Pro nuclear movement can appear confused to left and right
Last week Ketan Joshi (@KetanJO) published a piece titled Nuclear power’s tense contradiction.
Ketan is a thoughtful science and technology writer who earned a science degree (neuroscience and psychology) from Sydney University and has worked in the renewable energy industry. He is also deeply interested in politics and identifies with the left.
His article is worth a close read, but the major theme is pretty straightforward. Ketan observes that the pro nuclear movement is struggling because its supporters seem confused. They cannot be blithely categorized as supporting either the right or the left and thus can find themselves somewhat uncomfortable in any party gathering.
They (we) seem unsure about what we want politicians to do for us and end up pulling in many directions.
Part of the reason I find myself so drawn to the issues that swirl around nuclear power is the sheer dramatic tragedy of these contradictions. No other technology’s proponents are stretched so thin and so broadly across political and ideological tribes, and none have embarked on expeditions across ideological territory in the same way nuclear power’s proponents have.
The consequence of this is consistent public polling that shows a mostly-confused and somewhat distrustful public view of nuclear power, in Australia. In America, the solid climate policy landscape needed for a resurgence of a slowly-dipping nuclear power industry is only half-heartedly subscribed to by so many of its proponents. No industry that makes a habit of supporting those who sabotage its survival will last.
It is almost as if Ketan’s article was inspired by recent discussions in the comment section of Atomic Insights.
In contrast, he says the following about other energy sources.
Within my own renewable energy industry, expressing audible cynicism about a conservative political party at a conference isn’t a risky move. Doing the same about the Greens party at a coal conference is just as safe. These are worlds without major contradictions, and we heave at the hearts of these technologies in, mostly, a single direction.
I understand Ketan’s point of view, but I see the same issue through a different lense. I provided the following comment for discussion by his readers. It seems appropriate and timely to share it here as well.
Initially published on KetanJoshi.co. Modified, improved and repurposed here.
Ketan:
Thoughtful piece. Perhaps it would be worthwhile for me to offer a few thoughts of my own.
Nuclear energy advocates might seem hopelessly confused to people who occupy a left-right political world in which there are only two sides with battles being seen as either won or lost.
Some of us – hopefully a large majority of the population – live in a more nuanced and complex world in which there are many issues that pull us in various directions. We don’t define our politics as left or right because it all depends on the specifics of the issue.
I like to make the admittedly strained analogy that many politically vocal people participate and watch as if politics is a series of football games with exactly two teams and each contest ending in either a win or a loss.
In contrast, I see politics as a long running track and field or swimming meet in which there are a wide variety of contests happening at the same time with teams that are actually just groups of individuals who happen to go to the same school or live in the same area.
There are many winners of various contests, but nearly all of the participants can consider themselves to be winners depending on their own goals. Of course, there are also many who are disappointed in their own performance in any particular event and may end up considering that they have “lost” that specific contest. If they are like most meet participants, they have other events where the results might be different.
Nuclear energy isn’t a right or left issue because it isn’t a “one trick pony.” It was developed and commercialized several years before anyone expressed great concerns about climate change. Early adopters liked it because it wasn’t oil, coal, or gas and it wasn’t plagued by the drawbacks of those combustion fuel sources.
Atomic fission has no high volume gaseous emissions and doesn’t require a constant supply of oxygen laden air, so it held great appeal to people who wanted power in unconventional environments like underwater or in space outside of the earth’s atmosphere.
It also appeals to people who understand the very real and measurable effects of breathing hydrocarbon combustion waste products even in “normal” human environments.
Though there were some concerns about the magnitude of the potential resource in the earliest days, those concerns were alleviated within a decade or so of looking around the world.
We discovered that uranium and thorium were more abundant and widely distributed than we knew in the days before we started looking for them. Once the size of the resource became known, we gained another great reason to support nuclear energy – it was potentially so abundant that it offered a path out of the periodic or regional shortages and price swings know to occur with fossil fuels.
Its extremely compact fuel appeals to those who like endurance and resilience with independence from fuel supply chains. Its tiny waste product offers great advantages to those who understand the ease with which those waste products can be contained. Its lack of explosive or flammable properties appeals to safety-conscious designers and operators.
I could go on, but I think you get the picture.
There is incredible latent strength in the fact that nuclear energy has features that appeal along numerous vectors to so many different interests. I’m encouraged by realizing that its wide array of supporters can appear confused to people who occupy the left-right world of winners and losers that many media outlets seem to encourage.
Aside: Major media outlets love highly polarized, big money campaigns. As for-profit businesses, they capture a large fraction of the money spent. The product they sell is advertising. That is the product that campaigns spend most of their money purchasing. End Aside.
Maybe nuclear energy can serve a uniting purpose as well as serving as a powerful energy source.
Nuclear is also an “odd duck” in that it does not have large specific companies that pursue solely nuclear work. There is no nuclear equivalent of nuclear Apple or Intel, but rather a collection of side businesses. This also explains why there are no nuclear equivalent billionaire celebrities such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos to champion this technology. Nuclear advocacy seems to need more of a social advocacy leadership as much as an economic one.
The Greens expect to wipe out the US nuclear industry within 20 years and reduce coal and nuclear generated electricity by 50% of current capacity within 10 years. The Greens expect to replace 50% of coal and nuclear over the next 10 years with 190 GW of natural gas and 170GW of wind. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/05/offshore-wind-turbine-project-statoils-hywind-scotland-a-positive-viewpoint/
Unless the NRC is eliminated, there is no way for the US nuclear industry to compete.
The Achilles heel of the NRC is the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis of radiation damage. LNT is junk science just like Global Warming, the DDT ban, and the Green attack on genetic engineering. The Low Dose Radiation Research program was making substantial progress in proving that LNT is junk science before Obama terminated the program in 2012.
Spending $20 million per year on Low Dose Radiation Research should be the number 1 priority of the nuclear industry. Given that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy today, given that radiation standards can be relaxed by a factor of 1000 once biological repair mechanisms for radiation damage are accounted for, given that “walk away safe” sodium fast reactors are 1000 times safer than the best LWRs, there is no reason for the NRC to exist.
All due respect to the author and nuclear engineers, but…
The nuclear industry seems to be dying a slow death around the world.
If it were truly cost competitive with other forms of power generation it would have more support on the right. (and companies that make nuclear power plants wouldn’t be declaring bankruptcy.)
If it were a more nimble power source that could be ratcheted up and down quickly to complement solar and wind, it would have more support on the Left.
What we have is a analog system in a digital world. I really don’t see how Nuclear survives in a world of cheap oil, gas, solar, and wind. At best it a lesser-of-two-evils option. At worst its a multi-billion dollar money pit.
Except in China, Russia, S. Korea, and the export markets of those 3.
Nuclear power has costs piled onto it by government fiat, such as the new demand that US plants have the equivalent of a 24/7/365 SWAT team on-site to defend against military-equivalent assaults. The US government picks up the cost of defending everything BUT nuclear plants from such assaults.
When a small team of saboteurs could take out all the power lines, pipelines and even many of the roads feeding critical metro areas with a few days of work, this paranoia about nuclear plants is grossly misplaced… except as economic warfare by its competitors.
This insistence that other energy supplies deal with the failure of “renewables” to be reliable and available at need is one of the gross intellectual errors of the Green romantics. They should all be immediately forced to consume energy only when and how their preferred sources provide it, until they either recant or die. (cot’d)
Oil and gas are limited; we’ll (literally) burn through them in a handful of decades at best. Their effluents have already damaged the earth and will wreck far more just from emissions to the present date. The inadequacy of biomass and the inherent unreliability of solar and wind was the driving force to use coal, oil and natural gas in the first place.
Fission power gets rid of the unreliability without any of the GHG or other emissions of fossil fuels. THAT is why we MUST use it, at least until we have a superior replacement.
There seems to be many approaches for the up and coming solutions incl NuScale et al., For example, example by Dr. Forsberg seems to have an approach to address Fluoride-Salt-Cooled High-Temperature Reactor with Nuclear Air-Brayton Combined Cycle and Firebrick Resistance Heated Energy Storage by Dr. Charles – Competing with Stand-Alone Natural Gas and Enabling a Zero-Carbon Energy World – http://fhr.nuc.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/FHR-Global-14April2016.pdf … As well, there is a document by NUScale that highlights approaches as well … http://www.nuscalepower.com/images/our_technology/nuscale-non-electrical-apps-pbnc2014.pdf … I am not stating a specific reactor styles
Solar and wind are not cheap. They are subsidized. Big difference.
SCANA just pulled the plug on VC Summer units 2&3.
I presume there will be a special Atomic Insights post on VC Summer (now the VC Winter of Our Discontent?).
I will have something to say about that. I feel sorry for those that will have to work with/for Westinghouse.
I have more than one friend who had their badge stuffed in a garbage bag today…now they’re 3 or 4 beers into the evenings festivities. It’s a bad bad day.
This past January, my financial advisor said I could retire now. I feel bad for these guys between their 40s and late 50s who have mortgages, college tuition etc. The double-whammy of nukes closing and several hundred (thousand?) dumped into the nuclear workforce is sad.
I actually would prefer part-time work just to keep mentally active. I wouldn’t care too much about the money or benefits since I have a pension and health care plan.
But not at Walmart!
@FermiAged
Would you be interested in a position in the pro nuclear movement? If so, contact me via email rod_adams at AtomicInsights.com
Note: The following was received via email from Robert Parker, President, Australian Nuclear Association
I’ll respond to Ketan’s and Rod’s comments from the perspective of a citizen of a nation that has laws preventing any aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle from proceeding except uranium mining and in which no political party currently champions nuclear energy with any conviction.
We have a right of center agrarian based party in the Nationals who come out in support occasionally but they, like the Republicans in the USA have a difficult time with the climate change issue.
The left of center parties all campaign on climate change but don’t want nuclear and so far few of them actually engage with the technology because there aren’t any votes in it. On the right of politics we also get the “hairy chested” brigade who occasionally support nuclear in order to provoke the left but they could just as easily push for capital punishment or winding back our gun controls.
Overlying all this is the big issue of centralised state control which has been abandoned by nations in the Anglosphere and so we end up with a hollowed out political apparatus that can’t make effective decisions and fights over trivia. The political classes adopt the “ice cream” solution of renewables, not because its technically effective but because its politically safe.
I am an advocate for nuclear energy, not because I have any great affection for it, but because I am dead set scared of climate change and have a great respect for James Hansen’s thinking. We won’t fix climate change without nuclear energy being a key central technology.
This therefore leaves people like me in Australia without a political home. We advocate with politicians and the public alike but know that we have few friends. We also know that the majority of nations who have effectively implemented nuclear programs have had strong central government support and management of the process.
Frankly anyone who thinks we will fix climate change without strong government direction and a reversion to central planning is naive. In the vacuum we will just get more “ice cream” solutions.
So, sure Ketan is right, we do find political alignment difficult and probably its beyond left and right.
As good a place to leave this off topic question as any:
How much gross energy can be extracted from a kg of natural uranium if it is properly consumed in a fast neutron reactor?
Per Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
22 GWh/kg or 933 GWd/t
This is why I archive my comments. Some time ago I wrote “Fission of 32,000 tpy of uranium at 200 MeV/fission is about 82 terawatts (thermal).” Multiplying by the number of seconds in a year and dividing by 3.2e7 yields about 8.1e13 J, a little less than a gigawatt-day.
It should be a non-partisan issue. But it’s not, unfortunately. Some of us have have attempted to penetrate the left and far left on this issue, to varying degrees of success. In some ways the ecomodernist approach helps a lot in winning over the slightly left of center folks around the Democrats.
Or, as Treebeard said in “The Two Towers” film, “I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side”
The energy policy of both the left and the right is nearly completely senseless. Why would people who favor choosing a course of action using engineering principles align themselves with any of the nonsensical political platforms?
Nuclear Power has attributes of both parties. Technology born of American Exceptionalism steeped in Regulation and and Federal Subsidy.
Something to love or hate for just about everybody.
I still like it. Because it’s a hoot.
As I see it the tepid support for nuclear arises in no small part from contradictions between how the left and the right operate these days.
On the left we see environmentalists who have lost sight of what they’re supposed to be about, preserving the environment, in an effort to push technologies that they like and wing willfully ignorant to facts as they do so. This contrasts with the approach of conservationists ( those who protect endangered animals ) who tend to constantly search for facts to find out what might be threatening the wild animal they’re trying to protect, makes compromises with the human needs in the area and is given direct feedback from the real world about their success in the form of census data. The left can’t learn to love nuclear power until environmentalists reconcile themselves with the reality of the costs and benefits of nuclear power compared to other power sources.
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Likewise on the right there’s a contradiction at play. Fiscal responsibility has long been a somewhat ironic leg of any conservative platform but increasingly that has taken the form of simply being unwilling to put capital into any sort of long term project. No industrialized society functions without those long term assets however and until conservatives can reconcile themselves with the facts around the need for investments in large capital intensive projects making the case for nuclear on the right will be challenging at best.
Neither of these contradictions are tied directly to nuclear but they do make it hard for any party to embrace the technology without alienating their base.
“Lunar Solar Power electricity can cost less than 0.001 $/kWe-h wholesale when LSP capacity exceeds 1 TWe .” from: http://www.ela-iet.com/EMD/BeijingCriswell5745100813.pdf Perhaps the opportunity to open Space to economic activity is greater than providing electric prosperity to the World or completely solving the Carbon problem. Pure economics argue against further new nuclear plants as the first phase of LSP involves (mostly) Earth based receiving antennae that can balance the wayward wind and solar we already have, thus removing the need for new storage and long transmission lines. What a concept!
I’ll tell you the same thing I did in some other forum, which you clearly ignored, putting you in troll territory.
When the space shuttle still operated, the cost to launch one pound into low Earth orbit (LEO) was $10,000. With the new vehicles under development, that cost *might* come down to several hundred dollars per pound. The cost to send one of those pounds from low Earth orbit to the Moon would be several times again the cost to LEO.
Now calculate how many pounds of mass you need to send to the Moon to establish a meaningful industrial base and multiply them by a few thousand dollars each.
We will never have space based industry, nor mining as long as chemical rockets are our transportation system to orbit.
One day we could have the space elevator that Arthur C Clark wrote about – would reduce the cost of lifting mass into space by a factor of hundreds – just one or two “technical” hurdles to overcome first…like how to build it and how to capture the small asteroid to anchor it to…
One day!
So I will once again try to reply. O’Neill and Criswell plans are not dependent on anything but chemical rockets. https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-space-colonies-oneill/ and above.
Craig Phillips: check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1MAg0UAAHg and other Isaac Arthur videos for much more. We don’t yet have “stuff” strong enujf for Earth elevator.