Cliff, one of the commenters here, has a terrific profile on WorldChanging. Part One is about his pioneering work in creating the virtual community we all live in now. Part Two is about blogging climate change.

I didn’t know any of this stuff about Cliff, so I am doubly delighted he is a commentor here when he is not writing for his own blog, Climate Frog.

He says nice things about me in the second interview, which I am not sufficiently solipsistic to quote.

[Note to Cliff -- tell WorldChanging their link to your website is wrong in both Parts.]

Bloomberg has a very long article on the troubles plaguing Finland’s Olkiluoto-3, “the first nuclear plant ordered in Western Europe since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.”

The plant has been delayed two years thanks to “flawed welds for the reactor’s steel liner, unusable water-coolant pipes and suspect concrete in the foundation.” It is also more than 25 percent over its 3 billion-euro ($4 billion) budget. The article notes:

If Finland’s experience is any guide, the “nuclear renaissance” touted by the global atomic power industry as an economically viable alternative to coal and natural gas may not offer much progress from a generation ago, when schedule and budgetary overruns for new reactors cost investors billions of dollars.

The U.K.’s Sizewell-B plant, which took nearly 15 years from the application to build it to completion, opened in 1995 and cost about 2.5 billion pounds ($5.1 billion), up from a 1987 estimate of 1.7 billion pounds.

Nuclear power’s costs balloon partly because plants must be built to more exacting safety standards and stand up to more stringent oversight, leading to lost time and extra expense.

Indeed, the oversight is needed because so many plants have safety-related construction problems:

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Here’s the inside skinny. It was 4 on 2 (NRDC’s David Hawkins and me vs. the other witnesses). You can read my testimony here and all the witness statements here – not that I would recommend doing so unless you are a serious liquid coal junkie like me.

About 10 members of Congress were there at any given time — about evenly split on how they view liquid coal. The ranking Republican on the full committee, Ralph Hall from the great state of Texas, interrogated me at length — trying to get me to say that I was anti-fossil fuel, that I was pro tax (or that a cap and trade system was the same as a tax), and that I never offered any solution to the global warming problem. I think I held my own.

Wildman Roscoe Bartlett (R – MD) was the most forceful advocate against the stupidity of liquid coal and hydrogen. He came up to me after the hearing and said “We need to be much more aggressive on conservation and efficiency.” I gave him the one copy of Hell and High Water that I brought.

Surprising — at least to me — the opening statement that most closely matched my own view came from the ranking Republican on the Subcommittee, Bob Ingliss, from SC:

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Nature just published this remarkable letter by Neville Nicholls of Australia’s Monash University:

Climate: Sawyer predicted rate of warming in 1972

Thirty-five years ago this week, Nature published a paper titled ‘Man-made carbon dioxide and the “greenhouse” effect’ by the eminent atmospheric scientist J. S. Sawyer (Nature 239, 23–26; 1972, subs. req’d). In four pages Sawyer summarized what was known about the role of carbon dioxide in enhancing the natural greenhouse effect, and made a remarkable prediction of the warming expected at the end of the twentieth century. He concluded that the 25% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide predicted to occur by 2000 corresponded to an increase of 0.6 °C in world temperature.

In fact the global surface temperature rose about 0.5 °C between the early 1970s and 2000. Considering that global temperatures had, if anything, been falling in the decades leading up to the early 1970s, Sawyer’s prediction of a reversal of this trend, and of the correct magnitude of the warming, is perhaps the most remarkable long-range forecast ever made.

Sawyer’s review built on the work of many other scientists, including John Tyndall’s in the nineteenth century (see, for example, J. Tyndall Philos. Mag. 22, 169–194 and 273–285; 1861) and Guy Callender’s in the mid-twentieth (for example, G. S. Callendar Weather 4, 310–314; 1949). But the anniversary of his paper is a reminder that, far from being a modern preoccupation, the effects of carbon dioxide on the global climate have been recognized for many decades.

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Remember the liquid coal hearing at 10 am EST today, webcast here.

Even China appears to be moving away from coal to liquid. The AP writes

China “may put an end to projects that are designed to produce petroleum by liquefying coal,” the official Xinhua press agency said, quoting an official of the country’s top economic planning agency.

Why? Because it is so polluting and water intensive. As the Xinhua New Agency reported (in the most thorough news account I have seen of China’s liquid coal effort):

China has raised the capital threshold for projects converting coal to liquid fuel to brake a possible overheating in the coal-chemical industry, as excessive development of the fossil fuel pollutes the environment and strains the water supply….

Coal liquefaction soaks up water, and China — especially its northern and northwestern regions — is short of water. To develop coal liquefaction would intensify such inadequacy. Except for Yunnan and Guizhou provinces in Southwest China, most coal-rich provinces run short of water.

In addition to its massive water needs, coal liquefaction discharges waste gas, waste water and industrial effluent, creating significant environmental risks.

If China is smart enough to make it harder — not easier — to do liquid coal projects, so should we.