The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  Reliability is measured by “capacity factor,” the fraction of the time that the power plant is actually sending out electricity at its maximum rate. For U.S. coal plants, the capacity factor is less than 60 percent. Meanwhile, nuclear’s capacity factor is 90 percent, higher than any other type of energy (solar photovoltaics, for instance, are rated at less than 30 percent). Decades of experience have shown that once a nuclear plant is turned on, it tends to run quite reliably, with the main downtime being maintenance breaks.

  Cheapness refers to the price for a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Nuclear power is based, famously, on splitting the nucleus of uranium atoms. The nucleus breaks into two pieces that fly away from each other, releasing a lot of energy as they do. The energy is roughly a million times more than the chemical energy one would obtain by burning the same atom. Because of this greater energy density, nuclear plants need much less fuel to produce a given amount of electricity than fossil-fuel plants. As a result, nuclear facilities have proven to be less expensive to operate than any other type of power plant except, again, hydroelectric dams. By far the biggest cost is constructing the plant. After that, actually making the electricity is cheap.

  Safety usually is measured by the number of deaths in the “energy chain”—that is, how many people are killed by the entire cycle, from exploration and mining to refining and transportation to actual power generation, as well as waste treatment and disposal. Deaths from mining uranium are counted, as well as deaths from falling off roofs while installing solar panels (a surprisingly big number). Adding these together, a research team at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland’s biggest research center, reckoned in 2016 that nukes thus far have caused fewer deaths than any other power source except hydroelectric dams (wind power was pretty close). Coal had thirty to a hundred times the impact on human health in normal operations. Nuke boosters say, accurately, that nuclear plants kill people only in rare, awful accidents like Chernobyl (even in the frightening 2011 meltdown at Fukushima, radiation is not known to have caused a single fatality). Coal plants around the world kill millions of people every year in normal operation.

  In addition, nuclear plants take up less land than other sorts of utilities. An often-cited study of U.S. plants by Nature Conservancy researchers in 2009 concluded that nuclear power uses about four times less land per unit of energy than coal and about fifteen times less than solar arrays. Other scientists have come to similar conclusions. Because different researchers adopt different assumptions, the exact numbers vary from study to study, but in every case I am aware of, researchers have concluded that nuclear power has the smallest footprint, an important factor in nations that are short of farmland or open space.

  Brand cites the example of France, which constructed “fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation’s electricity in just twelve years.” Nuclear power provides about 77 percent of French electricity, a far greater proportion than in any other nation. Today, according to World Bank figures, France emits 5.2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita. The corresponding figure for the United States is 17. France shut down its last coal-fired power plant in 2004. It is the world’s biggest electricity exporter; meanwhile, French household electricity costs are among the lowest in Europe. What’s not to like? Wizards ask. Why not, in this respect, make the rest of the world like France?

  Wizards typically don’t disparage renewable energy. They just don’t see solar and wind power as playing a major role in the human comedy—not for decades, at least. Build what you can, they say, but don’t expect it to make a huge difference. For the foreseeable future, renewables are unreliable (low capacity factors), pricey (high cost per unit of power, including storage), and land-wasting. Here and now, nuclear power is ready. Equip the most efficient existing coal facilities with CCS, but go nuclear for everything else.*12

  Unsurprisingly, Prophets disagree from top to bottom. To begin with, most regard CCS as a sham—an industry-sponsored fantasy that never has and never will deliver on its promises. At a 2008 meeting of the Group of Eight (the world’s richest nations), the assembled energy ministers lauded the “critical role of Carbon Capture and Storage” and promised to begin building “20 large-scale CCS demonstration projects” in the next two years. That didn’t happen. According to the Global CCS Institute, an Australia-based association of governments and energy firms, the world had just one operational project that trapped and stored emissions from a big coal-fired power plant. Completed in 2015, the $1.1 billion Boundary Dam project, in Saskatchewan, Canada, went massively over budget but after some early stumbles has performed as advertised.

  Worse, to Prophets, CCS means that humankind keeps mining coal. Most coal mining now is “open-pit” or “open-cast”: companies carve a big pit in the ground, then extract an underlying coal seam. An especially large-scale form, mountaintop removal, involves the removal, as the name suggests, of entire mountaintops; giant backhoes dump the rubble into river valleys. Pioneered in the United States, mountaintop removal has occurred in about five hundred sites in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, permanently altering the topography and burying two thousand miles of streams. Rehabilitating these landscapes may be possible, at least in part, but so expensive that it is hard to imagine anyone actually doing it.

  More distressing still, several thousand coal mines have caught fire in Australia, Britain, China, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and the United States; many have been burning for decades, some for centuries. An infamous example is the Jharia coalfield, in the northeastern Indian state of Jharkand. Covering 170 square miles, Jharia is India’s main reservoir of coking coal, the hard coal used to make steel. It has been on fire, calamitously, since 1916; entire villages have disappeared into the smoking ground. Undermined railroad lines have fallen into the earth, followed by farms and streams. When I visited the region, toxic fumes shimmered in the air. Issuing from cracks in the earth, they wreathed the ruined buildings and black, leafless trees. In the evening, patches of smoldering red were visible, scattered like watching eyes across the charred landscape: Mordor without the Orcs. Centralia, Pennsylvania; Greenwood Springs, Colorado; Barnsley, Yorkshire; Wuda, Inner Mongolia; East Kalimantan, Indonesia—Prophets look at these smoldering places and see an insult to the future.

  A woman struggles to shore up her collapsing home in the burning zone of the Jharia coalfield. Hers was one of the last remaining houses in this impoverished village; the rest had already been consumed by the fire. Credit 72

  As for nuclear, Prophets regard it as too expensive to be plausible. Two new plants in Georgia were so expensive that they drove Toshiba’s Westinghouse nuclear division into bankruptcy; the price may soar to $21 billion before they are finished, years behind schedule. Two other Westinghouse plants in South Carolina were abandoned, half-built, in 2017, at a loss of $9 billion. Prophets agree that nukes are cheap to run, but disagree that the long-term savings in operations costs justify the massive upfront costs of construction.

  And then there’s the waste. Nuclear plants produce several types of waste, of which the most dangerous is “high-level” waste. Mostly spent reactor fuel and by-products from the reprocessing of spent fuel, it accounts for more than 99 percent of the radioactivity produced by nuclear waste—the other types of waste, though large in volume, emit very little. Since the beginning of the industry, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations–affiliated group that coordinates the peaceful use of nuclear energy, the world’s four-hundred-plus nukes have produced about 300,000 tons of high-level waste. (The figure rises by 12,000 tons every year.) By volume, this is approximately 160,000 cubic yards, enough to cover a football field eighty feet deep. Given that this pileup represents nearly all of the truly dangerous material from sixty-plus years of worldwide nuclear power, Wizards do not see waste as an overwhelming problem. They argue that this material can be encased in glass and left deep underground; within a few centuries, its radioactivity level
will have fallen by a factor of a million.

  To Prophets, these arguments are beside the point, pragmatically and ethically. Some types of nuclear waste, like plutonium and radioactive iodine, are astonishingly deadly: radioactive for millennia, lethal in doses smaller than grains of sand. It is unrealistic, Prophets say, to imagine that something so dangerous in such small amounts can be contained for eons, when it can be carried away by the smallest draft of wind or dissolve into drops of water. Transporting relatively large amounts of such substances in accident-prone trucks or trains—mobile Chernobyls, opponents call them—is an act of folly. Most of all, Vogtians see waste deposits, even if contained, as no-go areas that will endure for what is in human terms an eternity. Leaving such noxious gifts to future generations is a moral calamity.

  Instead of replacing coal with nuclear, Prophets favor almost anything else that doesn’t use fossil fuels. The most detailed roadmaps to this kind of future have been issued by research teams led by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, engineers at, respectively, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. In a long study published in 2015, Jacobson, Delucchi, and eight other researchers laid out a path for taking the United States entirely to wind, water, and solar power by 2050. (Four years before, Jacobson and Delucchi wrote an outline for switching the entire world to renewables, but I have chosen the U.S. project because it was more detailed and, in my view, easier to understand.)

  This version of the Prophetic vision can be summarized as seven No’s and one big Yes. The No’s are: no oil, no gasoline, no kerosene, no natural gas, no wood or biomass stoves, no nuclear power, no carbon capture and sequestration. The Yes is electricity, with two asterisks. The Yes is for electrifying the entire economy, including economic sectors—heating, transportation, and steel and cement manufacturing—that now run directly on coal and petroleum.

  The asterisks link to two footnotes. The first note points out that the task is smaller than it might seem at first glance; the second says that it is bigger. The first footnote is that the ensemble of new renewable plants will not actually have to replace all of the power generated by fossil fuels. Electric motors are more efficient than engines driven by fossil fuels, because those lose a lot of energy producing heat; replacing them will therefore require less capacity than before. In addition, advocates believe, energy-efficiency measures like insulating buildings and improving appliances will further cut demand.

  The second footnote is that building that smaller capacity will, paradoxically, require more power plants, because solar and wind power are intermittent. A solar facility might be designed to produce a megawatt of power, but if people want that megawatt day in and day out, society will have to build three or four one-megawatt plants in different places to ensure the supply.

  Altogether, the Jacobson-Delucchi team estimated, the United States would need to build:

  • 328,000 new onshore 5-megawatt (MW) wind turbines (providing 30.9 percent of U.S. energy for all purposes)

  • 156,200 offshore 5-MW wind turbines (19.1 percent)

  • 46,480 50-MW new utility-scale solar photovoltaic power plants (30.7 percent)

  • 2,273 100-MW utility-scale concentrated solar power (i.e., Mouchot-style solar mirror) power plants (7.3 percent)

  • 75.2 million 5-kilowatt (kW) home rooftop photovoltaic systems (3.98 percent)

  • 2.75 million 100-kW commercial/government rooftop systems (3.2 percent)

  • 208,100 1-MW geothermal plants (1.23 percent)

  • 36,050 0.75-MW devices that harness wave power (0.37 percent)

  • 8,800 1-MW tidal turbines (0.14 percent)

  • 3 new hydroelectric power plants (all in Alaska, 3.01 percent).

  As lagniappe, the nation also would convert all cars and trucks to run on electricity and all planes to run on supercooled hydrogen—all the while building underground systems that store energy by heating up rock under most of the buildings in the United States.

  Wizards criticize all of this as ridiculous. Jacobson and Delucchi propose constructing hundreds of thousands or even millions of underground heat-storage systems, for example, even though hardly any have been built. And they assume that by adding generators and turbines to existing dams they can squeeze fifteen times as much power out of them, which dam operators say is impossible. And the area that will be covered with solar and wind farms is huge—the scheme is taking us back to medieval times, when people used the landscape (in the form of forests) for power. The Prophetic reply is that the technology will improve and become cheaper. And nuclear plants and CCS are even more impractical, they say. Wizards envision building a thousand or more nuclear plants in the United States alone, each at a cost of several billion dollars. How can this be possible? Can one imagine people in developed nations approving nuclear plants in their neighborhoods? What about solar plants? Wizards reply. Already people are fighting their huge demand for land. But wait a minute—haven’t we been here before? The bickering about practicality and costs, the endless back-and-forth argument? Is this telling us something?

  To Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist, the intractability of the quarrel reflects the fact that both Wizards and Prophets are fooling themselves. “Energy transitions are always slow,” he told me by email. Modern energy infrastructures, assembled over decades, cannot be revamped overnight. In every nation, modern electricity grids took decades to assemble. Disassembling and replacing them quickly enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change would be an unprecedented challenge for societies that are still rapidly increasing their energy use. Worse still, in his view, there is little public appetite for beginning the process, or even appreciating the magnitude of what lies ahead. “The world has been running into fossil fuels, not away from them.”

  Smil’s arguments about economic and technological rules run parallel to Margulis’s arguments about biological rules. We cannot escape the laws, they are saying, and the laws will not let us escape tragedy. But there is an obvious counterargument: now, unlike in the past, humankind has a gun to its head. More generally, the impossibility of predicting the long-term future unavoidably leaves room for hope. The chance of a successful outcome cannot logically be excluded. Sweden, for example, has reduced its carbon output by two-thirds since 1970 without noticeable impact on its economic fortunes. At the same time, what if Smil is right? What if neither Wizards nor Prophets can move fast enough?

  Planet-Hacking

  When the next hurricane approaches New Orleans, every resident will know what to do: empty the fridge. Back in 2005, hardly anyone did that for Hurricane Katrina. Families in the city were accustomed to leaving for a couple of days during bad storms, then coming back to streets strewn with branches and trash and maybe a few shingles. When Katrina hit, the flooding was so bad that people couldn’t return for weeks. This was NOLA—New Orleans, Louisiana: The weather was sunny and hot. Because of the storm, the electricity was out. Across the metropolitan area, a quarter of a million refrigerators became inadvertent experiments in the biology of putrefaction. Despite the warnings, many homeowners opened their refrigerators. Almost everyone who did realized instantly that they could never be used again.

  Throughout the fall and winter, returnees duct-taped their refrigerators shut and dragged them out to the curb. White metal boxes lined the streets like gravestones. Sometimes they were spray-painted with sardonic slogans. Feed my maggots. Caution: Breath of Satan inside. Ho ho ho NOLA—this one decorated like a Christmas tree. Occasionally people illicitly dumped their refrigerators in faraway neighborhoods and came back home to find people from those neighborhoods had dumped refrigerators on their street.

  Katrina created about 35 million cubic yards of debris in southern Louisiana—an estimate that does not include, among other things, the area’s 250,000 destroyed automobiles. East of the city is the Old Gentilly landfill, shut down as a hazardous waste site. It quickly reopened and became Mount Katrina: a two-hundred-foot-ta
ll mass of soggy armchairs, ruined mattresses, busted concrete, and moldy plywood.

  By volume, refrigerators were a tiny part of this—a rounding error. Nonetheless, huge numbers came in every day. By late May the total was about 300,000. The refrigerators had their own staging area, separate from the stoves and dishwashers, in the foothills of Mount Katrina.

  Fridgelandia, December 2005 Credit 73

  Fridgelandia was an amazing sight. Battered white boxes, stacked up hundreds of feet in every direction. Teams of workers in gas masks and crinkly hazmat suits, scooping out the writhing contents with plastic snow shovels. If people didn’t shovel quickly, carnivorous dragonflies would descend on the maggots in such clouds that workers couldn’t see.

  Until I visited post-Katrina New Orleans I did not realize that rebuilding a flooded modern city would involve disposing of several hundred thousand refrigerators. Nor had I realized that it would involve a search for housing for relief workers there to build housing. Or criminals taking advantage of the lack of police to steal vast amounts of pipe and cable as soon as they had been replaced. Or toxic blooms of fungi new to science. Or that cities would have a hard time functioning after the sudden and immediate collapse of all local insurance bureaus.

  Katrina was a relatively modest storm that overwhelmed inadequate dikes and levees. Many climate scientists believe that in days to come governments will need to get better at shoreline defense. The world has 136 big, low-lying coastal cities with a total population of about 550 million people. All are threatened by the rising seas associated with climate change. A study in Nature in 2013 estimated that if no preventive actions are taken annual flood costs in these cities could by 2050 reach as much as a trillion dollars. Other research teams have arrived at similarly extreme estimates. Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world’s annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-British-Dutch-Belgian team in 2014). It could put as many as a billion people at risk by 2050 (a Dutch team in 2012). Test cases occurred in 2017, when storms inundated Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys.