Suzanne Waldman

The dubious environmental justice of 100% renewable energy

9/18/2015

There is a petition going around in Canada called “The Leap” sponsored by David Suzuki, Naomi Klein and others that is packed with excellent progressive sentiments and is oriented towards influencing the political climate in advance of our upcoming election.

It makes a series of 15 demands, some of which are easy for any self-regarding progressive to subscribe to, such as the need to better respect treaties with Aboriginal tribes. But some of the other demands—especially those concerning energy supply and infrastructure—are pretty incoherent.

The manifesto calls for Canada to initiate a shift to 100% renewable energy based on so-called research that holds such a shift is possible within two decades. The research is by a cult academic at Stanford University named Mark Jacobson who comes up with utterly impractical plans to power regions with renewable energy. His plan to power the New York state includes unproven, overrated, and inappropriate technologies such as offshore wind a mile deep along the entire coast of Long Island, and concentrated solar power, which needs tremendous levels of insolation to work and as such has ever only been built in deserts.

In most of the real world, the attempt to shift to high concentrations of renewable energies is failing. Germany has been going all out on a renewable energy system for 15 years, and they have only managed to reduce the amount of coal they burn by about a fifth, primarily by burning garbage and trees, which they are importing in vast quantities from around the world. Globally, the only regions successfully approaching high percentages of renewable energy are those that were there all along because they happen to be blessed with access to lots of hydro power, which not all of Canada is.

But the truly deep incoherence in #TheLeap is not the aim for a 100% renewable approach to energy, however dubious that is. Rather, the incoherent idea is that by shifting to renewable energy we can put an end to the burden exerted upon the earth of extraction.

I’m sympathetic to the writers of #TheLeap for being unfavorable to developments “nobody wants in their backyards.” But in other regards than fuel—in regards to the materials that goes into building the generation supply--renewable energies are the most extractive form of energies. Building a system on solar and wind requires vast amounts of redundant generation to gather wind power in one region when it isn’t blowing in another, transmission lines between them, as well as backup, which is virtually always fossil fuel. If instead you try to store renewable energy in batteries for when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, you would probably need more Lithium than there is in the earth. All of that metal needs to be mined and processed somewhere—be it China, or Malaysia—and the impacts on those places in terms of radioactive and other types of toxic contamination are not pretty.

By contrast, a better balanced energy system that moved beyond fossil fuels by combining renewable sources with nuclear power would be easier and cheaper to develop and would require a far smaller materials and land footprint. As is well known, nuclear, like renewable energy, produces electricity without greenhouse gases. Most experts, including the IPCC, know that combining nuclear into low-carbon energy system is essential for making those systems cost-effective and adequate for expanding economies and populations.

Nuclear energy is not considered "renewable," because it requires fuel, but the amount of power in that fuel is on a different order of magnitude than in fossil fuel and less than a millionth of it is required to do the same amount of work. For that reason, the material demands of nuclear power are exceptionally low. Two Canadian mines now produce enough uranium to power 40% of Canada's electricity demand. As importantly, our well-regulated uranium mines and deep geological waste repository projects can carefully protect the earth and its inhabitants from the impacts of our energy use.

The small environmental footprint of nuclear power has led 75 scientists concerned about conservation, biodiversity, and climate change recently called for a reevaluation of nuclear power's environmental credentials. By contrast, a 100% renewable energy system in Canada might look clean on paper, but that's because much of the mess would be elsewhere.

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The Naivete of #TheLeap

9/16/2015

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The Leap Manifesto" calls for a conversion to "clean energy" (i.e. renewable) and it also calls for an end to "extraction." We actually can't build up the scale of renewable energy it would take to get off fossil fuels without extracting vast amounts of rare earths and other metals. For one thing, we would have to build lots of redundant generation (wind turbines everywhere because the wind doesn't blow most of the time anywhere). And if we want the scale of batteries it would take to store solar power at night, or wind power when it is not blowing, that will require massive amounts of lithium (possibly more than there is in the earth) all of which has to be mined. Yes, we should try to get off fossil fuels, but "clean energy" is a myth. The manifesto says "if you wouldn’t want it in your backyard, then it doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard," but nobody wants a rare earths mine in their backyard. http://e360.yale.edu/.../boom_in_mining_rare_earths.../2614/

Trying to get off fossil fuels with low density forms of energy (e.g. wind turbines that blow for a fraction of the day) makes it way harder, more expensive, and more materials-heavy than it needs to be. Here is a good discussion: http://www.citylab.com/.../the-environmentalist.../398906/Even Environmentalists Are Cautious About 100% Renewable Energy Plans

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A Pictograph on Nuclear Energy

3/12/2015

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'Dialogue and Rhetoric, or Why I'm Becoming Interested in P.R.

3/2/2015

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I spent last year reading about deliberative democracy and thinking about dialogue. Western thought ever since Socrates has been very big on dialogue, on the idea that dialogue will lead to truth emerging and falsehood or lesser ideas fall away.

But I had a sense that there are limits to public dialogue. The outcome of a dialogue is still going to be confined to the impact of the knowledge and dynamics of the people in the room. It is magical thinking that dialogue will produce more than the sum of the parts.

That’s why I think citizen dialogues tend to generate risk-averse outcomes: because dialogue can neutralize the risk-taking extremes, curb the innovative thrusts, foment a “wait and see” approach that will be acceptable to all.

In Communication Theory, there is a lovely American thinker named John Durham Peters who says dialogue is overrated, and essentially, that if you want a revolution you have to dissemination (literally, "broadcasting"). He points away from Socrates and towards Jesus, and says you have to cast your ideas like seeds out to the crowd. In good soil they might take root, and in bad soil they probably won’t.

Dissemination leads us away from Socrates, towards Aristotle. It leads towards the idea of rhetoric, and to spicing up your logos (logic) with pathos (emotional acuity) and ethos (ethical credibility). It leads towards the idea of charisma, which Jesus had—though perhaps the older sense of charisma, of being not just charming but inspired.

Rhetoric involves someone taking the stage and others occupying the position of audience, at least for the moment, and taking what they do out of the experience. It can involve story-telling, as in Jesus’s parables. It certainly leads to the need for rhetorical craft, and for the construction of a message to be carefully honed to the audience and the circumstance, as Aristotle described.

Rhetoric is still a democratic process because people get to decide what they believe. It’s not as instantaneous as dialogue is meant to be, and perhaps not as egalitarian as dialogue can be—though for Socrates, dialogue was not the least bit egalitarian, we should remember, but was conducted between someone who knew and someone who did not.

Rhetoric is decidedly competitive. It is something done for a prize, whether a trophy or an elected position or influence. I don’t think there is necessarily anything shabby in that, though it is certainly different from the way something like science operates. Truth does *not* necessarily out in a rhetorical competition, which can certainly favour liars and other sophists if they are better at crafting their message than truthtellers. Rhetoric is P.R. writ large.

To conclude on the uncertain stakes of rhetoric, I would go to another biblical quotation: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

At least we have to hope they do.

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Nuclear Communication

2/28/2015

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When I tell people I do research on nuclear communication, they almost invariably say one thing: "now there is an industry that could communicate better.”

It’s a realization coming home to the nuclear industry itself. Last week I had the privilege of attending the Canadian Nuclear Association’s annual industry conference. The need for nuclear players to use communication more effectively was a constant refrain.

Here's a sector that supplies carbon-free nuclear energy that is cheap to operate once constructed, unsurpassingly reliable, managed with unparalleled safety, with an extremely small environmental footprint relative to other energy sources. Yet it remains linked in many people’s minds to three accidents over sixty years—only one with direct fatalities—and to the nuclear weaponry crises that traumatized a generation.

It's become evident better information about nuclear benefits and risks will not on its own combat the prejudice many feel against nuclear. As risk researchers Paul Slovic and Dan Kahan have shown, many risk beliefs are so cemented in adaptive instincts and cultural affiliations they’ll never be shaken loose with information.

So what, outside of simply providing information, can the industry do to shift people's thoughts and feelings about nuclear?

A number of communicative tacks were floated at the CNA conference. One was better dialogue with communities, given the reasonable need communities have to feel control over their destinies. PhD Student David Torre, who compares national nuclear energy policies, pointed out to me that Finland, where community consultation is traditionally initiated during the design stage, is one of the only OECD countries where new reactors are being built.

Another option is to accelerate technological improvements. Famed climate scientist and nuclear supporter James Hansen told me that to accept nuclear power more broadly “the public needs to see things becoming safer.”

To improve nuclear’s safety case, representatives of North America's Transatomic Power and Terrestrial Energy talked about how their Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) designs make meltdowns impossible while vastly diminishing waste by recycling spent fuel. The brilliant young nuclear engineer Leslie Dewan spoke of how recycling global stores of spent fuel in reactors like hers would supply the world’s total power needs for 72 years. Safer designs are also expected to lead to far lower costs for reactor construction and operation.

But these MSRs are still at the design stage, and the public will have to wait until the next decade to see them commercialized.

In the meantime, there was a sense at the conference that the nuclear industry should be developing communication strategies to nudge a cultural shift amongst the public along at least one of two lines.

The first line is towards greater public pragmatism. Matthew Nisbet, Professor of Communication and Public Policy at Northeastern University, talked about his research showing that when climate change is framed as a public health issue, the cultural resistance that dogs it becomes diffused. That the public health benefits of nuclear power ought similarly to be foregrounded was an idea that percolated throughout the conference.

As James Hansen pointed out in his talk, outdoor air pollution, largely associated with coal, kills approximately 10,000 people daily through respiratory and other illnesses. The public health benefit of nuclear power—as one of the only forms of CO2-free power that needs no backup and can so cut the legs out of coal—might be self-evident to publics more in touch with their own— and others’—practical, day-to-day needs.

The second line is towards greater public optimism. Leslie Dewan testified that the spirit of the “Atoms for Peace” era—the exciting early days of atomic energy—is currently being rekindled among young nuclear engineers. How to rekindle that excitement about human ingenuity and transformative technology broadly across society is the most difficult question for nuclear communication.

The Breakthrough Institute founders have written about how Western culture, once expansive and enterprising, has become inhibited since the 1960s into a culture focused narrowly on the risks of human enterprise.

We’ve gotten to the point where the only publicly acceptable response of affluent societies to a serious problem like climate change is to “do less,” not to “do better.” In Matthew Nisbet’s words, climate policy is falling short in part because policy-makers are mired in “soft energy path” solutions and averse to “hard energy path” solutions that would make a bigger dent.

The executive in charge of Ontario’s electricity supply said nuclear energy remains—after all these year—“a technology of the future.” Nuclear power is unlikely to be widely embraced by a society that shrinks away from its most powerful capabilities, afraid of its collective shadow. It's more likely to be embraced by a society that has relearned to trust itself and its best discoveries for meeting the challenges of the future.

How to engender a shift from a societal focus on risk to one on resilience and courage is perhaps the ultimate question for nuclear communication.

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Why we need nuclear power to save the environment

1/4/2015

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The idea we might need nuclear power to save the environment is one that could not have been foreseen thirty years ago, at the height of the anti-nuclear movement. But it’s an idea that more and more scientists of all stripes as well as energy experts and even environmentalists are coming to share.

Last month, 75 biodiversity scientists published an open letter imploring policy-makers to rethink “idealistic” opposition to nuclear energy, given the threats to global ecosystems set in motion by climate change. The scientists said despite “idealistic perceptions of what is ‘green,’”nuclear power was likely to be necessary for moving beyond fossil fuels.

This open letter follows in the wake of another published a year ago in the New York Times by climate scientists with a similar message: “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”

These scientists who study the earth and the life on it are concerned it is too risky to rely solely on wind, solar and other so-called “green” power to replace fossil fuels, which are still the fastest growing energy sources by a long shot. As these scientists point out, renewable power sources would require enormous amounts of land, materials, and money to meet the world’s current and growing energy needs.

Wind and solar power are especially problematic because they are intermittent and can't be dispatched to match demand. While the quest is on for grid storage options, there has not been a significant storage breakthroug h since the lithium ion battery. In the meantime other power sources that can run full time are required to take up the slack. Options for doing so are limited to fossil fuels, biomass that is comparatively bulky and limited in scale, hydro power that is largely tapped out in some places, and nuclear power.

The advantage of nuclear power is it can be built almost anywhere and is the most efficient form of power generation, taking into account land use, materials, carbon footprint, and fuel density. But as a complex technology, it is pricey to build. So in an era of cheap coal and gas, liberalized energy markets, cash-strapped governments, and hyped-up renewables, few nuclear power plants have been constructed of late in the Western world. Experienced work forces who can put them up quickly have become hard to assemble on the fly.

These patterns can be altered, though, as people realize once nuclear plants are up they can churn out steady carbon-free power for over half a century. History has shown the most effective way to replace fossil fuel power over a decade is to build up nuclear. Ontarians, who rely on nuclear plants to deliver roughly two-thirds of our power every day, and have become coal-free, know this. So do the people of France, where nuclear energy supplies 75% of power needs.

Moreover, once the nuclear plants are built, the power they provide is typically quite cheap. In the US, electricity from existing nuclear power is the second cheapest after hydro. France has among the lowest electricity rates in Europe.

But what about safety? The meltdown at Fukushima after the Japanese tsunami in 2011 has gripped the world. Yet no one has died from that meltdown, and the World Health Organization anticipates no uptick in associated death s will occur. The radiation released in the meltdown was simply not that significant and continues not to be. Unlike chemical waste, radioactive isotopes decay as well as dilute in nature, where they are naturally occurring.

By contrast, a million people die every year of health problems caused by the pollution from coal. A dam break in China in 1971 killed over a hundred thousand people. Rare earth mining for solar panel construction, wind turbine magnets and lithium batteries is poisoning parts of inner Mongolia.

Energy runs our world, keeping us comfortable, healthy, employed, and entertained. There is no absolutely risk-free, pollution free way to generate it, as James Conca has pointed out in a well-circulated article in Forbes, How Deadly is Your Kilowatt. Over its lifetime, Conca points out, “Nuclear has the lowest deathprint” relative to the amount of energy it produces. In coming years we are going to see the construction of even safer meltdown-proof nuclear reactors in China.

Choosing to build more nuclear power plants is going to require a mental shift for a lot of people. Its three significant accidents over sixty years have been easy to sensationalize in comparison with the slow blight of coal power and the shortfalls of renewables. But new situations require new ways of thinking. Climate change is going to require all hands on deck.

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Democracy and Energy: Case Study of the Energiewende

12/11/2014

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I had a fascinating exchange with Craig Morris yesterday, who runs the English communication arm of the Energiewende (Germany's energy transition). Morris brought my attention to an article he wrote recently about the reason why the nuclear phase-out has preceded the coal phaseout. In the narrative he offers, the reason was--surprisingly--not concern about nuclear radiation, nor nuclear fear post-Chernobyl.

Rather, what he says is the Energiewende began in the 70s as a protest against plans to build a new nuclear plant in southwest Germany by village folk who had no concern about radiation; in fact they mined uranium and were developing a "radioactive spa" for tourists. What they objected to was the intrusion of "ugly industrial complexes" upon their landscapes. On the other hand, these villagers didn't mind coal, which they associated with cheap energy and progress. Further, "in an age when tobacco was smoked everywhere, who would mind smoke from coal?"

When renewables were developed, it was thus natural that the first policy priority would be to follow through on this brooding dislike and distrust southern Germans harboured towards nuclear structures that were foreign to their culture and sensibilities.

To take Morris at his word, then, Germany's current energy policy is not to be understood as a primarily rational policy but a cultural-aesthetic one with fifty year old roots. Craig Morris told me in a tweet the policy decisions are in this regard reflective of Germany's vital democracy.

But I must ask what sense of democracy entails basing a policy on ignorant intuitions, such as villagers' unconcern with smoke, especially as conditions change and we come to understand that the smoke from coal affects more than just the villagers themselves, but the world's collectively shared atmosphere?

The essential German political theorist Jurgen Habermas described democracy as "a rationalization of power" where state decisions are made for good, transparent reasons that can stand up to ongoing, reasoned public deliberation. The Energiewende, which seems to be accountable in perpetuity to the aesthetic and cultural sensibilities of a poorly-informed populace of a past age, reflects in this regard a distinctly eccentric notion of democracy.

Indeed, this category struggle between aesthetics and rationality, which goes back to the 18th and 19th century division between Romanticism and Enlightenment reason, remains at the bottom of much policy paralysis--though the Germans foreground the struggle particularly distinctly, as they always have (see Schiller).

As societies, we remain confused about how to incorporate people's cultural feelings into policy decision making. We sense the rational procedures of technocrats can be used to mask an irrational will to domination.

But for Habermas the solution to this peril was not to incorporate unchallenged feeling and intuition into policy conversations. Rather, the democratic solution is to open the policy conversation to more voices. These voices must, however, still be accountable to fundamental standards of rationality (causality, math) and to incoming evidence, so new tyrannies and blockages don't set in.

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Behind the IPCC AR5 Models: The Need for Nuclear Power

12/7/2014

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What is the problem with leaning on renewable energy as a solution to climate change? All-RE scenarios show one thing in particular, which is they all depend on increasingly intensive demand reductions over time to avert climate change. (This will be a quick take; for much more detail, see Jesse Jenkins and Armond Cohn’s analysis.)

The most famous modelled scenario illustrating an all-RE plan is the 2010 one from ECOFYS/World Wildlife Federation (WWF). The WWF model sees “green” energy types on the bottom of the graph rising up and replacing the “dirty” energy types on the top: fossil fuels as well as nuclear power. In WWF’s model, though, green energy’s replacement capacity gets a lot of help from an envisioned overall downward slope of energy demand after about 2018, presumably brought about in part by increasing energy efficiency.

Yet that hoped-for pivot is now coming up in three years, and is there not any sign of such a global demand reduction on the horizon. Rather, global energy demand looks like this now (below). The significant thickening up of the renewables lines are nowhere to be seen at the present time. Now, it's true WWF sees most of the wind, earth, and sun action happening after 2020, and it is fair to assume given cost reductions there will be inroads into fossil fuel use by that point.

But more significantly, there are no signs of a spontaneous dropping off of fossil fuel use, nor of energy consumption in general, to support this global energy take-over by renewable power hoped for in the WWF model. As this BP graph shows, people are using more fossil fuels, not less, every year.

According to the US’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), ongoing energy demand is starting to look more like this, broken down by region:

And like this, broken down by energy type:

Thus the all-100% RE solution to climate change presented by WWF must start to be consigned to the realm of fantasy. What BPs and EIAs models show is global economies growing increasingly reliant on energy dense fuels like oil and natural gas, such that it will be increasingly hard to substitute these with renewable energies, with their lower densities. (For more on energy density see this article by Robert Bryce.)

We can see the same contradiction played out in the three modelled scenarios presented in the recent IPCC AR5 WG3 report (2014). Each of the scenarios were devised by a different group to envision a way to limit global warming to 2 degrees by 2100. The graphs on the left reflect how the modellers see the extension of current energy use without significant policy and technological changes. The graphs on the right describe how energy generation could be adjusted to meet the 2 degree limit.

One of the scenarios, GCAM, incorporates nuclear energy and a hefty dose of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) into their 2 degree solution. Reductions in coal, gas, biomass, and oil without CCS, seen under the line, are what allows the target to be met despite that increasing amounts of energy are being added to the global system in an ongoing way up to 2100, as can be seen by the upward curve on the right-hand graph. To a less significant degree, GCAM also achieves the 2 degree target though gradually increasing efficiency gains, indicated by the grey bar. These efficiency gains do not, however, counteract the generalized need reflected in GCAM for an increased amount of energy in the global system.

The second scenario is called MESSAGE, and it envisions an energy future restricted to renewable energy technologies. Presumably in part because it excludes nuclear, MESSAGE foresees far more solar as well as gas generation than GCAM in the baseline case.

The right-hand graph is, however, the most interesting one. MESSAGE includes a small amount of CCS but no nuclear, and as such must achieve its 2 degree solution almost entirely through efficiency and demand reductions from fossil fuels. Remarkably, solar and wind power contribute comparatively little to the envisioned climate mitigation achievement above baseline. Over time, energy is subtracted from the system at an increasingly greater rate than it is added.

The third IPCC scenario, REMIND, splits the difference between the two models. Like MESSAGE, it subtracts nuclear as well as fossil fuels. Meanwhile, to a far greater degree than MESSAGE it achieves the 2 degree solution through added renewables. Nonetheless, REMIND still requires a sloping off of energy increases over time, achieved through radically increasing efficiencies and demand reductions, to meet the target.

It’s important to remember that none of these three IPCC models reflect especially-likely realities at the current moment. Most analysts currently see us sailing over the 2 degree increase target and think we are aiming more for a 3 or 4 increase at best. To that degree these IPCC scenarios are all, like the WWF models, fantasies.

Yet the IPCC models are instructive insofar as they illustrate how drastically higher the demands for efficiency and demand reduction become when we exclude nuclear power from the available palate of carbon-free energy choices. The powerful requirement of CCS seen by all modellers is another element of this story, but CCS is not yet ready for wide deployment. Nuclear power is already here, and is as such the signature thing we can work now on retaining and expanding if we don’t want to stake the fight against climate change on a bid for efficiencies and demand reductions that are likely unrealistic and, if executed on a global scale, very likely to be unjust.

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Examining the Risks of Nuclear Terrorism

11/22/2014

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I was asked by the Argentinian energy think-tank OETEC for an analysis of the risks of nuclear terrorism for those who present it as a serious reason not to build up nuclear power. Here are those thoughts:

The standard risk analysis algorithm for making risk comparisons is to multiply the severity and magnitude of hazards with their probabilities of occurrence. This algorithm is considered by some to be callous, as it can excessively minimize a dreadful hazard which has a small probability, dooming some to experience it. As Nassim Taleb has argued in his black swan theory, scenarios with high risks and small aggregated probabilities like nuclear emergencies are still likely to occur at some point.

Yet the risk analysis algorithm still offers a place to begin in going beyond an intuitive risk perception that might be inflamed by imagination and what cognitive scientists call “heuristics”: mental shortcuts about risk based on associations rather than information and data.

The idea of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant is a frightening one, and one easy to mentally envision. But we may subject this idea to three questions: I) What is the real hazard of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant? II) What is the real probability of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant? III) What are the alternative hazards and probabilities of other available options? I will ask this in a series of questions, addressing the possibilities of both ground/sea and air attacks in turn.

1. Ground/sea attack.

I) What is the hazard of a successful terrorist attack on a nuclear plant from the ground/sea?

The hazard of a successful nuclear terrorist attack could be a) sabotage to prompt a meltdown, or else b) the stealing of nuclear materials that could be used to build an improvised nuclear bomb or dirty bomb.

a) What is the hazard of a reactor meltdown and radioactive release? Fukushima and Three Mile Island are good examples as they may be considered typical meltdowns, unlike Chernobyl. After Fukushima, the typical dose in the 20 square kilometers in around the plant (the exclusion zone) in the first two weeks was one millisievert (msv). This typical dose was the same as the maximum dose to a civilian after the Three Mile Island meltdown. One msv is 100 times smaller than the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to cancer risk, conservatively observed to begin rising at a rate of 1% per annual dose of 100 msv [5]. For civilians near Fukushima, the increased risk is thus indiscernible, as the United Nations concluded. At Fukushima 176 workers received doses of between 100 and 670 msv with the vast majority on the lower end of this scale. Thus the cumulative health effects of Fukushima may be conservatively put at an additional two fatal cancers above the 35 probable ones that will already occur among the worker population. The two worker deaths are tragic, but on the very low end for deaths related to energy production, even wind and solar power. Finally, it is notable that new reactor models such as Molten Salt Reactors are designed not to not melt down under any circumstances, thus reducing the hazard of a terrorist attack or accident dramatically.

b) What is the hazard of an improvised nuclear bomb or dirty bomb? Certainly an improvised nuclear bomb with explosive capabilities could be very hazardous, but according to Robin Frost its construction is practically elusive to terrorist groups, considering the requirements of advanced equipment, machining, vacuum pumps, et cetera (Adelphi Papers 2005). Further, the fuel that might be stolen from a reactor is so poorly enriched it could not be converted into a nuclear explosive, as we have learned in the civil nuclear power negotiations with Iran.

By contrast with an improvised nuclear bomb, a dirty bomb is simply a device designed to disperse or emit radiation. While the idea of a dirty bomb had some public currency in the post-9/11 era, it has been observed since that the dread associated with the idea was overblown. Frost, a defense analyst with the Canadian government, claims “it is generally acknowledged that, in most plausible scenarios, such weapons would pose little material threat to the public due” to the low dosage they could plausibly emit ("Dirty Bombs"). Expert concerns around dirty bombs consequently tend to address the spreading of fear and causing of disruption by such an apparatus rather than the perpetration of physical harm.[10] Further, the materials considered most practical for making dirty bombs are used in medical applications and can not be found in usable forms in nuclear power plants. By contrast, the radioactive materials such as spent fuel rods located in nuclear power plants are effectively untransportable due to "the heat generated by large quantities of such material and the extreme exposure hazard from the intensity of the radiation.” Terrorists attempting to steal them would get burned and receive serious radiation poisoning long before they would have the chance to dissipate the materials.

II) What is the probability of a successful ground or sea intrusion of a nuclear plant?

The probability of a successful intrusion is considered to be quite low. Robert Wilson, an energy analyst, pointed out in a recent article on nuclear safety that “there has never been [a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant], and there appears to be no evidence that a plan to attack a nuclear power plant has ever moved beyond the basic planning phase in any terrorist group.” He described a recent report commissioned by the German Renewable Energy Federation into insurance costs for nuclear plant, which calculated there was a probability of terrorist attacks on nuclear plants happening 1 every 1000 operating years, as "junk science," given there have so far been 15,500 operating years without one.

Nuclear plant intrusion is not considered to be an attractive goal for terrorists, for two major reasons. The first reason is the relative difficulty of penetrating the security systems that are mandated of signatories to the IAEA Convention on Nuclear Safety, which include guards and electronic devices in communication with defense forces. The only reported successful intrusions of nuclear plants have been by Greenpeace activists who did not want to cause harm but to send an anti-nuclear message; in all cases they were observed and apprehended. As well, a Green Party representative once shot rocket-propelled grenades at a plant under construction but missed the empty core.

The second reason why nuclear plant intrusion is not considered an attractive goal for terrorists is that nuclear sabotage, short of obtaining material for a bomb, would not have immediate dramatic effects of the kind of public explosions terrorists favor. Rather, it would result in release of radiation with invisible and possibly long-term effects, at the worst. Only one group has managed to put one together--Chechen rebels in 1995--but they alerted the media before detonating the explosive intended to disperse the material (Frost, "Dirty Bombs"). Overall, it would be far easier to penetrate other facilities with home-made explosives and do far more dramatic and instantaneous damage.

2. Air attack

I) What is the hazard of a successful terrorist attack on a nuclear plant from the air?

The worst hazard is that a penetration would cause an explosion or fire that could initiate a meltdown and radioactive release. For the hazard of a meltdown and radioactive release, please see above.

II) What is the probability of a successful terrorist attack on a nuclear plant?

It has been experimentally proven that nothing short of a jumbo jet can penetrate a typical containment dome, which have 3-6 feet thick walls made of concrete reinforced with embedded steel bars and a half-inch steel liner. Opinions are mixed about whether a jumbo jet could penetrate the containment shell of a nuclear reactor. In a review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it was considered very difficult for a jumbo jet to target "small, low-lying nuclear power plants" while “a sustained fire…would be impossible unless an attacking plane [including the fuel-laden wings] penetrated the containment completely” (Report to Congress 2006).

Even if a jumbo jet penetrated a nuclear reactor, the NRC concluded that “likelihood of both damaging the reactor core and releasing radioactivity that could affect public health and safety is low.” Steven Kraft, technical adviser for the Nuclear Energy Institute, pointed out that “the storage pools at Fukushima survived [with minimal damage] the fourth-largest earthquake in recorded history, hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs of three of the reactor buildings and the debris resulting from those explosions.” The New York Times accordingly observed that, “[t]errorists would have a far easier time igniting a conflagration at a toxic chemical plant or refinery than at a nuclear plant.”

III) What is the risk of not building more nuclear power plants?

More and more energy analysts and climate scientists are coming to the conclusion that nuclear power is an essential part of a decarbonized energy mix to avert global warming. In the words of climate scientists who wrote an open letter to those who influence policy-makers in the New York Times in November, 2013, “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.” This is because while “[r]enewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy… those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires.” Renewable sources apart from hydro-electric power continue to play a minor role in energy production, and experienced energy analysts anticipate they will continue to do so due to many factors, including the intermittency of wind and solar power generation and the elusiveness of techniques for storing large amounts of electricity for a substantial amount of time.

Thus we must seriously consider that an associated risk of not using nuclear power to produce carbon-free energy on a large scale is climate change itself, with the hundreds of millions of climate refugees that are projected to be engendered by it in the coming century. These hazards—we need not look at probabilities, because these patterns are already in motion—are apart from the millions of respiratory and other deaths already caused by fossil fuel burning and generation every year. Only carbon-free forms of generation like nuclear power can avert these tides of displacement and death, and only nuclear power—which does not require a switch to another kind of generation, almost always fossil fuel whenever the sun is down or the wind does not blow—can avert them on large scales, as it already does.

In short, I believe that these are the kinds of scrutiny we must undertake when we decide a technology is "too risky."

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Think piece on Nuclear Power as Climate Option, Part II

11/9/2014

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In the first half of this essay, I proposed that because of nuclear's record as the only effective approach to power grid decarbonization it should be considered a mainstream climate solution. In the second half of this essay I will move to the other factors habitually cited as barriers to the use of nuclear power as a climate mitigation option: the risks of nuclear power and its waste and the public image of nuclear power.

I previously mentioned an incident in which Friends Of the Earth (FOE) UK conspicuously switched strategies to opposing nuclear on economic grounds as opposed to safety grounds, which led some commentators to suggest that perhaps they had done so because earlier warnings of apocalyptic hazard have not been borne out. The record is that there have been three meltdowns in 60 years of civilian nuclear power: Three Mile Island, in which no one died and there was no statistically significant uptick in local cancers, Fukushima, which has received the same evaluation,1 and Chernobyl, a unique reactor that had no containment vessel, in which 50 people died from the accident and the official guess is 4000 may die due to related cancers.2

Without belittling the singular tragedy of Chernobyl, it can still be concluded from the record of nuclear power that it is the safest of all energy sources.3 For in the meantime, emissions from coal plants have been responsible for "roughly a million premature deaths a year,” every year.4 In the meantime, the biggest industrial accident in history was a hydro dam that broke in China killing 171,000 people. Energy is the stuff out of which civilization is built, but it is dangerous stuff. Indeed, energy might be both our our undoing, according to reports that climate change due to burning fossil fuels will cause three million deaths a year by 2100 and even now is associated with 150,000 deaths yearly.5

Yet when we think about risky energy sources our minds go to nuclear and we dread most of all the hazards of meltdowns. It sounds cavalier to say it, and I was surprised to observe it, but barring Chernobyl, even a meltdown is not an especially risky event even for those who are in the immediate vicinity. The lowest one-year dose clearly linked to cancer risk is 100 times as great as the typical dose in Fukushima Exclusion Zone in two weeks following accident. It is 10 rem.6 One Fukushima worker got that dose, and it was associated with an increased lifetime cancer risk of 0.5%.7 That increased risk of cancer is comparable to the increased risk of having one alcoholic drink a day, which is one that many of us are happy to take on without dread.8 Now divide that by 300 and you get closer to the risk of being a regular person near a nuclear meltdown who follows normal procedures like staying inside for 24 hours.

The other little-known reason why there is little concern about Fukushima’s health risk is that, at Fukushima, the engineered containment facilities did what they were designed to do--they contained the radiation, even after the earthquake and the tsunami. According to reports, the melting down material in the worst impacted reactor did not “even get close to exiting the container that was designed to retain it…in a case where the reactor was operating at full power and then lost all cooling within a few minutes, which is pretty much a worst case scenario.”9 It was after observing the minor impact of Fukushima that Monbiot, a pretty traditional environmentalist overall, claims he was “converted…to the cause of nuclear power” since at Fukushima “atomic energy was subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet was confirmed to be small.”10

It is often said the reason why radiation is scary is that it is invisible. But I think that another prospective reason is that it is measurable in such tiny amounts by scientific devices like Geiger counters. Who knows how much mercury we are breathing at any given moment from running our cars, or how many pharmaceuticals are in our drinking water? We don’t pay a lot of attention to it. Yet we can have the quantity of radiation that is around us described to us to a sub-atomic level. It is the same story with dealing with spent nuclear fuel, which I would consider to be even less of a scary thing in its nature than an active nuclear reactor. You can encase it in glass or concrete, and put it in rock, and if you do a moderately good job at that it will never cause anyone any trouble. But when you are measuring down to sub-atomic particles, anything does become hard to control with absolute perfection. Some people will find a disintegrating nucleus here or there, and others will make something of it.

To take another example, there was a chemical reaction earlier this year within an underground nuclear repository in New Mexico that caused a leak of radioactive material up the shaft, which was caught when 20 trillionths of a gram of plutonium were caught in a filter at a detector nearby.11 That is a very small amount of something to catch in a filter. This leak was subsequently observed to have communicated to “nearby occupied dwellings receiving a maximum potential dose near 0.1 mrem,” which is actually the “average dose a U.S. citizen receives in just one hour from what are called background sources: radon, radiation from natural radioactivity in the dirt, cosmic radiation and natural potassium in your body.”12 Yet you can still read on websites like nuclear-news.net that there are “very high levels of radiation again at WIPP nuclear facility.”13 People then decide that because there was a leak of a few atoms, the whole idea of deep repositories for nuclear waste has to be dished--and as such the whole prospect for nuclear power, because its responsible use depends on having something to do with the waste. And so the cycle continues.

But for me, shifting from thinking about the vast scale of millions of deaths that will be caused by global warming and that even noware caused by coal, to the minuscule scale of countable radionuclides from nuclear releases, feels strange. I once had someone ask me very ominously on twitter if I knew that I had Strontium-90 in my teeth. I probably do--probably around fifteen becquerels of it from nuclear tests in the '60s14 . A becquerel is one atom disintegrating every second. But monkeys have been be injected with 600,000 bequerels of Strongium-90 to no ill effect.15 And I have other things to worry about than an iota of radioactivity in my body, which is otherwise radioactive due to the potassium in my cells. Moreover, I would have much more to worry about if I was a fisherman in the Maldives whose island was probably going to be submersed in the next 15 years due to rising oceans16 or a farmer in South Sudan whose land stood to be swallowed up by the Sahara due to expanding deserts.17 I honestly think global justice demands a larger perspective.

I do not want to leave the impression that I utterly dismiss the risk of radiation and meltdowns, but rather with the impression that nuclear engineers are on it, and that it is something we don’t have to worry about that much. If we built up hundreds of nuclear power plants a year, no one could guarantee that something, somewhere, wouldn’t go wrong once in a while. But the odds are overwhelming that almost no one would get hurt, and that whatever happened, it wouldn’t be in the same ballpark of hazard as even one of the thousands of impacts of climate change we will otherwise be seeing in the coming period.

*

Finally, I would like to address the issue of public acceptability of nuclear power. It is well understood nowadays that people perceive higher degrees of risk in that which is man-made compared that which natural, that which is indetectable by the senses to that which is detectable, that we don’t as individuals have control over versus that which we choose, and that which is novel compared with that which is familiar.18 Nuclear power can push all the wrong buttons, and it can arouse resistance and indignation and protest and all those kinds of things that politicians don’t like.

Yet people who live with nuclear power nearby get used to it19 and don't get sicker than others20 and they have their appliances and their computers to use as they like and their cars to charge up and drive guilt-free, and all that with clean air to breathe. And if you ask people point blank, as was done in an American survey sponsored recently by the Nuclear Energy Institute, whether “we should take advantage of all low-carbon energy sources, including nuclear, hydro and renewable energy, to produce the electricity we need while limiting greenhouse gas emissions,” 82 percent agreed.21 Further, 75 percent said nuclear energy will be “very important” or “somewhat important” in meeting America’s future electricity needs.

People instinctively like the idea of getting energy from the sun and the wind; they are nice images. The idea of getting all the energy we need without the complications and inconveniences of having to deal with nuclear materials is also attractive. But people generally aren't clear on how hard it would be to do that, and they don’t realize what they might have to give up along the way, by way of cheap electricity on demand and cheap food whose prices aren’t ratcheted up by land use given over to grow biofuels.22

People also don’t realize that, as the sun is a big fusion reactor, solar energy and wind energy are actually nuclear energy. Yet when we build and control nuclear reactors on earth we have the added convenience of being able to turn the process on and leave it on and fine-tune how much power it is delivering. That is a capability we can either shy away from in dread or we can embrace for the next phase of civilization, to help us solve the problems from our maxing out on fossil fuels in the last phase.

1 http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2013/unisinf475.html
2 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
4 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coal-emissions-smog-deaths
5 http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/23/2662871/cutting-carbon-saves-lives/
6 Xkcd "Radiation"
7 http://www.livescience.com/13250-radiation-health-effects-japan-nuclear-reactor-cancer.html
8 http://www.bu.edu/today/2013/a-drink-a-day-raises-cancer-risk-study-says/
9 http://atomicinsights.com/more-accurate-headline-would-be-fukushima-containment-worked/
10 Read more: http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/energy/photos/9-high-profile-champions-of-nuclear-power/george-monbiot#ixzz3HyZou6t0
11 Twitter conversation with Jeff Terry (@nuclear94): “basically calculations goes as y Bq of material x 2.7e-11 Ci/Bq x 1 /specific Activity in Ci = y grams of mat. specific activity of Am-241 – 3.2E0 and Pu-239 – 6.2E-2.”
12 http://www.abqjournal.com/369403/opinion/radiation-levels-after-wipp-leak-negligible.html
13 http://nuclear-news.net/2014/06/28/very-high-levels-of-radiation-again-at-wipp-nuclear-facility/
14 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16546237
15 http://rais.ornl.gov/tox/profiles/strontium_90_f_V1.html
16 http://www.businessinsider.com/islands-threatened-by-climate-change-2012-10?op=1
17 http://online.wsj.com/articles/how-will-climate-change-affect-the-sahara-1401489555
18 http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2013/01/16/how-do-we-perceive-risk-paul-slovics-landmark-analysis-2/
19 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-yn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html
20 http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/nuclear-facilities
21 http://nei.org/News-Media/Media-Room/News-Releases/Poll-Americans-See-Nuclear-Energy-as-Key-to-Limit
22 http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2012/sep/05/cheap-food-stop-putting-it-in-cars

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