Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  From the mitigation angle, it will be worth refining a “climate footprint” template for cities, grading them on such things as their albedo, their vegetation density, and their greenhouse gas and soot output versus their use of carbon-free energy sources like hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar. As with ecological-footprint studies, there should be a time dimension—is the city improving or getting worse? Then comes adaptation. A “climate prospects” template would detail how each city might respond to climate impacts such as sea level rise, drought, extreme weather, and temperature changes. Is high ground nearby? Is there a move-upstairs option in the buildings? Can the local water supply and agriculture adapt to salt water infusion or, if inland, to drought? If city abandonment becomes necessary, how would it play out?

  • In the broad scope of history, growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, and injustice as much as they concentrate business, innovation, education, and entertainment. If they are overall a net good for the people who move there, it is because cities offer more than just job opportunity. They are transformative. In the slums as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well traveled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.

  The takeoff of cities is the dominant economic event of the first half of this century. Among all its other impacts will be infrastructural stresses on energy supply and food supply. People in vast numbers are climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder—from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat, and soy to the high protein of meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of such aspirations will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince people to stay in their villages did.

  Peasant life is over unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it.

  The demographic literature refers often to the “bright lights” phenomenon that draws people to cities. Thanks to military satellite imagery, those lights are now visible to us from space. The night side of Earth, these decades, displays a dazzling lacework of light on the continents, with incandescent nodes at the metropolitan areas and a bright tracery of transportation corridors between them. That web of light is the sign to any visitor that they are approaching not just a living planet, but a civilized planet.

  What powers all that light?

  Live-linked footnotes for this chapter, along with updates, additions, and illustrations, may be found online at www.sbnotes.com.

  • 4 •

  New Nukes

  Coal is the killer. Of all the fossil fuels, coal is the one that could make this planet uninhabitable.

  —Fred Pearce, New Scientist

  With climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened. With nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.

  —Variously attributed

  For the definitive word on how much to worry about climate change, environmentalists in America have taken to relying on James Hansen, NASA’s authoritative and outspoken climatologist. When Hansen declared in 2007 that we must not settle for leveling off carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm) but must take the level down from the current 387 ppm to 350 ppm or lower, the new environmentalist slogan became “350!”

  Environmentalists take no notice of Hansen’s views on nuclear, however. As President Obama was taking office, Hansen wrote him an open letter suggesting new policy to deal with the climate crisis. “Coal plants are factories of death,” he wrote. “Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as the other fossil fuels combined.” Hansen proposed what America needed: a carbon tax “across all fossil fuels at their source”; the phasing out of all coal-fired plants; and “urgent R&D on 4th-generation nuclear power, with international cooperation.” He warned: “The danger is that the minority of vehement anti-nuclear ‘environmentalists’ could cause development of advanced safe nuclear power to be slowed such that utilities are forced to continue coal-burning in order to keep the lights on. That is a prescription for disaster.” He repeated the point at the end of the letter: “One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of antinuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions.”

  Environmentalists have much less to fear in reality from the current nuclear power industry than they think, and much more to gain from new and planned reactor designs than they realize. Hansen is right: Nukes are Green; new nukes even more so. Here’s how.

  • Nuclear power inspires in most environmentalists one particularly deep aversion. They recoil from the idea of passing on to endless future generations the care of the deadly poison of nuclear waste. That was my view as well until one day in 2002. It was a visit to Yucca Mountain, of all things, that began to change my mind about nuclear power. I’ll report the occasion in some detail because it’s a look inside a “here-be-dragons” blank area on most people’s mental map of the nuclear world, and you’ll watch two people reverse their opinion about nuclear and an organization change its mind about itself.

  The Yucca Mountain Repository for “spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste” one hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, has been lodged in America’s political throat ever since the project was initiated in 1978. That had nothing to do with why the board of The Long Now Foundation made a site visit in 2002. We just wanted to see what a hole in a Nevada mountain looked like.

  Long Now’s maypole project (around which everything else dances) is a monumental ten-thousand-year clock, to be installed inside a mountain in eastern Nevada as an icon to, as we say, “help make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.” What kind of spaces work best inside a mountain, we wondered, especially inside a desert mountain? We thought that Yucca might give us some hints, and indeed it did—long, straight, cylindrical tunnels are boring; a twenty-five-foot ceiling is boring; but anything below ten feet is cozy, and anything above thirty-five feet is thrilling.

  Our main lesson from Yucca, though, threatened Long Now’s very core. Something was pathological about Yucca Mountain, and the sickness was embedded in its long-term thinking, its ten-thousand-year time frame. Among those on the bus were Danny Hillis, designer of the clock, and Peter Schwartz, cofounder of Global Business Network. I wrote in my trip report that at the entrance to the Repository,a training video informed us that it was important not to trip on anything, and showed how to use a belt-mounted emergency breathing apparatus. Danny Hillis remarked that it is the device which, in event of a mine fire, OSHA demands to find on your body. Outside the tunnel entrance were not one but two brand new ambulances, contextually shrieking “SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY!!”

  After a briefing in a pleasant underground “alcove” we rode a noisy train a mile and a half into the mountain—laser straight in a 25-foot diameter tunnel. The overall loop tunnel is 5 miles long. The eventual storage “drifts” have yet to be excavated, except for a few test drifts. We got off the train to visit one of the tests, where a vastly expensive experiment is under way to see how heating and cooling affects the rock and water flow around the drift—four years heating it up as if it had radioactive waste in it, four years cooling it down, modeling the first 1,000 years of waste storage.

  That evening we debriefed the Yucca Mountain experience over dinner. We were universally appalled that the government had poured $8 to $16 BILLION (“depending on how you count”) into that hole in the ground. Most of the money had gone into gargantuan tests meant to reassure the public that the stored waste would be “safe” for 10,000 years. It was a grotesque expenditure, based on 1950s ideas, a deeply political set of gestures meant to reassure cr
itics who are largely uninterested in science and distrustful no matter what.

  Peter Schwartz bet that if the waste goes in the mountain (there’s a 50 percent chance that it will), in 50 to 100 years we will be taking it back out as a valuable energy resource.

  I proposed that it was the 10,000-year time frame that made people crazy, which calls into question the whole premise of Long Now. We asked ourselves: If Long Now had been asked to handle the nuclear waste problem, what would we have done? Danny said, “I would have built the same hole in the ground, for only a couple hundred million, and told everyone that we just wanted to put the waste there for a hundred years while we thought about what to do with it eventually.”

  We realized that Yucca Mountain is a classic example of the folly of long-term planning—the illusion that we know now how to do the right thing for the next ten millennia. What Long Now pushes is almost the opposite: long-term thinking—where you set in motion a framing of events so that a process is made intensely adaptive, preserving and indeed increasing options as time goes by.

  The more I thought about the standard environmentalist stance on nuclear waste, which I had espoused for years, the nuttier it seemed to me. The customary rant goes: “You have to guarantee that all the radioactivity in the waste will be totally contained for ten thousand years (no, a hundred thousand years; no, a million years), and if you can’t guarantee that, you can’t have nuclear power.” Why? “Because any amount of radioactivity hurts humans and other life forms. It might get in the ground water.”

  What humans? The assumption seems to be that future humans will be exactly as we are today, with our present concerns and present technology. How about, say, two hundred years from now? If we and our technology prosper, humanity by then will be unimaginably capable compared to now, with far more interesting things to worry about than some easily detected and treated stray radioactivity somewhere in the landscape. If we crash back to the stone age, odd doses of radioactivity will be the least of our problems. Extrapolate to two thousand years, ten thousand years. The problem doesn’t get worse over time, it vanishes over time.

  The Yucca trip set in motion another board member’s conversion from anti- to pro-nuclear. Peter Schwartz, an energy expert who served for a long time on the board of Amory Lovins’s Rocky Mountain Institute, eventually became highly vocal on behalf of a nuclear revival. He and Lovins had friendship-threatening arguments on the subject.

  • A year after the Yucca trip, Global Business Network was invited to run a scenario workshop for Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which was conducting a series of meetings to explore what Canada should do with the waste from its twenty-two CANDU nuclear reactors. One option was to heave it down a deep hole in the ancient, stable bedrock of the Laurentian Shield and forget about it. Another was to leave it where it is now in dry cask storage at the reactor sites. Another was to develop a Yucca-like site for retrievable underground storage. At the workshop, I told my Yucca Mountain story. Also participating in the workshop were several Indians (the tribes are called First Nations in Canada) who proposed taking the “seven generations” approach to future responsibility long credited to the Iroquois League. Using the standard number for a generation—25 years—that would mean a 175-year time frame for thinking about the waste.

  After eighty meetings across Canada, the nation’s nuclear waste policy emerged. It is based, says a report from the organization, on the principle of “Respect for Future Generations: we should not prejudge the needs and capabilities of the future. Rather than acting in a paternalistic way, we should leave the choice of what to do with the used fuel for them to determine.” Accordingly, Canada has an “adaptive phased management” plan, where the spent fuel remains in wet and dry storage at the reactor sites while a “near term” (1 to 175 years) centralized shallow underground facility is built, designed for easy retrieval; that will be followed by a deep geological repository for permanent storage. Future Canadians have options at every step. No mention is made of 10,000 years. The report does note that “during the 175-year period, the overall radioactivity of used fuel drops to one hundred thousandth of the level when it was removed from the reactors.” Nuclear waste has the interesting property that it loses toxicity over time, unlike many forms of chemical waste, such as mercury.

  Two things about nuclear had changed for me, I gradually realized. Waste disposal no longer looked like a cosmic-level problem, and carbon-free energy from nuclear looked like a major solution in light of growing worries about climate change. My opinion on nuclear had flipped from anti to pro. The question I ask myself now is, What took me so long? I could have looked into the realities of nuclear power many years earlier, if I weren’t so lazy.

  Gwyneth Cravens, a novelist and former New Yorker editor, did what I should have done. In 1980 she was among the activists who shut down the $6 billion Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant in Long Island before it ever opened, which helped frighten the American nuclear industry to a standstill. In the 1990s, she started hearing the other side from a friend in the industry, a nuclear-safety scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque named Rip Anderson. Sensing a story, she traveled with Anderson as her guide through the U.S. nuclear power industry and came up with a masterly account of the journey, Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, published in 2007.

  I asked her what really changed her mind about nuclear. “Two things,” she said. “Baseload and footprint.”

  “ ‘Baseload,’ ” she explains in the book, “refers to the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock, rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of customers.” Baseload is the foundation of grid power. So far it comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and nuclear. Two thirds of the world’s electricity is made by burning fossil fuels, mostly coal. The Green, noncarbon one third is split evenly between hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors at about 16 percent each. (In the United States, 71 percent of our electricity is from coal and gas, 6.5 percent from hydro, about 20 percent from nuclear.)

  Cities require grid power, and that means baseload. The world’s growing cities and the billions of people climbing the “energy ladder” out of poverty will demand a lot more baseload by midcentury. If climate is the major Green threat, and cities are a major Green boon, then nuclear power looks doubly Green.

  Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some form of massive energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants. (Space-based solar, however, could feed directly into baseload, microwaving the juice from orbit down to surface rectennas. Sunlight in space has three times the intensity of the pallid stuff on Earth, and it’s always on, so solar panels in space have three times the sun exposure of solar panels on roofs. That adds up to a ninefold advantage. Expensive commute, though. Japan is planning a 1-gigawatt space solar facility nevertheless and a California utility claims it will have a 200-megawatt solar farm in orbit by 2016.)

  • As for footprint, Gwyneth Cravens points out that “A nuclear plant producing 1,000 megawatts takes up a third of a square mile. A wind farm would have to cover over 200 square miles to obtain the same result, and a solar array over 50 square miles.” That’s just the landscape footprint. (By the way, 1,000 megawatts equals 1 gigawatt—a billion watts; I’ll use that measure most of the time here.)

  More interesting to me is the hazard comparison between coal waste and nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is minuscule in size—one Coke can’s worth per person-lifetime of electricity if it was all nuclear, Rip Anderson likes to point out. Coal waste is massive—68 tons of solid stuff and 77 tons of carbon dioxide per person-lifetime of strictly coal electricity. The nuclear waste goes into dry cask storage, where it is kept in a small area, locally controlled and monitored. You always know exactly wh
at it’s doing. A 1-gigawatt nuclear plant converts 20 tons of fuel a year into 20 tons of waste, which is so dense it fills just two dry-storage casks, each one a cylinder 18 feet high, 10 feet in diameter.

  By contrast, a 1-gigawatt coal plant burns 3 million tons of fuel a year and produces 7 million tons of CO2, all of which immediately goes into everyone’s atmosphere, where no one can control it, and no one knows what it’s really up to. That’s not counting the fly ash and flue gases from coal—the world’s largest source of released radioactivity, full of heavy metals, including lead, arsenic, and most of the neurotoxic mercury that has so suffused the food chain that pregnant women are advised not to eat wild fish and shellfish. The air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 30,000 deaths a year from lung disease in the United States, and 350,000 a year in China.

  As for comparing full-life-cycle, everything-counted greenhouse gas emissions, a study published in 2000 by the International Atomic Energy Agency shows total lifetime emissions per kilowatt-hour from nuclear about even with those of wind and hydro, about half of solar, a sixth of “clean” coal (if it ever comes), a tenth of natural gas, and one twenty-seventh of coal as it is burned today.

  • Baseload. Footprint. Add portfolio—the idea that climate change is so serious a matter, we have to do everything simultaneously to head it off as much as we can. The first definitive portfolio statement came from engineer Robert Socolow and ecologist Stephen Pacala in 2004. Their paper in Science, “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies,” introduced the idea that a set of “stabilization wedges,” made up of already proven technologies and practices, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a tolerable level, but only if all the wedges are pursued extremely aggressively at the same time, starting yesterday.