EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

[GKH]

"Jan 1 (Reuters) - The European Union has drawn up plans to label some natural gas and nuclear energy projects as “green” investments after a year-long battle between governments over which investments are truly climate friendly.

The European Commission is expected to propose rules in January deciding whether gas and nuclear projects will be included in the EU “sustainable finance taxonomy”.

This is a list of economic activies and the environmental criteria they must meet to be labelled as green investments. By restricting the “green” label to truly climate friendly projects, the system aims to make those investments more attractive to private capital, and stop “greenwashing”, where companies or investors overstate their eco-friendly credentials.

Brussels has also made moves to apply the taxonomy to some EU funding, meaning the rules could decide which projects are eligible for certain public finance.

A draft of the Commission’s proposal, seen by Reuters, would label nuclear power plant investments as green if the project has a plan, funds and a site to safely dispose of radioactive waste. To be deemed green, new nuclear plants must receive construction permits before 2045.

Investments in natural gas power plants would also be deemed green if they produce emissions below 270g of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour, replace a more polluting fossil fuel plant, and receive a construction permit by Dec. 31 2030. Such plants must meet other conditions including that they are technically equipped to burn low-carbon gases.

Gas power generation would be labelled green on the grounds that it is a “transitional” activity - defined as one that is not fully sustainable, but which has emissions below industry average and does not lock in polluting assets during the shift to clean energy.

The Commission could not immediately be reached for comment.

EU countries and a panel of expert advisors will scrutinise the draft proposal, which could change before it is due to be published later in January. Once published, the proposal could be vetoed by a majority of EU countries or by the European Parliament.

The policy has been mired in lobbying from governmants for more than a year and EU countries disagree on which fuels are truly sustainable.

Natural gas emits roughly half the CO2 emissions of coal when burned in power plants, but gas infrastructure is also associated with leaks of methane, a potent planet-warming gas.

The EU’s expert advisers had recommended that gas plants not be labelled as green investments unless they met a lower 100g CO2/kwh emissions limit, based on the deep emissions cuts scientists say are needed to avoid disastrous climate change.

Nuclear power produces very low CO2 emissions but the Commission sought expert advice this year on whether the fuel should be deemed green given the potential environmental impact of radioactive waste disposal.

Brussels finished the rules last year for parts of the green list including sectors such as buildings and transport and from this month investments not included in the taxonomy cannot be marketed as climate-friendly in the EU. The gas and nuclear rules will kick in later." https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/eu-drafts-plan-label-gas-nuclear-investments-green-2022-01-01/?taid=61d03d97ef2b770001e4c3d9&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

[RhisiartGwilym]

Can I flag up once again that Dmitry Orlov - who is professionally competent in nuclear matters, and who now lives permanently in Russia - says unequivocally that Russia is developing a generation of nuclear power stations which not only eat their own radioactive waste, leaving none in poison-pits to pollute the Earth for generations, but which can also eat up and neutralise high-level waste from other, previously-created poison-pits.

I don’t know how accurate this information is. If true, though, it does seem to offer to transform the whole basic principled objection to nuclear energy. In particular, it may offer an escape from the already created, intractable problem of existing poison-pits. These, as we know, require a continuous, expensive and necessarily hitech input to keep them from doing a Fukushima; a level of management which may become impossible to continue in the near future. The idea of such continuous monitoring for thousands of years was always a complete nonsense, of course.

I remain steadily persuaded that this - allegedly - ‘clean’ nuclear technology, even if it’s real and as transformative as it would seem, will in the end make no difference at all to our fully-fated, baked-in global passage down through the Long Descent away from hitech industrial societies; except perhaps to make the final landing down at the other end of the curve a bit less precipitous for those regions of the world that have it.

Russia is one clearly obvious state which has the means - if wisely applied - to weather the Descent without total collapse into disaster. It seems that - like it or not - they’re developing this nuclear technology, and will put it to use. Not a lot of point in getting into a Greta-huff about something that’s going to happen whether we like it or not.

And then, of course, there’s the slowly-creeping-forward understanding that the story with climate-shift, though real enough, especially in its human-caused disruption element, is nevertheless a good deal less certainly predictable than the Chicken Littles like to kid themselves, and anyone else who’ll give them credibility.

We just don’t know in detail what’s going to happen; nor how rapidly.

Certainly, it’s already Spring in this part of the world. Winter was two days of an inch of snow and two night freezes at the end of November, and - if recent examples here are any guide, that’ll be it for this year. The primroses are already in copious flower here. Yet this has been the sum total of my eighty-odd years of watching the weather in Britain: just the slightest shift towards a more Mediterranean climate. And meanwhile, several iterations of “Just X more years to prevent catastrophe! Aaaagh, aaaagh!!!” deadlines have come and gone without any such catastrophes materialising. Truth is: we just don’t know with any cast iron certainty what the ever-changing climate of the Earth is going to do; especially once the Descent has resolved our current population-overshoot, has done a serious crunch to industrialism, and has initiated the return of the forests, peat-bogs and prairie-steppe that will take the current CO2 output in hand (though not too severely, we have to hope, since the CO2 level in the atmosphere was getting really dangerously low in pre-industrial times, to the point where there was a danger of photosynthesis becoming non-functional…)

That contrasts markedly with previous Eras in paleontology, when the whole planet was many degrees warmer than it is now, and life throve abundantly in the tropical warmth.

We need to choke off our climate hysteria, and proceed more cautiously about it than is the current fashion - amongst the knowitall technocrats and their troobleever followers, at least.

As for cleany-greeny nukes: well, we’ll see.

[KarenEliot]

a site to safely dispose of radioactive waste

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[GKH]

I’m much keener on bioremediation for leakage and spillage whereas there is no choice (other than solar destruction), but to contain waste (and eventually all that is captured by bioremediation), and store it! I fail to see how a system that claims to dispose of waste won’t simply give a green light for all the nuclear projects set to “improve our CO2 profile” despite also still requiring the mining of uranium ore and the intimate relationship between nuclear physics and seismology (quantum applies), quote: " “Ask yourselves how it has come to be acceptable for, for instance; The Russian and American presidents (ostensibly -and in reality- gnashing their teeth over Poland), to cabal themselves during the recent summit in Tokyo, get their heads together on how to repair the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactor ( http://www.stwr.org/land-energy-water/nuclear-power-no-panacea-critics-say.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihama_Nuclear_Power_Plant http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/earthquake-fire-and-nuclear-l/ -Edited 11/12/10-), and keep the whole affair from the public?” Go to: https://www.arafel.co.uk/2016/07/hinkleypoint-did-you-hear-one-about.html
Also, quote; " certain reeds and grasses bio-accumulate both chemical and radiological toxins and I am certain that we will find that the same is true of some of the seaweeds, this will be the way we clean the oceans." Go to: https://www.arafel.co.uk/2014/10/mycology-and-bio-remediation.html & https://www.arafel.co.uk/2016/12/the-undiscovered-science-of-myco-magic.html

Also, quote; “UK deployed 31 nuclear weapons during Falklands war” Go to: https://declassifieduk.org/uk-deployed-31-nuclear-weapons-during-falklands-war/

[RhisiartGwilym]

Well, we’ll have to wait and see which process makes its appearance first, G: the Russia tech., or ‘bioremediation’. There’s a practical bioremediation experiment going on in the Chernobyl exclusion zone right now. I don’t doubt, actually, that Gaia has ways in her repertoire to use life-forms to bind and neutralise radioactive stuff, just as she’s already produced micro-organisms which eat plastic. But I fancy producing a similar process to neutralise radioactivity is likely to take as long as the half-lives of the offending materials.

And I continue to think that shooting rocketsful of radioactive waste into the Sun is simply an impractical fantasy; and one, moreover, where the technical capability to get spacecraft to Earth-escape velocity is a wasting asset, as the Long Descent continues, and steadily takes away our industrial capabilities.

If I were having to take a gamble on a short-time-frame remedy for the idiot problem that we’ve given to the Earth with our idiot nuclear technology, my front-runner would be the Russian waste-eating technology now in development. I suspect that there will be a window of a few decades when that will still be doable, before the Descent finally puts paid to that ability too, even in Russia.

As for the rockets: do a quick survey of the brute weight of the materials which would need to be lifted - with 100% failure-free record, moreover - into escape orbit; and then forget it…

[GKH]

“And I continue to think that shooting rocketsful of radioactive waste into the Sun is simply an impractical fantasy” Nevertheless if this “Russian Tech” (or similar alternative), you mention proves to be (as I deeply suspect they will), a non-starter the only alternative to terrestrial storage is solar destruction. I also believe that short term lunar storage prior to launch to the Sun suggests itself.
Neither is bioremediation an alternative to storage, bioremediation is “capture only” tech. and will still be needed regarded of what eventually happens to the waste.

[RhisiartGwilym]

Sorry G, I just can’t take this mass rocketry idea seriously, especially with ‘Moon stopover’ additions. It’s an unrealistic fantasy. In this real world, we don’t do space-flight the way they do it in ‘Startrek’. The real thing is much more clunky, more dicey, and in any case not destined to be long with us even in its present primitive manifestation. You might as well ask an ant to pick up a football-sized boulder and carry it a mile.

The Russian thing is an open question. No point in speculating about will it, won’t it? Orlov - who has always proven a savvier than average commentator - says it’s in development. I’ll wait and see. If it ever gets up and running, I’m sure that’s another thing that VVPutin will announce when he’s ready. Till then, we wait and see.

[Evvy_dense]

Then there was one…

Inside Hunterston B as nuclear power station marks its final hours
The simple push of a button will shut down one of Scotland’s last remaining nuclear plants.

Inside Hunterston B as nuclear power station marks its final hours

I wonder if there’s any connection…

Nuclear expert warns of Chernobyl-like disaster at Hunterston

Nuclear expert warns of Chernobyl-like disaster at Scottish plant

So sad…39 cracks then 350 (the operational limit) then they asked if it could be raised to 1000.
I take it that was a No, then…

They live with up to…so many cracks in reactors, but…that would be a useful safety job for Neil Ferguson’s modelling team

“No it will explode and that will spread the virus…”

[RhisiartGwilym]

‘The Thirty-Nine Cracks’: wasn’t that a famous thriller? Buchan, Richard Hannay, spies in Scotland, that sort of thing…?

[GKH]

“SABRE – Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine – is a new class of engine for propelling both high speed aircraft and spacecraft. SABRE is unique in delivering the fuel efficiency of a jet engine with the power and high speed ability of a rocket”…
“A truly versatile propulsion system – SABRE is an air-breathing rocket engine that can propel an aircraft from zero to five times the speed of sound in the atmosphere and 25 times the speed of sound for space access. Highly scalable, this pioneering breakthrough boasts a huge range of operation with the potential to redefine what’s possible in the world of powered flight.” Go to: https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/beyond-possible/sabre

Nb. As you know I’m also in favour of exploring asteroid mining and the possible colonisation of Mars #MagnetosphereMars.

Yes “Project Abaris” (solar destruction), is a speculative project, nevertheless, the connection between nuclear power projects and seismic/other environmental instabilities is highly suggestive and bioremediation is a safe well understood principle not some hare-brained Russian fantasy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izYLVIPdUos

[RhisiartGwilym]

I’ll leave the hare-brained fantasies to you, G. Bioremediation is a great idea, already being put into practice, but as I understand it, it’s about moving agriculture towards practices which help, rather than hinder, Gaia’s natural healing processes to repair land damaged by human practices, particularly by the insanity of industagri. Sure, that’s a genuine green skill, highly relevant to the headline topic of this thread. Working well too, according to Zach Bush’s efforts in these matters, to mention just one of many trail-blazers engaged in the work. And I can see Mam Gaia eventually evolving new micro-children of her brood, which will eat and transmute radio-nuclides. The possibility has been raised seriously, though I don’t know any postulated examples of that yet.

I’d offer you a bullion bet that there will be no Moon or Mars colonies set up by Earthlings, nor any asteroid mining, except that we’d have to escrow the stakes over several incarnations, before it had become unmistakably clear that these were always sci-fi fantasies, which physical realities here on Earth were never going to support. I imagine that in a few generations from now it will have become unarguably clear that our decline away from hitech industrial society - permanently, due to lack of essential and non-substitutable resources that we have blown away - is now a non-negotiable part of our future. Without those resources, no physical vehicles will have the essential physical means to leave Earth to try to harvest those resources in bulk elsewhere in the Solar System. (That still leaves all the possibilities of non-physical travel, to anywhere at all in our mind-constructs of time and space, which shamans and other psychics have been doing since time out of mind, of course; but without carrying heavy loads of radioactive materials to throw at the Sun, or loads of asteroid to bring back to Earth, neither of which ideas any shaman would ever be insanely irreverent enough to attempt…)

Meanwhile, far from being a fantasy, a Russian nuclear expert is suggesting that there is a new technology in actual development right now in Russia which solves the radioactive waste problem, by using it up for power generation, till none is left. I’ve no idea whether anything will come of that, but I’m sufficiently impressed by Orlov’s hard-nosed savvy and his professional expertise, and by Russia’s very obvious tech-development energy and inventiveness, as currently demonstrated, to wait and see whether there’s anything in it, in the hope that there is.

I don’t get what Toyah Wilcox has to do with any of this. A singer/musician, as I understand. A sacred art, for which she’s to be respected; but - er - physics? The laws of thermodynamics? Basic industrial resources? Is music relevant to any of this?

Perhaps she can sing trilithium crystals into existence, to overcome our complete lack of any - actually existing - adequate energy sources to power our space-exploration daydreams?

[KarenEliot]

I am reading a wildly unlikely but very entertaining book called Closer Encounters. The author suggests that time travellers from Earth, who came here from Mars (a nuclear war having rendered that planet uninhabitable), fly their Foo Fighters through cracks in time from underground/undersea bases, and they will gradually be revealing their true agenda soon. These ‘Nordics’ actually built the moon, you see, as a way to stabilise the biosphere and generate life. The moon is mainly hollow, what’s more.

These devas mainly use the Greys (which are actually droids that they control) as a kind of lumpenproletariat.

I’m not sure I understood the propulsion technique they’re using but none of this solid fuel rocketry bobbins.

[GKH]

I believe there are consciousnesses in “space” but not the kind the “Alien Astronaut Theorists” imagine, however, having said that a recent “Ancient Aliens” episode contained much “conventionalists” dismiss and was very worth watching (esp. re: Ayurvedic medicine and the technology of the Indus/Saraswati culture that spawned the “Vedas” et.al), watch on “Blaze”.

[GKH]

“I’d offer you a bullion bet that there will be no Moon or Mars colonies set up by Earthlings, nor any asteroid mining, except that we’d have to escrow the stakes over several incarnations, before it had become unmistakably clear that these were always sci-fi fantasies, which physical realities here on Earth were never going to support.” Don’t have much bullion Rhis, but I’ll bet you what I can afford (a Henry of golden#!); “God created Arrakis to train the faithful” Dune, Frank Herbert.
I do, however, agree that if we are to succeed with any of these controversial endeavours we needs must do so “nuclear free”!

P.S Listen to the track (see YouTube link)! #Hypertime #Astrotometry

Nb. Our understanding of science clearly clashes here, the notion of being able to destroy nuclear trash on-planet is errant nonsense (to me), such being a clear contradiction of physical realities.

[RhisiartGwilym]

Crikey G, I never realised you were professionally competent in nuclear physics!

[GKH]

Quantum applies Rhis…you need to speak to Gaia…I believe the risk parameters can be calculated (don’t ask me to do it though), #Hypertime #Astrotometry…

[RhisiartGwilym]

? [plus some other verbiage that the board wants me to add.]

[KarenEliot]

I will give it a try thanks @GKH. There’s certainly a lot of magical stuff in, for example, the Diamond Sutra and even some of the Pali canon. Bilocation and unpowered flight to name just a few. I’m less familiar with the Vedic tradition but the roots are broadly the same.

About 60% thru the book now and been highlighting plenty of interesting-sounding citations.

[RhisiartGwilym]

The old shamans knew a lot about these ‘miracles’. Their collected wisdom helps me to be more confident about the psi-events that I’ve actually witnessed myself, such as levitation and materialisation. Weird the way our confidence in these memories wilts slowly, unless periodically reinforced. Psi-avoidance is a deep-set urge in absolutely everyone, it seems. For some reason, close encounters with unmistakable psi really shake us up…

Fwiw, I remain reasonably optimistic that many of the ‘intractable’ problems that we’ve worked up for ourselves on planet Earth will be resolved eventually by some serious applications of practical psi: a new flowering of competent shamanic methods, especially as techie-techie industrial civ. founders.

I have near-zero confidence that any further techie-techie proposed ‘solutions’ will come to anything - though I still wait with interest to see what’s cooking in Russia. More than one interesting piece of techno-thaumaturgy, it seems, what with the nuclide-eating nuclear tech that’s apparently in development there, plus their current - obviously rather confident - ultimatum to the staggering Anglozionist empire. Be fascinating to see what happens there, now.

[GKH]

“Psi-avoidance is a deep-set urge in absolutely everyone, it seems. For some reason, close encounters with unmistakable psi really shake us up…” They are qualitatively different experiences, I had been (partially), exposed to such from an early age so perhaps grew-into the craft rather more easily than some, nevertheless I have never recovered from being (more or less), “drafted” into the “frontline” at eighteen (not nananana-nineteen -I was born in '66-), following only a year or two of actually trying to practice “the craft”! I still hesitate to talk about it to anyone (I’ll maybe write you a full dramatic description of the event at some point), suffice to say there were two witnesses (we were otherwise alone with the experience), to me releasing what I can only describe as a “Jinn” from a silver casket (the witch who put it there having bequeathed the two 16c shepherd’s cottages to her son and daughter).

G

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byCCmBwRjGw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqco-fcY_aA