Stewart Brand bears his chest at the end of the nuclear power debate at TED.
75% of the audience was pro-nuclear before the debate, which just came out online.
(Separately, Bill Gates and Myhrvold also spoke of new nuclear technologies that would change some of the assumptions on waste and weapons risk.)
"Weapons risk" has made its way into the energetic mix discourse–read, it’s become political. Otherwise, how to raise the pressure on the Iranians?
I’m not sure why nuclear and wind/solar have to be dichotomous; I don’t know why energy efficiency is not on the table. Am I to anti-capitalist? Hope not…
What nobody really mentioned is energy storage and energy transport. The discussion about wind and solar would look different if we take energy storage into account. Currently we mostly have hydro, which is unevenly distributed and limited. Some areas have more hydro storage than they need – which could be used if we installed efficient energy transfer, such as HVDC. Europe is talking about this for a while now, but nobody seems to be willing to put in the money for it. Of course HVDC would also allow wind and solar energy to be shared across a whole continent, which would smooth out the ups and downs of sun and wind, reducing the need for intermittent power stations and storage.
There is a lot happening on the storage side as well. The Andasol solar plant in spain has molten salt heat storage which allows it to get through times without sun. The Australian National University is working on chemical storage of solar-thermal energy, using Ammonia. The concept scales to any size, as excess sunshine can be chemically stored indefinitely, transported through pipelines, and released on demand – so it even acts as intermittent supply to kick in when other sources have a low. However seeing how much trouble they had to get funding really hurts – the coal-fueled energy industry doesn’t like that sort of stuff. In the end funding came from a software company. (I’m not affiliated with that project, I merely observe and feel inspired by it).
Also, to make it all work we don’t need baseload power stations – we need as many renewable sources to go online to have a slight excess of energy most of the time, and intermittent load power stations for the times when it doesn’t quite add up. Those can be gas powered, as they will only run for short durations, and there aren’t many emissions if they’re off. This will of course increase energy costs – but this just means that we’re not putting the right price on energy, or a sustainable future.
What renewable energy research needs is money injections on a big scale. I would guess the average cost of a war like the one in Iraq would solve most of our energy problems in less than 5 years. 1 trillion dollars would build solar concentrators good for about 1000TWh/year, which is 1/3 of the fossil fuel electricity in the US. Or it would build 1600 TWh/year in wind power, based on current costs (obviously costs would drop dramatically if someone was to commit to such a big installation…). If that sort of money is available to wage wars or bail out failed banks, it would also be available to get rid of half of the fossil fuel power stations (or maybe even all of them, provided costs can be cut in half, which should be possible with 1 trillion dollars…) The money wouldn’t even be lost, it would be an investment paid back by the electricity it produces.
What really gets me about the way nuclear energy is discussed is how misinformation is (deliberately?) pushed without a second thought, and worse, that people don’t question it enough. (I should maybe say upfront that I’m a biased European as I still remember when we had to stay indoors because of Chernobyl… but that aside)
I certainly agree with the comment "be aware of the propaganda".
Examples:
– Nuclear is CO2 neutral – wrong. Plants have to be built out of concrete, which releases huge amounts of CO2. Mining trucks are diesel powered, and have to move many tons of earth to get a kilogram uranium fuel. Processing needs energy, and not all of that energy is currently produced in clean ways. It’s not easy to account for all that, but it should be done properly, and discussed openly, especially being very clear what has been included and what not. Saying there is no CO2-output is wrong. Same goes of course for wind and solar, but there the calculations are done more publicly.
-Nuclear energy is cheap – depends. It is only cheap for the owners of the plants, because of the huge subsidies the tax payer is putting in (at least in Germany, where the government promised to take care of waste disposal, safety and liability). Billions are spent on permanent storage research facilities, on policing the numerous nuclear protest rallies, and nobody knows the true cost of a nuclear accident in populated areas. An estimate from the 80’s put it at $10 trillion or more for a nuclear meltdown somewhere in central Europe. On top of that, the costs of decommissioning are generally underestimated.
– the fact that no country anywhere in the world has figured out what to do with the waste is conveniently forgotten about. It’s not for lack of trying, however, things like ground water leakage into an almost-definite permanent storage facility don’t go down well…
To your first comment, I should point out that stumping for "new nukes" is one of the places I can be unbiased by what I do at work each day, as we have no nuclear exposure. Globally, we have over 70 investments (43 from here) in renewables, efficiency and storage, and yes, we share your enthusiasm for all of those innovations.
To your second comment, the debate video makes passing reference to some of those points, with:
– a graph showing the CO2 emissions of nuclear (not zero, but less than most options).
– reference to use of the waste from first generation reactors as fuel for fast breeder reactors (which burn a U238 duraflame log continuously for 60 years, with 99% efficiency vs 1% for today’s U235 reactors. No fuel to reload or waste to ship around.)
And in his recent book, Brand wonders why we hold nuclear to a different standard than coal in terms of risks and waste; he argues that oil is subsidized more than nuclear, and makes a stunning environmentalist claim about Chernobyl:
"The real damage to people in the region is from poverty and mental stress. Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself. The zone’s evacuation put an end to industrialization, deforestation, cultivation and other human intrusions, making it one of Ukraine’s environmentally cleanest regions… The world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities. Even where the levels of radiation are highest, wildlife abounds. I predict there will be a Chernobyl National Park."
An argument against nuclear power is often made regarding nuclear weapons proliferation. That’s a false problem on any inspection. Almost no matter what is done, extrapolated over 25, 50, 100 years, any nation with a billion dollars will be capable of building or buying a nuclear weapon. It took Iran 60+ years after we managed our first nuke to come up with theirs, but if North Korea can do it, then so can Brazil, Venezuela, Poland, Japan, Germany, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and a zillion others. They’ll do so for whatever their own reasons happen to be, but the point being, nations on the development level of Burma can create nukes with enough effort, time, money and willingness to ignore international sanctions etc. There’s no (literally) stopping nuclear weapons proliferation, it has already happened, and will continue to gradually spread.
Nuclear is the only energy source powerful enough to move us to an all electric car future, which is where we should go. 200 million electric automobiles can only be sustained by an outrageously massive energy source. Until we have advanced fusion or hydrogen energy power plants – nuclear is the growth source for the next 50 years.
Jacobson’s arguments are rather terrible in that TED talk. He mentions that we must currently burn fossil fuels during the build time on the nuclear power plants. That’s another extremely bogus false problem, because the only flip to that position is the notion that we instantly stop using all fossil fuels tomorrow morning in order to stop the output of CO2. It’s the notion that we shouldn’t do something with a massive long term benefit, because it involves short term pain. If we had been properly investing into nuclear in the US in the last 25 years, we would have already progressed past the short term pain stage and have moved a lot of our economy off of fossil fuels.
Any talk of energy that excludes reduction of the ridiculous amount that the western world wastes… is missing the main advantage possible. "Our way of life" is, relative to other human beings, a relative absurdity of energy and resource waste. We don’t need more, but more efficient use of what we have and that comes with improvement in contextual thinking, not technology. The pied piper of energy and technology has led to barely being able to pay the energy bill or the cleanup bill – now painfully evident with the sloppy and ‘cost cutting’ use of technology in the drive for energy, which has now destroyed the gulf of mexico, thank you BP). Lets think more about using less than creating ways to use and use more.
all true… but if you are going to drive, and many people will have to to keep you alive, it would better if it were electric. And it will. Those little car engines are staggeringly inefficient, converting 80% of the oil into waste heat.
And then I saw this at the top of my tB wall from Courtney in China:
"China is building more nuclear plants in the next ten years than the rest of the world combined — growing from 9GW to 86GW. As such, side deals with Kazakhstan swapping natural gas for uranium are on the up and up!"
exactly
Start making candles out of bees wax again….
Oh…I forgot…we killed them all off…!
Soylent green anyone ???
Sadly J….I have to say;
I feel like you are so caught up in "modern technology and how it can save us"….
synthetic life forms
travel to mars
clean (nuclear) energy….
Like maybe the technology is part of the problem in many ways….(???)
Whoever that guy with the t shirt is…its spooky.
Sorry if I came across too critical in my earlier post, and thanks for the response. I am not per se against nuclear, and these new technologies might indeed be a good way to deal with the hot waste we already have amassed (unfortunately not the low-grade waste though). Certainly better to "burn" it up than to bury it somewhere in the hope it won’t come back up within the next 100,000 years…
However, it is often said about renewables that they might work in a research/prototype setting but haven’t been proven at a large scale, and that it would take too long to deploy. These new reactors aren’t any more proven in the real world than a huge variety of wave power, solar, tidal, storage or other technologies that are around right now. I think we do actually have enough clean technology available, what’s needed now is commitment and massive scale. It’s sometimes a trap to keep waiting for even better technology to become available (and it will), but sometimes one just has to go ahead with what we have right now (and it’s very much appreciated that funds like DFJ push alternative energy and clean tech!)
The debate did indeed give a more balanced picture than the usual discussions in the media, although most of the points were too short and too rushed to reflect upon them properly. To some extent I disagree with debates like "pro/against nuclear" – that is a way too general question and can’t easily be answered. Same with debates about stemcells and other diverse topics which are not black or white.
One of the interesting points was the huge discrepancy in the estimates for CO2 that were presented – orders of magnitude between low and high. I think that says it all 🙂
I read about the Chernobyl area, and how nature claimed it back so quickly. There is no doubt we can do worse things to the environment than nuclear power. I came across a website of a woman who rides her motorbike on the deserted roads of the "Chernobyl nature park" (google for Elena Filatova) – it’s interesting to see how briefly the artifacts of civilisation can persist before crumbling to bits again.
If you continue that thought though it’s maybe not the best idea to hope for nuclear accidents as environmental benefits. The best thing for most things on the planet except humans is if humans would disappear altogether, or at least heavily cull the population. While nuclear might be a good way to get there, it’s hardly a future I would look forward to 🙂
Thanks for making your photo available as CC-BY. I’ve used it on my blog in a post on how long copyrights last.
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