on climate change games
According to world-nuclear-news.org today -on French President Nicholas Sarkozy`s state visit to China- a deal was signed which ensures that
France’s national nuclear champion Areva will build two power reactors at Taishan, China and undertake a feasibility study for a used nuclear fuel reprocessing plant as part of an Eur8 billion deal ($12 billion).
Areva are also to provide “all the materials and services required to operate” the forthcoming 1600 MWe EPR units, to be sited at Taishan, 100 km southwest of Guangzhou and 150 km west of Hong Kong in Guangdong province.
Moreover
France’s national electricity generator, Electricite de France (EdF), also has an involvement in the new nuclear plant deal. It will take a 30% stake in a joint venture company established with CGNPC to build, own and operate the two units. This arrangement is similar to the Unistar Nuclear Energy (UNE) arrangement whereby EdF will participate in a fleet of standardised Areva EPR units in North America. EdF will also organise the finance of purchase and plant construction.
The last fact is more or less affirmed by world-nuclear.org:
France’s Areva NP is working to adapt its advanced EPR nuclear units for the USA, though the design is said to exceed US safety requirements. Much of the one million man-hours of work involved in developing this US EPR is making the necessary changes to output electricity at 60 Hz instead of the original design’s 50 Hz. A design certification application is expected early in 2008, and the first unit (with 80% US content) is expected to be grid connected in 2015.
This sounds to me as if the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is letting the deal through the nod!
Given the differing views on how to meet the challenges of climate change (in particular with respect to the use of nuclear energy!) the models which are used for simulating the various scenarios need to be discussed openly. This holds especially true if they are intrinsically hidden e.g. in an educational game on climate change.
Wikipedia holds a quite good list of Global warming games, which belong into the category of serious games. The list (of today) includes the Stabilization Wedge Game based on the Stabilization Wedge chart already mentioned in the above randform post, the Climate Challenge game by red redemption and BBC, the Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge, an architectural game with an awkward name, the Berlin/Potsdam cardboard game “Keep cool” and finally an upcoming climate change-sim city variant called logicity (via newscientist blog).
The discussion about the used models will be especially important if these games will be widely distributed, as it currently happens with the SimCity computer game and the OLPC project.