[Peace-discuss] Renewables Sorely Missing from Nuclear Power Debate

[C. G. Estabrook]

Renewables Sorely Missing from Nuclear Power Debate
By: David Dayen Wednesday March 16, 2011 12:16 pm

Given the people who run things in America at this stage, I’m not convinced that 
any kind of catastrophe coming out of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will 
force a rethink about the wisdom of nuclear power generation. Listen to this 
tool from Third Way spinning like a top about the situation in Japan, with very 
little knowledge that I can see other than who signs his paycheck:

"Josh Freed: When nuclear goes wrong, it goes wrong big. Though what that means 
aside from a lot of white-knuckle days and nights for everyone, we don’t know 
yet. One shouldn’t minimize the dangers faced by the workers, but even something 
as catastrophic as the disaster in Japan might turn out to be a lot less 
catastrophic in terms of damage and loss of life than we fear right now.

"And you have to weigh that against the health, environmental impact and 
assorted other costs of the fossil fuels we rely on every day. And if, like most 
people, you think climate change is happening and poses a massive threat, you 
have to ask what options we have. Right now, 65 to 68 percent of our electricity 
is coal or natural gas. Twenty percent is nuclear. And the remaining 12 percent 
is renewables. Now, the renewables are certainly growing, but it’s going to take 
a long, long time to get them to scale such that they can make a big dent in 
fossil fuels, let alone replace them. And they still require some kind of 
corresponding baseload fuel to provide the electricity for when they’re not 
running. So for a source that doesn’t emit carbon or other pollutants that 
contribute to health problems, the other source you have is nuclear."

Allow me to call bullshit. You do not have to weigh the costs of nuclear power 
against the health and environmental impact of fossil fuels. You have to weigh 
it against the costs of all other energy alternatives. And given that, it comes 
up well short. The defenders of the nuclear industry want to construct a world 
where the only choices for energy are coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear. That’s 
just an absolute falsehood. But, they say, actual clean energy like solar and 
wind and geothermal and tidal is too costly. What do you call an industry that 
requires $54 billion in loan guarantees from the government to construct any 
plants? And with the EPA finally getting around to pricing externalities of 
other power generation, at least indirectly, the cost argument is a giant red 
herring.

As for this conceit that you’ll still need other fuel sources in a renewable 
world: tell it to the researchers:

"For a long time, the argument that the world could wean itself off both fossil 
fuels and atomic energy was confined to earnest green groups. Last month, the 
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released a 250-page report on how to get there by 
2050. The roadmap starts with wringing out the enormous amount of waste energy 
from our industrial processes, buildings, and transportation systems. (That 
means everything from better insulation for homes to boosting recycling in, say, 
the paper industry). After that, our power would come from a variety of 
renewable sources, from sustainably harvested biomass to concentrated solar 
plants (which, in theory, can store power even when the sun isn’t shining) to 
acres and acres of wind turbines. It would be costly and difficult, sure, but 
technically feasible if everything went right [...]

"…a report by environmentalists isn’t going to convince everyone we don’t need 
nuclear energy. So, late last year, two engineering professors, Mark Jacobson of 
Stanford and Mark Delucchi of University of California Davis, published two 
papers in Energy Policy offering their own detailed analysis of how the world 
could get 100 percent of its electricity from existing renewables—mostly solar 
and wind—by 2050. The task would be staggering. We would need nearly four 
million five-megawatt wind turbines—i.e., turbines twice as big as those 
currently on the market. (China just built its first five-megawatter last year.) 
Plus 90,000 large-scale solar farms—for reference, there are only about three 
dozen in existence now. Plus 1.7 billion three-kilowatt rooftop solar 
systems—that is, one for every four people on the planet. But it’s doable. The 
main challenge, the authors found, would be mining enough rare-earth metals—like 
neodymium—for all those electric motors. So, again, mind-blowingly hard, but 
it’s at least possible to go carbon-free without nuclear (or algae). What’s 
more, the world wouldn’t have to pay that much more for energy than it does today."

I’m sure you could tally up all the fossil fuel plants operating today and write 
a paper from the perspective of 40 years ago with a bunch of big numbers showing 
how impossible it would be to serve the world’s energy needs.

The point is that this should generally be the goal. In fact, there’s one 
country where it is the goal – Germany, which has an official policy of moving 
to 100% renewables by 2050. When Matt Yglesias bemoans Germany taking their 
nuclear plants offline (ones they planned to decommission by 2020 anyway) by 
saying “if what was happening here is that the German government was announcing 
a visionary plan to transform Europe to a renewable energy utopia, I’d be 
clapping,” he’s just woefully misinformed. They are. And we all should be 
clapping, instead of covering for the nuclear industry because they over time 
kill less people, one catastrophe or two notwithstanding.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/03/16/renewables-sorely-missing-from-nuclear-power-debate/