Fossil, Nuclear and Green

 "He who intends to introduce a new law, should do it with a rope about his neck, in order that he might be immediately strangled, unless he could change the ancient constitution of the polity, to the very great advantage of his community." - Hierocles

Foreward:  

By now everyone likely knows that carbon dioxide has built up to abnormal historical levels, due to industrialization and the ongoing combustion of fossil fuels.

The notion that atmospheric carbon dioxide could create a greenhouse effect has been around a long, long time.  Svante Arrhenius predicted in 1900 that man-made carbon dioxide would theoretically cause global warming, all other things being kept constant.  I'd consider the theory pretty well experimentally confirmed, since the world keeps experiencing "hottest ever" months every goddam year now.

End of the forward.

Back when I was a young fella, there were a lot of protests against nuclear power plants.  I remember very well watching those demonstrations on the news.  I never got the sense that those people were well-intentioned - they seemed more like religious zealots than people making rational arguments against something they disagreed with.  At least this was my impression at age 15 or so.

I now understand that at the time, people didn't understand nuclear power and were afraid of it - it was frequently conflated with nuclear weapons testing - possibly intentionally.  

Three Mile Island (TMI) had not yet happened.  Before I went into the Navy's Nuclear Propulsion program, TMI had happened, and by the time I got out of the Navy, the disaster at Chernobyl had occurred, which was a million times worse than TMI.  Chernobyl was a nasty and completely unnecessary reactor accident - with no containment.  I'd never try to minimize Chernobyl.  

But Three Mile Island?  They legit slagged down a utility-scale reactor core, and still contained all but a whiff of some really bad stuff.  Had they done things right, it never would have happened.  Had they done things half-right, it would have been 100% contained.  But they didn't, and here we are.

With regard to nuclear power back then:  Between cost over-runs, politics, and the anti nuclear lobby, a couple of accidents, and a nascent environmental movement, nuclear plant construction stopped dead in its tracks.  "Good", you might be thinking.  Well maybe not so good... 

The electricity those abandoned nuclear power plants would have produced still had to be made, because nobody cut back using electricity.  That electricity was instead generated by coal-fired power plants, because coal was the only large-scale generating technology back then that didn't require building a dam.

The environmentalists at the time apparently didn't give a crap about the massive environmental impact of the coal life-cycle.  The mining, the acid run-off from the mining waste, the carbon dioxide, the ash waste, the persistent toxins like mercury compounds, the sulfur dioxide (acid rain), the particulates, and the nitrous oxides.  The nuclear power plants were replaced with the dirtiest, nastiest generating technology known to mankind - and they rejoiced.  The result?  The world unnecessary dumped billions of tons of CO2 into the air from burning billions of tons of coal for the next 50 years - and you can toss in all those other environmental pollutants, too.

So with several of the hottest years on record now in the history books, are any of those zealots willing to look themselves in the mirror and admit that the world is now hotter thanks to their efforts???  I didn't think so.  It turns out that the anti-nuclear movement was actually taking money from oil and gas companies.  If they are all still alive, I hope they live in a very hot place that is experiencing a prolonged drought.  If they are dead, I hope they are in a burning pool of lava. 

Most people aren't great fans of Michael Moore - and I'm not a big fan of his either.  Maybe it's because he is confrontational to powerful people.  Maybe it's because he doesn't bother to sugar-coat what he sees as problems.  Maybe it's because people don't want to hear about the wheels falling off of society, and don't like the idea of facing it.  Maybe it's all of those things combined that make people uncomfortable.  

Micheal Moore recently produced (but did not narrate) a movie called "Planet of the Humans".  The movie takes aim at the environmental movement.  Planet of the Humans is a movie about corruption and hypocrisy within the environmental movement.

• Selling out to big business and (for cash) and letting polluters green-wash themselves.  
• Glossing over the huge limitations of alternative energy.
• Ignoring how pollution-intensive the manufacture of "green energy technology" is. 

You can watch the movie below.  It earned Michael Moore the fury of the environmental movement, although there's little there that can be truthfully denied.  It was quickly pulled from movie theaters too!  It's sad and disturbing to watch (and of course it's biased), but I think it's important to watch, to better understand the dilemma that we currently find ourselves in.

Back those whacky anti-nuclear folks, though.  One argument that is frequently trotted out against nuclear power is the lifetime CO2 embedded in building, operating and refueling a nuclear power station.  Oddly (or not) this argument is seldom made against any of the alternative forms of generating power.  

Helpfully, I found a Wikipedia page with a table that shows how much embedded CO2 is in each form of electrical generation - which makes nuclear look pretty darn attractive, even compared to "green" energy.  The environmentalists ditched nuclear, down near the bottom, for coal, up top.  Very clever!

Technology	Min.	Median	Max.
Currently commercially available technologies
Coal – PC	740	820	910
Gas – combined cycle	410	490	650
Biomass – Dedicated	130	230	420
Solar PV – Utility scale	18	48	180
Solar PV – rooftop	26	41	60
Geothermal	6.0	38	79
Concentrated solar power	8.8	27	63
Hydropower	1.0	24	22001
Wind Offshore	8.0	12	35
Nuclear	3.7	12	110
Wind Onshore	7.0	11	56
Pre‐commercial technologies
Ocean (Tidal and wave)	5.6	17	28

Personally I would have preferred to have spent my career over the past 30 years *not* blowing CO2 into the air to earn a paycheck, but the only decent power plant jobs were in fossil-fueled power plants.  Sorry, not sorry.  Everyone wants their lights to work 100% of the time, but nobody wants to pay the (environmental) price.  It's all good, we can still be friends.  I hope they are enjoying the hotter world that they worked so hard to get, by replacing one of the lowest CO2-producing technologies with the very worst one. 

The enormous problem we humans currently face is that most of our infrastructure upon which modern life is based requires burning fossil fuels.  This is true whether it's planes, trains, or automobiles (transportation), modern agriculture (food), or electrical generation (everything else).  There is no battery powered jetliner, or cargo ship, and most of the personal vehicles around the world burn gasoline or diesel.

Food: Almost every acre of the entire US midwest gets tilled every spring, then it gets seeded, then it gets sprayed and fertilized.  Then it gets harvested.  So every acre of soil gets driven over several times by heavy equipment that burns diesel and gets maybe 1 mile per gallon - year after year - decade after decade.  Modern farming is incredibly energy-intensive.  Can this go on forever?  It seems doubtful.

To stop pumping so much carbon dioxide into the air will require replacing everything we use in modern society with something else - an incredibly massive and expensive undertaking.  Some things might need to be cut back on...  That's going to be a tough sell to people who like their annual vacation trip to Cabo, their monster truck, their Amazon Prime, fresh shellfish from Maine, or their A/C, and so it's not likely to happen.  I'd suggest preparing for a lot more record-breaking hot and dry summers. 

I am aware that with the Fukushima reactor meltdowns and explosions so fresh on everyone's mind, so it's probably not a popular notion to speak positively of nuclear power.  But at this point, it doesn't look like we have many options.

And I kid you not, this is chilling to look at - it's dangerous technology.  But the fact remains that the clean alternatives are not ready for prime time.  They don't make enough juice, and are too intermittent to reliably power steel mills, factories, air conditioners, or charge your Tesla on a still night.

Nuclear can be done, and it can be done much more safely than we are doing it currently.  The alternative is to pretend that we are doing something - like the movie shows - as the world burns.