Nuclear Follies

"Nuclear Follies" is the title of a musical some friends of mine wrote. It had a brief (very brief) run at the Village Gate in the 80's.

My Eco Freak self has never been a Nuke supporter. 

There's Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 

Lantern memorial

The Bikini Atoll, 

Storage and testing in the desert southwest, 

mining uranium in the Grand Canyon (a personal nightmare),

and Project Rulison. My middle school class monitored the last underground nuclear test in the US which was set off in Rulison Colorado in 1969. We set up a small plumb bob on a triangular mount over a paper bullseye in the playground and watched the ground shake from an underground blast 70 miles away.

The first time my "no nukes" attitude was challenged was in Paris. France is about is pro-nuke as a country can get.

I was visiting Mom in Paris in the late 80's and she was ebullient  about the nuclear industry in France. She was even more thrilled with "chauffage central" being supplied by the city to homes in Paris. This wasn't being done with nuclear power, but by turning garbage into heat.

I have to admit it was the first time in my life I remember being warm in her Paris apartment- *ever*. This government supplied heat had the extra benefit of being government regulated which meant our "super" couldn't chose when it should be turned on (not when he was on vacation in October for instance).

The next time my anti-nuke beliefs were challenged was at Bill Gates TED talk.

His argument for using nuclear waste as an energy source was compelling.

Then came Fukishima

which really seemed to reinforce my original anti-nuke ideas.

I've seen two documentaries which have made me look again.

The Babushkas of Chernobyl.

... and the film I saw last night at Mountainfilm

Pandora's Promise

It's hard to get a better spokesman than Stewart Brand who was also padding around the lobby of the TED where Mr. Gates made his pitch. Mr. Brand is a Colossus of the Environmental Movement with his bible "The Whole Earth Catalog" and his view then, as it is now, is "technology will save us"

Why take my review when the Washington Post and the Hollywood Reporter have done it so well?

Here are the pro-nuke points from the film which leapt out:

1. We're talking breeder reactors which would use the nuclear waste we already have. 

2. The newer breeder reactors can "self" shut down. I'm a hearty believer in Murphy's Law so this one isn't as compelling but it's very well presented in the film. The safety record *is* compelling- in nuclear's favor- even over PV panels.

3. There's been a lot of talk about 350 parts per million of carbon and we're already at 400 parts per million and climbing (basically, we're screwed). To get to the  current "goal" of 450 ppm by 2050 at current uses of electricity we would have to build one nuclear power plant *per day* to satisfy that consumption and keep the carbon ppm *down*. Oh, goodie.

4. Radiation levels: it's all about the microsieverts. By this chart avoiding dental Xrays and flying at 20,000'  makes a lot more sense than worrying about levels of radiation nuclear reactors. 

Fukushima with 102 microsieverts  which is .0001 of a sievert. That's too many decimal points for my small brain but basically means 10,000 days (27+years) of exposure would = 1 sievert.  One sievert is where the health risks start according to the World Health Organization.

A good deal more education could be done with this and the mass market media is throwing numbers around for the reason they normally throw numbers around- because it makes you sound smart- not because it's informative.

Here are some the the points they "fluffed" (IMO)

1. Conservation isn't a pipe dream. There was some rather unflattering 20+ year old footage of Amory Lovins showing off CFLs. What they didn't go into is that our major use for fossil fuels is *heating* and conservation combined with smart building can give you a house without a furnace (I know, I live in one). 

2. There was the the old 60 minutes trick of giving flattering camera angles and lighting to your proponents and unattractive camera angles and lighting to the people you want to discredit. That's a cheap trick. They could have made the film without casting anyone as a villain (or worse, as a dupe). The Environmentalists are an easy lobby to ridicule- they wear a lot of funny hats and chant a lot. Let's stop doing that.

3. The assertion that nuclear plants in the US are nothing more (or less) than a political football is an easy lob over the net. Polarization in Congress? Really? Who knew.  It did get the most titters and giggles from the audience but it's hardly a way to help *de*- polarization. 

4. Murphy's Law and my essential distrust of the ability of human engineering to out think the future is a deep rooted and well rewarded skepticism which will take a lot more than some nice graphs to dispel.  

So where does that leave me?

I'm very much afraid that I'm being asked to choose between natural gas and nuclear.

Natural Gas is here. We can access it more easily and cheaply than ever before. It is the darling of many Environmentalists and hailed as a "bridge" fuel from fossil fuel to renewables. (There is nothing so permanent as a "bridge fuel" to paraphrase the French "there is nothing so permanent as the temporary") The cost of Natural Gas is no less than our artesian water supply- all of it- through fracking and releasing all those million year old chemicals back into the water and the air. Given the recent benzene leaks into Parachute creek- it also threatens our above ground water supply.

Nuclear is here- but we haven't built breeder reactors yet. The capital costs are enormous but the potential benefits of a  fuel source which does not give off carbon is hugely appealing. The safety record is far better than public perception and the breeder reactor designs are truly hopeful. Using the waste we already have is really appealing. 

What's stopping the nuclear industry? Errr... other than really really bad graphics?

Well, fear for one. However the record doesn't support the level of fear the word "nuclear" evokes. Getting that genie back in the bottle isn't going to be an easy task.

More to the point it's expensive and there are a lot of interests which would *not* profit from a nuclear powered world (natural gas, coal and fossil fuels to name a few). We will probably do what we have always done which is pick the quick, cheap and immediately profitable over the long, expensive and long-range profitable. It will take an incredible strategist to move nuclear out of the possible into the probable. 

I'm not hopeful. 

Here's something that I am hopeful about, biomass. It's about heat, even more than it's about light, it's about heat; and electricity is a lousy fuel source for heat. Remember when I mentioned Paris getting central heating from it's garbage? Trash, we got. In the Western US we have more than that, we have beetle kill. 

We could certainly benefit from Thomas Heatherwick's design for a Power Plant as community center and a (literal) mountain of safety.

It is the concept design for a biomass power station on the banks of the river Tees. 

As a miner buddy of mine is fond of saying "If you don't grow it, you mine it." Uranium we mine, trees we grow. 

Agnes Denes Tree Mountain in Finland.

We should use our nuclear waste and power as much as we can but mining more Uranium, especially tearing up the Western US to do it- nope not so much. 

If we can pyrolize our trash into biochar  and sequester that carbon back into the soil we may have a chance. 

As usual, JMO.