Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  In early 2009, in Ambio magazine, Amory Lovins declared: “Nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete.”

  How can someone so smart be so wrong about a subject he knows so well? It turns out that his arguments against the economics of nuclear power work only within the narrow commercial boundaries he defines, which increasingly no longer apply, and he focuses mainly on the United States. His reasoning has no traction in relatively dirigiste economies like France, Japan, and most developing countries, especially China and India; if those governments want nukes, they build nukes. More important, the loom of climate change has altered everybody’s perspective on costs and risks.

  • The problem is not that nuclear is expensive. The problem is that coal is cheap.

  “Nuclear is dying of an incurable attack of market forces,” said Lovins. It was market forces that gave us coal’s dominance—40 percent of the world’s electricity comes from coal (and 20 percent from gas, 16 percent from nuclear, 16 percent from hydro, 6 percent from oil, 2 percent from renewables). If only market forces rule, coal will continue to beat everything else, and the world’s goose is cooked.

  That realization motivates governments even in strongly capitalist societies like the United States and Britain. By government fiat, coal will be made expensive—through carbon taxes, cap-and-trade markets, requirements for CCS (carbon capture and sequestration), and mandates. In the competition to provide baseload power, as the cost of coal-fired electricity goes up, nuclear will take the lead as the most cost-effective alternative. (The economics of wind, hydro, cogeneration, solar, and geothermal also gain in relation to a properly crippled coal.) The fate of gas-fired plants, including cogeneration, will depend on the local price of natural gas, which in most places is rising precipitously. And no nation that has been dependent on Russia for natural gas wants to remain so, because it gets used as a political weapon.

  The sticker shock for nuclear comes right at the start. Like the other major Green power sources—hydroelectric dams and large wind farms—nuclear plants require massive up-front capitalization; but once the facility is built, operating costs are low compared to fuel-intensive coal and gas plants, accounting for only one quarter to one third of the plant’s lifetime expense.

  Wind is serious infrastructure, and growing fast—94 gigawatts capacity worldwide in 2007 (nuclear was 365 gigawatts; coal, 1,393 gigawatts). Expanding wind power always means expanding long distance power lines. In Denmark and Germany, which led the European wind revolution, new construction has tapered off due to rising costs and scarcity of appropriate sites. Some are offended by the sight of massive wind farms churning away (Jim Lovelock and Robert Kennedy Jr. come to mind), but personally I find them thrilling. Unfortunately, wind power remains limited by intermittency to about 20 percent capacity (so that 94 gigawatts is four-fifths illusory), while nuclear plants run at over 90 percent capacity these days; and there still is no proven storage technology that would make wind a baseload provider. (Potential massive energy storage techniques that are being explored include flywheels, hot liquid, compressed air, and better batteries or distributed batteries in everybody’s plug-in hybrid car.)

  Many bird-loving environmentalists fight wind farms because of the harm to birds. My favorite Green publication, High Country News, ran the following list without comment: “Annual bird kill in the US: wind turbines, 28,500; buildings, 550 million; power lines, 130 million; cats, 100 million; cars, 80 million; pesticides, 67 million.”

  • Solar so far is a bit player in electricity generation—10 gigawatts of capacity total in the world in 2007, but with solar’s 14 percent capacity factor, that’s only 1.4 gigawatts operational, less than one large nuclear reactor. I fondly remember the 1970s solar boom, which ended the moment Ronald Reagan became president and canceled Jimmy Carter’s solar tax credits. I had the delicious opportunity to interview Ted Turner in front of the 2007 Solar Power Conference, which had twice the attendance of the previous year, 12,500 people. Among them were only a few of the old solar guard such as John Schaeffer, whose solar mail-order catalog, Real Goods, has freed thousands from the grid since 1978. Schaeffer and I were surrounded by suits, most of them apparently avid to save the world and become rich from a technology they expected to be heavily subsidized any day. That’s why they wanted to hear from rich, Green, Ted Turner. Turner went cheerfully off topic to inveigh against the Iraq War, noting that the enemy motivated their troops by promising them forty virgins when they die. “If we had incentives like that for solar power,” Turner cracked, “we’d have it made.” (I couldn’t resist asking Turner about nuclear; he said, “I would rather have a nuclear plant than a coal-burning plant.”)

  Boundless ingenuity and capital are being focused on solar, with new materials and new configurations—nano-this and concentrated that; someday, maybe, energy-producing solar paint. The most efficient so far is concentrated solar thermal, in which focused mirrors heat a fluid to run turbines, and some of the heat can be stored in steam accumulators when the sun goes behind a cloud or sets for the night. With enough breakthroughs, sustained over decades, solar could and should become a leading source of electricity. Hasten that day! Meanwhile, the finance-management firm AllianceBernstein opines that “the solar industry has benefited recently from spectacular policy-driven growth. . . . We think that the speculative interest is becoming bubble-like, particularly given that industry fundamentals depend on government subsidies and political support.”

  My wife, Ryan, and I use plenty of solar with no need for incentives. We’ve had solar panels trickling maintenance-free power into the battery bank on our tugboat for twenty-six years. The electric fence that keeps cattle out of the oak savannah we’re restoring runs on solar, and so does the automatic gate in the fence. Best of all is the solar water heater for our lap pool. We get an 80°F pool for seven months of the year with no use of propane, and the panels work in reverse on hot days, radiating excess heat to the night sky. Solar works well at the individual level; wind does not. Wind works well at the infrastructure level; solar, so far, does not.

  • A standard objection to nuclear, following Amory Lovins’s lead, is that it is grossly oversubsidized: It could never compete in a fair market, it steals subsidies that solar should get, etc. A 2007 study compared U.S. government energy incentives over the past fifty years for oil, coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal, with particular focus on the period from 1994 to 2003. The incentives tallied included direct subsidies, research, tax relief, regulation, government services, and market intervention. Among the conclusions were these: The general perception that the oil industry has been the major beneficiary of Federal subsidies is correct, with this source receiving nearly half of all subsidy support. . . . The perception that renewable energy has been short-changed at the expense of other energy sources is not correct. . . . Coal and nuclear technologies have been underfunded, while solar technologies such as photovoltaics, solar thermal, and wind have been well funded.

  (Details, with illuminating graphs, may be found in Roger H. Bezdek and Robert M. Wendling, “A Half Century of United States Federal Government Energy Incentives: Value, Distribution, and Policy Implications,” International Journal of Global Energy Issues, vol. 27 [2007], no. 1.) The study leaves out the copious subsidies at the state level for renewable energy.

  “Clean coal” is supposed to be a low-carbon alternative to nuclear for baseload power once we have carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). As of 2009, there was not a single demonstration plant using CCS, though China is working on one. Even industry proponents of CCS don’t expect the first commercial application before 2030 or broad use before 2050. The volume of CO2 that has to be dealt with is overwhelming. A 1-gigawatt coal-fired plant burns eighty rail cars of coal a day, each car carrying 100 tons of coal. The resulting CO2 weighs 2.4 times as much as the coal, so that plant will produce over 19,000 tons of carbon d
ioxide a day—7 million tons a year. It has to be separated, compressed to a liquid, piped to a suitable location, pumped down half a mile, and sealed off permanently. Good luck with that in the developing world. A Swede named Anders Hansson did the math on the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that would have to be buried to make a difference and concluded, “Carbon dioxide would be the world’s largest transported good.” Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles has it right: The best carbon sequestration technique is to leave the coal in the ground.

  You may have heard this one: “It’s no good building new reactors because we’re running out of uranium.” In fact we’re not, and it wouldn’t matter if we did. Known uranium deposits cover a hundred years of current-level use. The rising price of uranium is driving new exploration, with finds turning up all over the world. The price rise also makes reprocessing of spent fuel more attractive, and that leverages existing uranium manyfold. The leading substitute for uranium, thorium, is three times as abundant, and it can’t melt down, it’s useless for weapons, and it generates little waste. Meanwhile, new reactors are increasingly efficient, and breeder models create more fuel than they use. I’ll come back to the new designs in a minute.

  • We Greens are not economists. When someone needs fiscal advice, they don’t usually hire an environmentalist, because they know we don’t really know about money and we don’t really care about money. Our agenda is to protect the natural environment, not taxpayers or ratepayers. We’re perfectly happy requiring such impediments as environmental impact reports, which add horrendous costs and delays to projects, and our arguments for protecting one endangered species or another do not include cost analysis. How much is a condor worth? Don’t even ask.

  Occasionally we’ll invent useful economic instruments like debt-for-nature swaps, and many of our organizations are well run financially, but money issues are customarily employed by Greens strictly as a weapon. “If you want to kill a power project,” advises one activist in Orion magazine, “focus on economics.” I recall the futurist Herman Kahn talking about the fight over the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s: “The Greens began by complaining about the design of the pipeline, and they were right, it did have flaws. But once those were fixed, the Greens put all their effort into forcing delays and extravagances that raised the cost of the system. Their final argument was that the pipeline should not be built because it was too expensive. That’s like a kid murdering his parents and then asking for mercy from the court because he’s an orphan.”

  Amory Lovins does have economic expertise. He deploys cost analysis brilliantly in the service of energy efficiency and conservation. His Rocky Mountain Institute well earns its $9 million a year helping corporate clients and the military make their energy practices both frugal for themselves and good for the environment. But when Lovins aims his well-honed techniques at nuclear power, I think his private-sector bias gets in the way. He has said, “I admire those who try to reform public policy, but I don’t spend much time doing that myself. In a tripolar world of business, civil society, and government, why would you want to focus on the least effective of that triad?”

  With global warming, the game has changed. Market forces cannot limit greenhouse gases. Governments have to take the lead. What they deem the atmosphere requires will be the prime driver of the economics of energy.

  A common refrain against nuclear goes, “Solving the problem of waste storage is so difficult, not a single geological repository for nuclear waste is operating anywhere in the world.”

  But there is one in the United States, in operation burying radioactive stuff since 1999. WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, got through its safety reviews thanks largely to Rip Anderson, the scientist at Sandia Labs who guided Gwyneth Cravens through the nuclear world for her book. For political reasons, WIPP was assigned only waste (some low-level, some high-level) from U.S. military activities, while the high-level waste from the civilian energy program was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Having studied every kind of repository in detail, Anderson declares:From a technical point of view, the best place on dry land to store all nuclear waste—wherever it comes from—is at WIPP. We’ve proven that every way you can think of. We have trace-ability and transparency. Geologically and hydrologically, it’s the safest. There’s room for it, and more panels can be mined out of the salt bed whenever we want. It’s only politics and bureaucracy that stand in the way.

  WIPP is a salt formation, and Yucca Mountain is a dry desert ridge in a huge military reservation, but that’s not why one is now working and the other isn’t. New Mexico is familiar with nuclear technology, through long experience with Los Alamos and Sandia, where nuclear weapons were designed and built. Nevada is where the bombs were tested. Nevadans miss no opportunity to get in a fight with the federal government, which owns 86 percent of the state’s land. Nuclear waste in Nevada? “No, God damn it! Take your garbage somewhere else!” Antinuclear environmentalists restate that sentiment in terms of dangers of transport, insufficient testing on groundwater flow, effects of heat on rock, impossibility of defining what will happen over 10,000 years, etc.

  Jim Lovelock is baffled by the fuss:Consider the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste depository in Nevada: It cost a fortune to construct, and we need it about as much as we need a facility for imprisoning dangerous extraterrestrials. We must stop living in a sci-fi world. In the real world, high-level nuclear waste from 40 years of energy production in the

  U.K. and France is stored as chunks of glass packed in stainless steel containers and buried a few meters underground. Sandy [Lovelock] and I stood on all the French high-level nuclear waste at La Hague in Normandy. The radiation level on my own monitor was only 0.25 microsieverts an hour, which is about 20 times less than you’d find in any long-distance passenger plane.

  In Finland, construction is going ahead on a deep geological repository for high-level wastes at Eurajoki, where the project found a welcome because the local population had become comfortable with nuclear power: It has been generated in their neighborhood for thirty years. The repository should open for business in 2020. Meanwhile, Finland’s neighbor Russia wants to become a nuclear fuel handler for the world—mining, processing, shipping, and reprocessing fuel, and then storing the waste.

  The method of dealing with nuclear waste in the United States that emerged, de facto, in the absence of a national repository is proving so practical that a new solution is based on it. U.S. reactor operators now put their spent fuel in pools to cool off for a few years, then pack it in dry cask storage out behind the parking lot. So it is for all 121 reactor sites in thirty-nine states. Since the casks are designed for transport (there’s a thrilling video made at Sandia of trains, planes, and trucks ramming the casks without release of spent fuel), the idea now being legislated—with support of the Obama administration—is to cart them to a few well-guarded “interim” sites where they can be parked for decades while the nation decides whether it wants to recycle the material or bury it. Thus the United States would adopt Canada’s “adaptive phased management” solution. To my eye, the emerging rule is: Plan short and option long; take the actions in the near term that preserve the most choices for the long term.

  That approach was taken with funding for waste storage. American purchasers of nuclear-generated electricity have been paying for eventual storage facilities for years. Some $28 billion has accumulated. What’s in short supply now is political decisiveness.

  • I used to be certain that reprocessing spent fuel is the right thing to do. The once-through “waste” we bury has 95 percent of its energy still in it. If all the existing spent fuel in the United States were reprocessed, our whole nuclear fleet could run for seven years on nothing else. The eventual volume of unreusable waste after reprocessing is a fraction of the usual waste—some say a fourth, others a tenth—and the radioactive material does not remain dangerous for nearly as long. Because weapons-capable plutonium is generated in the current forms of reproce
ssing, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter shut down the U.S. operation in the hope that the rest of the world would follow suit. It didn’t work. Routine in France, Russia, England, Germany, and Japan, reprocessing is being considered in many nations with ambitious nuclear-energy programs. These days, the United States itself is undertaking to build reprocessing plants in Idaho, New Mexico, and South Carolina.

  An article in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum on France’s exemplary reprocessing operation is what gives me some second thoughts. The facility at La Hague reprocesses 1,700 tons of spent fuel a year, with an impeccable safety record. But even in France, with its primary reliance on nuclear for electricity, the enormous cost of reprocessing makes it economic only if the price of uranium is very high, or if the nation is developing fast breeder reactors. While the eventual waste from reprocessed fuel is relatively short-lived, it is much “hotter” and trickier to handle than the once-through spent fuel.

  And then there’s the weapons issue. That’s the one that keeps Al Gore hesitant about nuclear. He has said:For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out of a lot of coal—which is the real issue: coal—then we’d have to put them in so many places, we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale. And we’d run short of uranium, unless they went to a breeder cycle or something like it, which would increase the risk of weapons-grade material being available.