Why does my (only) head still have hair, ...
Monday, January 10, 2022
... and where are all the exploding nuclear submarines?
"It is only on the premise that the environmentalist movement is truly driven by a concern for human well-being that its vehement attacks on carbon-based fuels (without which human life as we know it in the developed world would be impossible), its cavalier lack of any alternative plan, and its active opposition to proposed alternatives (whether real ones like nuclear or hydro, or fantasized ones like solar), make no sense." -- Keith Lockitch ("Energy Privation: The Environmentalist Campaign Against Energy" (2011, continued here) originally in Why Businessmen Need Philosophy)
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The only thing that surprises me about this disingenuous, cherry-picking op-ed against nuclear power is that it took so long for one to emerge from the bowels of the establishment media. The title just about says it all, when one keeps the above words in mind: "Nuclear Energy Backers Say It's Vital for the Fight Against Global Warming. Don't Be So Sure."
I don't have time to rebut the many obvious problems with this piece -- and Michael Shellenberger adroitly recaps and rebuts its general arc within the pages of Apocalypse Never, anyway -- but one little example with which I am more acquainted than average is worth considering.
In a piece that happily repeats many of the smears and innuendo against nuclear power that the press has happily doled out almost since its invention, Michael Hiltzik decides to use -- and I mean this figuratively -- the expertise of one Hyman Rickover, renowned as the father of America's nuclear navy:
Rickover abandoned any thought of using [early liquid sodium-cooled] reactors in his submarines. He determined them to be "expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shut down as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair," as he advised his Navy superiors and technical experts at the Atomic Energy Commission in late 1956 and early 1957.
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| Image by U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. |
I haven't studied the modern design Hiltzik wants to scare everyone away from, but: It strikes me as a very odd way of thinking for someone who plainly wants to "leave it in the ground" to basically dismiss nuclear energy on the grounds of a reactor design from over half a century ago that was rejected -- also over half a century ago on the grounds of safety.
Furthermore, the man who rejected that design found one that was and is safe, as attested by the longstanding, excellent safety record of the nuclear navy. Hiltzik says nothing about that, apparently hoping we have forgotten about it by the time we've finished his screed against the old sodium-cooled reactor design that nobody is using.
We're to assume that nobody has thought of any improvement to the old design, that it would be a rip-roaring success in a free market even if it were unsafe, and that if any reactor design is unsafe, they all are.
And I sit here, like many other ex-submariners, scratching the hair I somehow still have on my somehow still-only head, at the willful evasion of someone who is somehow employed as a business columnist -- over a quarter of a century after I walked within feet of a running nuclear reactor on a daily basis over the course of several years.
Hiltzik doesn't actually indulge the cartoonish fantasies about "mutations" and exploding reactors that are a staple of popular culture, but I am sure he knows that many in his audience hold only slightly-less farcical preconceptions about nuclear power. (For example, Shellenberger notes that many people believe that a reactor can explode like a bomb, even though that is impossible.)
In any event, even if these things were true, since billions of people would die without access to reliable energy and recent troubles in Texas and Europe would seem to indicate that "renewables" aren't ready to take the load, Hiltzik's fixation on the alleged danger and unprofitability of nuclear power seems ... off ... to say the least.
Perhaps Hiltzik, rather than using Rickover's words to scare people, could try learning from his accomplishments. And that's just regarding safety. The news media, having scaremongered the public and officialdom into basically criminalizing nuclear power have thereby also made it inordinately expensive to deploy. But that's also a post for another day
Talk about "reporting on the problem you create," to borrow a very apt expression...
-- CAV
3 comments:
Yo, Gus, thanks, I guess, for linking to that editorial; my digestion was a bit poorly, but the stomach acids are flowing freely after reading that. I think you're unfair to it on one point: The author introduced all that bit about sodium-cooled reactors to attack a design being tested, so it's not entirely out of left field. However, it's the usual farrago of anti-nuke lies and Gish-gallops, such as quoting Amory Lovins favorably, always a bad sign.
To the extent that lot is right about the economics of nuclear power, it is of course primarily due to the fact that it's such a highly regulated industry. However, making this point when the anti-nuke side is relying on Lovins and his epigones would require a good deal of ground-clearing, but it would certainly be welcome because it's a complicated subject readily misunderstood or misrepresented. (One example from my own experience was digging down into the sources to check the claim, by Paul Ehrlich I think, that Sweden was a perfect example of how wasteful the US is in energy because it has half the US energy use per capita. Turns out if you go to the very source he quoted, there were two basic reasons for this: First, Sweden is a fairly small country and the US is very large, so the energy accounting for the US includes a large amount of petroleum used in transportation, and second, because of Sweden's mountainous terrain and much smaller population, hydroelectric provided something like half the electric generation of the country. Once you exclude these two categories, the two nations are almost the same in energy use or such per capita--though it depends a bit on whether you use purchasing power parity or not. However, this was decades ago and I can't be more specific on the details.)
It doesn't help that antinukes are essentially secularly religious puritans who hate the Satan of nuclear power with a magical-worldview passion. You can see this in the weird failure of Lovins to recognize what base load power means in that link above, or just as plausibly, his refusal to--I don't give him any benefit of the doubt after digging into some of his nonsense a couple of decades ago. While not as grotesque as Helen Caldicott and her despicable ilk, he's little more reliable. (In case you've forgotten Caldicott, as the antinukes now wish you would, she was the pediatrician who paraded pictures of deformed children in the claim that the deformities were due to nuclear power, and who was the toast of the antinuke movement until George Monbiot raked her sourcing over the coals, after which she was very very quietly memory-holed by the same groups that formerly didn't consider her a public liability--but all he did was the same thing her non-antinuke critics had already done, so while his accomplishment is praiseworthy, it merely shows that we pronukes were right and the antinukes were, as pretty much always, not just wrong but secularly religiously guided, and it was only when a prestigious member in good standing of their own church held her up for public castigation that pronuke criticisms were quietly ushered in the back door.)
And furthermore! Heh. Part of why Lovins' Gish-gallop succeeds, besides energy economics being a complicated subject, is that many people don't like numbers. Like this comment at the link about Lovins. It's quite solid and easy to understand, at least if you've looked into the subject, but it makes many people's eyes glaze over. These are simple incontrovertible physical facts that the antinuke sun worshippers and wind lovers dance around or evade, and it is in (and by) providing superficially plausible choreography of this dance that Lovins and his epigones excel.
And I was pleased to see this point in the comments that antinukes, sun worshippers, wind lovers, and biomass emission enthusiasts avoid and that isn't made enough of: The argument that storage makes wind power useful or even competitive is specious. Wind power advocates confound generation, storage and distribution to cover up the simple fact that wind is poor at generation. Electricity from any source can be stored just the same. Massive storage would be a boon to the nuclear power industry, so much so that no other source would be needed. If I have a black box that can store truly massive amounts of electricity (say enough for a city of 1 million for one month), I will charge it using a nuclear power plant because that is the best way to generate large amounts of electricity in the first place.
Quite so. Nuclear offers the most concentrated energy source currently available to humans. That is the fundamental reason for its desirability, and why it manages to remain economically viable despite the best efforts of antinukes to hound it to death with specious regulatory delays, monkey-wrenching at every turn, and a massive campaign of slime and lies. Solar is the most diffuse energy source, and thus would require insane amounts of material inputs were it to do more than (quite usefully) fill many niches (note that while the antinukes have a superstitious fear of nuclear power, I appreciate all forms of energy in proper measure)--and a tiny proportion of the materials needed to make solar and wind marginally viable under the most generous assumptions compatible with simple physical law would be much better invested in the same measures as part of improving a nuclear-based electric power system.
(I always want to ask antinukes why radioactive substances, which lose toxicity over time [decaying to the level of radioactivity of the fuel ores originally processed after about 300 years, depending on certain factors], are so much worse than eternally toxic materials like the mind-boggling amounts of selenium, tellurium, and so on that solar power would probably require--and which, unlike spent nuclear wastes fused into glass and buried underground, would be open to the elements under a much thinner sheet of glass, and which would have to be refashioned [and who knows what leaks might eventuate then?] or dumped in a landfill after ten or twenty or thirty years: You know, less time than a nuclear power plant is in operation. Note for the humor/irony-impaired: I'm not scare-mongering. That's not a major concern in my view and shouldn't be considered as such. But by antinuke standards that would be enough to condemn sun worshippers as genocidal, ecocidal psychopathic sociopaths. Their positions only come across as not utterly insane because they refuse to take a truly comprehensive, fully inclusive view of all the material inputs and outputs and all the factors involved.)
Snedcat,
Thanks for the additional comments.
I don't think I'm being at all unfair to Hiltzik, but I may have been unclear. He reads like he's equating the sodium-cooled reactor a company is trying to commercialize now with the design Rickover tried and abandoned. I am no engineer, but surely the new design is superior in some way to what was tried back then. In any event, his reporting is heavily biased against nuclear power, which is really odd for someone supposedly worried about the world being close to an end because of fossil fuels. Surely there would be more of an effort to find a redeeming quality...
Gus
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