|
There appears to be some confusion over the purpose of the
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) mentioned in the above article.
The purpose of the CDM was not to define what technologies
could be used by an industrialised country to reduce its Greenhouse Gas
Emissions. Those countries that continue to use Nuclear Power (rather than
to have entered a progressive phaseout e.g. Germany, although I'm not convinced
that the UK has not entered this phase while there is no government support for
new power stations) will continue to reap the benefit when calculating
their emissions. Rather the purpose of the CDM was to allow
industrialised nations (so called Annexe B countries) to gain a credit for
emission reductions achieved in another country through investing in
"clean, renewable, sustainable energy sources in the other (developing
country). This was supposed to be a win-win situation. There would
be investment, technology transfer and local environmental benefits for the
developing country and a Certified Emission Credit (CER), which could be used
to against their Kyoto reduction target, for the industrialised
country.
This could have for example allowed
Germany to fund the completion of the remaining unit at Angra (unit 3?) and gain
a CER to be used to offset against their own emissions target.
Unfortunately for the nuclear industry this was seen as an opportunity for
"nuclear countries" to export their dangerous, polluting, expensive
etc.(Greenpeace et al) technology to developing countries under the pretence
that they were improving the environment.
I'm not surprised at the outcome, given the number of active
anti-nuclear governments attempting to push the Kyoto Agreement ( with the more
pro-nuclear governments being less supportive of the overall policy). It does
however demonstrate that even though the global emissions would much higher, and
the cuts would have to go much deeper if nuclear power did not exist
environmentalist will remain staunchly anti-nuclear.
The only surprise is that Canada did not stand by it's long
standing posistion on exporting nuclear power to developing countries (8 units
in total to Argentina, Romania, South Korea and China), and seek to increase its
exports and use these to off set its own emissions.
regards
Julian Ginniver
|