Environmental Greats Debate Nuclear Power

Dur­ing the dis­cus­sion, Brune explains that the Sier­ra Club believes that nuclear ener­gy projects are too expen­sive and can­not be imple­ment­ed quick­ly enough to make the kind of dif­fer­ence that is nec­es­sary to pre­vent cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change. He claims that wind and solar costs have dropped far enough in the past four years that those tech­nolo­gies are replac­ing fos­sil fuel and help­ing to reduce the US emis­sions of CO2 to its low­est lev­el since 1992.

Brune also appeals to author­i­ty by point­ing to War­ren Buffett’s Mid Amer­i­can Ener­gy deci­sion to stop inves­ti­gating the poten­tial of build­ing a small mod­u­lar reac­tor in Iowa in favor of con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of its wind ener­gy portfolio.

Aside: Brune left out a few details, but we’ll get back to that lat­er. End Aside.

Robert Stone chal­lenged the Sier­ra Club’s posi­tion by explain­ing that wind and solar ener­gy pro­vide a small por­tion of the world’s ener­gy and by mak­ing the state­ment that US emis­sions have fall­en because we have replaced coal with nat­ur­al gas, not because we have start­ed pro­duc­ing mass quan­ti­ties of elec­tric­i­ty with wind or solar. He describes how man­u­fac­tur­ing and mass pro­duc­tion can be used to dri­ve down the cost of any tech­nol­o­gy, includ­ing nuclear tech­nol­o­gy, but that we cur­rent­ly have an expen­sive nuclear option because we have not been build­ing nuclear plants for more than 30 years.

Stone points out that the world’s ener­gy demands are increas­ing every year and that wind and solar growth is not even cov­er­ing the growth in ener­gy demand. Accord­ing to Stone, a deci­sion to avoid using nuclear ener­gy inher­ent­ly results in a deci­sion to con­tin­ue using as much fos­sil fuel as we do today, with all of the neg­a­tive impli­ca­tions that has on the risk of steady dam­age to the earth’s cli­mate sta­bil­i­ty.

Stone did a good job, even though he made an incor­rect state­ment about Cher­nobyl unit 4. It was not a crazy, one off plant, there were 17 sim­i­lar RBMK reac­tors built in Rus­sia, Lithua­nia, and Ukraine. Rus­sia is still oper­at­ing 11 RMBK reac­tors and recent­ly decid­ed to extend their allowed peri­od of oper­a­tion. The design can be oper­at­ed safe­ly; it is not inher­ent­ly unstable.

In fact, there was a time when light water-cooled, graphite-mod­er­at­ed reac­tors were pro­duced inside the US. The last one, Hanford’s N Reac­tor, includ­ed some design fea­tures that were sim­i­lar to those of the Sovi­et-designed RBMKs. At one time, that reactor’s dual use capa­bil­i­ties were so pop­u­lar that Pres­i­dent Kennedy vis­it­ed Han­ford and gave a speech prais­ing its abil­i­ty to pro­vide for both nation­al secu­ri­ty and elec­tri­cal pow­er. The N Reac­tor was shut­down for refur­bish­ment in 1987 and nev­er restart­ed. That deci­sion was dri­ven by pres­sure from peo­ple who point­ed out its design sim­i­lar­i­ties to Cher­nobyl; the plant’s own­er and oper­a­tor, the US Depart­ment of Ener­gy (DOE), appar­ent­ly decid­ed to allow the reac­tor to fade qui­et­ly into history.

Michael Brune is a capa­ble debater whose points make him vul­ner­a­ble to addi­tion­al challenges.

If giv­en the chance, I would point out that War­ren Buf­fett has invest­ed a lot more mon­ey into coal and coal-relat­ed trans­porta­tion com­pa­nies than he is into wind — and the Sier­ra Club knows it.

I’d also men­tion how orga­ni­za­tions like Beyond Nuclear have claimed cred­it — and stat­ing that they received help from Sier­ra Club, AARP, Friends of the Earth, and Green State Solu­tions — for dis­cour­ag­ing Mid Amer­i­can from con­tin­u­ing its involve­ment in SMRs. They claim that it was an “envi­ron­men­tal vic­to­ry” enabled by three years worth of focused lob­by­ing and activism designed to ensure that the Iowa leg­is­la­ture main­tains the cur­rent lim­i­ta­tions that pre­vent con­struc­tion work in progress pay­ments by elec­tric­i­ty rate payers.

I’d remind Brune that Sier­ra Club might have stopped tak­ing mon­ey from nat­ur­al gas com­pa­nies like Chesa­peake Ener­gy, but there is no record of them hav­ing giv­en back the $25 mil­lion that the orga­ni­za­tion accept­ed from Chesa­peake for its Beyond Coal cam­paign. The Sier­ra Club has been deeply involved in the effort by the gas indus­try to mar­ket its prod­uct as “clean” even though it is at least half as dirty as coal, espe­cial­ly when the risk of fugi­tive methane releas­es and dam­age from rur­al indus­tri­al­iza­tion from hydraulic frac­tur­ing (track­ing) is includ­ed in the calculations.

The Sier­ra Club once sup­port­ed nuclear ener­gy devel­op­ment and even ran a cam­paign called Atoms, not Dams. As James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Ker­ry Emanuel and Tom Wigley said in their now famous open let­ter to envi­ron­men­tal­ists, it is time to go back to that 1960s vin­tage posi­tion. The fate of the planet’s cli­mate rests on coor­di­nat­ed action to remove the bar­ri­ers that con­tribute to mak­ing nuclear ener­gy “uneco­nom­ic” and help make nuclear projects take too darned long. With the kind of coor­di­nat­ed sup­port that wind and solar have received, it is quite pos­si­ble for many of the world’s devel­oped nations to repli­cate the twen­ty to thir­ty year tran­si­tion away from fos­sil fuels in pow­er and heat gen­er­a­tion that the French, Swedes, Swiss, Ver­mon­ters and South Car­olini­ans have all demon­strat­ed is possible.

His­tor­i­cal Note: The Sier­ra Club’s sup­port for nuclear ener­gy in the late 1960s result­ed in a rift with­in the orga­ni­za­tion, which at one time had both nuclear engi­neers and oil com­pa­ny exec­u­tives on its board of direc­tors. The rift result­ed in David Brow­er, one of the lead­ers of the orga­ni­za­tion, get­ting fed up with the nuclear advo­cates. He left to form Friends of the Earth, a group that has been adamant­ly opposed to the devel­op­ment of nuclear ener­gy since its ini­tial incep­tion in 1969.

That new group was enabled with an ini­tial $200,000 con­tri­bu­tion from Robert Ander­son, the CEO of Atlantic Rich­field Com­pa­ny (ARCO), an oil and gas com­pa­ny that is now a part of BP. Soon after Brow­er left and demon­strat­ed the mon­ey rais­ing poten­tial of oppo­si­tion to nuclear ener­gy, the Sier­ra Club became anti­nu­clear. So did most of the oth­er peren­ni­al­ly under­fund­ed groups advo­cat­ing for the envi­ron­ment. End his­to­ry note.

PS: The nature of Inter­net adver­tis­ing ensures that each view­er has the poten­tial to receive a dif­fer­ent sequence of ads. How­ev­er, I was bemused by my expe­ri­ence. At the end of the debate, the bots decid­ed to show me an ad that end­ed with the tag line “Shale: The Pow­er To Do It Right.” It asked view­ers to vis­it a site called energyfromshale.org. That ad was spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Institute.