutely willing to get involved and make long-term commitments to protect natural resources. People love doing things where they can really see a difference– they get excited about it, and it’s excited me too.”

For more information on TWP and to find out how you can get involved, go to:

www.treeswaterpeople.org

By phone: 877-606-4TWP (toll free), 970-484-3678

By fax: 970-224-1726

By email: twp@treeswaterpeople.org

By regular mail:

Trees, Water & People

633 Remington St.

Fort Collins, CO 80524

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One kilogram of uranium fuel yields 20,000 times more energy than one kilogram of coal (photo: US EPA)

When I declare that the U.S. desperately needs to become more like France, some of my friends get upset. But hold your anger, keep eating your Freedom Fries, and let me explain. The real reason to emulate the French is that 75% of their electrical power use is derived from nuclear reactors.

The U.S. right now generates about 50% of its electric power from coal and only about 15% from nuclear reactors. No new nuclear plants have been built in the U.S. since the early 1970s, thanks in part to misguided environmental activists reacting to the Three Mile Island (3MI) meltdown, but also to really cheap natural gas and oil in the 70′s and 80′s. We will never see cheap oil and gas again thanks to huge increases in demand from India and China that is here to stay. We need to start building new nuclear power plants and catch up with our erstwhile friends those French, without whom we never would have won the American Revolution.

While the only by-product of a nuclear power plant that finds its way into the surroundings is hot water, coal fired plants spew out about 90% of all the pollutants given off by power production in the U.S. These include sulfur dioxides (acid rain), various nitrogen oxides (read smog), mercury, lots of carbon dioxide, (greenhouse gas, anyone?), and more radioactive gases than the virtually zero amounts given off by nuclear plants. Even relatively clean natural gas fired power plants still release significant amounts of pollutants and lots of carbon dioxide.

Opponents of nuclear power always point out that operating nuclear reactors create radioactive gases that are released into the atmosphere. Not true! The radioactive gases generated by a nuclear reactor are held in holding tanks until they decay into harmless, non-radioactive gases. Only then are they released into the atmosphere.

One large nuclear plant easily equals the 1.2 gigawatt output of Hoover Dam (photo: Idaho National Labs)

Along with coal, another energy choice we might consider in lieu of nuclear is hydroelectric. Building big new dams is probably even more expensive than building new nuclear plants, but the advantage is there is no waste or emissions at all. In the bargain, however, we lose all those wild rivers that rafters, kayakers, and myriad wild creatures love so much. In addition, we create huge new lakes that not only ruin the local environment, but also give jet boaters a place to zoom around in and make lots of noise. Let’s not forget about what dams do to migrating fish populations such as salmon. As for “green” dams? Well if you think a regular dam costs a lot…

Remaining alternatives to nuclear power, such as wind and solar, are promising technologies but can’t offer constant baseload power generation like hydroelectric and nuclear power. Moreover, solar power is still far too expensive to be developed on a scale sufficient to replace coal or nuclear power and meet growing worldwide energy demands. Also, windmills, as do new oil refineries and nuclear plants, evince the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) response. It is estimated that photovoltaic solar power costs about 23 cents per kilowatt hour (could get cheaper as new technologies evolve), while conventional coal and natural gas plants cost about half that. Nuclear power weighs in at less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour.

I was against the widespread use of nuclear power back in the hippy sixties and seventies for the usual reasons at the time: China Syndrome meltdowns, what to do with radioactive waste, Homer Simpson like reactor workers, and poor regulation and corruption. That was then, this is now. Several icons of the environmental movement, apostates like me, believe that the aforementioned nuclear power problems have been solved. Nuclear power is simply the most environmentally friendly way to generate electrical power, cleanly and economically.

The Three Mile Island accident could not have happened in today’s modern nuclear power plants (photo: US EPA)

No less a luminary than Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, recently endorsed developing nuclear power.
In his testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Energy and Resources, he said he now believes that the majority of environmental activists (his former friends) have become so blinded by their extremist policies that they fail to consider the enormous and obvious benefits of harnessing nuclear power to meet and secure America’s growing energy needs. His testimony in essence boils down to that we need to get away from the fossil fuels that are responsible for most all of the air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions we are inundated with, and get with nuclear power that is clean and safe.

Other pioneering environmentalists have also embraced nuclear power, including Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and James Lovelock, who put forth the Gaia theory (basically, Earth is a huge living, self-regulating organism in itself). Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore went on to say, “The industry is mature. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island (3MI) and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear plants are high yield, with low cost fuel that offer the best avenue to a hydrogen economy.” Well said, Mr. Moore. So let us now visit the questions of 3MI and Chernobyl, and what is “pebble bed”, anyway? And lastly, the big gorilla always put forth by nuclear opponents, what to do with all that dangerous radioactive waste from a reactor’s spent fuel rods.

US EPA

In 1979, at the 3MI nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pa., a reactor overheated and a partial meltdown of the uranium core occurred. Hydrogen gas was released raising fears of a BIG explosion that would release radioactive water, solids and gases into the atmosphere. The crisis lasted 12 days, and some radioactive water and gases were released, while thousands of people were evacuated from the area (for you trivia buffs, the movie, “China Syndrome” was released just days before the real thing happened at 3MI). The explosion never happened, but the incident effectively ended construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. Various celebrities and politicians at the time demanded the shutdown of all nuclear plants and predicted cancer epidemics of every kind. Well, after 25 years, no other such accidents have occurred and no adverse health effects on the people exposed to the radioactive materials have emerged. The whole incident was due to human error. The operators reacted to a completely manageable problem with safety valves by shutting down the emergency cooling system, ultimately causing a reactor to overheat, resulting in the infamous meltdown. Wrong move, Homer Simpson and pals!! Anyway, the incident caused the industry to fix some design flaws, and actually give plant workers rigorous training, MUCH more rigorous than before the accident.

Chernobyl from orbit. The dark elongated area area is the 12 kilometer long cooling pond. The reactor complex is just to the left of the pond (photo: NASA)

O.K., but what about Chernobyl, the poster child for nuclear power opponents? The worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred there, and the Ukrainian city is to this day a ghost town. In April of 1986, engineers (probably including “Homeri Simpsonov”) disabled emergency backup systems and then proceeded to test one of the plant’s four reactors. Who knows why? They only succeeded in initiating an uncontrolled chain reaction in the core of the reactor, which resulted in blowing up the whole containment building. This “minor misjudgment” on the part of the plant workers resulted in about 8 tons of highly radioactive materials being spewed all over Eastern Europe and beyond. About 35 people were killed immediately from the explosion itself and acute radiation poisoning, while hundreds of others suffered from severe radiation sickness (the unlucky ones, as it is a slow, painful death).

Nuclear energy experts I have talked to say such an accident is impossible for reactors of the design used in the rest of the world. Only the old Soviet Union used the Chernobyl design, which is fatally flawed and susceptible to such accidents even when the engineers working there know what they’re doing. In the 20 years since, there has been a large rise in thyroid cancers in people who were heavily exposed, especially in children. This is predictable because ingested radioactive iodine from the explosion is all concentrated in the pea sized thyroid gland. The good news is that it is one of the most curable of cancers. The cancerous gland is surgically removed and a thyroid hormone pill must be taken for the remainder of one’s life. Even better, no increase in any other types of cancers has been detected in the exposed population (yet).

US DOE

Now for the big gorilla, what to do with highly radioactive, long half-life, spent nuclear fuel. For the conventional nuclear plants that are operating today all over the U.S., the answer is Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The area has already been subject to about 900 nuclear bomb tests, NIMBY doesn’t apply because nobody lives anywhere near there, and the area is so arid that there is virtually no groundwater for any potential waste to leech into, even if the containers of the waste do fail in only 500 years or so. It has been approved by the government as a very, very, long-term safe disposal site for all nuclear waste, but its status is now in limbo because of all those former friends of Patrick Moore. Opponents cite the danger of vehicles transporting encapsulated waste being involved in some accident that might release radioactive waste all over the place. Firstly, transport will be by rail, not trucks, so the NIMBY folks needn’t worry about a truck hauling radioactive waste driving through their neighborhood. According to one of my favorite columnists, George Will, in the last 40 years more than 2,700 shipments of spent nuclear fuel have been transported more than 1.6 million miles in the U.S. Of those shipments, 4 rail and 4 highway accidents have occurred with no failure of any of the nuclear containers. Sounds like pretty good odds to me.

Yucca Mountain is being developed as a central repository for America’s nuclear waste (photo: Sandia)

At present, radioactive waste is stored at hundreds of temporary sites around the country. How secure are those sites against a possible theft by some terrorist determined to set off a “dirty bomb” in Manhattan? Nellis Air Force Base, next door to the Yucca site, will supply ample security. Because nobody lives anywhere near the site, a terrorist would have a hard time explaining why he just happens to be in the area, maybe counting mutant gila monsters (from all those nuclear bomb tests), or even house hunting? Finally, we could again follow the lead of our European friends, and use new technologies to re-cycle nuclear waste. They have been doing it for years, why not us? Perhaps because it’s cheaper to mine new uranium? The process ultimately reduces the amount of waste by about 80%. We recycle paper and aluminum, why not uranium?

Finally, let’s consider why newly built reactors should use that pebble bed reactor design as an alternative to conventional nuclear plant designs. The pebble bed uses pool ball sized uranium fuel, not rods. They produce less waste material, and are more easily disposed of. The most important thing is this: if the engineers running a conventional plant are abducted by terrorists or aliens, the reactor might eventually overheat, meltdown, and explode, just like Chernobyl. The pebble bed reactor would shut itself down! Accidents such as occurred at 3MI and Chernobyl are impossible! In addition, helium is used as the coolant instead of water, yielding hydrogen as the by-product, which could be recovered to power fuel cells for the hydrogen economy of the future.

International Atomic Energy Agency

America’s politicians and regulators need to drastically reform the process that a company must go through to get government approval for new construction. It would take about 2 years to build a new nuclear reactor and get it up and running. It now takes about 11 years to go through all the government red tape, paperwork, hearings (featuring eco-radicals screaming and obstructing at every turn), environmental impact statements with more words than the entire encyclopedia Britannica, and other political baloney that it would take to get approval, before construction can even begin. Saving the planet today starts with using nuclear power instead of coal, as the transitional fuel to the tomorrow’s totally clean and sustainable energy economy, whatever it may be.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Dear Editor:

Let me first thank you for an informative and thought provoking article about nuclear power from an environmental point of view. As one of many “environmentalists for nuclear power” I appreciate the way that you have provided a new way of looking at old issues. I laughed out loud at the following comment with regard to using hydroelectric damns for power production:

“In addition, we create huge new lakes that not only ruin the local environment, but also give jet boaters a place to zoom around in and make lots of noise.”

As one of the kayakers that loves wild rivers, I appreciated your point of view.

I also enjoyed reading about pebble bed reactors, a technology that I have studied intensively for the past dozen years.

One minor correction – though pebble bed reactors use helium for coolant, and though it is possible for them to be used in a system that produces hydrogen, they do not produce hydrogen as a “by-product”.

In other words, there is no chemical or physical process that is an inherent part of the closed cycle helium cooled pebble bed reactor that results in hydrogen production. The helium remains helium throughout the cycle, and all fission products remain locked inside the pebbles. As in other nuclear power systems, the only real byproduct that is normally emitted is heat.

Hydrogen production is often mentioned in association with pebble bed or other high temperature gas cooled reactors simply because it is a process that can be aided with a heat source in excess of 800 degrees C. Conventional water cooled reactors do not reach that temperature.

Any kind of electrical power reactor can be used to produce hydrogen from water by using electrolysis, but many observers think that process is not efficient enough for wide scale use.

Keep up the good work, I am going to point to your article from my Atomic Insights Blog.

Best regards,

Rod Adams

Editor, Atomic Insights

www.atomicinsights.com

www.atomicinsights.blogspot.com

NORTHERN WATERS SAVE THE SEA

Canals (in red) move water to the Aral Basin

Why Save the Aral Sea?

To spend somewhere between 25-50 billion dollars to refill the Aral Sea and turn the Aral Basin into a cornucopia of fishing, agriculture, forestry – a new example to the world of the old adage “water, wealth, contentment, health” – does seem like a bargain. And that’s about all it would cost to build two canals to drain water from the Volga and Ob rivers and move enough south to refill the Aral Sea in about 25-50 years. But maybe this international effort could yield additional benefits – saving the banks of the Caspian Sea from rising waters, and removing fresh water from the Arctic Ocean to preserve the gulf stream current? Now would it be worth 25-50 billion dollars?

Each spring these days, the Arctic Ocean must adjust to larger than ever amounts of fresh water from the melting icecap. What if during this same period, some of the freshwater runoff from rivers were diverted south? It is especially Eurasia, with its massive Siberian watersheds, that contributes the most fresh water to the Arctic Ocean. In particular, from the northern flowing Ob-Irtush river on the Central Siberian plain.

The ability to regulate ice-formation appears to be a worthwhile human capacity, whether the Earth is warming or cooling and regardless of why. And at the same time as the Arctic chokes on too much fresh water, the Aral Sea withers away. Up until 50 years ago the Aral was the fifth largest inland sea in the world, nearly 70,000 square kilometers. And the draining of the Aral Sea has adversely affected weather and land quality throughout Central Asia – the Aral basin encompasses seven nations and well over two million square kilometers! The draining of the Aral Sea once was the poster child for environmental destruction, now it is nearly forgotten.

How to Save the Aral Sea:

Saving the Aral Sea will only work if fresh water is drained from the Ob-Irtysh and the Volga Rivers. As the map indicates, canals (in red) would drain water from each of these rivers and move it south to the Aral Sea. At the same time as the Ob river pours a staggering 385 cubic kilometers of water into the Arctic Ocean, the Volga River pours an also whopping 240 cubic kilometers of water per year into the Caspian Sea. This is about 10% above normal and has gone on for years. The Caspian Sea is rising, threatening to inundate cities that have thrived on its banks for centuries.

The table below shows how much water reached the Aral Sea before diversions began in 1950, and how water would get there if new canals were built to divert water south from the Volga and Ob.

WATER TO THE ARAL SEA – ORIGINAL, TODAY, PROPOSED

At this point almost any increase will cause the Aral Sea to expand again

In 1950, the Aral Sea received about 50 cubic kilometers per year from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Because of canal diversions for agriculture, these rivers currently deliver at most 6 cubic kilometers per year into the Aral Sea. It is clear these farms are often growing water-intensive low margin crops. By improving the quality of the canals, including upgrades as basic as concrete lining, by making other water efficiency improvements, and by eliminating growing water intensive low margin crops, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya can at least double their input into the Aral Sea. It is estimated at best the Aral Sea could get as much as 20 cubic kilometers of water per year from its original rivers, while still preserving a viable agricultural economy in central Asia. This would be 40% of the original, but would be a 15x increase over today’s flow. The Aral Sea would immediately begin to expand from its current state.

Since there are no mountain formations or uplands between the Volga and the Aral Basins, a gravity-fed canal can move water from the Volga to the Aral Basin, and a 200 meter wide canal five or more meters deep would be able to move 25 cubic kilometers per year. This could be a highly innovative, possibly navigable canal that would literally siphon water into the Aral Basin. Why did canals once criss-cross Europe, yet none can be built today? Are they all so incorrect? Adding another 20 cubic km of water from the Volga to the Aral Basin per year would get the inflows almost to normal. With water going into the Aral Sea sustaining itself at 80% of normal, the Aral Sea could expand back to as much as 50,000 square kilometers.

Why the Ob Canal is Necessary:

To refill the Aral Sea completely, however, would require building a canal from the Ob river, and this would require costly pumping stations to move the water over the crest that separates the Central Siberian Plain from the Aral Basin. While the cost of such a pumping station would be about 2-3 billion dollars, it would allow inter-basin transfers of truly massive amounts of water. Not only does the Ob-Irtysh drain 385 cubic km of fresh water each year northwards across the low-lying plains of Central Siberia, but just to the east on this same watershed is the Yenisy river, which drains hundreds of cubic km into the Arctic and which could be part of a system of canals to divert excess flow into the Aral Basin.

If there were a compelling need to remove fresh water from the Arctic Ocean, this Ob to Aral canal would be an obvious solution. But developing the Aral Basin could be an international effort, and nations that might harvest fresh water from the sources of these rivers, whether they be the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, or the Volga, Ob, Irtysh or Yenisy, could participate in investment in the new agricultural and fishing industries in the Aral Basin. The Ob canal would make refilling the Aral Sea easy, adding up to 20 cubic km of water per year to the Aral, bringing the total inflow to the Aral Sea 60 cubic km, 20% above normal. After some years, the flow from the Ob canal could be slowed, or the extra water could be used for agriculture in the Aral Basin. Gentlemen, start your bulldozers.

The Ob Pumping Station – How Much Electricity?

To calculate the electric power required to move 20 cubic kilometers of water from Arctic watersheds to the Aral Basin, first assume a “lift” for this water of 1,000 feet, or just over 300 meters. That’s how much altitude the pumps will need to raise that volume of water, year after year. For this calculation it is assumed the pumping station will operate constantly, 365 days per year, but altering those assumptions don’t necessarily affect the power required, although they will affect the amount of generating capacity required (the work one 1.0 GW plant might do all year around would require three 1.0 GW plants operating only during the four month flood season). But only the water volume (20 cubic km/year) and the lift (300 meters) affect the total power calculation. If the electricity were coming from the grid, seasonal power requirement fluctuations might be mitigated.

The next step is to determine what amount of power, expressed in terms of “water horsepower,” would be required to run these pumps at the level of power required based on lifting the water 300 meters, and moving a water volume of 20 km3 through the pumps each year.

On the table below, the goal is to express the power requirement as how many “megawatts per 1.0 km3 per year,” it would take to move 1.0 cubic kilometers of water. So for each calculation the amounts are based on the volumne of 1.0 km3 per year.

HOW MUCH POWER WILL THE PUMPS NEED?

Every km3 of water lifted 300 meters will require 124 MW year-round output

The formula for how calculating water-horsepower requirements for water lift is as follows: Total dyamic head (TDH, the sum of the lift of the water, measured in feet, plus the friction loss encountered, expressed as additional feet) times gallons per minute, times 3960 (a constant). Rather than vary the constant, we must therefore plug into this formula the gallons per minute required to move a cubic kilometer per year.

The first calculation on the table, therefore, water volume required, converts km3 per year into gallons per miinute. As shown, one km3 per year is 502,607 gallons per minute. By knowing this figure, as well as the lift plus friction (total dynamic head) expressed as 1,010 feet, we can plug in the figures and make the second calculation, the water horsepower requirement.

As the second calculation on the table shows, therefore, it requires 255,051 water horsepower to lift a cubic kilometer of water 1,000 feet (or 300 meters). It is a reasonably safe assumption that the total lift required will not exceed this if the canal proceeds along the headlands of the Tobol (an Ob tributary) and passes into the Aral Basin just south-east of the foothills of the Ural Mountains.

The third calculation on the table determines how many megawatts of electric power are needed to generate the water horsepower with the pumping system. This depends on a constant, kilowatts per horsepower, as well as an assumption regarding the efficiency of the pumps. For very large pumps that run constantly, the efficiencies can get pretty good. In this example we assume a pump efficiency of 77%, meaning that 77% of the electrical energy input into the pumps is returned in the mechanical energy of water horsepower. The rest is lost to heat and friction.

Based on these calculations, it would take a constant input of 124 megawatts to move 1.0 cubic kilometer of water up 300 meters using giant pumps and pipes. As the final calculation shows, this means moving 20 cubic kilomters of water per year up 1,000 feet in altitude would require a 2.5 gigawatt electrical input. This is the equivalent of two Hoover Dams, or about one-sixth the output of the Three Gorges Dam. Put another way, it is the equivalent of about 5 very large nuclear reactors. It is unlikely a power plant of this magnitude could be contemplated using anything other than nuclear power, unless highly efficient transmission lines could be built to import electricty. Figure about 1-2 billion dollars per gigawatt for a nuclear reactor, meaning the powerplant for the pumps could cost up to 5 billion dollars. The cost for the new canals and the costs to overhaul the canals already built brings the total price tag to 25-50 billion.

A Renaissance in Central Asia?

But even if we don’t want to save the Aral Sea, or save the Gulf Stream, or stop the rising banks of the Caspian Sea? So what? After all, what’s the output of the restored Aral Basin worth, when its sea employs 100,000 fishermen, and new agricultural lands and rich deltas beckon the farmer and the tourist? What wealth might we reap?

For more information including references go to Refill the Aral Sea.