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Caselist.CitesClass[15]

Cites

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1		-Bans on nuclear power cause a shift to coal – renewables can’t keep up. Abernathy 15
2		-Mark Abernethy 15 speechwriter, ghostwriter, journalist and author. Born in New Zealand, he has lived in Australia for most of his adult life. A former editor at Australian Penthouse magazine, he has also written for the Australian Financial Review, “Solar, wind, nuclear power on the rise, but coal still has its place”, Financial Review, 30 Nov 2015,
3		-The future challenge is producing reliable power with low carbon emissions, as the population increases and people and continue to live in electricity-hungry cities.¶ Getting the future energy equation right is a moving target. The International Energy Agency forecasts an 80 per cent increase in world electricity demand to 2040, with an increase in total energy demand (gas, coal, oil, renewables) of 37 per cent by 2040. And even with a massive push for renewables, 75 per cent of the energy used globally will be still be the hydrocarbons of oil, gas and coal, which produce the highest carbon emissions.¶ ¶ The Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE) forecasts Australian energy usage to grow 42 per cent to 2050, with electricity generation growing 30 per cent over the same period. But renewables such as solar and wind will not take over the generation task. Coal's share of total electricity generation will remain stable at about 65 per cent to 2050, according to BREE. And wind and solar currently only comprise 20 per cent of Australia's renewables generation: the bulk is from biomass, in particular from the sugar and timber industries.¶ Observing the patterns of demand is the job of Matt Zema, chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator. He says total electricity usage in 2009 was about 200,000 gigawatt hours, and it has shrunk to 180,000 gwh. We are not expected to return to 2009 levels until at least 2020, and in 2035 the total won't rise much past 220,000.¶ ¶ He says the challenge is to forecast power patterns based on behaviour rather than the old certainties of demand and load.¶ ¶ "Since 2005 we've seen a move to decentralised power generation," Zema says. "We're moving away from huge, centralised power stations that were built from the 1960s onward and now we move into a new phase."¶ ¶ Solar only just begun¶ ¶ Zema says the rise of solar PV panels on roofs has only just begun because the arrival of cheap and effective battery storage will increase the uptake and the amount of power generated and used, from rooftops.¶ ¶ "A few years ago, storage was something happening in 10 years, perhaps. Now we can see that affordable storage is three to five years away. Technology will change our future energy usage faster than other factors.'¶ ¶ Zema says the current forecasts are that coal will continue to provide most electrical power in Australia in 2040, but that can't account for technology and consumer behaviour. This is because coal is Australia's cheapest and most "dispatchable" power source, but storage technology might make some renewables dispatchable too.¶ ¶ By 2035, AEMO forecasts that South Australia's PV rooftop panels will account for 28 per cent of underlying residential and commercial consumption, and in Queensland it will be just over 20 per cent coming from PV. When effective storage is added, Zema says, it is consumer behaviour that drives the energy market, not the old metrics of demand and load.¶ ¶ In South Australia, by the end of 2025, PV users could be net generators to the grid, at certain times, Zema says, which means rooftop PV will be sufficient, on some days, to meet the underlying consumption of the residential, commercial and industrial sectors during the middle of the day.¶ ¶ Unhitching from coal as a future energy source is directly reliant on plans for base-load power, says Ben Heard, a director at ThinkClimate Consulting. He says if you take out the fluctuations and spikes of power usage and the daily peaks and seasonal ups and downs, you end up with a base of daily and annual power demand that must always be available.¶ ¶ "When you build a power supply, you have the base-load at the foundation," says Heard, also a doctoral candidate at University of Adelaide. "You want this to be available 24/7 and so you use the cheapest and most reliable way of doing it. And in Australia, that's coal-fired generation."¶ ¶ Nuclear tech under consideration¶ ¶ The other reliable base-load technology is nuclear, a technology now being actively considered for South Australia.
4		-This is empirically verified and leads to millions of deaths—even if we can use renewables, we simply won’t, Japan proves.
5		-David Ropeik 16 (instructor in the Environmental Studies Program of the Harvard Extension School, a consultant in risk communication, and author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.) , The dangers of radiophobia, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2016
6		-Most directly, it sickens and fossil fuels kills by increasing air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. In the wake of Fukushima, Japan closed more than 50 nuclear power plants, which to that point had been providing 25 percent of the nation’s energy. The US Energy Information Agency reports that to replace that power, coal use in Japan increased 25 percent, and the use of oil for electric power generation doubled (US Energy Information Agency 2015). (Renewable energy – from sources like solar and wind power – increased just two percent.) Even though Japan is slowly edging toward reopening its nuclear fleet, restarting many plants will be difficult because of excessively stringent new safety rules. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that “if the plans all come to fruition, Japan’s coal-fired power capacity would increase to around 47 gigawatts over the next decade or so, up 21 percent from the time right before the Fukushima accident” (Iwata 2014). Burning coal and oil produces fine particulate air pollution, which the WHO calls “the greatest environmental risk to health – causing more than three million premature deaths worldwide every year.” (Natural gas, the use of which also increased in Japan, is mostly sulfur-free and does not produce fine particles.) Though the increased morbidity and mortality from particulate pollution in post-Fukushima Japan has not been quantified, it is inarguable that increased use of fossil fuels because of fear of nuclear power will sicken or kill thousands of people if it hasn’t already.
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8		-Coal causes huge harms and environmental racism—turns case.. GEP 15, “Environmental Racism in America: An Overview of the Environmental Justice Movement and the Role of Race in Environmental Policies”, The Goldman Environmental Press, 24 Jun 2015,
9		-The problem of racial profiling in America relates to more than just police brutality and the senseless acts of violence that have recently captured the national spotlight. Race also plays a determining role in environmental policies regarding land use, zoning and regulations. As a result, African American, Latino, indigenous and low-income communities are more likely to live next to a coal-fired power plant, landfill, refinery or other highly polluting facility. These communities bear a disproportionate burden of toxic contamination as a result of pollution in and around their neighborhoods. Moreover, these communities have historically had a diminished response capacity to fight back against such policies. A recent report from the NAACP entitled “Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People,” found that among the nearly six million Americans living within three miles of a coal plant, 39 are people of color – a figure that is higher than the 36 proportion of people of color in the total US population. The report also found that 78 of all African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal fired power plant. In an interview for Yale Environment 360, Jacqueline Patterson, the Environmental and Climate Justice Director for the NAACP commented on the disproportionate burden faced by communities of color:“An African American child is three times more likely to go into the emergency room for an asthma attack than a white child, and twice as likely to die from asthma attacks as a white child. African Americans are more likely to die from lung disease, but less likely to smoke. When we did a road tour to visit the communities that were impacted by coal pollution, we found many anecdotal stories of people saying, yes, my husband, my father, my wife died of lung cancer and never smoked a day in her life. And these are people who are living within three miles of the coal-fired power plants we visited.”
10		-Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Hvistendahl 07
11		-Mara Hvistendahl 7 American writer. Her book Unnatural Selection was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction “Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste”, Scientific American, 13 Dec 2007,
12		-Over the past few decades, however, a series of studies has called these stereotypes into question. Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy. * See Editor's Note at end ofpage 2 At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels. Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas. In a 1978 paper for Science, J. P. McBride at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and his colleagues looked at the uranium and thorium content of fly ash from coal-fired power plants in Tennessee and Alabama. To answer the question of just how harmful leaching could be, the scientists estimated radiation exposure around the coal plants and compared it with exposure levels around boiling-water reactor and pressurized-water nuclear power plants. The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants. McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors. Dana Christensen, associate lab director for energy and engineering at ORNL, says that health risks from radiation in coal by-products are low. "Other risks like being hit by lightning," he adds, "are three or four times greater than radiation-induced health effects from coal plants." And McBride and his co-authors emphasize that other products of coal power, like emissions of acid rain–producing sulfur dioxide and smog-forming nitrous oxide, pose greater health risks than radiation.

EntryDate

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1		-2016-10-15 10:36:49.0

Judge

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1		-Demarcus Powell

Opponent

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1		-Harvard-Westlake IP

ParentRound

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1		-13

Round

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1		-1

Team

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1		-Strake Jesuit Li Neg

Title

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1		-SO - Coal DA

Tournament

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1		-St Marks