Stewart Brand: Environmental Heresies
Here is the article by Stewart Brand in Technology Review that the NY Times article was based on. Some points on GE crops, population growth and 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. That's the kind of idea that can go from "Impractical!" to "Necessary!" in a season, depending on world events.
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.
There is also this interview with Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, mentioned by Brand in the passage above, on an old episode of Penn Radio. Patrick Moore has been vilified in environmentalist movement for supporting capitalist solutions to environmental issues.
My Groups
-
Atheists Updated: 2 hours ago
-
Freethinkers (host) Updated: 2 hours ago
-
twitter Updated: 3 hours ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
Comments
Stewart Brand says that: "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."
Can we open up a "public debate" here on the last point.
Far from being low-carbon, nuclear power is a major source of emissions. Even under the most favourable conditions, nuclear plants produce approximately one-third as much carbon dioxide emissions as gas-fired electricity production. Using the richest ores available, a nuclear power plant must operate for ten years at full load before it has generated more energy than was consumed mining and refining the uranium, building the plant etc..
There is only a finite supply of uranium ore containing reasonable concentrations of uranium 235. When this concentration falls below 0.01%, the costs of energy production from nuclear power can no longer cover the costs of extraction of uranium from the earth, at which time the nuclear fuel cycle will produce no net energy. In other words: below a certain uranium content, nuclear power produces less energy than is needed to build, fuel, and operate the reactor and to repair the environmental damage.
Is there enough fuel to support a growing use of nuclear power?
Uranium is not an abundant material - if enough nuclear fission reactors were built to meet most of the world's demand for electricity, exploitable sources of uranium would be exhausted in about fifteen to twenty years. This is an extreme case, but no-one can deny that uranium will one day run out, just like oil and gas.
As exploitable sources of uranium become exhausted, prices will rise. And as higher-grade ores are exhausted, more energy will be consumed and more CO2 will be released in processing the lower-grade ores that remain.
In recent heat waves, nuclear power plants have been shut down owing to shortages of cooling water and unacceptable damage that would be caused by the discharge of hot water into the environment. This kind of problem is likely to become worse as global temperatures rise.
It’s clear that Nuclear scores badly on both energy security and carbon emissions compared to renewables. Even if we ignore the subsidised cost of nuclear, the risk of accidents and the un-resolved issue of waste, these should be reason enough to scrap any idea of more nuclear power.
Many people are now advocating a renewable technology called Concentrating Solar Power (CSP).
CSP doesn’t use expensive photo-voltaic panels; instead it uses the heat of the sun to produce steam and turn turbines in the same way that a conventional power station does. It is also possible to store solar heat in melted salts so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since1985 and half a million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.
CSP works best in hot deserts. But it is feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity over very long distances using highly-efficient 'HVDC' transmission lines. In the 'TRANS-CSP' report commissioned by the German government, it is estimated that CSP electricity, imported from North Africa and the Middle East, could become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in Europe, including the cost of transmission. A large-scale HVDC transmission grid has also been proposed by Airtricity as a means of optimising the use of wind power throughout Europe.
Further information about CSP may be found at www.trec-uk.org.uk and www.trecers.net . Copies of the TRANS-CSP report may be downloaded from www.trec-uk.org.uk/reports.htm . The many problems associated with nuclear power are summarised at www.mng.org.uk/green_house/no_nukes.htm .
CSP would appear to have at least three crucial advantages compared with nuclear:
1. it has an inexhaustible supply of fuel
2. it really is low carbon - no expensive mining and processing costs just to produce the fuel
3. It leaves no dangerous waste materials.
It strikes me that if the 'developed' world had not discovered nuclear fission and fusion reactions in the quest to build superior weapons, we might all be using solar thermal power to produce electricity by now.
Oh Robert, yet another nuclear-bashing CSP-promoting comment, just like all the others scattered around the internet, copied from Gerry Wolff tracks (or did he copy yours?) Sadly, the nuclear bashing seems to have increased with time.
Anyway, the lie about nuclear's CO2 production needs an answer. Well-audited work by Vatenfall and investigations by Melbourne University have comprehensively demolished the idea that nuclear's energy inputs (not necessarily carbon-based) even approach a third of gas-based emissions. The major inefficency in US nuclear power today is the enrichment technology (diffusion), which will be fixed in the relatively short term, cutting lifetime energy input back from 6% of output to under 3%. For an 85% capacity plant (cf. under 25% for solar) this implies complete payback in roughly one year of operation, counting advance payback (payforward?) for 40 years of mining and refinement and of course decommissioning and waste handling.
And uranium is abundant. Unlike fossil plants, the fuel cost is not a major part of the operations cost of nuclear, so significant increases in uranium cost make little difference to electricity costs. As such even (currently) expensive methods like extraction from seawater can be economically supported if and when necessary. This maintains uranium supply for a minimum of thousands of years, and under ideal conditions for several billion years.
Thanks for the space to reply here Stephen.
Nuclear's net CO2 emissions are ~2% of coal's and ~5% that of gas. They are equal to or lower than most renewable sources:
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull422/article4.pdf
Limited supply of uranium (in the ground) is not, and will not be an issue for the foreseeable future. Even with the once-through cycle, along with a large increase in nuclear generation, it will be hundreds of years before we run out of high-grade uranium ore. Thus, the net energy inputs and CO2 emissions for nuclear will not measurably increase for at least a century. With breeder reactors (which will have been developed by ~2100), the fuel supply is essentially infinte.
The recent run up in ore cost is due to a temprary lack of sufficient mining capacity, not a limited supply of uranium in the ground. The "official reserves" of high-grade ore are probably less than ~1% of the high-grade ore that is actually out there, and which will be found over the next century. Now that the price is high, we hear news of new high-grade ore discoveries literally every day. We've barely started looking for the stuff.
Of note is the fact that uranium's discovery cost (per amount of energy produced) is 600 times less than that of oil. Whereas we've largely finished discovering oil and gas (no major finds in decades), we're near the start of the discovery curve for uranium. The uranium situation is akin to that of oil in the early part of the 20th century (when, BTW, the official reserves estimates were ~100 times smaller than the endowment that was eventually discovered).
More on this topic at:
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html
and
http://216.94.150.122/investor_relations/speeches/speech_text.php?spid=49
Emissions, like . . water vapor? Detrimental. .
where did this guy get his information? the Christian Coalition?