Is a “Just Transition” away from fossil fuels towards a decarbonized energy system technology specific? The basket of available & scalable technologies: Wind, Solar & Nuclear each come with characteristics that determine wages, levels of unionization & security of employment.🧵1/
When #GreenNewDealers imagine the jobs of a clean energy transition, they often nostalgically harken back to the post war era when generations of blue collar workers could support families on a single income in a unionized workplace & afford to send their kids to college. 2/
This was the reality of many blue collar jobs before the neoliberal era crushed the labour movement. As a result, much of Western manufacturing was offshored, leading to a cut throat race to the bottom for wages & working conditions. 3/
With the availability of new hydroelectric and geothermal sites limited by geography, we are left with wind, solar & nuclear as the potentially scalable tools for a clean energy transition. We must examine their characteristics & potential of delivering a just transition. 4/
New Left thinkers, like @SethDKlein, imagine a return to world war two levels of western manufacturing & production, to churn out the millions of solar panels & hundreds of thousands of wind turbines needed to achieve a net zero future. 5/
The reality is that there is no significant Western manufacturing sector for wind & solar. Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to compete with countries like China and Vietnam precisely because of their low labour standards & dirt cheap coal powered electricity. 6/
Wind & solar jobs in North America largely consist of low skilled labour, installing foreign made solar panels to frames & erecting “offshored” wind turbines. The jobs consist almost entirely of installation and decommissioning every 20-30 years. 7/
Employment is therefore not tied to a local community. Workers instead move from one facility to another unable to anchor their families in a stable community. There are no parking lots outside of a wind or solar farm. These are the energy worker equivalent of “Carnie” jobs. 8/
Progressives can fantasize all they like, but low skilled, transient labour with a foreign supply chain cannot negotiate itself the dignified wages and secure employment that they aspire to as part of a just transition. 9/
The union movement wins concessions through the threat of withholding its labour. Workerless facilities like wind & solar farms do not offer that opportunity. Unfortunately, a transition to wind & solar is just another race to the bottom for western energy workers. 10/
In addition, as progressives that purport to care about international human rights, we should be concerned about a just transition for workers internationally. There are credible allegations of forced labour within the solar supply chain. 11/
Forty percent of the world's polysilicon, the base ingredient for solar panels, comes from western China where a dystopian security state imprisons & exploits the labour of a significant portion of the Uyghur ethnic majority. 12/
In contrast, where I live in Canada. CANDU nuclear with its proven track record of deep decarbonisation, is from uranium mine to power plant 96% made in Canada mostly by unionized labour. 13/
As a society, every dollar we spend on CANDU stays within the Canadian economy supporting permanent, intergenerational jobs tied to prosperous local communities. 14/
In contrast to wind & solar facilities, nuclear plants provide high paying, intergenerational skilled jobs rooted in a local community. Nuclear jobs are one of the last bastions of industrial work the Green New Dealers allude to in their call for a #justtransition. 15/
Because nuclear requires large local workforces of highly skilled labour for construction and operation it is not vulnerable to offshoring. Supply chains are localized and money invested in the sector remains in country and helps local communities to prosper. 16/
In Canada, nuclear workers provided 90% of the energy required for the Ontario coal phaseout, North America’s greatest greenhouse gas reduction. Ccoal workers were seamlessly transitioned into high quality jobs in nuclear facilities, a textbook template for a just transition.17/
It's time that Green New Dealers re-examine their allegiance to the 300 billion/year largely privatized wind & solar industry & reconsider publicly owned nuclear as the deep decarbonization technology that offers fossil fuel workers the best opportunity for just transition. 18/
Tritiated water behaves just like H2O and is excreted from the body quickly with a biological half life of 3.5 days. For this reason it doesn’t bioaccumulate up the food chain and diffuses and dilutes rapidly in lakes and oceans.
It may come as a shock to some journalists but the natural world, including our lakes and oceans, are naturally radioactive thanks to cosmic rays and the decay of naturally occurring radionuclides like Potassium 40.
Its all doom and gloom for Nuclear in @BentFlyvbjerg's new book "How Big Things Get Done"
But did he miss some nuance when conflating the Korean/UAE collaboration which will have delivered four 1400MW reactors in 12 yrs with the unfolding fiasco of Vogtle 1/
In the book @BentFlyvbjerg and @dgardner contrast the Guggenheim museum and the Sydney Opera house to draw important lessons from two very cutting edge buildings. 2/
The Guggenheim is the product of meticulous iterative planning by a mature dreamteam of architects & engineers who routinely pull off complex projects on budget/on time, the Opera House a couple of sketches by an inexperienced architect which balooned into a budgetary fiasco 3/
Unshielded & fresh out of the reactor exposure for seconds would result in certain death.
But somehow there has not been a single documented death from storing civilian nuclear waste. Ever.
Here's what you need to know: a 🧵
We make dangerous things, like nuclear waste, safe.
Consider civil aviation.
In 2019, 4.5 billion passengers took 42 million flights worldwide flying 900km/hr at 30,000 feet in thin skinned, pressurized aircraft often over vast oceans.
There were only 289 fatalities.
The truth is that it's a lot easier to handle and store nuclear waste than to meticulously maintain an airliner which has over 10,000 mission critical moving parts.
This Hydrogen Alliance is coming under increasing scrutiny due to allegations of a conflict of interest arising out of the Premier of Newfoundland, Andrew Furey's luxury trip to a lodge owned by Canadian billionaire John Risley this summer. 2/
Risley happens to be one of the principal investors in a project called Nujio’qonik, one of three projects competing to be part of the Canada German Hydrogen Alliance alongside EverWind Fuels in Nova Scotia and the Port of Belledune project in New Brunswick. 3/
Greta called on Germany not to close its nuclear as it pivots back to coal.
Wilkinson claims that gas is not used for electricity generation in Ger. This is factually incorrect. 1/
Here is Germany’s electricity generation by source in 2021. Gas was a significant part of their electricity. EU Natural Gas reached an all time high of 345 euro/MWh on the TTF in March of 2022 which has driven even more coal burning as a way to ration gas use on the grid. 2/
Germany despite a 550 billion euro wind & solar dominant “energy transition” used Coal as its #1 source of electricity in 2021 (BEFORE PUTIN’s INVASION)
Ontario by contrast used nuclear to phaseout coal.
As doctors we explain the risks & benefits of treatment plans on a daily basis. The risk/benefit profile of nuclear energy is clear. Nuclear is extremely safe, our lowest CO2 energy source & is essential to reaching our climate goals. 1/
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many Americans felt that flying was too risky and started driving instead. 2/
An analysis by the U.S. Department of Transportation revealed a significant rise in fatal crashes in the final three months of 2001: an extra 353 deaths compared to previous years due to increased traffic on the roads. 3/