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April 16, 2006

The Nuclear Option

If the United States is going to do anything about the threat of anthropogenic global warming, it really only has two options: shutter the economy and move into an age where people are nostalgic for the Great Depression, or go nuclear. The first option is unacceptable, as it would cause as much loss of life as it could potentially save and, as any historian of democracy knows, democracies don't do self-inflicted pain, at least not when they realize what they're doing. (There's plenty of pain we inflict on ourselves under democracy, but there's rarely such a direct link between cause and effect as there would be with an attempt to eliminate a sizeable fraction of our carbon emissions.) That means that if we're going to do anything about carbon emissions, we're going to have to start building nuclear plants again.

That's the conclusion of Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. Mr. Moore wisely lays out the reasoning for shifting our economy to nuclear power and takes on some of the myths about nuclear energy that render it such an unattractive option right now. He fails to note one important thing: that nuclear energy is only marginally cost-competitive with other fuels right now because nuclear plants face a whirlwind of legal and regulatory burdens often intended to prevent them from going on line by making nuclear power uncompetitive. If nuclear plants were protected from that burden, nuclear energy could not only be a cleaner source of power than coal, it could also be cheaper.

Mr. Moore deserves great credit for his turnaround on this issue. There are plenty of people carrying on about the dire threat of global warming, but very few have been willing to acknowledge the role nuclear power must play in fighting global warming effectively, instead preferring to simultaneously warn that global warming will kill us all and that nuclear power is unalterably evil. Mr. Moore will take a fair bit of heat from his erstwhile colleagues in the environmental movement over his words, because a lot of them would prefer to keep nuclear power bottled up as it is now, even if that means the U.S. fails to address the question of carbon emissions. He should be applauded for having the courage to take on his own allies by following the facts to their logical conclusion.

I should note here that I am not yet convinced that global warming is nearly as dire a threat as it is made out to be, nor do I know to what degree global warming is anthropogenic, but if you accept carbon emissions as a major factor in global warming and that global warming will have catastrophic consequences if not dealt with quickly and you're still not willing to shift power generation to nuclear, then you're not really interested in solving the problem. The logic is quite simple: if we accept the premise that global warming is anthropogenic and that global warming will have catastrophic consequences , then the conclusion we must take measures to mitigate global warming logically follows. The problem is that there are some other premises we have to accept as well, primarily that the government of the United States won't intentionally cripple its own economy in pursuit of carbon reductions. With that premise in place (and the 97-0 vote against Kyoto under President Clinton is pretty suggestive of that premise), our options are either to find massive economies in energy usage that will allow us to produce the same amount of goods with vastly less power or find another source of power to replace carbon-emitting sources like coal. The former isn't possible: we got the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency in the 1970s. Can we use power more effectively? Sure, but not so much more effectively that we'll be able to keep our economy afloat while shutting down all our coal-fired power plants. That means finding another source of power, and until somebody can crack the code on cold fusion, that means nuclear power.

Why nuclear, and not renewables? Because renewables can't provide power in either the amounts we need nor with the reliability we need. Wind power is great, but when the wind stops blowing we have to have another source of power ready in the background to pick up the slack. That's the tricky thing about electric power: it's a zero-sum game. However much power I'm generating has to equal the amount of power I'm using, no more and no less. When you turn on your light switch in the morning, that power has to be generated at that time; we can't generate it at some earlier time and hold onto it until we need it. (Actually, we can in small amounts, but the amount of power lost in storage is huge, so if we want to go that route we're going to have to generate significantly more power than we do right now to account for losses in storage and transmission, not to mention the cost of building all those batteries.) Solar suffers from the same problem. Hydroelectric is more reliable, but we're already using most of the best locations for hydro power, and hydro power carries its own list of problems. We probably still have some low-hanging fruit available among sources of geothermal power, but that list isn't long enough to fill more than a tiny fraction of our energy needs. Ultimately, the only source of power that we have readily available that could fill our generation needs without emitting carbon is nuclear energy.

As I noted above, I'm not yet convinced that carbon emissions are something we should be worrying about. But I can easily find common cause with those who do when it comes to building new nuclear plants. Increasing our power generation capability can only do good things for our economy, and cutting back on coal-fired plants is good for the environment in other ways than simply trimming carbon emissions. So encourage your elected representatives, both local and national, to make building new nuclear power plants easier and cheaper, and let's encourage the private sector to do so sooner rather than later.