Nuclear power is probably mankind's only real hope of weaning our civilization off fossil fuels in time to avert runaway global warming.

By nuclear power I don't mean the first or second-generation reactors, the type that you might associate with Fukushima or Chernobyl.  I'm referring to fourth and possibly fifth-generation technologies such as the IFR, integrated fast reactor.

You can't evaluate nuclear power rationally if you're saddled with irrational fears.   As David Ropeik recently explained in The New York Times, much of our fear of nuclear power is rooted in the dynamics of risk perception, not reality.

Though it has worked well enough to get us this far down evolution’s challenging road, our risk perception system, which blends thinking and feeling and mostly takes place subconsciously, often produces fears that fly in the face of the facts.  Many of us are more afraid of some risks — like mercury or pesticides or genetically modified food — than the evidence warrants. And many of us aren’t as concerned about some really dire dangers as we ought to be, like climate change, particulate pollution or acidification of the ocean  The problem is, being too afraid, or not afraid enough — a phenomenon I call “the perception gap” — produces dangers all by itself.

research on risk perception, by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff and others[1], has identified several emotional characteristics — fear factors, if you will — that make risks feel more or less frightening, the statistical probabilities notwithstanding. Here are just a few;

• Human-made risks upset us more than risks which are natural.
• Risks imposed on us are scarier than those we take by choice.
• Risks grow scarier the greater the pain and suffering they cause.

Consider how those factors contribute to a perception gap about nuclear power. Nuclear radiation is human-made, which is one reason it’s scarier than radiation from the sun (which kills 12,000 Americans a year).  Radiation from meltdowns like the ones at Chernobyl or Fukushima is imposed on us (many Americans unreasonably worried last spring about a radioactive cloud blowing in from Japan), so it scares us more than the much higher doses of radiation to which we willingly expose ourselves for medical diagnostics or treatment. And nuclear radiation causes cancer, which often causes great pain and suffering.

 It’s not as though this form of radiation isn’t dangerous. It is. But we know from studies of atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hibakusha, who have been followed for two generations, that even at high doses for prolonged periods of exposure, nuclear (ionizing) radiation just isn’t the carcinogen most fear. It raised the cancer death rate for those survivors only about half of 1 percent. And while it caused birth defects in children exposed during fetal development, Godzilla and Moth Ra notwithstanding, it didn’t cause multigenerational genetic damage at all.

But given the subjective, instinctive, facts-and-feelings nature of risk perception, it is entirely understandable that nuclear power evokes fear so deep and strong that when people learn about studies of the hibakusha, many simply refuse to believe those well-established facts.

Consider, however, how that fear can be dangerous all by itself. Fear of nuclear power has contributed to energy policy that favors fossil fuels. Burning coal to make electricity produces particulate pollution that kills thousands each year. 

But why the Integrated Fast Reactor option?   There are several reasons.   One is that it's a very peaceful technology.   IFRs don't produce waste that can be turned into weapons grade materials.  Another is that IFRs produce little radioactive waste and what there is has a comparatively very brief life.  Third, and perhaps most important, is that we already have abundant fuel for IFR reactors.

IFR reactors can consume those "spent" reactor rods we're looking to store safely somehow for the rest of their thousands of years of life.  Early reactors were able to extract anywhere from just 3 to 5% of the radiation energy in those fuel rods.  That's why they're so dangerous and stay that way for so long.   IFRs can literally consume those  supposedly spent rods and extract their remaining energy.  Britain has worked out it has enough spent rod energy that IFRs could provide that country's entire energy needs for a century. IFRs are also a dandy way to burn weapons-grade materials from deactivated nuclear arsenals.  That's neat when you want that stuff not to fall into the hands of terrorists.

But we'll never have IFR technology so long as we're blinded by fears of nuclear dangers that never truly existed.   We have to overcome our irrational fears and, for that, time is not on our side. 

Before You Slam Shut Your Mind on Nuclear Power, Read This

It's a reflection of how little most of us know about nuclear power generation that we fell apoplectic at the Fukushima reactor disaster.   The tragedy of Fukushima is if we allow an accident caused by a tsunami at an aged, "first generation" reactor plant to seal the fate of the latest, fourth generation nuclear technology which, alone, may hold the key to the future of our civilization.

I strongly urge you to read Dr. Steve Kirsch's open letter to Obama's energy and climate change assistant director, Heather Zichal.   Kirsch is writing, not as an investor or developer or someone looking for handouts, but as one person who has come to understand the enormous benefits that fourth generation nuclear power offers us at the very moment when we need them more than ever.

He points out that today's IFR "fast reactor" technology can safely and reliably help in averting runaway global warming, safely dispose of existing nuclear waste, generate base-load carbon-free power at very low cost, avoid creating any additional long-lived nuclear waste, stimulate economic growth and create jobs and at the same time save billions in government spending.
 
Read the letter.   IFR, today, may be just the breakthrough we need right when we most need it.

Angela Merkel's Fossil Fuel Fondness

In the immediate wake of the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel sprung into action, rescinding her decision to extend the operation of her own country's nuclear power plants and moving to have them out of operation as quickly as possible.   So just how does the Chancellor plan to ensure her country's energy security?   You guessed it - fossil fuels.

Germany needs to build twice the number of new fossil-fuel power plants than the government previously had earmarked in order to secure energy security while exiting nuclear power, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday, while sticking to ambitious emission-reduction goals.


"If we want to exit nuclear energy and enter renewable energy, for the transition time we need fossil power plants, " Ms. Merkel said in a parliamentary declaration on her government's decision to phase out nuclear power.  "At least 10, more likely 20 gigawatts [of fossil capacity] need to be built in the coming 10 years. " 

That is more than the generation capacity of Belgium, which in 2009 had capacity to generate more than 17.3 gigawatts, according to the Union of the Electricity Industry, a Europe-wide sector group.

...Michael Mueller, from the German Federation for Nature, said the climate targets can't be achieved if the additional fossil-fuel capacity were to be built, pointing to the energy industry's emissions calculations.


The switch-off of the first seven of Germany's 17 nuclear power stations will add some 25 million metric tons a year to the country's carbon-dioxide emissions, the International Energy Agency said in May.

And there you have it, kids.   Even the Iron Chancellor can't have her cake and eat it too.  CO2 it is.   In fairness, however, Germany has had its own nuclear accident - in 1986 when a fuel pebble jammed that resulted in a minor leak of radiation detectable two miles from the plant.   Zowee.

The Double Standards of the Anti-Nuke Enviro Crowd

The Fukushima nuclear reactor fiasco fractured the ranks of environmentalists into two camps: pro- and anti-nuclear.   The two sides had always been there but they co-existed without much rancour at all.  Now we're starting to resemble Sunni and Shiite Muslims, of course without all the bombings and beheadings.

I find the anti-nuke side hypocritical, self-righteous and astonishingly willing to lapse into the same double-standards they so indignantly ridicule on the global warming front.   There are exceptions.   My friend Jim Bobby remains ardently anti-nuke but he's concluded we've already lost the war to prevent runaway global warming anyway.  From JB's perspective, I can accept the anti-nuke stance.  To my mind I suppose he's probably right on our prospects for taming the global warming threat too but the repercussions of that defeat are so horrific that I don't think we can ever surrender that fight.  I've wrestled with this but I won't, I can't.

The Guardian's top eco-correspondent, George Monbiot, also supports the nuclear option as a bridge energy source to help wean us from fossil fuels.  He's been roundly roasted for that since the Fukushima fiasco but, today, he's fired back.  Here are a few of his points:

Double standard one: deaths and injuries

We rightly lament the horrible consequences of industrial exposure to radiation. Two workers at Fukushima have so far received radiation burns and 17 have been exposed to levels of radiation considered unsafe. This is and should be a cause for serious concern. It is also worth remembering that no one has yet received a dose of radiation that is known to be lethal as a result of the Fukushima disaster. But if we are concerned about industrial injuries, why do we say nothing about the deaths and injuries in the industry most likely to replace nuclear power?

...Chinese coal mining alone kills as many people every week as the worst nuclear power accident in history – the Chernobyl explosion – has done in 25 years.

And this is to say nothing of the far larger number of injuries that coal mining inflicts, in particular the hideous lung diseases which plague so many miners and cause long, lingering and terrible deaths. When was the last time you heard an anti-nuclear campaigner drawing attention to this daily carnage?

Double standard two: the science

We emphasise, when debating climate change, the importance of the scientific consensus, and reliance on solid, peer-reviewed studies. But as soon as we start discussing the dangers of low-level radiation, we abandon that and endorse the pseudo-scientific gibberish of a motley collection of cranks and quacks, who appear to have begun with the assumption that it must be killing thousands of people every year, and retrofitted the evidence to match it.

Such people exist in every field, especially those that are politically contentious. We should, by now, have learned to be wary of them. But it seems that the temptation, for people hoping to make the case against nuclear power, is overwhelming.

Double standard three: radioactive pollution

If low-level radiation really was the problem that some environmentalists say it is, the focus of their campaign should be coal plants, not nuclear power. As Scientific American notes:

"The fly ash emitted by a power plant – a by-product from burning coal for electricity – carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."

This is because coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium, which are concentrated in the ash. Not only does this expose people living around coal plants to higher doses of radiation than people living around nuclear plants; but the regulations for disposing of fly ash are far weaker than the regulations for disposing of low-level nuclear waste. 

These are just a few excerpts from Monbiot's article.   To read more, follow the link above.   Meanwhile today's Guardian also contains a report about soaring world coal prices driven by Asian demand that stands to rapidly increase if Fukushima drives Asia away from nuclear power and more firmly into the arms of coal.

Science Doesn't Agree With You

Science doesn't agree with anybody.  It is what it is.  On the other hand you can accept science, you can dispute science, you can even deny science but, beyond that, your choices are limited.

How many times have we criticized the radical Right for climate science denial?  We routinely excoriate them for promoting false narratives that fly in the face of solid, scientific research - and rightly so.

Yet why is it, when it comes to nuclear science, the Left is as ridiculous as the Right?  Suddenly we're joining the chorus attacking the credibility of nuclear scientists as the atomic equivalent of fossil fuelers.    It's as though we've never managed to grow out of our "ban the bomb"/China Syndrome shells.   "Oh you can't trust them scientists, they're surely up to something, they're in it for themselves."

Bollocks.

Do you really believe, even just for a minute, that climate change scientists/advocates of the stature of James Lovelock or NOAA's James Hansen or The Guardian's George Monbiot would support nuclear energy as the only vehicle to enable mankind to wean ourselves off fossil fuels if their decades of research and scientific knowledge didn't leave them convinced of it?   What do you think, they're like Loki out pulling your leg for the sheer fun of it?  Do you think?

One thing the Fukushima fiasco has brought home to me is that the radical Left is every bit as odious, closed minded, dishonest and hypocritical as the radical Right and they both deserve our heartfelt contempt.   Science isn't science when it conveniently bolsters your narrative, your dogma and garbage when it does not.   If your narrative is convincingly  dispelled by science, it's your narrative that's garbage and shame on you for pretending otherwise.

George Monbiot - The Real Nuclear Disaster is in China

The Guardian's chief environmental writer, George Monbiot, warns that the nuclear disaster we need to fear is happening in China where the Japanese fiasco has caused the Chinese government to suspend approval of new nuclear power plants.

George Monbiot, pro nuke?  That's right you ninnies.

While nuclear causes calamities when it goes wrong, coal causes calamities when it goes right, and coal goes right a lot more often than nuclear goes wrong. The only safe coal-fired plant is one which has broken down past the point of repair.

Before I go any further, and I'm misinterpreted for the thousandth time, let me spell out once again what my position is. I have not gone nuclear. But, as long as the following four conditions are met, I will no longer oppose atomic energy.  

1. Its total emissions – from mine to dump – are taken into account, and demonstrate that it is a genuinely low-carbon option

2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried

3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay

4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diverted for military purposes

To these I'll belatedly add a fifth, which should have been there all along: no plants should be built in fault zones, on tsunami-prone coasts, on eroding seashores or those likely to be inundated before the plant has been decommissioned or any other places which are geologically unsafe. This should have been so obvious that it didn't need spelling out. But we discover, yet again, that the blindingly obvious is no guarantee that a policy won't be adopted.

...While producing solar power makes perfect sense in north Africa, in the UK, by comparison to both wind and nuclear, it's a waste of money and resources. Abandoning nuclear power as an option narrows our choices just when we need to be thinking as broadly as possible.

Several writers for the Guardian have made what I believe is an unjustifiable leap. A disaster has occurred in a plant that was appallingly sited in an earthquake zone; therefore, they argue, all nuclear power programmes should be abandoned everywhere. It looks to me as if they are jumping on this disaster as support for a pre-existing position they hold for other reasons. Were we to follow their advice, we would rule out a low-carbon source of energy, which could help us tackle the gravest threat the world now faces. That does neither the people nor the places of the world any favours.

So ban the bomb and kumbaya and all the rest of  that crap.  There, now if you've got that out of your system, let's turn our attention back to saving instead of destroying our civilization.

Japanese Nuke Meltdown - The Catastrophe Is Mainly In Your Head

The real damage from nuclear accidents is mostly psychological.  It's fear and fear can  have powerful manifestations.   Cambridge University prof and specialist in the public understanding of risk, David Spiegelhalter, says we fear most that which we cannot see:

Psychologists have spent years identifying the factors that lead to increased feelings of risk and vulnerability - and escaped radiation from nuclear plants ticks all the boxes.

It is an invisible hazard, mysterious and not understood, associated with dire consequences such as cancer and birth defects. It feels unnatural.

It has been estimated that 17m were exposed to significant radiation after Chernobyl and nearly 2,000 people have since developed thyroid cancer having consumed contaminated food and milk as children.
This is very serious, but nothing like the impact that had been expected, and a UN report identified psychological problems as the major consequence for health.

The perception of the extreme risk of radiation exposure is also somewhat contradicted by the experience of 87,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who have been followed up for their whole lives.


By 1992, over 40,000 had died, but it has been estimated that only 690 of those deaths were due to the radiation. Again, the psychological effects were major.

Radiation does, however, feel acceptable when used in benign circumstances such as medical imaging. You can pay £100 ($160) and get a whole-body CT scan as part of a medical check-up, but it can deliver you a dose equivalent to being 1.5 miles from the centre of the Hiroshima explosion.

Because more than 70m CT scans are carried out each year, the US National Cancer Institute has estimated that 29,000 Americans will get cancer as a result of the CT scans they received in 2007 alone.

I've been really astonished at the "Chicken Little" reactions I've seen from progressives about the Japanese fiasco.   Ten thousand Japanese have either been swept out to sea or lie buried beneath rubble and yet our attention is seemingly riveted on a few failing reactors that have killed - oh, let me count - nobody.   What, this is Armageddon?  Nope, not really.

Yet widespread fear may rule out the use of nuclear power which may be our last best option for weaning ourselves off fossil fuels if we're to avoid a real catastrophe, runaway global warming.  Hey, wait, I've got an idea!  Let's compromise.  How about if we all agree not to build major nuclear reactor plants anywhere that four of the earths' major tectonic plates collide?  Hmmm, I wonder why the Japanese didn't think of that?

Fear is a real bitch.  That's why it has become the instrument of choice of today's radical/mainstream Right.   Fear weakens you.  It leaves you vulnerable, malleable. We no longer can afford that.   If we don't learn to reject fear (a.k.a. "grow a pair") we may be in for a brief and brutal century.  The ship has sailed and on this voyage it's going to take clear-headed courage to make it through.

So get on your best woolly sweater, have a soothing cup of jasmine tea and stop being such a bunch of fucking ninnies!

With Nuclear Down the Tubes, We're Going to Have to Get More Radical About Alternative Energy

Modern, fourth and fifth-generation nuclear energy was, until the past week, about the only viable option to ease our transition from fossil fuels.   The nuclear option was the only one capable of delivering the amounts of energy required within the ever narrowing window for weaning our civilization off oil, gas and coal.   Solar, wind, tidal and geothermal technologies simply aren't scaleable as yet.   They won't do the job in time.

Japan's ongoing nuclear meltdown has made the nuclear option a non-starter.   The criticisms are simplistic, unfair even, but that really doesn't matter.   The argument is closed.

So, without the nuclear safety net, we're down to some awfully tough choices.  Either we stay with the existing, destructive but cheap fossil fuels or we prepare ourselves to pay a vastly greater portion of our incomes for alternative energies.  When many who were once secure in middle classdom now on the ropes, the cost of survival just became an awful lot tougher.

The Japanese fiasco has been music to the ears of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Gas, especially as it has the Left taking to the streets with torches and pitchforks demanding an end to the nuclear option.

I don't know how many people, if any, will lose their lives to the Japanese reactor disasters but I know that many millions will lose their lives this century to global warming if we paint ourselves into a corner with the fossil fuel industries.   It's a tough choice and, right now, much of the public is indulging itself in an orgy of self-gratifying fear.   Somehow I have this feeling that the 21st won't be a pleasant century for the timid and the hesitant.

There Goes the Baby Out with the Bathwater

There are plenty of highly intelligent, eminently reasonable people who advocate nuclear power not just as a viable alternative to our fossil fuel addiction but as the only viable alternative, if we're to step back from the edge of runaway global warming.

Like many of us, at first I was dismissive of this pro-nuclear business.   Many of us have become wrapped up in the "Ban the Bomb/Dr. Strangelove/Three Mile Island/China Syndrome/Chernobyl" matrix of adamant anti-nuclear sentiment.  Yet, as I opened my mind and read a lot more about the nuclear option and corresponded with some nuclear-power proponents such as Australian professor Barry Brook (www.bravenewclimate.com) it became apparent I had a lot to learn.

Nuclear power is about as loaded a topic as can be imagined.  Yet most of us, including the media, fail to grasp the difference between early nuclear technology and today's fourth and fifth generation, "fast" reactors.  I won't go into a sales pitch here but I will toss out a few things you might not have known.

Old technology reactors are trouble.   Not only do they produce enriched nuclear waste (the stuff that can be further processed into "weapon grade" material) they're also enormously inefficient, getting just a fraction of the energy from their fuel rods which thereafter have to be safely buried for thousands of years.  Because old technology reactors are so inefficient there is genuine doubt about how long the world's remaining reserves of uranium would last.

New technology reactors solve many of these problems.   They can consume those "spent" reactor rods that we have to scrap and extract most of the energy from them.   They can likewise consume weapons grade fissile material.  In other words, they can clean up the mess that otherwise isn't going anywhere.   Best of all, they don't create enriched waste that can be processed for nuclear weaponry and, of course, they don't produce a lot of greenhouse gases either.

Despite the considerable promise of fourth and fifth-generation nuclear power, the fiasco in Japan may render it all for naught.   There are many conflicting opinions on the severity of the problem at the Japanese nuclear plants.  We're just going to have to wait to see what happens at the end of the day but, long before then, we're already turning on nuclear power of any variety.   The media may have filled enough empty minds with glowing visions of nuclear Armageddon to kill the nuclear option for all time.   In coming decades we may pay dearly for that.