Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[17]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[18]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[17]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-11-14 05:18:28.317
	1	+2016-11-14 05:18:28.0

Caselist.CitesClass[18]

Cites

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	1	+Nuclear is key to stability of warming and aff prevents this from happening
	2	+Waldman ‘15: - Susanne, PhD in Risk Communication at Carleton University (“Why we Need Nuclear Power to Save the Environment” http://energyforhumanity.org/climate-energy/need-nuclear-power-save-environment/)
	3	+The idea we might need nuclear power to save the environment may have seen farfetched thirty years ago, at the height of the anti-nuclear movement. But it’s an idea that more and more scientists of all stripes as well as energy experts and even environmentalists are coming to share. Last month, 75 biodiversity scientists signed an open letter imploring the environmental and conservation communities to rethink “idealistic” opposition to nuclear energy, given the threats to global ecosystems set in motion by climate change. This open letter follows in the wake of another published a year ago in the New York Times by climate scientists with a similar message: “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.” These scientists who study the earth and the life on it are concerned it is too risky to rely solely on wind, solar and other so-called “green” power to replace fossil fuels, which are still the fastest growing energy sources by a long shot. As these scientists point out, renewable power sources would require enormous amounts of land, materials, and money to meet the world’s current and growing energy needs. Wind and solar power are especially problematic because they are intermittent and can’t be dispatched to match demand. While the quest is on for grid storage options, there has not yet been a significant storage breakthrough, and any contribution it ends up making may only be modest. In the meantime other power sources that can run full time are required to take up the slack. Options for doing so are limited to fossil fuels, biomass that is comparatively bulky and limited in scale, hydro power that is largely tapped out in some places, and nuclear power. The advantage of nuclear power is there is no shortage of suitable sites and it is the most low-footprint form of power generation, taking into account land use, materials, carbon footprint, and fuel density. History has shown the most effective way to replace fossil fuel power over a 15-year-period is to build up nuclear. Ontarians, who rely on nuclear plants to deliver roughly three-fifths of our power every day, and have become coal-free, know this. So do people in France, where nuclear energy supplies around three quarters of power needs. The problem is that as a complex form of technology, nuclear plants are relatively pricey to build. Few have been constructed of late in the Western world, during an era of cheap coal and gas, liberalized energy markets, cash-strapped governments, and hyped-up renewables. Experienced work forces who can put them up quickly have become hard to assemble on the fly. These patterns can alter, though, as people come to recognize that once nuclear plants are up they can churn out steady carbon-free power for over half a century. Moreover the power they provide is typically quite cheap and not sensitive to fuel price volatility.
	4	+Nuclear power counter-acts greenhouse emissions
	5	+Biello ‘13: David, writes for the scientific American, Internally Cites James Hansen, Professor at Columbia University (“How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nuclear-power-can-stop-global-warming/)
	6	+In addition to reducing the risk of nuclear war, U.S. reactors have also been staving off another global challenge: climate change. The low-carbon electricity produced by such reactors provides 20 percent of the nation's power and, by the estimates of climate scientist James Hansen of Columbia University, avoided 64 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution. They also avoided spewing soot and other air pollution like coal-fired power plants do and thus have saved some 1.8 million lives. And that's why Hansen, among others, such as former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, thinks that nuclear power is a key energy technology to fend off catastrophic climate change. "We can't burn all these fossil fuels," Hansen told a group of reporters on December 3, noting that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source they will continue to be burned. "Coal is almost half the global emissions. If you replace these power plants with modern, safe nuclear reactors you could do a lot of pollution reduction quickly." Indeed, he has evidence: the speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and ‘80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid "dangerous" climate change in the estimation of Hansen and his co-authors in a recent paper in PLoS One. "On a global scale, it's hard to see how we could conceivably accomplish this without nuclear," added economist and co-author Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where Hansen works
	7	+Prohibition is empirically verified to cause a shift back to fossil fuels.
	8	+Chameides ‘12, Bill (Dean of Nicholas School of the Environment 2007-2014, Professor Emeritus at Duke University). "The Nuclear Power Conundrum." Nicholas School of the Environment. Duke University, 5 July 2012. Web. http3A2F2Fblogs.nicholas.duke.edu2Fthegreengrok2Fnuke-conundrum2F
	9	+What to do when your favorite nuclear plant gets shut down? One the option would be to just do without. Another option, and the one that Japan and California have chosen, is to replace the lost nuclear power with another source. And what do you suppose the source of choice is? Fossil fuels of course. The shutdown of Japan’s nuclear power plants corresponded with a more than doubling in the consumption of fuel oil and crude oil (primarily for electrical generation) in January 2012 compared to January 2011. There was also a 27 percent increase in liquid natural gas usage, although coal usage went down by eight percent. This, despite the fact that overall energy usage in Japan dropped sharply since the disaster. Overall, Japan’s carbon dioxide emissions for 2011 increased by about 2.4 percent. The cost of all that extra fossil fuels has been huge. For the first time in decades Japan has experienced a trade deficit. The economic damage caused by the shutdown of Japan’s nuclear fleet is perhaps an explanation for why the prime minister has decided to take a baby step back toward nuclear power with the restarting of the Ohi plant. California’s experience with the loss of San Onofre is like a miniature version of Japan’s. Since the San Onofre shut down, two retired natural gas units at Huntington Beach have been called back into service. So what to do if you are uneasy about nuclear power and worried about climate change? Many experts opine that you would be foolish to think we could immediately do away with both — you’ve only got two options: choose nuclear or choose fossil fuels. As Per Peterson, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New York Times: “We are really faced with a choice, at least in the next decade. Do we turn off nuclear plants first, or do we turn off coal plants first? You have to do one or the other.”
	10	+Fossil fuels increase CO2 emissions which are the strongest internal ink to warming.
	11	+NWF ‘15, National Wildlife Federation, 2015. “Global Warming is human caused”. National Wildlife Federation. https://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Threats-to-Wildlife/Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Human-Caused.aspx. RW
	12	+Scientists have concluded that most of the observed warming is very likely due to the burning of coal, oil, and gas. This conclusion is based on a detailed understanding of the atmospheric greenhouse effect and how human activities have been tweaking it. At the same time, other reasonable explanations, most notably changes in the Sun, have been ruled out. The atmospheric greenhouse effect naturally keeps our planet warm enough to be livable. Sunlight passes through the atmosphere. Light-colored surfaces, such as clouds or ice caps, radiate some heat back into space. But most of the incoming heat warms the planet's surface. The Earth then radiates some heat back into the atmosphere. Some of that heat is trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide (CO2). Human activity~-~-such as burning fossil fuels~-~-causes more greenhouse gases to build up in the atmosphere. As the atmosphere "thickens" with more greenhouse gases, more heat is held in. Fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas are high in carbon and, when burned, produce major amounts of carbon dioxide or CO2. A single gallon of gasoline, when burned, puts 19 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The role of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in warming the Earth's surface was first demonstrated by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius more than 100 years ago. Scientific data have since established that, for hundreds of thousands of years, changes in temperature have closely tracked with atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Since the Industrial Revolution, the burning of coal, oil and natural gas has emitted roughly 500 billion tons of CO2, about half of which remains in the atmosphere. This CO2 is the biggest factor responsible for recent warming trends.
	13	+And, prohibiting nuclear leads to fossil fuels tradeoff, which is substantially worse.
	14	+Kharecha ’13: A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen. April 2013. “Fossil Fuels Do Far More Harm Than Nuclear Power”. Web. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2013/04/15/fossil-fuels-do-far-more-harm-than-nuclear-power/.
	15	+To compute potential future effects, we started with projected nuclear energy supply for 2010-2050 from an assessment by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency that takes into account the effects of the Fukushima accident. We assumed that all of this projected nuclear energy is canceled and replaced entirely by energy from either coal or natural gas. We calculated that this nuclear phaseout scenario would lead to an average of 420,000 to 7 million deaths and 80–240 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent net GHG emissions globally. This emissions range corresponds to 16-48 of the “allowable” cumulative CO2 emissions between 2012-2050 if the world chooses to aim for a target atmospheric CO2 concentration of 350 parts per million by around the end of this century. In other words, projected nuclear power could reduce the CO2 mitigation burden for meeting this target by as much as 16–48.
	16	+Thus, Warming causes multiple scenarios for extinction
	17	+Hansen ‘12: James Hansen, professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and at Columbia’s Earth Institute, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “Game Over for the Climate,” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html
	18	+Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegrateion of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk. That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels. If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground. The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change. We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

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	1	+2016-11-14 05:18:29.796

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	1	+Sunset bhat Neg

Title

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	1	+SO - Warming DA

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