The myopia of energy production: "Nothing will go wrong"

Just Compare (yeah, it's wiki, but this is hard/fast/easy mode):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents

Since 2005 (Uses same time period and incidents that are 'modern', i.e. could conceivably happen today and aren't based on turning off all the safeties or single-hulled liners)

Oil: 17
Nuclear: 3

9 of the oil spills leaked more than 1000 tonnes.
Not a single nuclear accident was bad enough to get an actual 'accident rating' on the INES.

Is Nuclear Power foolproof? No.
Is it safer than oil? Easily.

Ultimately, the best thing we can do is start diversifying our energy sources. We need Nuclear, Oil, Coal, Gas, Wind, Solar, Fusion(Please physicists...), Geothermal, Hydroelectric, etcetera.

We need to stop depending on Coal/Oil so much and try moving towards other things. Efforts to reduce consumption simply aren't working. For every person who turns out the lights when they leave a room, there are 10 others who build new rooms that need lights.

Ever hear of a solar-power-related catastrophe?

Benjamin Cohen,

I was curious about the title of your blog article, so I decided to take a look.

The cartoon was cute, but I don't think it goes very far to make your point, whatever that is.

Oil production for energy use is not perfect. Of course.
Nuclear power production for energy is not perfect. Of course.

But, so what? We live in a real world with real problems and real needs. What social systems can do is try to solve the problems and meet the needs while making choices to minimize the short and long term negative effects of meeting those needs (which seems to be what you are most concerned about) and dealing with or mitigating any unexpected or unintended negative effects (like people breaking into the pipelines to siphon off oil to sell for money).

Since the cartoon didn't make your point very clear, I read your linked blog and most of the comments. It seemed mostly concerned about negative effects of oil production in Nigeria. Certainly Nigeria is a social mess with lots of problems and I don't know enough of the specifics there to make useful recommendations. I would be interested in seeing your specific recommendations besides getting rid of oil production which would be an economic disaster.

I also looked up a few numbers on Nigeria. The GDP has gone up 3-7% every year for the last eight years or so, so that doesn't seem to bad. Somehow I don't think all that growth has come from internet scams.

The newborn life expectancy has gone up 10 years in the last 50 years, so that looks good.

Nigeria does import some oil, but so do most oil producers with rare exceptions like Saudi Arabia. Mexico produces only slightly more oil than Nigeria, but imports almost twice as much, so Nigeria doesn't seem to be doing too badly in that respect.

I thought Blair made some good points in his comments and BRC (is that you, by the way?) didn't really address the specifics much.

All forms of energy production, from burning wood or using a water mill to grind grain into flour to wind, solar, nuclear, and other forms of electrical generation have advantages and disadvantages. I would also like to know what your preferred plan would be for generating 1 gigawatt of electrical power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year in a third world country.

squirrelelite @ # 2 - please look up "non-sequitur" in the dictionary, and contemplate why people who use that as their primary form of argument get little to no respect.

Then go take a long hike on a short catwalk.

squirrelelite@ #2...

I disagree. The cartoon (and the point) is well made. The sourcing and implementation of several major energy sources come fraught with large-scale risks.

For oil, it's the potential damage associated with marine spills either during extraction or transport (impacting fragile ecosystems) and the impact of fossil fuels released during the burning of oil.

The risks associated with an industry like nuclear power are also high, if not higher... to name three:

*** CONTAMINATION during uranium extraction and processing
--> poor containment in tailing ponds and contaminants seeping into groundwater (much as with the chromium seepages depicted in the film Erin Brokovich)... poor containment has already been documented in mines in Australia (right above the Great Artesian Basin)
--> mobilisation of radioactive particles into airborne dust

*** ACCIDENT either something comparable to a 'spill' on land (be it a truck rolling over or a train derailing or...) or through inappropriate operation of a plant itself

*** misuse of radioactive materials (aka 'terrorism')... fly a plane into a plant, steal processed uranium and make a dirty bomb etc. I'd also throw in here that the centrifuges we use for civilian nuclear power are also, by design, inherently capable of producing highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. This means the more nuclear power is adopted throughout the world (spurred on by the US and other major nations), the greater the risks of nuclear (weapons) proliferation.

All these potential spills are relevant to the lives of all those pragmatists out there (as you seem to be, squirrelelite?): chronic low-level radiation exposure is linked with a range of teratogenic (cancer) processes. Higher levels can make areas unlivable and non-arable for long periods of time.

What the cartoon is saying is that an incident in one industry should serve as a point of reflection on claims from other industries that they are 'safe'... particularly those like nuclear power where the stakes are high when safety fails.

Were there no viable alternatives, minimizing risk would be the best possible strategy... but as emerging reports from the Deepwater spill suggest, humans and corporations in a competitive environment have a bad track record of enforcing safety standards.

So, painting with a broad brush, I would suggest that the issue is whether trust a class of individuals (across multiple industries) to appropriately mitigate the risks to a level we would deem acceptable. If not, far better to invest time, money and our brightest minds into emerging energy technologies whose 'accidents' would have more restricted impact on the health of humans and the broader environment.

@Pierce R. Butler #3 Could you be any more worthless?

>>> "misuse of radioactive materials"

Then you go hide under the bed and let the adults deal with things. For pity's sake is everything going to be "what if terrorists get involved!" for the rest of the century? You should go work for Homeland Security as a Patriots Act advocate.

@Nemo #1

Of course there aren't any solar power-related catastrophies - solar power is an insignificant contribution to national and worldwide energy usage. Start building multi-gigawatt solar plants that provide energy when we need it, and we'll see some problems.

Imagine covering hundreds, maybe thousands, of square miles of land with manufactured parts. You'll need mirrors capable of moving by computer control, collectors and turbines to generate the energy, lots of little roads in between to service all of that hardware. And definitely get rid of any significant plant or animal life on the site, or that takes migratory paths through it. And of course stuff will break and wear out, so you'll need to be constantly re-manufacturing all of that gear. And what are the environmental and weather effects of changing the sunlight absorption and reflection for those hundreds of square miles of land?

But all of that still doesn't us power when and where we need it. So we'll need a way to store and release tera-joule levels of energy (probably more, actually), hopefully in a sort-of efficient way. No energy storage system even a thousandth of that size has ever been built. All of the ideas that I've heard of for doing it are horribly inefficient and have lots of potential for environmental destruction (batteries with nasty chemicals, moving gargantuan amounts of water around, etc).

Or maybe we could do a solar satellite. If we could ever figure out how to move terawatts of power from orbit to Earth. What happens if all of that power ends up going where it isn't supposed to? And just how much pollution will be involved in mining, manufacturing, and launching to orbit enough stuff to gather terawatts of power and beam it back to the Earth?

What's the point of all this? Industrialized civilization is messy. There are 6 billion people on the earth, and they all need power. Getting the quantity of power that they need is going to be messy any way you do it. Hopefully, we can keep the messes reasonably rare and well-contained. But there is no real alternative - you can't feed and house 6 billion people with hunting-gathering and subsistence farming. Pre-industrial world populations were in the hundreds of millions, so we'd have to go back to that, meaning billions of dead people. Think Hitler and Stalin and Mao were bad? They didn't even make a dent in the numbers of people who would have to die for that to work. No thanks, I'll keep our industrial society, even if we have an oil spill every now and then.

Tock, I take it you're not a fan of the Patriots Act.

Good.

And (I think) I understand your frustration... in Australia we watched with bemusement (and, at times, despair) the pugilistic, nationalistic, narrow-minded and blantantly destructive fervour with which the US seemed to attack its own international position (and the rights it claimed to value for its people) in the name of security for the first decade of the 20th century.

This blog, however, is probably not the forum for a discussion of the relative merits of US domestic and foreign security policy (or is it?). The original post was about the safety (or lack thereof) of the various power strategies at our disposal.

I would hope that you, in all your assumed maturity, might be able to draw a distinction between the tabling of legitimate risks in an assessment of the relative merits of different energy strategies, and fear-mongering (as a justification for the stripping of civil liberties?).

If you can offer a sensible rationale for how nuclear power addresses any of the principle concerns associated with energy security and environmental sustainability (either for your own country, or in the broader context of pursuing, say the Millenium Development Goals), then I'd be happy to hear it.

Failing that, I see no justification for pursuing nuclear power. By all accounts, it is economically uncompetitive (and depends on massive government subsidies), environmentally expensive (in its carbon footprint, land degradation and end-of-cycle uranium storage) and, in liberating and mobilising uranium creates substantial health challenges with indiscriminate specificity.

Further, if you're fed up with the predominance of fear in international and domestic policy, a understanding of the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear warfare is important: if nothing else, the expansion of civilian nuclear power provides fuel (pun intended) for the fears on which foreign policy hawks feed... and is used to argue for bigger military budgets and more suspicion (and paranoia) in international relationships.

[Do I end with a passing comment about the implied maturity of insults in a public forum, rather than taking 2 minutes to jot down a substantive response? Better not. I'm new here, and sure I'll learn the ropes eventually... plus I was taught to respect my elders (amongst others).]

Cheers.

@Pierce R Butler #3,

I am enough of an old fogie to have taken Latin in high school so I didn't really need to look it up, but I thought I would anyway. About.com says "A non sequitur is something that does not follow."

An example would be:
my dog is brown, therefore the sky is blue.

The conclusion is unrelated to the premise. Therefore, the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

Since I was mainly trying to explain my perspective as a preliminary to asking a couple of questions about Benjamin Cohen's point, I am not sure which statement you thought did not follow. Perhaps if you will identify it, I can offer a clearer explanation with some supporting details.

As for the catwalk, I thought the song "I'm Too Sexy" on one of the Shrek CD's was rather funny. But, I don't have the figure for it and don't really think I'm that good looking, so I have no interest in trying out for a modeling job. I don't mind taking a hike once in a while. It's good for my heart and lungs although it does add a tiny amount to our daily CO2 emissions.

@mvb #4,

The cartoon may have been technically well-drawn, but the point was so obvious that it was little but a straw man argument. No one who seriously advocates nuclear power claims that it is absolutely 100% safe. But, even with Chernobyl included, the record of the world-wide nuclear industry is pretty good.

For details about Chernobyl, I offer this quote from Wikipedia:
"A 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed "fewer than 50" direct deaths (including nine children with thyroid cancer) and estimated that there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths over time among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed people.[1][4] Although the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and certain limited areas remain off limits, the majority of affected areas are now considered safe for settlement and economic activity."

I don't wish anyone to die unnecessarily and those deaths are bad. But that still works out to only about 100 people a year since 1986. Compared to the 2000 people who die every year in coal mining accidents in China alone and a number of people who died recently in a U.S. accident, it is not good but it is better.

And, keep in mind that the Chernobyl reactor design was unacceptable by U.S. standards and would never have been licensed in the U.S. or most other countries that use nuclear power. And the safety record of the U.S. nuclear power industry is quite good. There has never been a radiation-related fatality at a U.S. nuclear power plant in over 50 years since the first such plant opened. The last nuclear reactor fatality was over 40 years ago at an experimental reactor in a lab in Idaho.

Certainly the safe storage of uranium mine tailings is a major concern everywhere uranium is mined and chemically separated from raw ore. The following table lists tailings pond accidents:

http://www.wise-uranium.org/mdafu.html

I noticed that there have only been four such accidents in the last 30 years and the last accident with a significant consequence was 31 years ago.

It is somewhat ironic that the PG&E chromium contamination case involved a pumping station for a natural gas pipeline since the major clean alternative energy sources currently being suggested (wind turbines and solar cells) both have availability problems that require natural gas plants to make up the needed load when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. And there was a recent construction accident at a natural gas plant that involved some fatalities.

I would like to see more information on your preferred plan for generating electrical power 24 hours a day.

@mvb #4,

The cartoon may have been technically well-drawn, but the point was so obvious that it was little but a straw man argument. No one who seriously advocates nuclear power claims that it is absolutely 100% safe. But, even with Chernobyl included, the record of the world-wide nuclear industry is pretty good.

For details about Chernobyl, I offer this quote from Wikipedia:
"A 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed "fewer than 50" direct deaths (including nine children with thyroid cancer) and estimated that there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths over time among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed people.[1][4] Although the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and certain limited areas remain off limits, the majority of affected areas are now considered safe for settlement and economic activity."

I don't wish anyone to die unnecessarily and those deaths are bad. But that still works out to only about 100 people a year since 1986. Compared to the 2000 people who die every year in coal mining accidents in China alone and a number of people who died recently in a U.S. accident, it is not good but it is better.

And, keep in mind that the Chernobyl reactor design was unacceptable by U.S. standards and would never have been licensed in the U.S. or most other countries that use nuclear power. And the safety record of the U.S. nuclear power industry is quite good. There has never been a radiation-related fatality at a U.S. nuclear power plant in over 50 years since the first such plant opened. The last nuclear reactor fatality was over 40 years ago at an experimental reactor in a lab in Idaho.

Certainly the safe storage of uranium mine tailings is a major concern everywhere uranium is mined and chemically separated from raw ore. The following table lists tailings pond accidents:

http://www.wise-uranium.org/mdafu.html

I noticed that there have only been four such accidents in the last 30 years and the last accident with a significant consequence was 31 years ago.

It is somewhat ironic that the PG&E chromium contamination case involved a pumping station for a natural gas pipeline since the major clean alternative energy sources currently being suggested (wind turbines and solar cells) both have availability problems that require natural gas plants to make up the needed load when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. And there was a recent construction accident at a natural gas plant that involved some fatalities.

I would like to see more information on your preferred plan for generating electrical power 24 hours a day.

I think it is interesting and ironic that the only way that we can cost-effectively put a massive solar power satellite project into orbit is with a high specific impulse rocket of which only a nuclear rocket is capable. It might be a very good idea!

@squirrelelite 9(&10)

The point of a cartoon, surely, is to simplify (or, in this case, illuminate) a current issue. Is the point blindingly obvious? Certainly. And it's all the more relevant, given that nuclear protagonists persist (and succeed) in positioning nuclear power as clean, green and safe.

Central to their argument is that new designs are safer, with multiple safety strategies and automatic cut-in mechanisms to prevent accidents in their operations. I'm a neuroscientist, rather than engineer, so I can't claim the ability to assess the legitimacy of those claims. I would bet, however, that the safety mechanisms on BP's Deepwater rig would have been effective, too... had they been appropriately implemented.

Concerning 'deaths' from different energy industries... it's always going to be an apples and oranges game when we start comparing who's killed how many people (as someone observed above, how many people have died from solar? or wind? or geothermal? Note, I don't claim to have the numbers on this!) I would, however, make a few observations:

1. I'm no conspiracy-theorist (much to the chagrin of some of my acquaintances!). However, as a one-time high-school debater (and now, it seems, a 'scientist'?), I'm increasingly mindful of how one's position and objectives shape the evidence we accept and ... From that perspective I note that the IAEA's explicit objective is the active promotion of peaceful nuclear energy use. I'm therefore mindful that its conclusions are likely, if anything, to tend towards underestimates.

I note that during the NGO session at the (Nuclear) Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference (on Friday, May 7) representatives from the recently established IRENA were far less glowing about the prospect of safe, sustainable, environmentally friendly nuclear power.... unsurprisingly. Rather than suggesting that IRENA's perspective is preferable to the IAEA's (it's likely just as biased towards renewables), I'm suggesting that conservative assessments of the safety of any industry are best taken from a source whose mandate is NOT the active promotion of that industry.

Similarly, it's no surprise to anyone when we hear reports that juniors in oil companies are discouraged from reporting incidents, or that senior management in many industries have poor hearing when it comes to whistle-blowers talking about lax safety standards. Given that government monitoring agencies are typically under-resourced, the burden of assessing safety typically falls to NGOs (even more poorly funded and without the benefit of access to the projects themselves).**

As a case in point, I note that the list you cited is incomplete. The Jadugoda Uranium mine in India has had several cases of poor control of tailings in 2006, 2007 and 2008... and the Indian Doctors for Peace and Development reported on significantly elevated cases of genetic and birth defects and primary sterility (approaching 10% of the population) in the local population. Indeed, the very website you cited has a dedicated page to events at the Jadugoda mine.

I'd therefore suggest that the IAEA/WHO assessment is at best out-dated and, at worst, a massive underestimate (if you propose it as a proxy for the whole nuclear industry) that ignores - at a minimum - the impact of uranium mining on local populations and the workers in mining facilities.

2. If we accept the '4,000 + 50' figure from Chernobyl as the cost of nuclear power over the last 40 years (and, in so doing, assume no human cost from mining, refining and ultimate disposal), the next logical question is what proportion of our power is provided in return? Again, I don't know the answer to this... Any thoughts? The best I've come up with is that nuclear in 2006 accounted for up to 16% of our electricity globally, according to this report.

As for my 'preferred plan' for generating electricity 24 hours a day. Again, I'm not an engineer (and, like many final-year students, there are assignments to be written that, thus far, have prevented me from adequate research) so I don't have claim to have the complete answer.

Instead, I'm influenced by reports like this one (and this one)from the Australian government that talk about the realistic potential for renewable technologies to provide 50% of baseline power by 2040, and explicitly indicate

I'm pleased that technology in many diverse renewal classes is currently addresses key concerns, including:

* delivering comparable loads... e.g. with novel wind harvesting strategies, denser solar arrays etc.

and

* storing harvested energy for times when it's not available... e.g. solar plants using the fission of water into hydrogen and oxygen as a store for energy harvested during the day

* refining current technologies for deployment in new areas... e.g. the use of deep drilling for hot-rock geothermal in Australia (we're short of volcanic activity over here)

* development of technologies that do not suffer the same 'nature' constraints that solar (needing sunlight) and wind (needing breezes) do... e.g geothermal, tidal, bacteria-generated biodiesel and biohydrogen etc.

I also note (as many others have before me), that while no single solar or wind plant (for example) will ever provide power all of the time, it does not logically follow that a mix of these technologies in a geographically diverse network cannot provide baseload+peak supply.

Indeed, countries like Australia already make predictions (over 5-minute windows) to ensure consistent supply across a network from inputs from a range of different generation methods, with suggestions that nothing prevents substantial integration of renewables into this mix. Again, I'm not completely clear on all the details, but I note this same report (linked from this Australian Government report, which argues there are no technical or conceptual barriers to complete delivery of 'baseload' power using renewables...

A favourite quote (via my father when I was growing up):

For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong. (HL Mencken)

Nuclear power is currently being positioned as a silver bullet to solve climate change. Based on my previous posts, I surmise that it isn't... moreover, being persuaded that it is leads to diversion of funding from renewable technologies that might more rapidly address climate issues, with substantially reduced cost to the environment, and with fewer human costs.

mvb

**There's a related film on this topic, called 'Blowing in the Wind' by Academy Award-nominee David Bradbury. It's primary topic is Depleted Uranium munitions (used in Afghanistan and Iraq, and tested on the north Queensland coast), but from memory it also covers uranium mining in Australia (and questionable safety practices).

Is there another economically viable solution that won't emit huge quantities of C02 that I'm not aware of?

Which should not distract from the point made by your comic, but it does seem a poor comparison of new oil Extraction methods and old nuclear power.

If you are so convinced that nuclear power is bad, is there any chance you could actually make a coherent argument to that effect (this being SCIENCEblogs) instead of working from what looks to be a prior assumption (Nuclear=bad, Nuclear Power Supporters=evil people/funded by industry) and assuming that all 'right thinking' people will just agree with you?

After all, pretending that a 'witty' cartoon makes a significant argument is the kind of thing you find on septic blogs:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/24/wuwt-gets-a-cartoon-by-josh/

(no, I do not agree with any of the content of the above site. Just demonstrating the level you are arguing at)

@Mason #6,

We already have countless acres of land covered by manufactured parts that do nothing but alter the local climate and keep the rain off. Adding solar panels to rooftops isn't going to make them much worse. And that's electricity "where we need it". As for when, sure, we need to balance loads (which we can do through the existing electrical grid), and increase our storage capacity (using batteries, etc.). But with decentralized production, there's no need for massive centralized storage, either.

Destroying the biosphere in an attempt to save it is analogus to a medicine being worse than the cure.

Putting a wind farm in the middle of a raptor migration corridor is a good example, and putting a solar farm in habitat used by endangered desert tortoises is another. Ironically, when Chernobyl blew up it actually increased habitat for rare (albeit slightly radioactive) species ; )

I'm all for wind, solar, and enough nuclear mixed in to make a carbon free grid work but we can make things worse if we don't do things right, as the corn ethanol mixed into our gas supply attests.

http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com/2010/02/reframing-nuclear-power-as-a…

Wind is one thing but the German solar experiment strongly suggests that solar is not feasible in all climates. You would think they could have figured that out with a spreadsheet.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/05/treachery-or-common-sense/

@mason:

You forgot all the chemicals needed for actual manufacture of cells (if photovoltaic) and the safe disposal of those cells, or the fun from leaking liquid metallic sodium for the heat based plants.

@squirrelelite...

Posted a reply c. 20 hrs ago, but waiting for moderation - perhaps it was too long? :-)

Briefly, then (and without being able to spend time nuancing and qualifying the points):

1. I accept the utilitarian argument (comparing deaths when looking at health costs). However, I'd suggest a few things.

a. IAEA is a body whose explicit mission is the promotion of peaceful nuclear power... by contrast the (newly established) International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) is far less glowing about the prospects for safe, sustainable nuclear power. The lesson: we're probably best off taking assessments of costs from parties with the fewest vested interests possible... I'm not yet convinced the IAEA satisfies that requirement

b. Chernobyl is a poor proxy for an assessment of the overall costs of nuclear industry. The list you provided about tailing spills is useful (thanks), but incomplete - even using information taken from the same website. Of the cases of corporate transgression that I know, the most interesting (distressing?) involves Jadugoda Uranium mine in India... tailing spills reported in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and Indian Doctors for Peace and Development documented elevated cases of birth defects and primary sterility (up to 9.6%) in the local population.

As always, neither corporations nor governments actively supporting nuclear power are particularly enthusiastic of investigate health impacts (much as neither the US nor Australian militaries are particularly interested in the effects on soldiers of using depleted uranium munitions in Iraq/Afghanistan?). As such, the responsiblity for documenting and recording tends to fall to NGOs and local civil action groups... often poorly resourced - hence why that list you cited shows signs of not having been updated for a while... To wit: Absence of (recent) evidence (on an NGO wesbite) is not evidence of absence!

c. Even if we were to accept the IAEA's Chernobyl figure '4000 + 50'... how do these deaths (are successfully treated cancers irrelevant) stack up as a proportion of energy contributed? To the best of my knowledge, nuclear was about 16% of global electricity generation in 2006... I'd assume coal was significantly higher?

d. Anyway, it rapidly becomes apples and oranges (and who's got the most complete stats) once you start playing a numbers game... Very few (any?) documented deaths from solar and wind and geothermal.. so they win?

2. Baseload power and 24-hour electricity generation.

Again, I hope my original comment is approved. It has more detail on my position.

As a substitute, though, I'd submit these two reports:

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/climatechange/responses/mitigation/e…

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/2008-09/09rp09.pdf

The message is that there is no theoretical (i.e. technical) obstacle to supplanting non-renewables with a moderately diversifed combination of renewable technologies.

I note that current research is addressing the principle concerns renewable technology:

a. the need for larger yields... e.g. using novel wind-harvesting strategies, denser and more mobile solar arrays etc

b. the need for energy storage and controlled release with uneven collection... e.g. the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity generated by solar.

c. the commercialisation of renewable forms that already provide consistent supply of energy... e.g. tidal, geothermal and (in at least one case) a geothermal-like setup that taps the temperature differences of thermoclines in the ocean.

d. the adaptation of technologies to be implemented in more diverse conditions... e.g. drilling down several kilometres to tap geothermal heat in Australia ('hot rock' technology) ... Sadly we don't have the volcanic activity needed for surface geothermal!

e. the farming of biodiesel and bio-hydrogen in smaller, more efficient spaces and at high yields... e.g. the use of bacteria hanging in vertical columns in the middle of the desert!

Other issues, such as transmission of the power we generate to where it's needed, are either well within our civilization's engineering capacity, or are actively being addressed. Solar is already being deployed in a decentralised way on residential rooftops in Australia, with landowners earning credit for delivering power into the grid. Besides, with NIMBYism strong in many of our communities, you're still going to have a hard time getting nuclear deployed close to the communities that would benefit from the power!

Overall, I'm influenced by the words (via my dad when I was a kid) of HL Mencken:

For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.

Nuclear keeps being painted as a silver bullet - clean, green and sustainable... it isn't! (or at least, doesn't seem to be to me).

The more plausible solution seems to be support to rapid deployment of the renewable technologies that do work, and development of the more efficient renewables that still need a few years work. Given that the time from planning to operation of a nuclear power plant is about 50 years... we'll still get there faster with renewables!

Cheers.

@Nemo,

Good point about using roofs. I'm sure we'll see more and more of that in the future, especially as solar cell efficiencies continue to creep upward. A major store near where I live was originally built with enough solar power to power the building, but that was quite a few years ago. I'm not sure if they replaced the cells when they finally broke down.

But, there is competition for some roof top space. Some people would like to see it used for community gardens and other people just want to go up where there is a nice view.

Unfortunately, until we develop practical room temperature superconducting materials, it will be too inefficient to transmit photovoltaic power from where the sun is shining, say Japan, to where it isn't like the U.S. right now. Which means that load balancing will have to be done locally with some form of generation that still works when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing strongly enough. Right now, from what I've heard and read, the best candidate for that is natural gas powered generators which have a relatively fast reaction time and are easy to get construction approval for, but have a high fuel cost and compete with other good uses for gas like heating homes and cooking food.

And, storage will always have some conversion inefficiency losses whether it is in batteries or hydrogen fuel cells or water reservoirs or something else. And, all of those have some safety issues.

Our current system uses a combination of all available generating technologies and that will probably remain true indefinitely. What we can do is worry about little technical issues like improving reliability and safety, minimizing harmful emissions and safely disposing of all wastes, and meeting the needs of a growing world population.

@Squirrelelite

Just a heads up... I've tried a couple of times to post a reply to your comments (#9/10) but they're waiting for moderator approval?

Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I'll hope someone approves them soon.

Cheers

mvb

@mvb,

I'm not sure why your comments are being held up. If you included too many links, that sometimes triggers moderation.

I will be looking for them when they finally get released.

In the mean time, a lot of my comments were based on sources like this one:

http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/2010/02/01/the-atomic-show-149-pro-…

It discusses the nuclear energy proposal in President Obama's state of the union address. The people on the show are admittedly pro-nuclear power, but it discusses several methods of electrical power generation as well as current plans and progress for new nuclear power plants.

I don't think they rant and rave too much, and it may give you some insight into how people on the other side are thinking about these problems.

My comment also has never appeared. It contained two innocuous links.

We cannot allow solar and wind projects to be sited in places that accelerate the extinction crisis. See this recent study in the journal Nature:

(link removed to prevent censorship)

Destroying the biosphere in an attempt to save it is analogous to a medicine being worse than the cure.

Putting a wind farm in the middle of a raptor migration corridor is a good example, and putting a solar farm in habitat used by endangered desert tortoises is another. Ironically, when Chernobyl blew up it actually increased habitat for rare (albeit slightly radioactive) species ; )

I'm all for wind, solar, and enough nuclear mixed in to make a carbon free grid work but we can make things worse if we don't do things right, as the corn ethanol mixed into our gas supply attests.

Wind is one thing but the German solar experiment strongly suggests that solar is not feasible in all climates. You would think they could have figured that out with a spreadsheet.

An apology to those whose comments have been slow to appear: I posted this cartoon as a former co-blogger of the site; I also forgot how to operate the back-end spam filter, so that I just tried to get those comments posted. We/this blog doesn't censor posts. But apparently the Moveable Type platform does weird things to slot some into the spam filter. I'm not sure why. Hopefully they'll all appear now. Ben

@mvb,

Your comments finally came through. I'll read them both and offer a response soon.

I am a blatant promoter for increasing our use of atomic energy systems. My reasons for engaging in that activity, however, are based on personal and close experiences that I believe are worth sharing with others who would like to live a life in a world with abundant, safe, clean and affordable energy that requires a certain amount of study, diligence and integrity among its operators.

My issue with the normally "acceptable" alternatives to burning massive quantities of fossil fuels is that they simply cannot do the job. Yes, there are plenty of studies that show that massively overbuilt systems connected through numerous transmission paths might be able to cover a certain portion of energy needs. The problem for me as an engineer is that no system anywhere in the world has been implemented on even a village scale to provide a significant portion of the area's energy with "renewables" - unless you want to count places where there is dire poverty and people live like they did 200 years ago without hot and cold running water, indoor cooking with the flick of a switch or valve, and the ability to read books at night without the flicker of a candle.

There are many examples in history of civilizations that faltered when the "biomass" fuels that they depended upon could not longer grow fast enough to support the needs of even a small portion of the society.

Going back to my advocacy for nuclear - I have spent months at a time sealed up in an isolated underwater environment where all of the power 150 people needed for cooking, computing, reading, breathing, showering, and watching movies was produced almost as a by-product of a compact nuclear reactor power system whose main purpose was to drive that contained environment around the ocean at speeds that could be in excess of 20 knots. While operating in a small space where there was no additional oxygen and no place to dump any waste products, that power plant served reliably and safely for 15 years on a quantity of fuel that weighed just a bit more than I do.

Sure, we knew that something could go wrong. The plant was designed, built, maintained and operated by fallible human beings, after all. However, everyone involved in the process was well trained not only to understand all of the engineering and technical requirements, but also carefully trained in personal responsibility, integrity, and diligence. We understood the need to work hard, but also built in processes and systems that did not depend on being perfect. We were fairly compensated and could afford to raise families that we cared deeply about. I do not think there are many titans in the nuclear energy business who are only motivated by accumulating massive quantities of wealth.

I have spent the past 29 years involved or associated with people who performed similar work at large commercial power plants. They have the same kind of safety culture and respect for the massive quantities of energy that they control. The plant designers know that things can go wrong, so they spend an incredible amount of time thinking of all of the things that might go wrong and engineering either stronger containers or better systems that avoid major consequences for any failure or casualty. The operators spend about 20% of their work year in training that includes accident scenarios and response on some incredibly high fidelity simulators.

Though people without engineering training or system knowledge might disbelieve me, I would be comfortable living and raising a family inside the fence line at nearly every nuclear station in the US. The only reason I put the qualifier of "nearly" is that a few of our plants are in locations that are otherwise kind of ugly or desolate anyway, so I would not choose to live there even if there was no plant at all.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
(Like I said at the beginning - I am a blatant and aggressive atomic energy promoter. Someday, I might actually start making instead of spending money on the projects.)

This article is absurd. You're taking safety issues of a dangerous and explosive liquid (or gas) and applying that to its competitor. That's like you stating that trains are dangerous because you had a car crash. It's illogical and completely absurd.

The main difference between fossil fuels and nuclear is that the risks of nuclear are mainly theoretical, whereas the risks of fossil fuels are very real, as we've seen by the natural gas plant explosion a few months ago, and the latest oil spills which have killed large amounts of plant workers, and damaged the environment. The competitor to that, Nuclear, has killed nobody (through radiation) ever(western civilian plants only) with occasional leaks measured in the picocuries. I can think of two studies off the top of my head that show Nuclear is safer than the alternatives, one, the ExternE report, and another by the Paul Scherrer Institute.

How can you state that Nuclear is dangerous even though the demonstrated risk of our nuclear industry is extremely low, practically zero, with safety only getting better, all while accepting the risks of accidents that occur practically every day that actually do kill people? Newer plants rely on the laws of physics to keep safe, they no longer require significant operator intervention. In essence, the human has been taken out of the loop. That's another difference, if something goes wrong when using natural gas or oil, you have an explosion that kills a bunch of people then spills huge amounts of poisonous substances into the environment. If something goes wrong with a new nuclear plant then the laws of physics keep the public safe. Perhaps the real myopia is using energy sources that are killing people every day, instead of those which has mere theoretical risks that even if realized wouldn't be that bad.

I think the cartoon is funny, though. The Oil industry claims they will not have accidents, then they do. The Nuclear industry claims they will not have accidents, and then they don't. Um, maybe that is having the opposite of the intended effect? Also, Chernobyl is not comparable with a western reactor, the basic physics of the reactors are completely different. If we want to make nuclear even safer then perhaps persuing it would be the best way to go - after all that will allow us to leverage more safer designs, like the LFTR, and ESBWR to ensure that another Chernobyl type accident does not happen anywhere in the world?

it's amazing the lengths people will go to to attack nuclear power. I have lived in France for over 20 years, during which time France has relied heavily on nuclear power. Nobody I know glows in the dark, and we're not growing extra heads or anything like that.

I recently spoke to someone who said someone they heard of hadn't followed safety protocols and got irradiated, therefore nuclear power itself should be banned. Incredible, isn't it! Should we also ban cars because someone somewhere didn't put their seat belt on?

The difference between fossil fuel accidents and nuclear ones is that;
When an accident happens at a well designed nuclear plant, noone is hurt and the surrounding environment is not affected.
When an accident happens at a poorly designed and run nuclear plant, it kills about as many people as fossil fuel accidents have killed in the US in the first three months of 2010 alone.

Cute as your comic is, nuclear engineers spend their careers knowing something will go wrong, and planning to handle and minimize that eventuality.

Context is so important when considering nuclear energy, and context is exactly what this cartoon and and many folks are missing...

Think about the advances made in the past 50 years in computer technology alone. The first nuclear reactors were essentially analog, but are now digital in terms of their designs and safety mechanisms.

Folks tend to think of Nuclear as a single technology that has not changed since its inception. That is simply not true.

New reactor designs are small, self contained, and capable of providing energy to giant developed nations like the US and Australia, as well as small developing nations. Modular reactors could even effectively provide electricity after emergency situations like the Haiti quake.

Engineers have been steadily improving fuel & waste management for the past 50 years as well. Much of America's nuclear fleet currently runs on old Russian weapons that have been reprocessed into spendable fuel, under the Mega Tons to Mega Watts program. As it turns out the materials we used for weapons during the Cold War Era are more valuable as energy (the upkeep of weapons is expensive), making non-proliferation much more feasible for future generations.

The very valuable materials that we used to refer to as nuclear waste, retain 90%+ of potential energy after being run through a fuel cycle. Our abundance of weapons and spent fuel stocks put us into a position that we will not need to mine for Uranium ever again, especially if our new generation plants run off of Thorium, a much more abundant and efficient element in a fission reaction.

Nuclear engineers have had their noses to the grindstone since the first nuclear came online over 50 years, and have indeed already resolved all of the major issues to safe, clean, abundant power for everyone. Now it is just an issue of implementing the resources we have in the most effective way possible and sharing current, accurate information to alleviate the disproportionate fear of nuclear held by many citizens.

best,
Suzy Hobbs, Creative Director
PopAtomic Studios
www.popatomic.org

The thing that makes a power source is a combination of the inherent danger associated with the fuel and the safety culture in the industry.

I don't think any industry can go head-to-head against the nuclear industry safety culture. But they were only able to get there because of the centralized nature of a large nuclear reactors (a consequence of the energy density) and the predictability of the operation.

"Nothing will go wrong" is sooo 1970s. And so is the author of that comic.

âNothing Will Go Wrongâ

Great news. We can follow the Russian example and skip that billion dollar containment building. Skip the triple redundant emergency high pressure injection pumps. Skip the triple redundant emergency low pressure injection pumps. Skip the emergency accumulators. Skip the dual containment emergency spray system. Skip the fire protection systems. Skip the triple redundant instrumentation systems. Skip the emergency core catcher that can contain a full meltdown. Skip the triple redundant emergency generators. Skip the triple redundant emergency backup batteries.

Just dig a hole, drop in a reactor vessel, hook up a turbine and a cooling tower, and we can have cheap unlimited nuclear power in about 2 years for $2 billion.

Suppose jumbo jets could be built to fly straight into the ground at 500 mph without killing anyone. Suppose the airlines had a non fatal accident every 20-30 years. Would that be a good argument for abandoning aviation?

There are some really well-researched comments here and good discussion. Full disclosure: I am pro-nuclear and a part of a pro-nuclear blog.

Nothing is 100% safe or fail-proof. Some things (nuclear) are safer than others (oil, natural gas, coal). I won't be redundant and link to various stats because plenty of people here have done a great job of that - those who choose not to listen, well...let's just say you're not helping your position by shutting down opposing viewpoints without an attempt at understanding their perspective. I try very hard to listen to others with an open mind before drawing a conclusion based solely on my preconceived notions, else what is the point in engaging in discourse?

Through this mindset and long hours reading and researching, I was brought from being a strong renewables supporter to a cautious one. They a their place, but it is really in reduction of other fuels at peak demand. The science simply does not show that renewables can be an effective replacement for baseload demand because we have no ability to store energy for when the wind isn't blowing strong enough or the sun isn't shining.

Now for cost. Solar power is anywhere from four to eight times more expensive per kWh than coal or nuclear. Wind can be two to eight times more expensive than coal or nuclear. The hard-line "green" people want to say, "well, what is the cost you place on our environment?" Here's the rub: NO ONE IN THE US CAN AFFORD TO HAVE THEIR ELECTRIC BILL QUADRUPLE WITHOUT SERIOUS ECONOMIC TROUBLES. Replacing coal and nuclear with solar and wind will do that.

And, nuclear IS NOT SUBSIDIZED, at least not in the US. Loan guarantees, none of which have been disseminated even, are NOT SUBSIDIES. It is essentially loan INSURANCE, which is paid for by the utility seeking the guarantee. The only reason guarantees are even necessary is because of the track record of environmental groups halting construction for years at a time by tying up the utility in court, thus increasing the total construction cost by almost double simply through interest accruing on a project that is not allowed to operate and generate cash flow.

Nuclear is safer, more cost effective, and more reliable than any other power source. Any information that I have come across which does not support that conclusion has been funded or otherwise supported by antinuclear activists, some of whom receive hefty endowments from natural gas and coal organizations. Honestly, there are too many to cite, so don't even ask - just google it, that's how I found out.

All the hub-ub of the 'risk' associated with nuclear power is a complete fabrication. It is a fact that there has never been a single fatality among the public in the United States in 50 years operating over 100 reactors. That's over 5,000 Reactor-years without one fatal accident!

There isn't a furnace or hot water heater in any house in the country that can show a safety record that good and those are a few feet from where we all sleep! These people protesting nuclear have explosive and volatile natural gas pumping through their homes to their furnace, hot water heater, stove, or dryer and yet they want to talk about a nuclear plant being dangerous?

Fossil fuels in he first 5 months of 2010 have produced more fatalities and more environmental damage than 10 Chernobyls and it's still May! That's not even counting the thousands of deaths every years from respiratory illnesses caused by dirt burners.

The longer we sit here and entertain the dillusional fears of unreasonable people, the longer we will continue to burn fossil fuels, the more people will die, the more environmental catastrophes will happen.

Can we get a cartoon that shows that?

@ Chuck P.

So, we must not have very many poorly designed and run Nuclear power plants. We have not had the accidents that Coal, natural gas and oil have had over the past 60 years.

The difference between a hazard and a danger is that a hazard is a potential harm that under the right circumstances could become a danger. A danger is a combination of circumstances that make a hazard an immediate risk.

So, if you are comparing the two, Nuclear Physics is well known and the interactions of a nuclear reaction have been well studied and the hazards involved are well known. Thus, the ability to mitigate those hazards with protections and engineered solutions is much greater. We would expect that newer plants would be even less hazardous than old ones, although the old ones have not proven dangerous as actual stats can show.

On the other hand, mining coal and drilling for oil mean that you are in a new circumstance each moment. You cannot know precisely what is buried under the ground, which is the reason for test wells. Thus, the ability to control the hazards is much less.

This is why it is not a fair comparison between the hazards of Nuclear and the hazards of Fossil fuels.

As pointed out above, both of these hazards are much less than the hazard of living without power. No refrigeration, and unclear water are amazing dangers that are well worth the risk of even an oil spill to access. But since nuclear power is much less dangerous a move toward nuclear is warranted.

There is way too much focus, on the part of the media and the public, on whether something could go wrong (and what that would be), and not nearly enough focus on the on-going damage that different energy sources cause under normal operation.

The reason for this is clear. Big sensational events sell newspapers, and are etched into people's memories. On-going effects don't make the news at all, since there is no "story" there. The result is the silly mindset expressed by the cartoon's author.

In the grand scheme of things, the impact of big oil spills (that occur here every ~20 years) is nothing compared to the steady, ongoing environmental, economic, and geopolitical impacts of oil, and our dependence on it. Air pollution from oil burning (cars & trucks) cause tens of thousands of deaths per year in the US, its extraction and refining cause major environmental damage, and it causes almost half of our CO2 emissions.

Same thing for coal. The handful of miners that die, per year, in mining accident are all we talk about, and get all the press attention. Much less attention is paid to the vastly larger number of miners that (quietly) die from black lung, the environmental destruction of the Appallacians from mining, and the 25,000 Americans who die ANNUALLY from coal plant pollution. It also is responsible for one third of our CO2 emissions.

The worst conceivable accident that "could" happen at a US nuclear power plant wouldn't cause one tenth the environmental and public health damage (deaths) caused EVERY YEAR by either coal or oil. As for normal operations, the picture is completely black and white. Nuclear has negligible impact.

Although there has never been a significant accident or event (that killed anyone) in the entire 50-year history of the US nuclear industry (unlike the oil, or other, industries), the case for nuclear has never relied on the notion that "nothing can go wrong". The case is based on the fact that the risks, and the overall environmental and health impacts over the long term, are negligible compared to fossil sources. All scientific studies on the matter have concluded that.

One final annoying thing about the cartoon is the suggestion that the nuclear industry is anything like the oil industry. Nuclear requirements and regulations are stricter by orders of magnitude, and the history/record clearly shows that. How could it be that a perfect record, over 50 years, is not good enough. Given the fact that nuclear's risks and impacts are orders of magnitude smaller, and that nuclear can be an alternative to oil (through electric cars and other means), then the oil spill does indeed strengthen the argument for using nuclear.

@ Daivd,
My point is that the hazards of fossil fuels are real while those of nuclear are largely theoretical. To boil it down to a soudbite:
People are afraid that nuclear plants might kill people.
Fossil fuel plants, on the other hand, actually DO kill people, year after year.

Another writer once characterized us as "the culture of maximum harm". I am reminded of those words far too often.

Strictly speaking, it's incorrect, of course. There's more harm left to do. We're capable of inflicting even more damage. I see plenty of indications that we're eager to fulfill that prophecy, though.

I remember when Prof. Cohen wrote regularly here about the collision of culture and environment. I stopped by to see if he might have visited to offer some thoughtful insight about the BP oil catastophe.

It pleases me to see that he has.

It saddens me to see the commentary that followed.

I'm pretty sure we humans are capable of more than merely maximizing the harm we inflict. It seems to me so much depends upon our ability to perceive harm. Prof. Jonathan Haidt at UVa is doing some interesting, and important, work to understand our human moral foundation. Fortunately our human moral foundation includes our ability to perceive harm. I hope his work has some beneficial influence before we completely maximize the harm we can inflict.

Thanks for trying, Prof. Cohen. Thanks for trying.

I don't know whether oil or nuclear is the safer option; in fact, I suspect it takes about the entire collective intelligence of BP or Areva to understand *either* industry.

What I think is clear, and clearly backfiring badly, is that the organizations that decide what risks to take have mostly arranged to profit from the good years but not pay for the mistakes. I could put up with a lot less 'precautionary principle' than I now want if I knew that a corporation would pay to make whole those hurt by an unlucky corporate decision, just as the corporation would profit by a lucky decision.

didn't really address the specifics much.

Engineers have been steadily improving fuel & waste management for the past 50 years as well. Much of America's nuclear fleet currently runs on old Russian weapons that have been reprocessed into spendable fuel, under the Mega Tons to Mega Watts program. As it turns out the materials we used for weapons during the Cold War Era are more valuable as energy (the upkeep of weapons is expensive), making non-proliferation much more feasible for future generations.

The very valuable materials that we used to refer to as nuclear waste, retain 90%+ of potential energy after being run through a

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