Is Nuclear Power Necessary for a Workable Approach to Energy?

A reader named Barry has been active in 2GreenEnergy since its inception and asks:

I had a couple of college professors that told me in 1977 at UCSB that nuclear power was using a flawed theory and that we have just been lucky so far. I don’t know anything about the advanced nukes you speak of but I consider you reliable. So here’s the question ….what would you prefer to see proliferate as our next form of energy?   I realize the answer is probably a mix of sources but it would be nice to hear: where would you put your money?

Thanks for the confidence you’ve placed in me. As you suggested, the answer is complicated.  There is no silver bullet, but let me lay out a few thoughts.

The only reason that life on Earth exists at all is that it was gifted with a huge fission fusion reactor fairly close to it (93 million miles away).  Thus the main energy-related question on this planet:  Can we make do with the power we receive from the sun?  After all, it’s providing us with 126 trillion horsepower, which is about 6000 times more than we can use.  Can we harvest enough of it to render all other forms of energy unnecessary?

That’s a yes or no question.  So it is yes?  Or no?

Unfortunately, there are many moving parts, most of which have to do with economics, and they’re changing in important ways every single day:

• A growing population and a growing consumption of power per capita

• A falling cost per installed watt of solar and wind, and a falling levelized cost of energy (dollar per kilowatt-hour of the energy generated amortized over the life of the equipment)

• Rising scarcity of oil

• Environmental/health-related concerns associated with fossil fuels — which itself has dozens of dimensions: the cost, in dollars and suffering, associated with repairing climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, lung disease, etc.

• Geo-politics of energy

• Viability of “advanced” nuclear, in particular: how safe and inexpensive will it be?  How much time and money will it take to get there?

I know there are people who claim to have taken all this into consideration and have produced a single answer as to the appropriate direction that humankind must take.  In my experience, these people are either a) disingenuous spokespersons whose jobs are selling certain technologies, or b) people who don’t really understand the inescapable complexity of all these factors.

Having said that, there are a few things that the human race should most definitely be doing at this point:

1) Implementing a vast array of efficiency and conservation measures: mass transit, building energy management, etc.

2) Carrying out energy policies that phase out fossil fuels as quickly as that can practically be accomplished

3) Exploring the validity of advanced nuclear

4) Investing in further R&D designed to improve the cost-effectiveness of renewables, especially those that have the potential to address the global energy issue at scale

To answer your question as to where I would put my money, I suppose I would divide it somehow across each of the four items above.  Sorry I couldn’t have offered you a silver bullet, but I hope I’ve made my point that none exists.

Regarding your professors’ statement that nuclear is a “flawed theory,” I don’t know how to address that either.  As Einstein understood 110 years ago, if you can make a tiny bit of mass go away, you get a huge amount of energy in return.  It’s hard to say that there’s anything inherently “flawed” about that, though, as we’ve seen, it can result in a hell of a lot of destruction—both deliberate and accidental.

Thanks again for the faith you’ve placed in me, and I hope this has helped.