By IANS
New Delhi : Concentrated solar power and thorium-based nuclear power are the ways to generate energy without causing climate change, Nobel laureate and head of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) Carlo Rubbia said here Friday.
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), which is now entering large-scale industrial development in Spain, can reduce solar energy generation costs from 10-12 to 6 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with power generation from fossil fuels, the eminent particle physicist told delegates at the Feb 7-9 Delhi Sustainable Development Summit.
Rubbia wanted much more research into CSP as well as thorium-based nuclear power generation, an area of high promise for India with its abundant thorium reserves. “Both these options deserve to be properly understood and supported by the political and financial stakeholders, since they have the true potential to harness a major fraction of energy.”
Talking about the danger of climate change, Rubbia pointed out: “The idea that this release of carbon dioxide may affect the climate of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years has not reached general public awareness”. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas leading to global warming.
Rubbia said “somewhere between 17 and 33 percent of carbon will still reside in the atmosphere 1,000 years from now, decreasing to 10-15 percent at 10,000 years and seven percent at 100,000 years.
“These figures are quite comparable to the ones for the radioactive decay of nuclear waste, which is having a very relevant impact on public concern. However, while radioactive waste will hopefully be concentrated in well localised underground repositories, the presence of carbon dioxide is widespread in the atmosphere, the sea and the land with inevitable worldwide consequences on our climate.”
Rubbia described the sea level rise due to global warming predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year as “too conservative”. He was afraid that a complete melt of the Greenland ice-sheet or a 10 percent melt in Antarctica were very real possibilities, leading to a 7.2 metre rise in sea levels.
“This could have devastating effects on coastal towns, cities and ecosystems.”