Let's Put Threatened Species on the Election Agenda

by Stephen Garnett, Charles Darwin University; Hugh Possingham, University of Queensland; and John Woinarski, Charles Darwin University

Bennett's Wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus rufogriseus) juvenile, Maria Island, Tasmania, Australia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Coalition will instate a Commissioner for Threatened Species should it form government, according to shadow environment minister Greg Hunt.

The minister says that, while management plans for threatened species exist, they are not being enacted thoroughly enough.

For many the announcement is the first sign of relief in a campaign, from both major parties, that has been almost devoid of positive environmental policies.

Most Australians do not want more of our species to become extinct, even if it does mean some constraints on development.

So, what needs to change if we’re to look after our threatened species properly?

The Coalition’s announcement also responds to messages underlying recommendations from a senate report on threatened species released last week - although a Commissioner was not explicitly recommended.

Out of the report’s 44 recommendations, five stand out.

The first is to bring the “official” roll-call of threatened species lists up-to-date.

Review after review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) have recommended that the lists be updated regularly. Over 80% of the species on the list were simply adopted from an old list prepared in the 1990s.

Some should not be there at all - in fact there is one bird on the list, the Roper River Scrub-robin - that never existed - it was almost certainly a fraud.

Other species on the list are now known to be common, not threatened, and drive both government regulators and industry to distraction. Because they are on the list, conditions have to be imposed on proposals that insist on conservation work for species that need no protection.

Worse still are the species that should be on the lists but aren’t. The pace of threatened species bureaucracy is not keeping up with our growing knowledge about threatened species.

Such unlisted threatened species live now in an administrative limbo in which they have no protection from development (or other factors).

While the existing vetting body (the Threatened Species Scientific Committee) does its level best to keep up with public nominations to get on the list, the process is hopelessly under-resourced and woefully slow.

The senate inquiry recommends that the process of adding or deleting species from the official list of threatened species should be expedited using the pool of talent and goodwill present in the wider community of experts.

The second major recommendation is for dedicated threatened species funding. A few years ago the Commonwealth began to emphasise a landscape approach to biodiversity conservation rather than funding many individual programs for particular threatened species.

This policy change was hoping to focus on the causes and broader picture of landscape dysfunction rather than on the symptoms (individual threatened species).

But the change led to abandonment of the essential management of individual threatened species and their threats, and has had some catastrophic consequences. As recognised by the senate inquiry, there needs to be a balanced portfolio of investment in both landscapes and species.

Our research suggests that A$10 million a year should secure all Australian birds from extinction. We estimate that dedicated funding of about A$100 million a year could prevent further extinctions of just about all Australian species.

The amounts are not unreasonable. Importantly most of the money would go into creating jobs in rural and remote areas where the threatened species live, strengthening local community economies and giving value to lands that are often useless for farming or other commercial use.

Also, threatened species investments are highly effective. A submission to the inquiry from BirdLife Australia listed a string of extraordinary successes in threatened species management in Australia.

We can turn things around and secure Australia’s natural heritage for the price of two cappuccinos per Australian per year. The latest success is the extraordinarily well-conceived and executed removal of rabbits and rodents from Macquarie Island, but there have been many others over the years.

The senate also recommends long-term funding be committed. AusAid now makes commitments to fund programs for eight years with potential to extend after reviews at four years.

Threatened species funding should adopt the same approach. It is inconceivable that the deep-rooted problems affecting many Australian threatened species can be remedied in the one to three-year projects typical of conservation grants.

The inevitable consequences of such ephemeral funding is chaotic project management, failure, frustration, waste and concern from auditors due to the poor return on investment. The management of threatened species is a long-term commitment.

The fourth key recommendation is to spend the money efficiently. Scattering the money to squeaky lobby groups and needy electorates will squander it. Australia leads the world in research on how best to allocate conservation funds.

The Commonwealth, through the National Environment Research Program, funds a centre led by one of us for this very purpose.

Research on cost-effective conservation allocation is already being followed by Tasmania, New South Wales and New Zealand. It is time for the Commonwealth to act on the findings of its own far-sighted research investments

Finally threatened species conservation needs proper research and planning. All successful conservation programs to date have been built on a good knowledge base. That then feeds into good planning. A random sample of recovery plans suggested that they fail as often as they succeed.

But the good ones, such as the South Coast Threatened Bird Recovery Plan in Western Australia, have proved critical to threatened species management, bringing together diverse teams with a common purpose to retain one or more species for our descendants to enjoy.

The Senate committee recommends that a collaborative recovery planning approach, bringing together all key actors likely to be involved in recovery, be supported. We concur, provided such teams are managed properly.

There is still time for the major parties to commit to retaining all species in Australia. Such a commitment would be good value at twice the price.

But it will require more than wishful thinking and platitudes: this recent senate inquiry provides the strategic approach on which enduring success can be built.

Stephen Garnett receives funding from the Australian Research Council and serves on committees advising BirdLife Australia and the Northern Territory Government.

Hugh Possingham receives his primary funding from The Australian Research Council, DSEWPaC National Environmental Research Program and international science-based non-government organisations, WWF Australia and small grants from other organisations. He is affiliated with The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, The Nature Conservation Society of Australia and Birds Australia.

John Woinarski receives funding from the National Environmental Research Program for research on declining native mammals, but this piece is not directly related to that support.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Fukushima

by Ingolf Eide, Online Opinion: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=15377&page=0

Spent fuel pool (Wikipedia)

A recent Reuters article ("After disaster, the deadliest part of Japan's nuclear clean-up") proved something of a rabbit hole.

Having ventured down into this unfamiliar terrain, new tunnels kept opening up.

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami left 400 tons of "highly irradiated spent fuel" more or less hanging in the sky 30 metres up in Reactor Building No 4.

Its roof, and much else, was pulverised by a hydrogen explosion so there's no containment structure left.

Only desperate efforts in the immediate aftermath when all power sources were knocked out kept the pool in which the fuel rods are stored covered with water.

It wasn't alone in suffering severe damage.

Reactor Nos 1, 2 and 3 (which were all online when disaster struck) are now in permanent shutdown with their reactor cores largely or entirely melted down and sitting in intensely hot lumps at the bottom of their containment chambers.

Vast quantities of water keep their temperature within tolerable bounds but much of it is leaking into the groundwater and, eventually, the Pacific.

What sets No 4 apart is three things. First, it has far more spent fuel in its cooling pond then any of the others because for maintenance purposes the entire fuel contents of its reactor had been transferred to the pond only four months previously.

Second, because of that transfer, some 550 of the 1231 used fuel rod assemblies were much more radioactive than normal.

And, finally, the building itself is structurally unsound. Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) have done some shoring up, but it wouldn't take too much of a shake to crack it, or maybe even tip it over.

D-Day for TEPCO's plan to move this spent fuel to a safer location is nigh. Since the infrastructure to handle spent fuel was destroyed, they've had to recreate that capacity from scratch. Handling fuel rod assemblies is a delicate business and no one can know if they'll succeed.

The plan is to start in November and finish within a year. It's just one (particularly important) piece of the wind-down of Fukushima, estimated by a spokesman "to take about 40 years and cost $11 billion." The total cost for Japan may range up to $100 billion.

There were some alarming scenarios raised in the article.

No one knows how bad it can get, but independent consultants Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt said recently in their World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013: "Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date."

And Arnie Gunderson talked about a few ways that sort of release could happen.

"There is a risk of an inadvertent criticality if the bundles are distorted and get too close to each other," Gundersen said. He was referring to an atomic chain reaction that left unchecked could result in a large release of radiation and heat that the fuel pool cooling system isn't designed to absorb. "The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can't stop it. There are no control rods to control it," Gundersen said. "The spent fuel pool cooling system is designed only to remove decay heat, not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction." The rods are also vulnerable to fire should they be exposed to air, Gundersen said.

Fascinating, so much so I badly wanted to get a better handle on the processes at work. Was all this unduly alarmist, or not? It seems not. Let me share some of the fruits of my trip down the rabbit hole.
When reactor fuel is used up, no longer useful for fission purposes, it's replaced.

The spent fuel is still intensely radioactive, however, which simply means some of the materials created through the fission process are unstable and constantly emit a stream of particles and gamma rays until they attain a more stable structure.

It must therefore be stored under water for at least a year and usually much longer.

The water in the spent fuel pool does two things: through a heat exchange mechanism, it keeps the fuel assemblies at reasonable temperatures; and, it captures the radiation streaming out of the fuel rods.

There's a lot of this spent fuel about, some 260,000 tons, most still in storage ponds and growing by 8-10,000 tons per year (the US has some 65,000 tons, Japan about 19,000 tons). It's seriously nasty stuff.

Spent fuel from light water reactors (like Fukushima's) is composed of 93.4% uranium (with only ~0.8% U-235, the fissile isotope), 5.2% fission products, 1.2% plutonium and 0.2 % other transuranic elements. It's the middle two that are the potential killers.

Some of the fission products break down very quickly to more stable (i.e. less harmful) elements, but two hang around for a long time and are particularly dangerous: strontium-90 and caesium-137. Both have half lives of about 30 years and they mimic potassium and calcium respectively.

They're therefore rapidly absorbed into the food chain and become concentrated in higher-order creatures, like us. Iodine-131 is similarly lethal; it mimics iodine and concentrates quickly in the thyroid.

The good news is its half life is only eight days and so it's only a factor in nuclear explosions or reactor accidents.

All this radiation also generates heat. Once the spent fuel is removed from the reactor, the radiation (and heat generation) tails off dramatically; after one year, it's down by a factor of 10 and by 10 years it's reduced to about 1% of its starting level.

For much of the first 100 years, the radioactivity comes principally from the fission products with strontium-90 and caesium-137 dominant after the first 10 years. After a few hundred years only the transuranics are still going strong: plutonium, americium, neptunium and curium.

Still, the radiotoxicity of spent fuels remains a potentially lethal hazard for hundreds of thousands of years. And, given the plutonium content, the fuel also of course has to be safeguarded for all that time.

What about the heat generation, though? This was a question I wanted to get to the bottom of. With radiation tailing off so quickly, maybe after a year or two even exposure of spent fuel rods to the air wouldn't be catastrophic, in which case Fukushima might be through the most dangerous phase.

Not so, unfortunately. Gundersen and co were not exaggerating. In "Technical Study of Spent Fuel Pool Accident Risk" (2001), the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote:

In summary, 60 days after reactor shutdown for boildown type events, there is considerable time (> 100 hours) to take action to preclude the fission product release or zirconium fire before uncovering the top of the fuel. However, if the fuel is uncovered, heatup to the zirconium ignition temperature [900°C] during the first years after shutdown would take less than 10 hours even with unobstructed air flow. After five years, the heat up would take at least 24 hours even with obstructed air flow cases. [PWR is a Pressurised Water Reactor; BWR a Boiling Water Reactor. Both are light water reactors]

So, however one gets there (whether by leakage, a crack in the pool or, heaven forbid, another earthquake, or even a slow boiling off if the heat exchange mechanisms were to fail), even after five years those fuel assemblies would burn.

Before such a fire starts, the cladding around the fuel rods would almost certainly swell and burst, releasing "radioactive gases present in the gap between the fuel and clad." It's the next stage that's truly catastrophic.

If the fuel continues to heat up, the zirconium clad will reach the point of rapid oxidation in air. This reaction of the zirconium and air, or zirconium and steam is exothermic (i.e. produces heat). The energy released from the reaction, combined with the fuel's decay energy, can cause the reaction to become self-sustaining and ignite the zirconium. The increase in heat from the oxidation reaction can also raise the temperature in adjacent fuel assemblies and propagate the oxidation reaction. The zirconium fire would result in a significant release of the spent fuel fission products which would be dispersed from the reactor site in the thermal plume from the zirconium fire.

Unlikely as it is, this is the nightmare scenario at Fukushima.

Lethal radioactive particles, notably strontium-90 and caesium-137, would stream into the atmosphere and be dispersed according to the vagaries of the weather, winds and currents.

Even worse, were this process to unfold at Reactor No 4 (or at any of the others, of course, it's just that No 4 is the most vulnerable), it might become impossible to prevent similar processes eventually unfolding in all the other spent fuel repositories at the site (substantial as it is, the load at No 4 is little more than 10% of the total).

It has been a standard practice in the nuclear industry to avoid consideration of all of these possibilities, based on the assumption that there will be "lots of time" to react to any emergency involving the spent fuel pool, as it will normally take days for the spent fuel to reach the melting point and it will be a "simple matter" to refill the pools with water if necessary. This ignores the fact that major structural damage may make it impossible to approach the spent fuel pool due to the lethal levels of gamma radiation emanating from the spent fuel once the protective shielding of the water is gone.

To judge by various estimates found here and there on the net, the damage from such an ultimately uncontrolled spent fuel fire hardly bears thinking about.

Based on U.S. Energy Department data, assuming a total of 11,138 spent fuel assemblies are being stored at the Dai-Ichi site, nearly all, which is in pools. They contain roughly 336 million curies (~1.2 E+19 Bq) of long-lived radioactivity. About 134 million curies is Cesium-137 - roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at the Chernobyl accident as estimated by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP).[author's emphasis]

Viewed in this light, the light of what might have been, March 2011 starts to look like a win. For days (perhaps weeks) after the 11th, things teetered on the brink.

Had just one spent fuel pool seriously cracked, had some pumps failed for an hour or two too long, it might have been all over; there may then have been no way to indefinitely keep the fuel assemblies covered with water and the whole thing would have fed on itself.

As it was, all that escaped into the air was a comparative smidgen. Enough, mind you, to cause the evacuation of 160,000 people and create a 20 km exclusion zone which is still mostly in force.

Thankfully, the evacuations were ordered early enough to avoid any significant radiation damage to residents surrounding the plant.

The curious thing is, in one sense radioactive materials are more manageable than I'd thought. Particle emissions, for example, are for the most part easily blocked, sometimes with as little as a sheet of paper.

Gamma rays are altogether more vicious, although even they can be shielded against with sufficient depth of water, concrete, lead or steel. The real trouble starts when radioactive particles get out into the environment.

Then, they very quickly end up in living creatures where they wreak their damage directly. Once they've escaped and been scattered by wind, water and rain, the deed is done, much of it irrevocable.

And the effects, well, they go on, and on. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. Much further into the future than Neanderthal man lies in the past. Have we taken leave of our senses, perhaps, to take such risks, however slight, for so little gain?

This article was first published on Conversation at Stanley Park.