I recently wrote a post critical of radical environmentalists who take rigid positions and refuse to make the tough choices that confront us all in the real world.  In particular, I stand in disagreement with people’s unwillingness to exile the tortoises from 4613 acres (about five square miles) in the California desert that would have been used for a gigawatt of solar photovoltaics, an almost exact replacement for a full coal-fired power plant.

Frequent commenter Larry Lemmert (who’s normally pretty much in my face) writes:

Craig, you are a reasonable man. I say that not because I agree with you about the desert tortoises vs. the PV panels but because you understand that trade-offs must be made to secure green energy for replacement of retiring fossil fuel sources. So many so-called environmentalists want a free energy lunch. It doesn’t exist.

Ah, a red-letter day; Larry and I agree on something. And he’s even used my favorite “no free lunch” metaphor…

Seriously, this idea of trade-offs and no free lunch is all-important; in fact, it lies at the base of my series of videos and infographics on renewable energy for young people and other newcomers to the subject. But regardless of one’s level of sophistication with the subject, it’s not an easy issue.  In brief, we need to choose between:

• Continuing  with business as usual, and subjecting the natural environment to the ever-increasing ravages of climate change, ocean acidification, etc.  The U.S. is the only major country on the planet that considers the status quo a viable option; we are  actually working against a progressive climate policy.   

• Do nuclear in a big way and run significant health and safety risks. Many of the world’s people have recently cast their votes against nuclear. Here’s a summary of this discussion.

• Aggressively cut back on our per-capita use of energy and move back in the direction of an agrarian economy. (How likely is that?)

• Fund the advancement of renewables, energy efficiency and conservation, by pulling money away from other things we think we need.

Regular readers know that I believe this last option is our only credible one, but I do freely admit that it comes with a cost.  In particular, I’m a big fan of education, especially of females in developing countries.  But how important are most of these things that we think we need? Tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to the oil companies? Trillions of dollars for waging wars whose primary missions are securing access to oil? I’m not a believer.  

No, there is no free lunch; everything comes at a cost.  Which is why our choices really do mean something. May we make the right ones.

We speak often about ending the subsidies for Big Oil, in an effort to create a level playing field for renewable energy, and simply to stop transferring wealth from the U.S. tax-payer to the captains of the most profitable industry on Earth. And the discussion is heating up even further, now that America is $15 trillion in debt.

Here’s an article that points out that the federal government has spent more than $95 billion (in 2011 dollars) on nuclear energy research and development (R&D). That is more than four times the amount spent on solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, biofuels, and hydropower combined.

Its authors note:

Many in Congress talk of getting big government off the back of private industry. Here’s an industry we’d like to get off the backs of the taxpayers. …..One thing we strongly agree on is the need to end wasteful subsidies that prop up the nuclear industry. After 60 years, this industry should not require continued and massive corporate welfare. It is time for the nuclear power industry to stand on its own two feet.

I hope everyone gets the opportunity to catch this episode of Frontline on PBS: Nuclear Aftershocks – one that essentially claims that nuclear energy is both unacceptably dangerous but completely necessary. I’m reminded of the way Amory Lovins begins his current-day presentations: “Which would you rather die from? Nuclear holocaust, drowning from rising sea levels, respiratory disease, or terrorist attacks and social chaos from the demand for increasingly scarce oil?” I have to admit; it’s a great way to capture an audience’s attention.

“Aftershocks” did a great deal to explore the dangers of nuclear energy, while presenting some semblance of the case for renewable energy. But the treatment of solar, wind, etc. in this one-hour show should have been longer, less simplistic, and less dominated by the nuclear industry and other groups with obvious vested interests in competitive technologies. We had to listen to a nuclear spokesperson trying to convince the audience: “(Renewables won’t be abundant and affordable) until I’m gone, you’re gone, and all our children are gone.” That’s simply false, you shameless pawn of an industry without morals.

Whenever I speak on renewable energy, I’m careful to leave my audience with a sense of the “tough realities.”  We all want simple answers to our questions, but in the case of clean energy, none exist.

There are dozens of different flavors of solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal, each improving in terms of cost and efficiency, but at different rates.  There are economic issues, as none of these flavors can compete with the dirtiest form of coal, if we don’t take into account the “externalities” like lung disease and environmental damage.  And Lord knows there are political issues, where we have serious candidates for president of the U.S. who, if elected, boldly pledge to dismantle our Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy.  If this occurs, it would effectively end the efforts of the largest economy on Earth to migrate away from fossil fuels and nuclear. 

Here’s another in a series of infographics that attempts to put all this into perspective. Hope you enjoy.

A friend who favors right-wing ideologies sent me a video in which the Cato Institute ripped up Obama’s State of the Union Address, pointing out certain claims as lies – even challenging the legality of some of the actions he’s taken as president. While I’m not a huge fan of the Cato Institute, they’re no fools, and they certainly make some good points here. Let’s also admit that Obama has been a bitter disappointment, as millions of us realized that he’s just another politician, put in place with huge money (in this case, Big Pharma and Wall Street) to protect and expand these interests.

But I’m always astounded when intelligent people believe that one of these two political parties is right and the other wrong. When Romney or Gingrich speak, is it even remotely possible to imagine that they are sincerely interested in anything other than your vote? Or that they have a credible plan to put a space station on the moon (an American one, of course), or to power the world with nuclear energy, or close down the EPA, or “kill our enemies” – does any of this make real sense?

OK, if that didn’t annoy you, try this: What did the Cato Institute say when ex-CIA director George Tenet admitted that the most senior levels of the G. W. Bush administration launched their war against Iraq based upon false pretenses and manipulated intelligence? This isn’t a mere difference of ideology about healthcare or unemployment or debt ceiling limits. These are war crimes – you know what I mean  – the types of things for which people in other parts of the world are brought to justice, then hanged or shot.

I’m amazed that well-educated people can hold on so tenaciously to ideas that either one of these two political parties, in a process that is so overtly corrupt, can save the world, while the other is the route to hell. Sorry if I’ve insulted anyone here, but I find the notion ridiculous.

I’ve been preparing to make a few videos for newcomers to the subject of clean energy that answer basic questions on renewable energy, fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and the energy-related challenges we face.  I’ll be recording a series of short talks, aided by graphics, that point out that all our energy sources go back to the Big Bang, and come forward through time to us as follows:

Solar power is nuclear, of course, as all that hydrogen that became our sun billions of years ago undergoes fusion and emits enormous amounts of energy. That which we accumulated over hundreds of millions of years as fossil fuels (ancient biomass) we extract and burn as oil, coal, and natural gas. That which we receive right now, or in the very recent past, we have the potential to harvest as renewables: photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, wind, new biomass, run-of-river hydro, ocean current, and wave.

Tidal and geothermal are two energy-related products of the Big Bang that don’t derive from the sun. Tides are caused largely by the moon, which was created by a huge collision shortly after the formation of the Earth. Geothermal energy actually has four different causes (the energy of impacts, friction from heavier elements migrating toward the core, radioactive decay and compression due to gravity) — all of which stem, however indirectly, from the mass and energy released in the Big Bang.

Nuclear energy comes from splitting some large atoms that resulted as simpler elements combined after the Big Bang. Here, I’ll point out that nuclear reactions are perfectly safe when they occur 93 million miles from us – on the sun, where they belong.  Though, as we’re slowly learning, this is not necessarily the case down here where we live.

Coincidentally, Bill Paul, our renewable energy finance guru, has been working along a similar vein, and sent me this masterpiece, a site on environmentalism for kids. I hope you’ll check it out.

I personally would say there are simply two main reasons to reject or abandon nuclear. And I fully expect some nuclear supporters to reject this.

1) Costs

2) Danger & Damage, both short-term and long-term

Costs
A majority of the general American public does not realize the immense and rising costs involved with building and developing a nuclear plant.

A former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Peter Bradford, who is also former chair of New York and Maine’s utility regulatory commissions, said recently: “Even before Fukushima, events over the last 2 years have amply demonstrated that new nuclear power was a bad investment in the U.S. Cost estimates have continued to rise while costs of alternatives are falling. Wall Street rating agencies are skeptical. Constellation pulled out of Calvert Cliffs last October. Exelon did the same for it proposed Texas reactors, and in the context of a review of its low carbon options that showed new nuclear to be far more expensive than most of its other choices.”

Paul Fremont, managing director of equity research at Jefferies & Company, Inc. said that the cost of building a new nuclear plan “…varies widely from $4,500.00 per KW estimated by the NRG for its cancelled project in Texas to $6,350.00 per KW estimated by Southern Company for its project in Georgia. Today, nuclear represents the highest cost option to construct as compared to traditional technologies…the economic alternative for new building today is gas-based on forward prices ranging from $4.40 now to anticipated $6.00 in 2015.”

Paul Gipe at RenewableEnergyWorld wrote that the sheer cost of nuclear that may overwhelm any industry “renaissance”.

A group of scientists at www.NuclearBailout.org makes that three-fold case against nuclear, saying it is uneconomical; it is polluting; and it is a health threat. The group created the site as a project of the Safe Energy Program at Physicians for Social Responsibility and points out that nuclear is far too expensive and uneconomical in a number of papers.

The New York Times ran a story on August 31^st, 2010 by James Kanter that looked at the nuclear power question. (“New Warnings about Costs of Nuclear Power.”)  In that story, the Bulgarian economy and energy minister had just announced that the cost to build their second plant (near the Danube River) was over $11.4 billion dollars ($9B Euros), while the original cost projection had been at $4B for the two reactors. At the same time, the British ministry of state for energy said that he expected each new nuclear plant to cost about $9.3 billion. Costs are dramatically out of control at a Finnish project where the French builder (Areva) agreed in 2005 to build a cutting-edge plant by 2009 at $3 billion Euros but the costs have doubled and it is not even complete (perhaps not until 2012.)

Christian Parenti, a scholar at CUNY and fellow at The National Institute, wrote in The Nation that for all of the boosters and champions of nuclear power, none seem to consider the economic factor, and he writes that the numbers just don’t add up.  He also believes that trying to argue that nuclear is a solution for climate change is just plain dangerous, because it threatens to delay the shift to clean energy.  Every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on green tech.

Henry Sokolsky wrote the paper “The High and Hidden Costs of Nuclear Power” published in Policy Review (no 162), August & September 2010 (Stanford University.) “Since the early 1950s, every major government in the Western Hemisphere, Asia, the Middle East and Europe has been drawn to atomic power’s allure only to have market realities prevent most of their nuclear investment plans from being fully realized,” writes Sokolski.

In 2003, says Sokolski, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the nuclear industry would probably default on nearly 50% of governmental loans, even though subsidies have been pushed through. Moody’s announced that it would downgrade its rating of any power provider that invested in new nuclear construction. At the same time, the president of “America’s largest fleet of nuclear power plants, who now serves as the World Nuclear Association’s vice chairman, publicly cautioned that investing in new nuclear generating capacity would not make sense unless both natural gas prices rise and stay about 8 dollars per cubic feet and carbon prices or taxes rise and stay about $25 a ton…Industry officials believe neither condition is likely to be met…” (page 56, Policy Review, Aug & Sept 2010.)

The good news is that clean tech is catching up.  An authoritative study by the investment bank Lazard Ltd. found that wind power actually beat nuclear power, and nuclear essentially tied with solar power as to costs. Further, the Worldwatch Institute reports that between 2004 and 2009, electricity from wind (not capacity but actual power output) grew by 27 percent, while solar grew by 54 percent. Over the same time, nuclear power output actually declined by half a percent.

… to be continued

Now, four decades later, I’m still wondering about the pro-nuclear people. Who are they? What’s the attraction?

If nuclear were cheap, I’d at least be able to understand the appeal. But the amortized cost of building, operating, and decommissioning a nuclear facility is fantastically high. So, if you’re willing to pay increased cost, why not choose any of dozens of flavors of solar and biomass, or wind, hydrokinetics and geothermal? While they may be expensive right this minute, at least they don’t leave you with spent fuel rods that must be isolated from all life forms for half a million years (the year 502,011).

Bottom line: I don’t get it. But, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t understand the appeal of many other phenomena that the human race seems to favor either: auto racing, pro wrestling, rap music, etc. Maybe it’s just one of those things…