[A-List] Return of the Nuclear Salesmen

[Bill Totten]

Global Warming Gives Them a New Sales Pitch

by Dave Reed

Rocky Mountain Institute, rmi.org (Spring 2000)

[I am posting this old essay today because I believe it is as vital now
as when written four years ago.  Bill Totten]
 
You'd think that boosters of nuclear power would have given up by now.
What with ballooning costs, public resistance, weapons proliferation,
and the political quagmire of waste disposal, the energy source that was
supposed to be "too cheap to meter" has turned out to be too expensive
to compete. Nuclear power has failed in the marketplace - in the United
States, there hasn't been a new plant built or ordered since 1978.
Despite US taxpayer expenditures of $1 trillion, nukes deliver less
energy than biomass (wood, ethanol, and other fuels derived from living
matter).

But the nuclear salesmen are knocking at the door again, peddling the
same product but with a trendy new claim: it cures global warming. In 
an election year, they might just get some takers.

Richard Rhodes and Denis Beller make the hard sell for nukes to an
influential policy audience in the January/February issue of Foreign
Affairs. With world population growing and an increasing proportion 
of it gaining access to electricity, they argue, "even with vigorous
conservation, world energy production would have to triple by 2050 to
support consumption at a mere one-third of today's US per capita rate".

Generating all that electricity the way we do now would cause
unacceptable environmental damage, including climate change and acid
rain. Replacing dirty coal-fired plants with cleaner ones that burn
natural gas will help, Rhodes and Beller say, but the only way to beat
climate change is to meet most of the new demand with nuclear power.
That's because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases or other air
pollution (at least not directly: they do indirectly through uranium
mining and processing), and because other non-polluting energy sources,
such as efficiency and renewables, are deemed impractical and
uncompetitive.

Peter Huber makes the same claim in his new book, Hard Green, but with
an extra twist. Huber's thesis is that land is the only permanently
scarce resource, so environmental policy should focus on the efficient
use of land, not of energy or other resources. Since nuclear reactors
extract maximum energy from a minimum of the earth's surface - so says
Huber - that leaves more land for trees, which abate climate change by
absorbing carbon dioxide. Not only is nuclear power without sin, it
actually offers salvation.

Like any sales pitch, this one has a kernel of truth. A massive shift to
nuclear power would help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. But at what
price?  Don't expect Rhodes, Beller, and Huber to call your attention to
the fine print. They make nuclear power look like a bargain only by
downplaying its costs, risks, and long-term consequences, while at the
same time portraying the alternatives as too small, dangerous, or
expensive.

Here's a brief look at the {key assumptions} that underpin their
argument:

{Demand for energy is growing inexorably}.  Forecasts of ever-rising
energy demand are as unreliable today as they were in the 1970s and
early 1980s, and for the same reason. Then, suppliers saw demand for
services rising exponentially and reasoned that supply would have to
increase at the same rate. Demand for services did indeed rise
exponentially, but thanks to efficiency and structural improvements, the
demand for energy grew only modestly - or to put it another way, almost
all of the new "supply" (95 percent during 1996?98) came from efficiency
improvements. Rhodes and Beller seem genuinely unaware of the simple
truth that a watt saved is a watt earned, and don't fully appreciate the
power of market forces that favor efficiency over inefficiency. The
efficiency gains they consider "only marginal" are now the nation's
largest energy source - by 1998, 28 percent bigger than oil and more
than six times bigger than nuclear power.

It's significant that Rhodes and Beller published their article in
Foreign Affairs; that's where, in 1976, a young Amory Lovins published
"Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?", the article that opened up a
national debate over energy policy and signaled the beginning of the end
of nuclear power. In it, Lovins, now co-CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute,
suggested that efficient use could cut officially projected US energy
needs in the year 2000 by 46 percent. It actually cut them by 50 percent.
There's no end in sight to efficiency improvements, and in fact the pace
is accelerating: during 1997-1999, at a time of record-low and falling
energy prices, the rate of improving aggregate US energy efficiency set
a new three-year record.


{Nuclear power is competitive}.  Rhodes and Beller like to quote the
operating costs of nuclear plants, but gloss over the vast expense of
building and decommissioning them and disposing of their wastes.
Implicitly acknowledging this, they concede that new nuclear plants
aren't competitive with fossil-fuel ones, but say that's only because
nukes are required to maintain costly systems to keep their
radioactivity from the environment - if coal or gas plants were
similarly required to contain all their pollutants, they'd cost more.
While that's true - and incidentally, forcing fossil-fuel plants to
internalize their pollution costs is a fine idea - doing so would only
strengthen the economics of efficiency and renewables. In fact,
efficiency and the cheapest renewables (wind) are already vastly more
economical than nuclear power, and even beat coal-fired plants.

If you want a truly impartial assessment of the economics of nuclear
power, just ask the market. In the United States and Britain, actual
transactions reveal that investors value existing nuclear plants at
approximately zero, and nobody is buying new ones. Nobody wants to make
a multi-billion-dollar, bet-the-company investment and wait ten years to
find out if they were right. And Rhodes and Beller's safety claims to
the contrary, nobody wants to take on the open-ended liability of waste
disposal and decommissioning (which in a sense is the market's way of
expressing society's scientific and moral unease about the long-term
hazards of burying or entombing radioactive wastes).
 

{Nuclear power is safe}.  Rhodes and Beller claim that nuclear accidents
have been "few and minimal", the Chernobyl meltdown was a result of
sloppy Soviet design and could never happen here, and safety procedures
have in any case improved since then. Huber complains that nuclear power
is unfairly hobbled by what he views as the public's irrational fear of
accidents. All three writers believe that the potential grievousness of
a nuclear accident is outweighed by the tiny chance of its happening.

But events carrying such extreme consequences, however unlikely,
necessarily become questions of policy. The public, policy makers, 
and the insurance industry (which, tellingly, excludes such risks from
virtually all its coverage) have weighed the risk differently, but no
less rationally. Rhodes, Beller, and Huber are of course free to try 
to change the public's mind, but if they fail, they shouldn't blame 
it on the public. (That would be like blaming the failure of, say,
earwax-flavored jellybeans on consumers' finicky tastes.)  Huber, 
in particular, is an arch-foe of socialistic central planning and
manipulation of the markets, so one would hope he isn't suggesting 
that the government impose upon the public a technology it doesn't 
want and isn't willing to pay for.


{Nuclear proliferation isn't a problem}.  Rhodes and Beller claim 
that it's beyond the capability of terrorists to process reactor-bred
plutonium into explosives, and go on to state that, in any case,
proliferation would still be a risk even if nuclear power ceased to
exist - as if the size of the risk were immaterial. Yet the link between
nuclear power and nuclear bombs has been well established, by Rocky
Mountain Institute and others (see "A Treaty Whose Time Has Come",
summer 1995). The risk of terrorists or rogue governments turning stolen
plutonium into bombs has increased since the breakup of the Soviet Union,
while many nations (Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea come 
to mind) have used their civilian nuclear power programs as covers for
making weapons.

Rhodes and Beller also use a good deal of ink contending that coal-fired
power plants emit more radioactive materials than nuclear plants do.
This argument is so scientifically lame - equating diffuse, low-
radiation, short-lived, nonexplosive natural uranium and thorium in coal
fly-ash with the vast flows of plutonium in their proposed nuclear
future is like comparing apples to whole orange groves - that the only
conceivable reason for making it is to divert attention from nuclear
plants' obvious role in proliferation.


{Nuclear power uses less land}.  Huber's central thesis is wrong because
it counts only the area taken up by the power plant - ignoring the much
larger area consumed by all the activities to mine and process uranium
into concentrated nuclear fuel. A 1981 study led by nuclear advocate
Wolf Hafele found that, when their entire fuel cycles are taken into
account, solar, coal, and long-run nuclear energy systems consume
roughly the same amount of land per unit of electricity produced 
(and the efficiency of solar power has improved since then). And
contrary to what the nuclear apologists like to claim, there is 
nothing inherently better about processed nuclear fuel just because 
it's so concentrated. Consider this: a pound of silicon processed 
into solar cells will produce more electricity over the cells' 
life-time than a pound of uranium consumed in a light-water reactor.

Huber further stacks the deck by assuming that solar panels couldn't 
be mounted on roofs and therefore would have to be placed in huge,
land-gobbling arrays. Actually, there's no reason why panels can't be
placed on or integrated into roofs or other idle surfaces. That's what
we do with ours at Rocky Mountain Institute. In fact, the ease of siting
solar panels right next to where the electricity is used is one of their
chief economic advantages over central power plants.


{The alternatives won't cut it}.  Efficiency generally saves electricity
more cheaply than any sort of power plant can produce it. And although
Rhodes and Beller effectively ignore it, and Huber positively pooh-poohs
it, efficiency is and will continue to be the largest source of "new"
energy and electricity for many years to come.

As for other sources of new supply, the nuclear salesmen acknowledge the
market-driven rise of "combined-cycle" natural-gas-fired power plants,
but warn that burning gas still gives off carbon dioxide (albeit less
than coal). This raises an interesting question. If natural-gas plants
beat nuclear plants so roundly in so many ways - they're much cheaper
and quicker to build, more modular, and twice as efficient - what could
possibly cause nuclear power to succeed in the market? Perhaps another
$1 trillion in subsidies?  Rhodes and Beller, who tut-tut about the $30
to $40 billion spent over two decades on efficiency subsidies and
renewable energy research, and Huber, the scourge of central planning
and government intervention, are strangely silent on this matter.

They likewise overlook, or ignore, the growing cost-effectiveness of two
other alternatives to nuclear power. At least as cheap per delivered
kilowatt-hour as combined-cycle gas plants are new natural-gas-powered
micro-turbines, which when installed onsite also provide heat as a
valuable byproduct. Edging into that price range, too, are well-sited
wind turbines. True, wind power isn't a panacea, but Rhodes and Beller
are way off in saying it produces electricity at "double or triple the
cost of fossil fuels" - in fact, they got the ratio about right in size,
but backwards. Not only do these alternatives deliver electricity more
cheaply than any new and many existing nuclear power plants, they're
also smaller, more modular, and faster to deploy, resulting in a host 
of other financial benefits.

Finally, Rhodes and Beller make a nod to fuel cells, which they imply
could be powered by hydrogen produced with nuclear electricity to 
create a "minimally polluting infrastructure".  Indeed, Rocky Mountain
Institute has for several years envisioned the same scenario, except
with the hydrogen produced from renewable electricity, or from natural
gas in a way that reinjects the separated carbon dioxide back into the
gas wells so that it doesn't enter the atmosphere. But the fact is that
the hydrogen will be produced with whatever electricity the market
favors, and as we've seen, nuclear electricity is probably the least
favorable of all. Fuel cells, far from reviving nuclear power, will 
only hasten its demise.


The bottom line of all this?  Even setting aside its accident risks,
proliferation dangers, and waste problems, nuclear power is just plain
too expensive, and in all likelihood always will be. And because it's so
expensive, investing in it makes climate change worse..

Why?  Because capital is finite: sinking it into an expensive solution
means it's not available for cheaper ones. In the United States, each
dollar invested in electric efficiency displaces nearly seven times as
much carbon dioxide as a dollar invested in nuclear power - without any
nasty side effects. (Efficient natural-gas technologies also beat
nuclear power for the same reason, though not by as much.) It's better
for the climate, as well as the economy, to pursue the best buys first.

If climate change is the problem, nuclear power isn't the solution. It's
an expensive, one-size-fits-all technology that diverts money and time
from cheaper, safer, more resilient alternatives.

http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid642.php

Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins and Daniel Kammen, director of
the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of
California, Berkeley, have submitted a detailed rebuttal of Rhodes and
Beller's article to Foreign Affairs.

rmi.org is published by Rocky Mountain Institute.
1739 Snowmass Creek Road| Snowmass, Colorado 81654-9199 | 
Tel: 970.927.3851

Copyright 2003. All Rights Reserved.

Other RMI web sites include:
Natural Capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org)
National Energy Policy Initiative (www.nepinitiative.org)
Small Is Profitable (www.smallisprofitable.org)

See also "Two Kinds of Mass Death" by George Monbiot, The Guardian
(September 07 2004), www.monbiot.com, posted her on September 8th.

Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/