Choosing to build new nuclear
power plants now is a decision to delay
any
impact on greenhouse production for at
least 10-20 years – later than 2030 –
because that is the minimum time to
bring even developed and tested nuclear
power plants onto the grid. It’s not
good enough. Going to an all-electric society
run from wind, water and solar power -
with
storage - is the fastest way to respond
to global warming and climate change.
Mark
Jacobson’s book No Miracles
Needed: How Today’s Technology Can
Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air, 2023,
Cambridge
University Press, explains how Wind,
Water and Solar power (WWS) -
with storage - can provide clean
electricity that can run everything in
modern
life – light, heat, air conditioning,
information, mobility and manufacturing.
He
shows that WWS solutions come at lower
cost, can be put in place faster and are
less vulnerable to terrorism or war than
big centralized power plants. The book
explains producing electricity by water,
wind turbines and solar power and how
they can be used, as well as explaining
things like electricity grids and
managing their stability. The chapter written on “why not”
for other energy sources like nuclear
and natural gas (mainly fracked gas)
presents strong arguments to go “clean”,
to WWS, for human health as well as for
global warming. Non-WWS sources involve
hidden needs like mining for uranium
fuel and finding a way to safely dispose
of the accumulating millennia-lasting
radioactive waste. There is the need for
on-going searching and fracking to keep
gas fuel available, and both nuclear
and fracking involve serious
environmental impacts. Fracking
creates vast amounts of
polluted wastewater that needs to be
safely disposed of without affecting
community
groundwater. Fracking also emits
greenhouse gases such as methane and
releases
toxic air pollutants. A
by-product of
the nuclear reaction is a plutonium
isotope necessary for making nuclear
weapons so that some suggest this
by-product might be a reason to justify
the
high cost and high risks of this energy
source. In the book, each “why not”
section more fully explains the problems
than my summary here. Indeed, this
book serves well as a reference work on
the science of the broad range of topics
it covers. Interestingly, the author reports
his own experiences in developing WWS on
his campus and his working with the
states of California and New York to
take
advantage of WWS for electricity
production. He reports that in recent
years electricity
utilities in several US states have
abandoned nuclear and natural gas
electricity
production in favour of Wind and Solar
because their costs have been falling. There have been mischievous claims
of a need for gas because the
electricity might go off in winter.
However, there is another “S” --
storage.
And batteries are available for home and
building owners, for example the “Tesla
Wall”. These can be combined with an
owner’s solar panels to automatically
supply power when the grid power fails.
And the wall stores solar power for the
owner. Nobel laureate economist Joseph
Stiglitz has written about using fracked
gas or nuclear power in circumstances
where nuclear power and fracking might
make sense that I found helpful for the
Ontario situation. He also has had
thoughts
on risks. I present his thoughts on both
topics below. Stiglitz’ on Use of Fracking and
Nuclear in 2022 Germany In Summer 2022
Stiglitz argued
that in a contingency the use of fracking
and of continuing use of existing
nuclear power was justified. In that year,
with the Russian war in Ukraine,
Germany needed to stop using Russian
natural gas. Stiglitz does not speak
favourably of either using fracking for
gas or using nuclear power. The
question of adding new nuclear power did
not arise given the long time always
necessary
for it to be brought on line. Adding
nuclear is similarly useless for Ontario
because it cannot be done before 2030 and
likely not by 2050. With a decision,
wind and solar - with storage - can be up
and running by 2030. Muula.ch
reports: “On the fringes
of a conference
the American Nobel Prize winner for
economics, Joseph Stiglitz, called for
pragmatic action to be taken at long last
in the energy crisis. He said
Germany, for example, must mobilize all
its reserves to avert supply bottlenecks: ‘Now
is not
the time for half-hearted measures,’ he
said in an interview with the German
newspaper WELT on
Thursday on the sidelines of the Nobel
Laureate Conference in Lindau. ‘Investing
billions in energy alternatives is not
enough,’ he added. ‘In the short term,’
he said, ‘Germany must also abandon its
reservations about nuclear power and
fracking technology.’ ‘The
good
thing about fracking is that it’s a
short-term measure that you can set up and
just as quickly stop,’ Stiglitz also said.
‘Nuclear energy is another option,’
he added. ‘I’m
not a fan
of this technology, but if you can keep
nuclear power plants running longer or
even bring back the ones that have been
shut down and still ensure safety, then
it makes perfect sense to do that now,’
the Nobel laureate stressed. At the same
time, however, the
top economist also advocated Germany’s
stepping up the pace on alternative
energy. ‘Countries should use all the
solar panels they can muster, and fire up
all the wind turbines they have,’ the
79-year-old continued.” The article
continues with
Stiglitz’ thoughts about lack of insurance
for the unexpected, but
interestingly ends: “On
the other
hand, he is critical of a state bailout of
companies that are on the verge of
going out of business because of high
energy prices. ‘I’m
actually against bailing out companies
that haven’t made adequate provision for
problems that were actually obvious,’
Stiglitz said. …” Nuclear Risk
Opinion Piece by
Joseph Stiglitz, Guardian April 2011 Under a
headline “Meltdown:
not Just a Metaphor” and “Vested interests cause
both our financial
system and the nuclear industry to
compulsively underestimate risk” Stiglitz wrote as follows: “The consequences
of the Japanese earthquake – especially
the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima
nuclear power plant – resonate grimly
for observers of the American financial
crash that precipitated the Great
Recession. Both events provide stark
lessons
about risks, and about how badly markets
and societies can manage them. “Of course, in one
sense, there is no comparison between
the tragedy of the earthquake – which
has
left more than 25,000 people dead or
missing – and the financial crisis, to
which no such acute physical suffering
can be attributed. But when it comes to
the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, there
is a common theme in the two events. “Experts in both
the nuclear and finance industries
assured us that new technology had all
but
eliminated the risk of catastrophe.
Events proved them wrong: not only did
the
risks exist, but their consequences were
so enormous that they easily erased all
the supposed benefits of the systems
that industry leaders promoted. “Before the Great
Recession, America's economic gurus –
from the head of the Federal Reserve to
the titans of finance – boasted that we
had learned to master risk. ‘Innovative’
financial instruments such as
derivatives and credit default swaps
enabled the
distribution of risk throughout the
economy. We now know that they deluded
not
only the rest of society, but even
themselves. “These wizards of
finance, it turned out, didn't understand
the intricacies of risk, let alone
the dangers posed by ‘fat-tail
distributions’ – a statistical term for
rare
events with huge consequences, sometimes
called ‘black swans’. Events that were
supposed to happen once in a century – or
even once in the lifetime of the
universe – seemed to happen every 10
years. Worse, not only was the frequency
of these events vastly underestimated; so
was the astronomical damage they
would cause – something like the meltdowns
that keep dogging the nuclear
industry. “Research in
economics and psychology helps us
understand why we do such a bad job in
managing these risks. We have little
empirical basis for judging rare events,
so it is difficult to arrive at good
estimates. In such circumstances, more
than wishful thinking can come into play:
we might have few incentives to think
hard at all. On the contrary, when others
bear the costs of mistakes, the
incentives favour self delusion. A system
that socialises losses and privatises
gains is doomed to mismanage risk. “Indeed, the entire
financial
sector was rife with agency problems and
externalities. Ratings agencies had
incentives to give good ratings to the
high-risk securities produced by the
investment banks that were paying them.
Mortgage originators bore no consequences for
their irresponsibility, and even those
who
engaged in predatory lending or created
and marketed securities that were
designed to lose did so in ways that
insulated them from civil and criminal
prosecution. “This brings
us to the next
question: are there other ‘black swan’
events waiting to happen? Unfortunately,
some of the really big risks that we
face today are most likely not even rare
events. The good news is that such risks
can be controlled at little or no
cost. The bad news is that doing so
faces strong political opposition – for
there
are people who profit from the status
quo. “We have seen
two of the big
risks in recent years, but have done
little to bring them under control. By
some accounts, how the last crisis was
managed may have increased the risk of a
future financial meltdown. “Too-big-to-fail
banks, and the
markets in which they participate, now
know that they can expect to be bailed
out if they get into trouble. As a
result of this moral hazard, these banks
can
borrow on favourable terms, giving them
a competitive advantage based not on
superior performance, but on political
strength. While some of the excesses in
risk-taking have been curbed, predatory
lending and unregulated trading in
obscure, over-the-counter derivatives
continue. Incentive structures that
encourage
excess risk-taking remain virtually
unchanged. “So, too, while
Germany has shut down its older nuclear
reactors, in the US and elsewhere, even
plants that have the same flawed design
as Fukushima continue to operate. The
nuclear industry's very existence is
dependent on hidden public subsidies –
costs borne by society in the event of
nuclear disaster, as well as the costs
of
the still-unmanaged disposal of nuclear
waste. So much for unfettered
capitalism! “For the planet,
there is one more risk, which, like the
other two, is almost a certainty:
global warming and climate change. If
there were other planets to which we
could move at low cost in the event of
the almost certain outcome predicted by
scientists,
one could argue that this is a risk
worth taking. But there aren't, so it
isn't. “The costs of
reducing emissions pale in comparison to
the possible risks the world faces.
And that is true even if we rule out the
nuclear option (the costs of which
were always underestimated). To be sure,
coal and oil companies would suffer,
and big polluting countries – like the
US – would obviously pay a higher price
than those with a less profligate
lifestyle. “In the end, those
gambling in Las Vegas lose more than
they gain. As a society, we are gambling
–
with our big banks, with our nuclear
power facilities, with our planet. As in
Las Vegas, the lucky few – the bankers
that put our economy at risk and the
owners
of energy companies that put our planet
at risk – may walk off with a mint. But
on average and almost certainly, we as a
society, like all gamblers, will lose. That, unfortunately,
is a lesson of Japan's disaster that we
continue to ignore at our peril.”