Speaker Night – March 26th at 7pm (Click for details)

webmaster Events

 Dear members and friends of CANWin

 Can you help us push the SUSTAINABILITY barrow for 2010?

 We are inviting you, our members and friends, to help us make a bright spectacle at the Australia Day Parade in Berrima on Tuesday 26 January 2010 at 12pm as part of CANWin’s “Wheelbarrow Flotilla.”

 Marching behind the rainbow CANWin banner, we have a vision of a gentle citizenry of CANWinners and friends pushing barrows full of all the good things each of us does in our community.  Can you imagine what a positive statement that will make?  Our entry in the 2009 Tulip Time Parade made a wonderful gentle and effective statement and to top it off won the prize for best float!

 All you need is your wheelbarrow, decorated with whatever you feel is an appropriate way to show your passion.  As a starting point some suggested decorations/themes are biodiversity, transition, food gardens, grow and eat local, renewable energy, water saving, mulch, re-use/re-cycle, compost, bush tucker, slow food, preserves, seed saving, permaculture, transport, water tanks, solar cells.

 To help organise, we need RSVPs as soon as possible so we can plan the event.  Be creative and think of others who would like to join in.   Forward this invitation to a few friends with a personal message AND we can swell our numbers.

 Twenty wheelbarrows would be great, fifty would make an unforgettable impact! 

 If you can come please send an email to secretary@canwin.org.au.  We are not sure of the exact marshalling point but we meet at 11am in Berrima.  Don’t forget include your name, contact number and email address.

 We think CANWin can make this Australia Day Parade the best one ever and really hope you are equally inspired and can join us there.

Andy Events

On Thursday evening Thursday 5th November at 6.30pm members of the steering committee of the Australian Water Network (AWN) will screen the award winning documentary FLOW (For Love of Water). The evening will be an informative fundraising to assist with the incorporation of the AWN and to build a website to provide a platform for over thirty water campaign groups and individuals around Australia.

webmaster Events

Friday 18 September 2009 7:30pm
Wingecarribee Shire Council Civic Centre Theatrette, Elizabeth St, Moss Vale

Andy Events, General

Dear members and friends of CANWin

Can you help us push the climate change barrow at the 2009 Tulip Time Street Parade on Saturday 26 September?

We are depending on you, our members and friends, to make a bright spectacle at the Parade with CANWin’s “Wheelbarrow Flotilla.”

Marching behind the rainbow CANWin banner, we have a vision of an gentle citizenry of CANWinners and friends pushing barrows full of all the good things each of us does in our community. Can you imagine what a positive statement that will make?

All you need is your wheelbarrow, decorated with whatever you feel is an appropriate way to show your passion. Some suggested decorations/themes are biodiversity, transition, climate change, food gardens, grow and eat local, renewable energy, water saving, mulch, compost, bush tucker, slow food, preserves, seed saving, permaculture, transport, water tanks, solar cells. Use this as starting point.

To help organise, we need RSVPs as soon as possible so we can plan the event. We meet at Banyette Street at 1pm and the March goes from 2pm to 3pm. Children are most welcome. Be creative and think of others who would like to join in. If you forward this invitation to a few friends with a personal message, I’m we can swell our numbers.

Twenty wheelbarrows would be great, fifty would make an unforgettable impact!

If you can come can you please reply to secretary@canwin.org.au Can you include your name, a contact number and an email address.

We think CANWin can make this Tulip Time Parade the best one ever and really hope you are equally inspired and can join us there.

Sincerely

Maree Byrne
For the Management Committee
CANWin
Climate Action Now! Wingecarribee

Andy Events

SIGN ON FOR AUGUST!

TRAINING FOR TRANSITION workshop Bowral 8th & 9th August
“to inspire, encourage, & inform”  people in the Transition process.

The Transition Town movement offers an opportunity to create a future that is abundant, sustainable and resilient as we stand at this critical time. Our response to the global challenges of climate change and peak oil will shape the lives of generations to come.

Transition Shire Wingecarribee recently hosted the national Transition Training workshops given by the UK trainers who have prepared local groups to deliver this exciting program which offers an inspiring vision and action plan for the transition to a low-carbon future in socially connected, resilient communities.

What you can expect at the Transition Training Workshop:

• an in-depth experiential introduction to Transition

• an inspirational/energetic boost that will empower and propel you as a powerful Transition catalyst in your community

• connection with others who are responding to the call for Transition

This 2-day fundamentals course is designed for people thinking of creating a Transition Town group or those  already in a group working towards becoming a Transition Town,  It is for those wishing to know how to set up, run, and maintain a successful transition initiative in their locality. The course is packed with imaginative and inspiring ways to delve into both the theory and practice of Transition.

For more information see Transition page on CANWin website

Register (by 22nd July) – please contact: Sandra at menteith@bigpond.net.au or phone 0403 790 777.

Click here to read the February issue of Transition Shire News

Click here to read the November issue of Transition Shire News

PATHS FORWARD

If you missed the Revisioning Workshop you missed some stimulating discussion about CANWin’s objectives for 2008. Included for discussion were papers by two of our members. These can be downloaded by clicking on their title below.

Strategy Motion

Where to from Here

tmarch Events

Senator Kerry Nettle will be the Guest Speaker at the launch of the local Greens Election Campaign to be held on 5th October, from 7-8.30 pm. in the Henrietta Room (behind the library), Bendooley Street, Bowral.

Local Candidate Jim Clark will introduce Kerry, who will speak on the urgent issue of Restoring Balance in the Senate, plus answer questions from the floor.

Light refreshments will be served. Hope to see you.

Maree Byrne Events

CANWin’s first street stall was held in Mittagong on Saturday the 25th August.
We are holding these every couple of weeks in different towns in the Shire to provide basic information to the public on climate change and they also serve to recruit new members.
Mittagong is a difficult venue particularly because the new shopping development has greatly reduced the number of people in the main street. Despite this, our first day was quite successful with 8 people registering with Sandra for our newsletter and two new confirmed financial members.
Nina D’Arcy has done a great job organising Council approvals and our roster. The first stall was attended by Sandra Menteith, Jeremy Hynes and Rob Parker. Jeremy showed great skills in meeting with people and has a very engaging manner.
Our selection of handouts has been greatly boosted by our own research group who have contributed ten different papers on subjects such a Greenpower, solar hot water and carbon trading.
Whether you are rostered on or not, members are encouraged to come along on Saturday mornings because these events are fun and are just a good outing. We generally grab a coffee and have a good yarn.
Our next stall will be at Moss Vale on the 8th September somewhere between IGA Tuckerbag and the newsagent and it will be run by Bob Thomas, Sheila Ring and backed up by Amanda Lambess.

From Rob Parker

parker Events, General

The Nuclear Forum on June 2nd was an example of the broad community interest in the nuclear issue and also the wide appeal of CANWin. The audience of about 70 was a mix of ages, classes, levels of education, political leaning and included those with pro, con and undecided opinions on the appropriateness of the nuclear option. Not only was the audience very heterogeneous, but the evening was an excellent example of people demonstrating respect for each other and their differences.

To the best of my recollection, this is what I heard from the four speakers:

Dr. Tom Romberg, formerly of the CSIRO and the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, presented the technical facts about nuclear power generation, and he expressed a great deal of confidence in the safety of the latest generation of nuclear reactors. From a purely scientific perspective, the nuclear option seems to be a practical proposition, provided that coal-fired electricity production is priced to reflect its real cost to the environment. However, Dr. Romberg stated very emphatically that nuclear power is not the solution to climate change. The Switkowski Report to the government admitted that it would take 10-15 years to get nuclear power up and running, too late to have any significant impact on a fight against climate change that is becoming increasingly urgent. Dr. Romberg doubted that a nuclear power industry could be in place even in 15 years, due to the shortage of trained personnel and technical expertise in Australia, and considered that 20-25 years would be a more realistic timetable.

Graham Sanders, an electrical engineer and former lecturer at the University of Sydney, provided an evaluation of alternative forms of power generation.

Hydropower is clean but is already about as developed as it is going to get, especially in an increasingly dry continent. Natural gas is the only immediately available alternative for additional base load generation, and could fill the gap while waiting for renewable forms of energy to be developed further. It burns much cleaner than coal, but still produces greenhouse gases, and is a more expensive option, though not as expensive as nuclear.

Hot-rock geothermal power in central Australia is the most promising, as it offers potentially well-priced, abundant, full-time electricity production with no carbon emissions, and could be available within 10 years. The main drawback is the distance over which the power must be transmitted, but this is not insurmountable.

At this stage, wind-power is the most competitive in terms of price, (cheaper than nuclear, but more expensive than coal) but there are problems balancing demand with production, which varies with the wind. As yet there is no cheap, simple and reliable means of storing electrical power so as to even out the load.

Solar power is similarly variable, producing only when the sun is shining. Photovoltaic cells are still relatively expensive per unit of energy, though the price will fall and efficiency will rise over the next few years. Solar thermal plants have an advantage in that some designs incorporate methods of storing electricity so that they can generate power even when the sun is not shining, and they will produce power more inexpensively than photovoltaic cells.

Other sources of power that are convenient to a population that lives largely on the coast include waves and tides, but the technology has not yet progressed to a stage where commercial quantities of power can be supplied.

However, Graham said that the single most important contribution that can be made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and one that can be made immediately is an increase in efficiency in our use of energy. Simply using less energy far outweighs any potential advantage provided by nuclear energy or any other form of energy in the short to medium term, and is absolutely essential if we are to make a meaningful impact in reducing our carbon emissions.

Whereas the first two speakers addressed that which can be done with nuclear power, Sandra Menteith, a lecturer in ethics, talked about whether or not we should do anything at all with nuclear power. Indeed, this is the crux of the issue, and hence the most important question to be answered. She noted that ethics is all about how we act toward others; so, ethical considerations have to do with putting our own wants aside to consider the needs of others. With regard to nuclear power, we must first ask: who wins and who loses, who profits and who pays, who gains and who suffers.

Even if the risks associated with nuclear power are as reasonable as the nuclear industry suggests; even if the risks are more than balanced by the advantages, it is unethical to impose those risks on others, especially future generations that have no say in the matter. The more that is learned about exposure to radiation, the stronger the medical opinion that there is no safe level of exposure. If, as is claimed, the radiation leaking from a typical nuclear power plant is about the same as the background radiation from cosmic rays, it still means doubling the number of cancers that would be caused by background radiation alone.

History shows that dangerous or polluting industries follow a path of least resistance to the poorest and most powerless members of the community. Those who profit from the nuclear industry inevitably will not be the ones who live near uranium mines, nuclear power plants and nuclear waste storage sites. (As yet there is no safe commercial long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste.)

Noting the long history of accidents and near accidents in the nuclear industry, it would be naïve to think that it was now without danger. Even the best science cannot rule out human error and even the best engineering cannot produce a fault-free plant. Insurance companies, which make a business of evaluating and quantifying risk, have never been willing to insure a nuclear power plant against a major accident. The cost of such a tragedy would fall upon the taxpayer.

Apart from the very first members of the nuclear club, which developed nuclear power from their weapons programs, the later proliferation of nuclear weapons has followed the development of nuclear power plants; hardly what is needed amid today’s violent and unstable political situations.

Although there are several moral arguments against nuclear power, there are none to support it. It does nothing that another, less polluting form of power cannot do, particularly in Australia, which is blessed with abundant sun, win, geothermal, and tidal sources of power. With regard to combating climate change, Sandra agreed with the other speakers that nuclear power would be too little and too late to make a significant difference, and she added that, even if one were to pursue nuclear power at a later time, even with the best of intentions (e.g. to reduce carbon emissions), it would be a morally flawed means of obtaining that goal.

Finally Rob Parker recounted the political history of nuclear power in Australia, and noted that it continues to be a function of the lobbying power of the mining and other industries, as well as a means by which the government can be seen to be doing something to cover up the apparent inadequacy of their response to climate change to date. He called upon the people to lobby for immediate action on climate change, particularly to obtain the help of government to bring about the necessary behavioural change toward a sustainable life style, which is the single most important ingredient in reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas production.

All of the presentations were well done and thought provoking. As one who came from a science and engineering background before moving into the ministry, I can appreciate the technical beauty of the modern nuclear reactor, and I understand Dr. Romberg’s position very well. It is easy to marvel at the technical brilliance that humankind has brought to the task of overcoming problems and improving its lot. However, having been a reliability engineer for an aerospace company and the quality manager for a global corporation, I know how quality and reliability decrease as a device moves from the brilliance of the scientist’s invention and the attention to detail in the engineer’s design to the factory where it is made to the place where is to be used to the human beings who operate and maintain it. If I was the fifth speaker, I would have wanted to say:

Quality and reliability are design parameters that are quantified and costed. In the end, the design parameters can be no more stringent than can be funded by the budget for the project. GM has the ability to make a Holden that will last as long as a Rolls Royce, but if it did, we would have to pay Rolls Royce prices for our Holdens. Perhaps, with an infinite budget, we could make a device that would last forever and never falter, but in the real world compromises must be made. Customers will only pay so much, and manufacturers must make a profit, so there are limits to quality and reliability, even in nuclear reactors.

The device that has probably the highest-ever levels of designed-in quality and reliability, full of redundant systems to guarantee fail-safe performance, is the space shuttle; yet, over only 120 flights, two have been lost along with their crews. Despite all the money and brainpower that has gone into making space shuttles failsafe, almost 2% of the shuttle missions have ended in disaster. Would you fly in an airplane that crashed 2% of the time? Nuclear reactors are somewhat safer, of 440 plants in the world, two have melted down, i.e. a little under half a percent, but still an unacceptably high rate of catastrophic failure. There have, of course, been thousands of other less serious accidents that you never hear about. Generation IV reactors may indeed be safer, but since none have ever been built, we do not know for certain whether or not practice will measure up to the theory.

One of the basic tenets of reliability engineering is that, all things being equal, the more complex a device, the more it is inherently unreliable. It is a statement of the obvious: the more complex something is, the more there is to go wrong. Space shuttles and nuclear reactors are immensely complex. Add the flaws inherent in human nature to the inherent unreliability due to the complexity of the device, and you have a dangerous mix.

I have dealt with numerous failures of supposedly very reliable products and processes in my working life, and they happened for all sorts of reasons. It is not that the designs were flawed, though they sometimes are, but that human beings conspired to create a series of unpredictable events that overcame all of the quality measures and redundant systems. If an engineer was to imagine that a particular failure would only occur if a particular component failed at the exact time that five different people did something wrong in a particular order over a precise timeline, he might reasonably conclude that it would never happen in a million years; but sometimes the millionth year plus one comes first.  Space shuttles crash and nuclear reactors melt down.

Perhaps a factory manager is pushed to meet a budget and a deadline, and he is falling behind, so he takes a short cut and overrides a quality manager’s decision. Perhaps a government inspector finds the fault, but he needs money, and a bribe helps him forget to report the problem. Perhaps an operator is overtired because he had a fight with his wife and didn’t sleep the night before, and he pushes a wrong button. Normally, a safety device would notice his mistake, but this device was the one made by the factory with the harried manager, and passed by the bribed inspector. Of course, there is a back-up safety device, but at the very moment it was needed, there was a fraction of a second in which the power was interrupted due to a lightning strike nearby. In that fraction of a second there is a cascade of failures as one failure brings on a failure in a related system, and so on.

If the project quality manager had suggested that this precise series of events might happen, he would have been laughed down. But things like this really do happen. They cause planes to crash and submarines to sink, space shuttles to blow up and nuclear reactors to release radiation upon an unsuspecting neighbourhood full of children. Early in his presentation Dr. Romberg noted that life is a series of risks that we take daily. Simpy to use a car to attend the forum required a risk to be taken. But there is moral question with regard to risk. Space shuttle pilots, airline passengers and operators of motor vehicles know the risks, and choose to take them. The children who live next door to a nuclear plant have not accepted the risk, nor are they likely even to be aware of it; rather, it has been imposed by others who’s objective is money and/or power. Moral or immoral?

If you talk to the people who actually work with the equipment, their stories will be quite different to the stories of the owners of nuclear power plants or designers of the plant or the managers who devise the procedures. The workers will tell you of workmates who are drunk or stoned, mistakes that have been covered up and shortcuts that have been taken; accidents that have happened but are not reported, and reported accidents that have been covered up under the guise of “security.”

There is one thing that can be depended upon in any human endeavour, particularly one as complex as nuclear power: if there is something that can go wrong, it will. If that “something” is as devastating as a nuclear meltdown, the only way to guarantee that it will never happen is to avoid building any nuclear reactors. Sandra quoted Ian Lowe, a former nuclear scientist and professor at ANU, who said, “If nuclear is the answer, it must have been a stupid question.”

webmaster Energy, Events, General

Saturday 21st April, at 7.00 pm
Uniting Church Hall, corner of Bendooley & Boolwey Streets, Bowral.

Explore your role in a world of climate change. Learn what you and your community can do to effect change. This stimulating evening includes a multimedia presentation and will be facilitated by Ruth Rosenhek. The ‘Climate Despair & Empowerment Roadshow’ is in very high demand, with more than forty presentations planned for cities and towns in NSW, Queensland and Victoria.

Information and registration for the next ‘Climate Change Circles’ (beginning in May) will be available on the night of the 21st from 6.30pm.

Bring a plate to share for supper. For more information phone Sandra on 0403 790 777 or email secretary@canwin.org.au

Sandra Menteith Events