Why Cheney's Nuke Plan Will Not Solve Global Warming - But Solar Now Can!

[Dems Will Win]

Why Nuclear Power is Not The Answer to Global Warming

In “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore makes it clear that global warming is a true crisis for humanity. Indeed it’s a calamity of unprecedented proportions in the history of our species. It’s even worse than most know, for if methane peat bogs in Russia and Canada ever melt and release all that methane greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we are really cooked. Global warming is a misnomer as we are in reality looking at climate disruption followed by climate destruction.

So what can we do to survive? Nuclear power? Wind? Solar? What’s the answer?

Since 2000, the nuclear power industry has pumped millions into a PR campaign touting nuclear energy as the solution to global warming. Dick Cheney wants nuclear power everywhere, even nukes making "black hydrogen" out of oil sands. There have even been a handful of prominent environmentalists who have “reconsidered” nuclear power, primarily Stewart Brand, the editor of The Whole Earth Catalog.

Yet unknown to most, Brand is now a paid consultant to nuclear energy companies for the last several years, including PG&E, Southern California Edison and Duke Power. Another “convert” is Patrick Moore, who left Greenpeace 20 years ago, and is today paid by the so-called Clean And Safe Energy Coalition, financed entirely through the Nuclear Energy Institute.

http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/green-to-the-core-part-1/151/

Moore’s clients also include The Vinyl Institute, for his defense of the polluting plastic industry and he has spoken at public hearings for the timber industry, joking that “clear-cuts are just temporary meadows”. The late Hugh Montefiore is a third environmentalist, ejected from the UK Friends of the Earth when he went over to the pro-nuclear side, and then there’s James Lovelock, the co-founder of the Gaia Hypothesis. If we leave aside the two paid spokesmen, that makes only two prominent environmentalists, and only Lovelock is actually a scientist.

There’s good reason so few have changed their position on nuclear power.

How many nuclear plants would we really need to make a dent in global warming? The number is in the thousands. The total global installed electrical capacity on Earth is 3800 Gigawatts, while nuclear reactors worldwide were at 368 GW (installed in 2005). Installed wind power stands at 60 GW in 2005, while solar is a mere 5.5 GW installed. Hydro is 740 GW installed on Earth. Most of the rest is fossil fuel, especially coal and natural gas. A hundred new coal plants each are currently planned for both the US and China, which is true folly. Oil meanwhile primarily goes to heat and transportation, now being sucked up at the global rate of a billion barrels every 10 to 11 days.

Assuming we went from gasoline-powered to electric or hydrogen cars, we would need around 2,000 1 GW nuclear plants worldwide to really end the reign of fossil fuel here in the present. Yet the real carbon emission crisis lies in emerging Third World economies, which are projected to be half the increase in carbon through 2025. Thousands and thousands of dirty village diesel generators will soon be coming online, some funded by the World Bank and other agencies.

Any nuclear solution to global warming would thus have to replace these small diesels, which are spread out over vast regions. Many of the new nuclear reactors would need to be smaller 100 MW units, with construction of long transmission lines to all those villages and towns. After figuring in future needs and this Third World diesel village generator problem, we would need additional hundreds of big 1 GW plants and then several thousand smaller facilities spread out all over the Third World. But do we really want thousands of 100 MW reactors in places like Burkina Faso, Niger and Laos? And who would pay to construct those unprofitable transmission lines going everywhere?

In fact, trying to reduce carbon by building thousands of new nuclear power plants would clearly put us on the wrong road to planetary survival.

Here’s why. There is only so much high-grade uranium ore so far found on Earth, and its price has soared in recent years from $7 to $30 a pound, with some analysts predicting $110 a pound within 5 years. At current rates of use, all the known high-grade reserves are used up in a few decades. Having many new plants, producing for example 50% of the world’s electricity rather than 16%, means that the reasonably priced high-grade stuff will be used up in less than a decade. Then we are stuck with refining and enriching low-grade ore, containing the vast majority of uranium on Earth.

It turns out that with low-grade, we would have to mine 5 times as much ore, transport 5 times more, and process 5 times more--all done with fossil fuel for 30 to 40 years to keep the plants going. Uranium processing also releases tons of CFCs into the atmosphere, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Plus all nuclear plant construction would be accomplished with fossil fuel.

According to a 2003 study by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, when it is all added up, the high-grade ore nuclear fuel cycle produces only three times fewer greenhouse gases than modern natural-gas power stations. Low-grade uranium ore would make the carbon trade-off negligible. Nuclear is not greenhouse gas-free.
(http://www.stormsmith.nl/).

Another question arises over nuclear power. Is it wise to create more radioactive waste, when the Yucca Mountain Waste Site—legal capacity 70,000 tons--is already “full” thanks to the 80,000 tons of waste currently stored near the 104 U.S. nuclear reactors? And Yucca may never even open. How can we start producing many, many times the waste, when we still can’t open one single waste depository?

Given Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, part of the nuclear industry’s PR campaign is to convince a skeptical public there is a new design for a reactor that cannot melt down. This is the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor—but there are several issues the industry does not tell the public about the PBMR.

Pebble reactors work by harnessing the heat released by radioactive pebbles the size of tennis balls, which move slowly through the reactor core. It’s true they are harder to go into meltdown, but pebble bed nuclear reactors can erupt in a graphite fire. David Lochbaum of The Union of Concerned Scientists explains:

“There is no free lunch. While it may not melt down, it could catch on fire. The pebble bed is like the Chernobyl reactor in that it uses an awful lot of graphite. None of our reactors operating in the United States use graphite in the core. Graphite is just carbon. If the carbon catches on fire, it's pretty hard to put out. It's particularly hard if you're using airflow to cool the reactor, which the pebble bed does. If you have a fire and you stop the airflow, you also stop the heat removal. So you may stop the fire and start the meltdown. You may not be able to get `fireproof' and `meltdown proof’, you may have to pick one or the other.”

Unfortunately, pebble bed reactors also generate 10 times the waste for the same amount of electricity. When Stewart Brand was informed of this, he replied: “It may well be true about the pebble bed and waste. But then, okay, back to the old drawing board!" Yet Brand went right back to touting pebble reactors at the industry events he is hired to speak at.

Worst of all, the corporations and the government have convinced themselves that pebble nuclear reactors are “inherently safe”. So they plan to build each one without containment buildings--allowing them to add reactor module after reactor module. The truth is that PBMRs are air-cooled, so they need convection--which a containment building would hinder. The industry continues to tell the public the pebble reactors are “inherently safe”.

Yet as Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb said, "Sooner or later a fool will prove greater than the proof even in a foolproof system."

When the Germans built a working 300 MW pebble reactor, the lack of a containment building proved to be a real mistake on May 4, 1986, when a defective fuel pebble got stuck in the feeder tube and caught fire. It is in the end impossible to assure that every nuclear pebble is perfect, with no defects, and that’s what they need to be.

The resulting graphite inferno contaminated a 2-kilometer area around the plant on the Ruhr River in Hamm-Uentrop. Germany shut the plant down permanently, citing it as “unsafe”. Pebble reactor manufacturers have yet to address the possibility of graphite fires in any of their proposals to governments. They simply ignore it.

Another real issue is a terrorist attack Any nuclear reactor is subject to one. The government is predicting that the War on Terror is going to last decades. Unfortunately, in mock terrorist attacks conducted by the NRC, fully half of the terror gangs succeeded in gaining control of the plant’s safety systems. If they had been real instead of mock terrorists, control of plant safety could have lead to meltdowns or releases. Recommendations for increased security have included the National Guard being deployed around each plant to restrict land, water and air access.

On September 11, 2001, Mohammed Atta himself flew United Flight 11 right down the Hudson River, thankfully passing the Indian Point power plant. If Atta had decided to descend and had rammed the jetliner into the unhardened building housing the used fuel rod pool, the resulting catastrophe would have been centered in the Hudson Valley. The lethality of the resulting fire and its smoke, laced with the radioactivity of decades worth of fuel-rods, must be understood to comprehend what the threat of a terrorist attack is all about. Obviously, building thousands of nuclear plants would greatly increase the risk of terrorist attack or take-over.

Meanwhile, the top US climate modeler, Dr. James Hansen, gives us just 10 years to stabilize carbon emissions before warming is irreversible. If so, nuclear reactors are not the answer. Previously, it took 10 to15 years just to get a single nuclear plant permitted, and that would only be worse today. In addition, the new pebble reactors would require tens of billions of research dollars and decades of R&D to commercialize. It would all be too late.

Then there are the unfair subsidies nuclear energy must receive to make a profit, over $140 billion in subsidies over the years (NIRS). Even with these, no one has financed a new nuclear plant in the US since Three Mile Island released enough radiation to trigger the evacuation of small children and pregnant women from Harrisburg on March 30, 1979.

All this for a technology that was initially advertised as being a power source that would one day be “Too Cheap To Meter”. The catastrophic liability insurance, decommissioning, uranium enrichment and waste disposal tabs are mostly picked up by the American taxpayers, sometimes camouflaged by lumping them in with the nuclear weapons program. There should be a level economic playing field, without subsidies for obsolete reactors.

So if nuclear reactors are not the answer, what’s the solution to global warming? In fact, we need a mix of solutions: primarily conservation, wind, solar, some hydro and natural gas (with sequestered carbon).

Conservation is not “wishful thinking”, as Dick Cheney said. Europeans, for example, use half the energy Americans do. Conservation can reduce US energy use substantially, even more if we switch to plug-in hybrid cars that charge with the wasted “off-peak amps” produced by our base-load power plants each and every night. That’s right, every night there is excess base-load capacity, as much as 30% excess in most regions, which would easily charge much of the US commuter fleet for the average 25 mile per day trip. All without adding a single power plant or using any extra fuel.

Conservation equipment has been shown to cost only 2-3 cents a kWh, thus every penny spent on nuclear reactors wastes a least twice the money compared to spending it on switching to more efficient lightbulbs, building methods, etc. Amory Lovins of The Rocky Mountain Institute: “buying nuclear power instead makes global warming worse. Why? If delivering a new nuclear kWh cost only (say) 6¢, while saving a kWh cost (pessimistically) 3¢, then the 6¢ spent on the nuclear kWh could instead have bought two efficiency kWh.”

Meanwhile, wind power is predicted to far outpace nuclear power increases over the coming years. Amory Lovins explains the new shape of the energy market: “The International Energy Agency forecast in 2003 that in 2010, wind could add nine times as much capacity as nuclear added in 2004, or 84 times its planned 2010 addition. Eight years hence, just wind plus industry-forecast PVs could surpass installed global nuclear capacity. The market increasingly resembles a 1995 Shell scenario with half of global energy, and virtually all growth, coming from renewables by mid-century--about what it would take, with conservative efficiency gains, to stabilize atmospheric carbon.”

In addition, there is hydroelectricity, with much capacity around the world. 20 GW of hydro-electric power in the US alone can be supplied by current dams which right now have no generators (FERC), so no new dams need be built.

At the same time, modern combined cycle gas generators, with only a third the emissions of a coal plant, can support the bulk of the transition to lower carbon levels quickly. Natural gas is unfortunately necessary as a temporary measure in the response to the crisis of global warming. Natural gas prices will drop from current levels, as supply quadruples with the completion of several LNG terminals. Plus there are now sequestration methods that trap the carbon and inject it into underground geological formations, successfully done in Norway. Later, when we are creating “green” hydrogen from water, these temporary natural gas facilities can be converted to that.

The Solar Breakthrough of the 21st Century: Concentrating Photvoltaics

Finally, there is a fantastic new breakthrough in solar technology.

Solar power has just leapt from 11% efficiency to 40%. Just as a magnifying glass can burn a hole in a newspaper, a set of magnifying lenses can increase the amount of electricity produced by a special solar “chip”. In fact, a working prototype has operated for a year without problems in El Cajon, California, churning out 6.6 kilowatts from a 23-foot diameter, floating circular platform, which I confirmed on a trip to the West Coast.

Currently, five acres of panels are needed to produce one Megawatt. Within a year the new technology, from a company named Pyron Solar, will reduce that to a mere one acre per Megawatt. The National Renewable Energy Lab in July 2005 put out a press release predicting that concentrating photovoltaics will soon be cost-competitive with fossil-fuel, lowering solar to just $3 a watt installed. Ordinary solar panels today are $5 to $6 a watt or more--without any installation.

The great thing is, a practical concentrating solar PV device is here now, not 15 years from now. Plus the Boeing-Spectrolab chips work on gallenium, so there is no chance of being held back by the current silicon shortage that is plaguing solar power. In fact, the European Science Agency released a report in 2004 stating that nuclear power was apparently no longer needed to avoid global warming, as new breakthroughs such as the concentrating photovoltaic prototype by Pyron promised to alter the energy landscape.

So let’s not get distracted and waste our money on building thousands of pebble nuclear reactors that each generate ten times the radioactive waste, in a process that ends up emitting greenhouse gas anyway. The mix of conservation and the energy solutions given above makes sense and nuclear reactors are not needed.

Our country and the world needs to go on a war footing over global warming. If the Allies won World War II and beat the fascists, we can pull together in the same way and overcome this challenge with energy initiatives around the globe.

Let’s have community conservation drives. We can set local conservation goals and use the media, events and local organizing to meet them. And let’s spend our time and money on the real solutions of renewables, the emergency gas plants and especially the fantastic new solar breakthrough in concentrating photovoltaics.

For it is this exciting new solar technology that finally gives us a fighting chance against global warming. So get out your magnifying glass and take a closer look--because here comes the Sun!