Environmental Heresies  

Stewart Brand (Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Well and the Long Now Foundation) has an interesting essay on the environmental movement in Tech Review that adds to the chorus advocating the rejuvenation of the nuclear power industry (via Boing Boing).

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power

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Everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration” (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

Nuclear certainly has problems—accidents, waste storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best avenue to a “hydrogen economy,” combining high energy and high heat in one place for optimal hydrogen generation.

The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem (see “A New Vision for Nuclear Waste,” December 2004). Many reactors now have fields of dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons. One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing.

The environmental movement has a quasi-religious aversion to nuclear energy. The few prominent environmentalists who have spoken out in its favor—Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, Friend of the Earth Hugh Montefiore—have been privately anathematized by other environmentalists. Public excoriation, however, would invite public debate, which so far has not been welcome.

Nuclear could go either way. It would take only one more Chernobyl-type event in Russia’s older reactors (all too possible, given the poor state of oversight there) to make the nuclear taboo permanent, to the great detriment of the world’s atmospheric health. Everything depends on getting new and better nuclear technology designed and built.

Years ago, environmentalists hated cars and wanted to ban them. Then physicist Amory Lovins came along, saw that the automobile was the perfect leverage point for large-scale energy conservation, and set about designing and promoting drastically more efficient cars. Gas-electric hybrid vehicles are now on the road, performing public good. The United States, Lovins says, can be the Saudi Arabia of nega-watts: Americans are so wasteful of energy that their conservation efforts can have an enormous effect. Single-handedly, Lovins converted the environmental movement from loathing of the auto industry to fruitful engagement with it.

Someone could do the same with nuclear power plants. Lovins refuses to. The field is open, and the need is great.

I'm still tending to fall into the "nuclear is evil" camp (albeit with some bets that the other side will have their way), and I'm suspicious that a lot of what he says is wishful thinking rather than pracital and reliable policy. He doesn't address the uranium depletion issue either unfortunately.

Elsewhere, Monkeygrinder has a bit of an anti-nuclear / anti-geo green rant going on over at Peak Energy North called "Give Gaia Cancer" thats worth considering, and Energy Bulletin has published some analysis entitled "The Cyanide Solution", that looks at the nuclear energy from a Peak Oil point of view (with Richard Heinberg being one of the contributors).

Many conservatives and some so-called environmentalists and greens now espouse nuclear power as the solution to combat global warming. Kéllia Ramares investigates whether building a new generation of nuclear power plants is practical, possible, or wise given both their huge expense and that climate change is already occurring and global oil peak is imminent.

The Cyanide Solution refers to the unfortunate new global policies of dramatically increasing coal and nuclear power stations. The chemical formula of cyanide is CN.

In March of 2001, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney told MSNBC, ``If you want to do something about carbon dioxide emissions, then you ought to build nuclear power plants. They don't emit any carbon dioxide. They don't emit greenhouse gases.''

The pro-nuclear recommendation from the Republican Cheney comes as no surprise to those who see the former Halliburton CEO as a proponent of corporate industrialism.

Former Vice President Al Gore, a reputed environmentalist, authored a book called, “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,” published in 1992. Yet on July 25, 1998, Gore visited the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev, Ukraine, and delivered a speech in which he said, “The lesson of Chernobyl is not an indictment of nuclear power as such. Nuclear power, designed well, regulated properly, cared for meticulously, has a place in the world’s energy supply.”

And no less a green figure than British environmentalist James Lovelock, who promoted the Gaia Hypothesis--Earth as a living, self-regulating organism--has decided that nuclear power is needed to combat global warming.

But even as some environmentalists start to rethink the traditional Green opposition to nuclear power, one must ask, “Is nuclear practical?”

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