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Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Solar energy

Nuclear energy makes a cameo appearance in Jeff Gibbs’s Planet of the Humans

April 24, 2020 By Rod Adams 38 Comments

Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs teamed up to produce a piercing, controversial, gut punching documentary titled Planet of the Humans. Partly as a result of the global closure of theaters, and partly as a result of wanting to make an impact on the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, they released their film for free on Youtube.

It’s worth watching. I watched it once straight through and have enjoyed spending additional hours reviewing and clipping key highlights.

Like many Moore films, this one has a cast of white-hatted scientists and activists opposing black-hatted billionaires, bankers, corporate leaders and politicians. In what may be upsetting to some, this film’s black-hatted group includes the leaders of numerous major environmental groups including the Sierra Club, 350.org, and Riverkeepers.

Michael Brune of the Sierra Club, Al Gore, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from Riverkeepers are all shown as being willing recipients of contributions, donations and outright payments from billionaires including Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Jeremy Grantham, and the Koch Brothers, corporations like Archer Daniels Midland, and investment banks like Blackrock and Goldman Sachs.

Planet of the Humans includes flashy footage with dramatic music that illustrates the inescapably negative environmental impact of moving massive quantities of material.

By implication, it also highlights the huge sums of money involved in the process of moving more material faster and farther. One component of the money churning process includes the inevitable need to replace machinery and infrastructure after its useful life is over.

What we know that ain’t so

The narrator seems genuinely shocked to learn that much of what he has been taught about alternative energy isn’t true. Wind, solar and biomass aren’t successfully replacing fossil fuels or reducing human environmental footprints.

Instead, they are dependent on fossil fuel-derived materials and fossil fuel powered machinery. Wind turbines and their towers are massive and have lifetimes measured in small numbers of decades. Solar panels covering vast quantities of land produce an inadequate amount of power, especially on cloudy days and during winter months.

Even solar thermal energy plants like Ivanpah promise much more than they deliver. The mirrors are failing, and the power conversion system needs to routinely burn a large quantity of natural gas in order to keep systems warm and ready to run once the sun comes up.

Physically large collecting systems for diffuse power sources require massive material inputs, and they don’t least very long. When they no longer function, the areas that were scraped clean to house the equipment are virtually unusable wasteland that no longer supports much life.

Biomass and biofuels receive special animosity

A substantial portion of the film is spent documenting the ways that burning biomass for electricity isn’t sustainable or carbon-neutral despite all of the messaging to the contrary.

These scenes also document the forest industry’s generally successful efforts to influence perceptions of their industry. Often, those efforts have included creative carbon accounting as well as targeted contributions to non-profit groups willing to accept money in return for greenwashing.

Those influence efforts include lobbying for subsidy programs or for redefining terms to qualify for already existing subsidy programs.

The film credits Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, for helping to encourage a wave of interest among college students and administrators for converting on-campus coal furnaces to biomass burning furnaces.

The evidence supporting this thesis is straight from the horse’s mouth in the form of video clips of McKibben speaking at Vermont’s Middlebury College in 2009. He lauds the opening of the the college’s new wood chip-burning boiler.

McKibben: What powers a learning community? As of this afternoon, the easy answer to that is wood chips. It’s incredibly beautiful. To stand over there and see that big bunker full of wood chips. You can put any kind of wood in, you know oak, willow, whatever you want. Almost anything that burns we can toss it in there if we can chip it down to the right size.

McKibben has taken offense at the way Planet of the Humans portrays him and his organization. He claims that his position on biomass burning has changed dramatically in the decade since he lauded his college’s wood chip-burning furnace. That change happened as soon “as more scientists studied the consequences of large-scale biomass burning”.

He even claims that he and his organization have been attacked by the biomass industry as a result of negative pieces written in 2016, 2019 and 2020.

But that defense is weak, especially considering a different scene in the movie where Gibbs gives McKibben ample opportunity to state his current position on biomass.

Gibbs: I’d like to see us come out against any burning of trees for clean energy.

McKibben: Alright, go ahead and do it. Although I confess I stoke my wood stove almost every night of the winter, so I’m not really the right person to ask.

Gibbs: But that doesn’t mean it’s green energy for power plants.

McKibben: I don’t know. That’s not what today is about.

Dialog from “Planet of the Humans” time stamp 1:08:20

Emphasis on human prosperity and population as part of problem

Between scenes depicting both environmental devastation and the financial flows that enable established infrastructure and materials interests to continue doing what they do best, Gibbs talks with scientists and activists to find out if there are any solutions.

Almost unanimously, those interviewed experts suggest that humans are the root of the problem. They emphasize how our numbers have expanded almost geometrically since we began exploiting fossil fuels. They also decry our collective and individual desires for mobility and material goods.

It’s easy to get the impression that since renewables have issues that are similar to those that handicap fossil fuels, the only path available is reducing both populations and standards of living.

Though I may be guilty of seeing what I want to see, I caught a brief flash indicating that the filmmakers might be hoping for a more optimistic sequel.

An alternative with a uniquely useful set of attributes

As a nuclear fission expert and enthusiast, I could not help wondering when Gibbs and Moore were going to address my favorite fossil fuel alternative.

Finally, an hour and 22 minutes into the hour and 40 minute movie, nuclear energy made a 6 sec cameo appearance.

But immediately after noting that GE produces both nuclear energy and wind turbines, the documentary moves on to show a GE spokesperson extolling the virtues of converting biomass – especially seaweed – into liquid fuel.

A critical viewer might wonder why a corporation with a seven decade-long history of selling nuclear energy systems is more interested in talking about its interest in biofuels than in marketing advanced developments in nuclear energy.

As shown in the film, corporations, billionaires and banks that have successfully educated customers about the virtues of wind, solar or biomass have ignored nuclear energy. None of the interviewed activists or scientists mentioned a desire to consider using nuclear as an alternative to both fossil fuels and the more heavily popularized renewables.

Perhaps it is because nuclear fission, using elemental fuels that contain several million times as much energy as a similar mass of fossil fuels or biomass, changes everything.

What’s so different about fission?

Fission doesn’t depend on a massive infrastructure of ships, pipelines or railcars. Its conversion equipment is rarely exposed to the weather and its shielding and external hazards protection enables structures, systems and components that last many decades.

Fission provides a virtually unlimited source of power to enable humanity to flourish while gradually shrinking our environmental footprint.

Aside: Commodity businesses like energy don’t like anyone to know that accessible supplies are virtually unlimited. That knowledge doesn’t support high prices. End aside.

Fission isn’t wildly popular, especially among people and corporations that have prospered by moving vast quantities of extracted or harvested material rapidly through supply lines that span the globe.

Nuclear fission power also isn’t popular among nihilistic scholars who consider Albert Camus to be an inspiring visionary.

People in the “peak oil” wing of Malthusian thinking almost purposely ignore fission. They forget that M. King Hubbert’s 1956 paper titled “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels” was the seminal paper that inspired their worried projections.

That paper included a virtually ignored pair of graphs that should have been the source of incredible optimism among thinking people. But some studiously avoid any and all causes for optimism, especially when it comes to respect, growth and development of their fellow human beings.

This optimistic – scary to multinational petroleum interests – pair of graphs were on the last slide in a March 1956 presentation by M. King Hubbert to the American Petroleum Institute
This optimistic – scary to multinational petroleum interests – pair of graphs were on the last slide in a March 1956 presentation by M. King Hubbert to the American Petroleum Institute

At least one other reviewer for Planet of the Humans thought about nuclear energy while watching a film that barely mentions it. Here is a quote from Peter Bradshaw’s piece in The Guardian about the film.

I found myself thinking of Robert Stone’s controversial 2013 documentary Pandora’s Promise, which made a revisionist case for nuclear power: a clean energy source that (allegedly) has cleaned up its act on safety and really can provide for our wholesale energy needs without contributing to climate change, in a way that “renewables” can’t.

Gibbs doesn’t mention nuclear and – a little lamely, perhaps – has no clear lesson or moral, other than the need to take a fiercely critical look at the environmental establishment. Well, it’s always valuable to re-examine a sacred cow.

“Planet of the Humans review – contrarian eco-doc from the Michael Moore stable” by Peter Bradshaw, published April 22, 2020 by The Guardian

Gibbs’s single mention of nuclear was apparently so brief that Bradshaw missed it.

I believe the film offers two clear choices, one overt and one that is barely visible.

1. We can continue on our present path of depending on massive extractive industries. That path will end – whether we like it or not – with either reduced prosperity, reduced human population, or both.

2. We can reject the lessons we have been carefully taught by people with vested interests and develop a truly different kind of power source. Nuclear fission is here and available, but rich and powerful interests see it as a serious threat that must be fought, ignored or both.

But fission opposition backers are billionaires and we aren’t.

As far as I know, there isn’t a single Atomic Insights reader that has to worry about having millions or billions of dollars worth of existing capital that will lose most of its value in a fission-powered world.

We can see a much brighter future ahead.

*********************************************************

Update: (April 26, 2020 at 06:00 am) It seems that I was wrong about the possibility that Gibbs and his colleagues might have purposely left out nuclear because they want to introduce it in a sequel as a better path forward. Commenters like Meredith were right, Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs and Ozzie Zehner, the creators of Planet of the Humans, simply don’t like humans and the well-powered society that we have created.

Here’s the proof.

In case you don’t want to take the time to watch, here is a summary of the individually expressed positions on nuclear energy.

Moore has been fighting nuclear energy since the 1970s and calls it “madness”.

Zehner became worried about nuclear energy as a result of his research into issues related to slurry tanks at Hanford. He believes it is almost impossible to separate weapons development from atomic energy development. He also believes nuclear power plants are enormously expensive because of the amount of material required to build the plants. He also believes that building and running the plants requires the efforts of “an enormous number of PhD scientists.” He states there is a significant, unattributed carbon and energy footprint associated with the education system required to produce those scientists and engineers.

Gibbs is worried about the use of concrete and steel in nuclear power plants, the environmental impacts of uranium mining, thorium hype, micro plastics, pollution at Mount Everest, whaling, fish and soil depletion, and pollution in Antarctica produced by the small contingent of scientists there. (I realize that most of that list has nothing to do with nuclear energy, but Gibbs groups them all together in his antinuclear rant.) End Update.

Filed Under: Alternative energy, Biomass, Clean Energy, Climate change, Solar energy, Wind energy

Why are many nuclear advocates turning against large scale wind and solar energy?

December 12, 2017 By Rod Adams 59 Comments

On Friday, a well-respected energy industry observer posed an important question on Twitter.

Michael Liebreich
@MLiebreich
Replying to @tder2012 @Daniel_W_See and 4 others

Answer. The. Question:

Why have you concluded that attacking cheap wind and solar is the best way to help nuclear?

Please explain, because from where I sit it’s pretty darn clear: the more you thorium boys attack renewables, the more you set back your cause. It’s absurd.

Aside: Despite all you might hear about Twitter, there is an active and serious set of users who engage in important, often open and informative discussions about energy technology and policy. It is a medium with great utility for helping achieve my communication goals. End Aside.

Michael Liebreich is the founder of New Energy Finance, which was acquired by Bloomberg in 2009 and renamed Bloomberg New Energy Finance. He continues serving as Chairman of the Advisory Board at BNEF.

I’ve had the opportunity to hear Liebreich speak about the future of energy at BNEF conferences; he is a thoughtful, provocative speaker who includes a major role for advanced nuclear energy systems in the long-term energy future. He is not as positive about the near term ability of conventional nuclear power plants to retain their current market share.

He’s not alone in supporting advanced nuclear research and development while challenging the viability of existing nuclear power plants. He’s also not alone in classifying wind and solar as cheap and renewable.

I took his question seriously, and put some thought into my replies. Twitter has a fairly tight limit on the length of its tweets, but it has a threading capability that many use to expand the available space when they have a lot of information to share or when they feel particularly passionate about a specific topic.

Those passionate threads are often known as “rants” to the frequent users. Some of the more pertinent and well-written rants get shared widely and achieve almost cult status.

I was aiming for that result with the following response – which required several separate, threaded posts. For brevity, I’ve eliminated header and footer information between each tweet.

The tweets are quoted, so some may be missing an article or two; that’s one of the ways to fit thoughts within the character limits of a tweet.

Rod Adams
@Atomicrod
Replying to @MLiebreich @tder2012 and 5 others
I am opposed to continuing generous subsidies for “cheap” wind and solar projects. In many of the best production areas, there is so much opportunistic capacity that market prices drop to unsustainably low levels when the weather is favorable.

In a rational market, low price signals would slow or halt capacity additions until demand increases. However, 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour guaranteed plus the opportunity to collect higher amounts if lucky enough to be operating during high demand is incentive to keep building.

Because the incentive is based on production without any reference to need in particular locations, developers naturally choose high wind locations, even if there is no local demand. Then they demand preferential grid access & new transmission lines.

I’m not opposed to wind and solar. I’m a sailor and love wind driven transportation. I’m just angry with people who keep telling us how cheap wind and solar are getting all year long and then, at the last minute, engage in a shady deal with oil exporters to extend tax credits

Finally, analysts seem to agree that low priced natural gas is largely responsible for disinterest in nuclear. Low price is result of too much supply for demand. A major reason supply is currently too high is displacement by wind & solar. Adds to available gas supply

Liebreich’s question was posted on Friday and I had responded on Saturday morning. I diidn’t really expect any response from him during the weekend, but when the working day on Monday was nearly over, I decided to follow through to find out what he thought of my response.

That was when I learned that Liebreich had decided that I was not worth his attention.

I only unmuted you because someone I follow got lured into a thread with you. You persist in calling renewables “unreliables”, show no understanding of the economics of networks and storage, espouse a variety of conspiracy theories and don’t answer the question. So goodbye again.

I’d like some serious feedback and advice. Should I change my approach? Is it really a communications foul to call wind and solar “unreliable?”

Sure, it is meant as criticism, but isn’t “renewable” simply a brand meant to put a favorable spin on an industrial technology with known limitations and widespread environmental impact?

Does documenting historical examples showing coordinated efforts to slow nuclear energy development really amount to espousing “a variety of conspiracy theories?”

During the past few months, I’ve begun wondering if I am doing more harm than good. Should I withdraw from the serious discussion about energy supplies and policies and save myself the angst? Or should I listen more carefully and find less offensive ways of sharing what I have learned about how one of the world’s largest and most impactful industries operates?

Will being nicer make it easier for people to pay attention to my serious thoughts and observations?

Recently, I chose to stop writing for Forbes. Some of our differences stemmed from a mistake that I made and corrected with a public apology.

The decision to sever our professional relationship, though, came when the editors decided that it was unfair and inaccurate for me to use the term “antinuclear” to describe a specific group of organizations.

The organizations that I lumped together as “antinuclear groups” were the signatories of the agreement with PG&E to close the Diablo Canyon Power Plant.

That agreement, known as the Joint Proposal, was signed by the following groups: International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, Coalition of California Utility Employees, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, California Energy Efficiency Industry Council and Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility.

Initially, my Forbes editor replaced “antinuclear” with “environmental” and then published the post. I pointed out that there were several organizations on the list that did not even make a pretense of being an environmental group. I made the case that “antinuclear” was a more accurate description of groups that have joined together to close a power plant that produces one fifth of California’s clean electricity.

When they decided to respond to my challenge by using the collective term “environmental and labor groups” suggested by PG&E press releases, I decided it was time for me to focus my communications efforts in other venues where accuracy is more valued.

It used to baffle me to find people who claim to be focused on protecting the environment fighting a power source with such an excellent environmental record.

It no longer confuses me. I’ve learned that the antinuclear movement was branded as “environmental” by skilled propagandists. They cleverly took advantage of the popularity of environmental causes and purchased the favor of group leaders by providing resources to increase their reach and influence.

Non profit group leaders with national level aspirations spend almost as large a fraction of their time raising funds as politicians do.

Oops, there I go again. I suppose I should work on breaking that darned habit of exposing “conspiracy” when talking about a logical business move to paint a competitor in a negative light.

Filed Under: Unreliables, Solar energy, Wind energy

Self-Described Antinuclear, Pro-Renewable Former Vermont Legislator Claims “We were angels, doing God’s work.”

November 21, 2017 By Rod Adams 7 Comments

Tony Klein, a former Vermont legislator who played an important role in Vermont energy law creation during the last decade, recently gave a fascinating talk at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Vermont. Fortunately for those of us with a deep interest in energy politics, the talk was competently recorded for posterity […]

Filed Under: Tony Klein, Antinuclear activist, Politics of Nuclear Energy, Solar energy, Unreliables, Vermont Yankee, Wind energy

Eduardo Porter says states that close nuclear are going in wrong direction for climate

January 20, 2017 By Rod Adams

In a recent New York Times column titled On Climate Change, Even States in Forefront Are Falling Short, Eduarto Porter begins by lauding California’s claimed position as a leader in environmental consciousness. He points to recent political statements by the state’s elected officials indicating they plan to stubbornly resist any Trump Administration efforts to interfere […]

Filed Under: Climate change, Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy

Three nuclear science deniers express their concerns about climate science denial

November 17, 2016 By Rod Adams 60 Comments

A major reason that climate change skepticism has captured a strong foothold in the United States is that many of climate activists are illogical and inconsistent. They profess grave concern about climate change and call it one of the greatest threats to human civilization on Earth. They adamantly refuse to critically consider the usefulness of […]

Filed Under: Climate change, rhetoric, Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy

NREL Study: Eastern Interconnect Would Strain If 30% Of Annual Electricity Was Solar And Wind

September 8, 2016 By Rod Adams 52 Comments

A high fidelity simulation of the North American Eastern Interconnect known as ERGIS–Eastern Renewable Generation Integration Study–indicates that the system could continue to function in the year 2026, even if as much as 30% of its annual electricity generation and consumption was produced using variable power sources like the wind and the sun. At the […]

Filed Under: 100% WWS, Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy

Atomic Show #252 – Security, Future of Energy, HEU

April 11, 2016 By Rod Adams Leave a Comment

On the evening of April 10, 2016, I met with two good friends and fellow nuclear energy bloggers for a wide ranging discussion about nuclear energy. We talked about the following topics: Nuclear energy’s role in the future of energy supplies Impact of the Nuclear Security Summits initiated by President Obama Demonization campaign being waged […]

Filed Under: Podcast, Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy

The Worth-It Threshold – When gas or gas + renewables is as bad for climate as a coal plant

April 9, 2016 By Guest Author 104 Comments

The following article dovetails nicely as support for several articles that are in the queue. Those articles will describe a global case of ill-advised groupthink about a future energy supply system consisting of unreliable wind and solar power generation. My interpretation is that the “100% renewables” goal is a seductive mirage that has been carefully […]

Filed Under: Climate change, Natural Gas, Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy

Defending FP&L from Tim Dickinson’s Rolling Stone hit piece

February 13, 2016 By Rod Adams 4 Comments

Tim Dickinson wrote a lengthy piece for Rolling Stone titled The Koch Brothers’ Dirty War on Solar Power: All over the country, the Kochs and utilities have been blocking solar initiatives — but nowhere more so than in Florida. Though the Koch Brothers got top billing in the headline for fairly obvious reasons, the real […]

Filed Under: Alternative energy, Solar energy

Another day, another model “proving” capabilities of weather-dependent power

January 28, 2016 By Rod Adams 46 Comments

On January 25, 2016 the NOAAnews (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency news) web site published a brief article with the following alluring headline: Rapid, affordable energy transformation possible NOAA, CIRES study: Wind, sun could eclipse fossil fuels for electric power by 2030 As the headline creator hoped, I couldn’t resist reading more. I was shocked, […]

Filed Under: 100% WWS, Alternative energy, Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy

Reliable partnership between natural gas and renewable energy

January 14, 2016 By Rod Adams 27 Comments

Naomi Oreskes is the Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is also the author of the December 16, 2015 opinion piece published in the Guardian titled There is a new form of climate denialism to look out for – so don’t celebrate yet. […]

Filed Under: Alternative energy, Natural Gas, Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy

Solar and wind tax credit extensions will put more nuclear plants at risk

December 18, 2015 By Rod Adams 117 Comments

Update: (Posted 4:40 pm December 18) It’s too late. The House and Senate passed the spending bills and went home for the holidays. Sorry to have been too late on this one; the several thousand page bill was just released a couple of days ago. It took a little time to read and understand the […]

Filed Under: Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy

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