A reader reacted quite a while ago to my post on decarbonization of the energy sector and the part nuclear power might play, with regard to Environmental Progress:
Environmental Progress sounds like a highly suspect group. California “could have mostly or completely decarbonized their electricity sectors had their investments in renewables been diverted instead to new nuclear”? In what crazy world of imaginative finance do they live? As you pointed out, new nuclear is crazy expensive.
I refer you to the last 2 subsections of the History section in the Wikipedia entry for Nuclear Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Nuclear_power_in_the_United…), titled “Competitiveness” and “Westinghouse Chapter 11”. Fossil fuels are way too cheap to make nuclear viable. The 4 nuclear reactions under construction have already lost billions of dollars, and they aren’t online yet.
So noted. Yet I’ve been unable to find dirt on Environmental Progress, although my time for such activities is extremely limited. The Founder / President of EP is Michael Shellenberger, who from his Wikipedia entry appears to be on the up & up – but, of course, Wikipedia is always a contingent, not definitive, source. Listed as an eco-pragmatist, nuclear power may, in Shellenberger’s evaluation as an environmentalist, make the grade.
Stipulating to the fixed and running costs of nuclear power tending to run over estimates, let me quickly present a contrarian argument to my reader’s comments. One of the facets of most, or even all, “green” energy sources is its effect on the energy environment. I use that term simply as a lowest common denominator, so here’s an easy example: a wind turbine. It converts the energy implicit in the wind into energy convenient to human beings. But if a wind turbine doesn’t exist, is that implicit wind energy wasted?
Only in the mind of the short-sighted human. The truth of the matter is that this wind is carrying moisture, it’s bending trees, its conveying that energy itself to somewhere else. Perhaps birds are riding on it – easy enough to imagine, yes? But so are spiders. And bacteria. In other words, all those creatures and substances, which all boil down to energy, that energy topology is being disturbed in an unnatural manner by that wind turbine. What are the long term implications? Similar remarks may be made with equal accuracy concerning hydroelectricity, tidal power, and solar power – each is removing energy from an active ecology.
Nuclear power is emissions free, once installed, for its operational lifetime. Its fuel, until removed from the ground, contributes little or nothing to the energy landscape, although the removal and processing does contribute quite a lot. That’s interesting, because that failure to disturb the energy landscape makes it close to unique. I can only think of direct human (or perhaps animal) exercise as also being relatively benign to the energy landscape, an idea explored at length in Norman Spinrad’s Songs from the Stars.
I don’t wish to deny that the costs of commissioning and decommissioning nuclear power plants are unimportant, as they present unpleasant and even disqualifying challenges. Perhaps the potential cost of a disastrous accident is even more disqualifying, compared to the traditional green technologies. But I think it’s important to note that those green technologies, while carbon neutral, do have their own side-effects, and some of those may turn out to disqualify them in turn.
