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Published by the Kingston Greens
GREEN LIGHT KINGSTON #227 |
Issue #227
Monday, March 01, 2010 |
Printed in cyberspace on recycled electrons
Compiled and edited using 100% clean, renewable power (wind and low-impact hydro) from Bullfrog Power.
To publicise future events, corrections and/or if you have comments, please email Green Light Kingston:
We welcome new submissions!
Quote of the Week:
The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
- Henry Beston, naturalist and author (1888-1968)
In This Issue:
| 1. Website of the Week | |
| 2. Cartoon | |
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| 3. Current Events | |
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| 4. Coming Events | |
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| 5. Elsewhere Events | |
| 6. Community Action | |
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| 7. Worth Reading | |
| 8. Community Notices | |
| 9. Wanted! | |
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| 10. Local Organic Produce | |
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1. Website of the Week
| New! Storms Of My Grandchildren |
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The website for James Hansen's new book. Timely, given the climate change skepticism taking hold in the popular media.
http://www.stormsofmygrandchildren.com/ |
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2. Cartoon
3. Current Events
| New! Sanctity of Seed |
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010 7:00 PM
Public Screening Wednesday, March 10th 7 - 9 p.m. Kingston Public Library A Val Westgate film about the unique partnership between local seed savers Carol & Robert Mouck and the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul. Copies will be available by donation Suggested donation of $40 to cover the cost of production In keeping with the spirit of the Sisters of Providence, the suggested donation can be adjusted as required. |
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4. Coming Events
5. Elsewhere Events
| GPC Campaign Workshop |
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20 March 2010 - 10:30am - 4:30pm
A training event hosted by the Kitchener-Waterloo GPC EDA and the University of Waterloo Campus Greens, March 20, at the University of Waterloo (PAS Building). Join us for talks and workshops that will help candidates, campaign teams, volunteers and members talk about the Green Economy. Featured speakers and facilitators include the Leader of the Green Party of Ontario, the Senior Advisor to the GPC, the Chair of the national Campaign Committee, four members of Shadow Cabinet, and a professional videographer. Keynote I: Ralph Benmergui Workshops I: Communicating Economic Policy (Ralph Benmergui) Poverty Relief and the Green Economy (Rebecca Harrison-White) Economy and Environment (Cathy MacLellan) Lunch and Mock All-Candidates meeting on the economy (Kathy Acheson, moderator) Workshops II: Prosperity With or Without Growth (Ard Van Leeuwen) Canada's Youth and the Green Economy (Griffin Carpenter) Your 15 Seconds of Fame: Presenting the Green Economy in the Media (Peter Shannon) Keynote II: Mike Schreiner 10:30-4:30, March 20th, 2010: $25 regular, $12 student and unwaged (includes lunch) Register by March 4th: ceo@kwgpc.ca or according to instructions on attached form. |
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6. Community Action
7. Worth Reading
| New! Norwegian Company Develops World’s Largest Wind Turbine |
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March 1st, 2010 As fossil fuels continue to diminish and climate change poses an ever-increasing threat, scientists around the world are searching for new and more efficient methods of generating energy. Wind energy is one of the more promising alternative energy sources and Norwegian scientists are currently in the development stages of what promises to be the world’s largest wind turbine. As if creating the biggest wind turbine in the world was not enough, it also floats. Current plans for the world’s largest wind turbine have the machine standing 533 feet tall. The proposed rotor diameter of this machine is 475 feet. Obviously, these gargantuan dimensions make it difficult to imagine many places able to accommodate such a device. Fortunately, the floating design makes the turbine suitable for open ocean use. In addition to being the world’s largest wind turbine, the proposed machine (which is to be built by the Norwegian company Sway), will also be the most powerful. A single floating turbine will be able to generate 10-megawatts to power more than 2,000 homes. These figures make this proposed new design at least three times more powerful than the existing wind turbines in use today. The floating design gives this generator a huge advantage over other wind-power generators because the device can be placed in deeper water. The machine’s tower is a floating pole filled with ballast beneath the ocean’s surface. This gives the world’s largest wind turbine a low center of gravity, which prevents tipping. The generator is anchored to the sea floor with a single pipe and a suction anchor. This design allows the turbine to tilt 5-8 degrees as well as rotate freely to generate power from any wind direction. Sway plans on installing the device in 2011. The prototype of this machine will cost an estimated $67.5 million dollars. Sway plans on testing the design on land first in Oeygarden, Southwestern Norway. If the design is successful, Sway will continue testing seafaring prototypes. Currently, Norway is one of the world’s top oil and gas producers. Despite this fact, Norway generates most of its own power from hydroelectric plants. Norway’s dedication to designing and building the world’s largest wind turbine showcases the countries commitment to alternative energy, and serves to further illustrate how important this cause actually is. If the world’s largest wind turbine is a success, it will mark a major stride in humanity’s quest to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/worlds-largest-wind-turbine/ |
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| New! A French Documentary On Nuclear Waste |
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By Mycle Schneider on February 22, 2010 11:10 AM
From http://www.fissilematerials.org/blog/2010/02/a_french_documentary_on_n.html On 20 February 2010 Greenpeace issued a call for a moratorium on shipments of reprocessed uranium from France to Russia. Activists had been repeatedly blocking rail shipments of the material from the La Hague reprocessing plant to Cherbourg port. Parliamentary enquiry, government statements, Greenpeace actions are a few of the stunning consequences of a 100-minutes TV documentary Déchets - Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire (Waste - The Nuclear Nightmare) broadcast by the Franco-German station ARTE for the first time on 13 October 2009 and re-broadcast by various television stations since. The documentary presents the results of an investigation into nuclear waste management in the US, Russia, Germany and France. The authors Eric Guéret and Laure Noualhat were often accompanied by technicians of the French independent radiation-monitoring lab CRIIRAD (http://www.criirad.org/ ). They detected and measured radiation in many places where they went, from the Columbia river close to the US nuclear weapons lab in Hanford to the Soviet counterpart Mayak in the Urals. Some of the most remarkable scenes include a Geiger counter that goes crazy under a publicly accessible bridge over the Techa river and a scene outside the French "plutonium factory" called reprocessing plant at La Hague. In the latter case a spokesman for operator AREVA, when asked about radiation levels in the fields outside the plant, stated after a long hesitation that he would not call this contamination, but "absence of impact" before stumbling: "Well, we'll redo that one..." However, remarkably enough, the largest impact had a simple mass calculation that the journalists presented. Constantly facing the AREVA PR that states that 96% of the nuclear materials are "recycled" through the reprocessing scheme, the reporters inquired where the recovered uranium, roughly 95% of the mass of spent fuel, does end up. In fact, AREVA has been sending most of the reprocessed uranium (23,000 tons were still stored in France at the end of 2008), to Russia officially for re-enrichment. In fact, even if all of that uranium had indeed been re-enriched, which is not the case, over 90% of the mass remains in Russia as enrichment tails. This material is waste, because there is absolutely no economic incentive to re-enrich it, in particular considering the hundreds of thousands of tons of "clean", first generation enrichment tails that are stored in Russia and in the other major enrichment countries, including in France (close to 260,000 tons at two sites). The message that AREVA's "recycling" ratio had to be corrected from 95% to less than 10% of the original mass send a shockwave through the French political landscape. The minister of Environment asked for clarifications and the parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological Option Assessment (OPECST) organized public hearings. During the hearings EDF has admitted that, apart from a period of about five years, 100% of the reprocessed uranium had been sent to Russia. Between 2000 and approximately 2005 (the EDF representative was not certain) reprocessed uranium was sent to URENCO's Dutch plant that can re-enrich reprocessed uranium (contrary to URENCO's UK and German plants). EDF signed a contract with AREVA to use part of the Georges-Besse-2 plant, currently under construction, to enrich reprocessed uranium for a period of about 10 years starting in 2013. The French Nuclear Safety Authority ASN announced that by the end 2010 it will have finished studies into the potential requalification of reprocessed uranium as waste. The full version of the film "Déchets - Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire", by Eric Guéret and Laure Noualhat (in French and German with English subtitles) is available online. ARTE-Editions has also published a 210-page book by Laure Noualhat with the same title (in French). |
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| New! Space-based solar energy |
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Generating solar energy in space stations and beaming it down to earth is a wacky idea, but it’s also an interesting one, and not just for the obvious reasons (outer space, energy beams, etc). To explain why, I need to make a digression into some energy facts and figures.
Solar energy enthusiasts are fond of pointing out that enough energy from the sun hits the earth every hour to fill humanity’s needs for a full year. This is meant to sound very impressive, but really it’s cause for at least a little bit of concern. In the long term, the amount of solar energy reaching the earth’s surface represents the maximum amount of energy available to humankind. If we flip around the statistic about the amount of energy that reaches the earth in an hour, we see that the sun is sending us roughly 8,000 times the amount of energy we presently consume. That seems like a lot! But how much of it can we actually make use of? Only 30% of the earth is covered in land. And let’s say that, through dedicated effort, we’re able to cover 5% of our land with solar panels. And maybe those solar panels covert 20% of the light that hits them into electricity. Of course, things aren’t static on the demand side. By 2050, the earth will contain 50% more people. And those people will be much wealthier than they are today, so they might use, on average, double the amount of energy we do now. Multiply this all through, and the sun is only sending us 8 times the amount of energy we need to keep the human population fat and happy. That still gives us some headroom, but not a lot. And this analysis fails to take into account that electricity usually needs to be produced close to where it’s consumed, so the pressures on land use in densely populated areas could be enormous. A recent article in the New York Times comes at the issue from the opposite direction, estimating the area needed for energy production based on the energy density of various types of renewable power technologies. It’s an interesting and readable article, so go read it, but the punchline is roughly similar to my analysis above: For illustration, imagine getting one-third of that energy from wind, one-third from desert solar power and one-third from nuclear power… If a country with the size and population of Britain — 61 million people — adopted that mix, the land area occupied by wind farms would be nearly 10 percent of the country, or roughly the size of Wales. The area occupied by desert solar power stations — in the case of Britain, they would have to be connected by long-distance power lines — would be five times the size of London. The 50 nuclear power stations required would occupy a more modest 50 square kilometers. The effort required for a plan like that is very large, but imaginable. Countries that claim to be serious about creating an alternative energy future need to choose a plan, stop arguing and get building. The assumptions underlying both analyses may be significantly off, but the basic message is sound: powering ourselves with renewable energy is doable, but it’s also a really big undertaking that will push against some tricky constraints. (Related message: energy efficiency is really, really important.) Space-based solar energy may help to sidestep some of these land-use constraints. Such schemes, of course, face their own daunting engineering challenges, but one can imagine a far future in which such exotic forms of power generation become an important part of the mix. Recently a California company signed a contract with PG&E to deliver space-based power by 2016. And Japan just announced an initiative to build a 1-gigawatt plant in space by the 2030s. Much more on the benefits and challenges of the technology is available here. The inevitable Joe Romm takedown of the idea is here. I suppose I should add the obligatory caveat that most highly speculative, far-off technologies don’t pan out. In other words: you’ll be waiting a long time for that jetpack. http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/space-based-solar-energy |
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| New! Efficient Battery Chargers |
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http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=find_a_product.showProductGroup&pgw_code=BCH |
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8. Community Notices
| New! Market Gardening Workshop |
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Do you dream of starting a CSA or a market garden? This workshop will look at planting techniques and schedules, equipment, and market considerations. Limited enrollment to allow lots of time for questions. Saturday March 6 from 10-2, light lunch included. Cost $100 per person. For information contact Janette Haase at or 613-376-9849
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| Frontenac Farmer's Market |
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The Frontenac Farmers' Market is re-opening on February 13th at the
Lions' Club hall in Verona. A good variety of vendors are there to welcome you and showcase their products. We have farm products, preserves, local cheeses, crafts, bakery and ready cooked items. Open from 9 to 12 a.m. on Saturdays, indoors, at the Lions' Club in Verona. Watch for the signs on highway 38. Buy local, encourage local producers! |
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| Join the Kingston Greens |
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Free newsletter, articles, talks etc.
Get involved in community actions (for example: Lobbying Council for a Ban
on the Cosmetic use of Pesticides, Fighting Urban Development on
Conservation Land, Survey on Green Issues that affect Kingstonians, Election
Canvassing etc.). Green momentum is building in Kingston. Come out and help us bring a sustainable future to Kingston! Membership to Kingston Greens is free but we encourage membership to the Green Party of Ontario ($10) and the Green Party of Canada ($10). Remember: You can get up to 75% of your donation to the Kingston Greens back at tax time! The current government will help you subsidize the greening of their own non-Green policies! Give generously and you'll receive a generous dividend in return: a 75% tax credit and more progressive government. Please send your cheque made to: KINGSTON GREENS (please specify Provincial or Federal membership on your cheque. Unfortunately, separate cheques are required for each.) - P.O. Box 1691, Kingston ON, K7L 5J6 More info: 384-8504 or ( |
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9. Wanted!
10. Local Organic Produce