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Books in Review
Nuclear Recovery
(This review appears in the December 2008/January 2009 issue of The American Spectator.)
Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green
Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey
By William Tucker
(Bartleby Press, 420 pages, $27.50)
ONE CLEAR MEASURE OF of nuclear power’s rising fortunes is that both presidential candidates this year came out in favor of harnessing the power of the atom to address our nation’s energy and environmental challenges. It wasn’t too long ago that politicians avoided talking about nuclear energy, or if they did, it was to call for shutting down the nation’s fleet of reactors. Times are certainly changing. John McCain called for building 45 new reactors. Barack Obama claimed to be for nuclear power as well, though he did say he doesn’t “think it’s our optimal energy source.” Still, that’s a big concession from the nominee of a party that largely takes its cues from decidedly anti-nuke environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace.
Someone who does think nuclear power is our optimal energy source, and the answer to all our energy and environmental problems, is veteran journalist (and American Spectator contributor) William Tucker. Tucker has emerged as a true evangelist with his book Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey. The book’s premise is simple: “The only way we are ever going to supply ourselves with enough energy while reducing our carbon emission is through a revival of nuclear power.” Addressing longtime fears about this strange technology, he notes, “Nuclear power is a perfectly natural phenomenon, as natural as the warmth in the ground beneath our feet.”
Powerfully written, Terrestrial Energy is a remarkably accessible book that should convert any number of skeptics with its pro-nuclear sermon. However, its strength lies not in the zeal this preacher brings, but in the dispassionate way he makes the case for nuclear in the context of all our energy options. More than just filing a brief for nuclear power, Terrestrial Energy really offers a first-rate primer on energy.
Almost all the conventional energy sources we employ are forms of solar power, Tucker notes, including fossil fuels. When we burn coal and oil, we unlock stored solar energy that originally rained down from the sun. Or we can “turn to a variety of technologies that tap the sun’s rays directly or draw on physical processes driven by the sun’s heat,” like solar panels and windmills.
Nuclear power is different. The energy source comes not from the sun, but from deep within the earth (hence the title). “There is one great difference between terrestrial energy and solar energy,” writes Tucker, “and that is the energy density. Terrestrial energy is far more concentrated--by a factor of about two million.”
This can have dangerous possibilities--just one gram of matter was turned into the energy that annihilated Hiroshima. But it also offers an almost boundless opportunity to provide the energy humanity needs at a time when we are accustomed to think of our resources as limited. Tiny amounts of material and land can generate enormous volumes of power, without pollution or greenhouse gas emissions.
Compare that to the environmental footprint of other “clean” technologies. Tucker describes one cutting-edge thermal solar project in Spain as “a remarkably futuristic 30-story structure that looks like a giant carpenter’s level stuck the ground after arriving from outer space. The facility uses 136 acres to generate 11 MW.” That's not much power for a lot of land. Extrapolate from that, and “to get 1,000 MW--an average commercial plant--it would have to cover twenty square miles.” Photovoltaic solar panels are worse; they would need 50 square miles. For all those Greens who talk of the virtually limitless resources of the sun, Tucker points out that “land, after all, is also a limited resource.”
Wind is hardly better, similarly requiring large tracts of land. Plus, it doesn’t always blow, meaning that windmills generate electricity no more than 30 percent of the time. You couldn’t power the grid solely on wind, writes Tucker. Wind may be able to play a marginal role in our energy economy--energy expert and Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens says that, in a perfect world, wind might supply as much as 20 percent of our electricity. But that’s an optimistic assessment, and no one thinks wind is anything more than a partial contributor to our energy solutions. At bottom, writes Tucker, wind “remains a medieval technology.”
Tucker ably dispatches the fuzzy thinking that has muddied our energy and environmental debates for decades. A particular target is environmental guru Amory Lovins, father of the “soft energy” movement, who thinks we can jettison fossil fuels and nukes and instead power the economy on efficiency and windmills and solar panels. Lovins’s influence is outsized; he is almost singularly responsible for California’s refusal to build any new power plants during the 1990s, even though demand kept rising. Result? The rolling blackouts in 2000 and 2001 that made California a laughingstock and helped bounce governor Gray Davis. Tucker eviscerates Lovins for peddling a doctrine that conveniently ignores elemental facts about where we get our energy from and what we use it for.
A THOROUGH JOURNALIST, Tucker travels the globe to get to the bottom of the 21st-century energy story. He visits coal plants in Ohio as well as nuclear reactors in France (a country that produces 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power). His journalistic sense of fairness leads him to seek an interview with Lovins. This is where Terrestrial Energy takes on a “Roger and Me” quality, as Lovins won’t talk to him and is conveniently absent when Tucker treks all the way to his Snowmass, Colorado home. The account is hilarious, as is Tucker’s chance meeting with celebrity New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. The author of several bestselling books on global economic trends, Friedman holds considerable sway on energy and environmental topics. Yet Tucker exposes Friedman as fundamentally unserious for his abrupt dismissal of nuclear power.
Despite the evident benefits of nuclear power, it’s the downside that has made Americans hesitant since Three Mile Island (TMI) and Chernobyl. Tucker addresses those worries, noting the heroic reforms undertaken by the nuclear industry to instill a culture of safety after TMI (a not-very-serious accident that served as a dramatic wake-up call). He also calls out extremist environmentalist claims that any amount of radiation is dangerous. “If swallowing 100 aspirins will kill 100 out of 100 people,” Tucker notes, “that does not mean taking 2 aspirin will kill 2 people. Clearly there are thresholds below which the body’s defenses can deal with an environmental insult.”
The public (and our politicians) is slowly coming to the conclusion that we should build new nuclear power plants to address our energy and climate change challenges. Kudos to Tucker for showing why we can, and why we should.
(This review appears in the December 2008/January 2009 issue of The American Spectator.)
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William Selenke| 12.19.08 @ 11:11AM
There are a number of pilot plants which use heat to convert biological matter especially cellulose into CO , which can be converted to ethanol by bacteria, methanol and biofuels by coal gasification process.
Some 40 percent of garbage is plain paper. 35 percent of hardwood is made into short lived pallets which are discarded. There are large wind falls such as now troubling New England from the ice. Transfer the waste 900 degree heat the now is made into steam to close by facility plants and convert the vast amounts of cellulose and biological waste into useful forms of liquid fuel.
L. Ross| 12.19.08 @ 12:33PM
Thank goodness. Some common sense, as opposed to the uneducated hysteria that is so common regarding atomic energy.
I think that if most people understood, in their hearts as well as their minds, that our sun is an unshielded fusion reactor, they might begin to change their attitudes to nuclear power. We are constantly bombarded by nuclear radiation. Radiation from the sun, from the water, from the ground. Ever heard of radon? Big problem in the midwest. That is radioactive gas that seeps out of the ground. As they made midwest houses more weather tight, the actually had radon build up problems. For Pete's sake, the reason we have a molten core is decaying radioactive elements.
I'm not saying that radiation isn't a concern, but it is a manageable problem. What is unfortunate is that international treaties currently outlaw the best, least expensive, and safest form of dealing with nuclear waste. I'm talking deep, sub sea burial. Using deep oil drilling technology, we can bury our nuclear waste under hundreds of feet of clay, then repack the clay on top. Under thousands of feet of salt water, hundreds of miles from shore, next stop for the waste is back to the earths core in 10 million years. No freswater contamination, no possibility of terrorists making off with it, not in anyone's back yard.
We need to renegotiat those treaties.
dgdc| 12.19.08 @ 1:10PM
Burying nuclear waste, whether in a nevada mine or tossing it in the ocean, is a terrible idea. Not only are you sweeping the problem under the carpet (usually someone elses carpet), which will come back to haunt you sooner than you expect, but your throwing away most of the energy.
The toughest part is the concentration of fissible material to a point where stimulated decay can be self sustaining. So why throw it out once its barely been used. Breeder reators not only eliminate most of the waste problem but also can run on more fuel types. The molten salt reactors look the most promising.
Frank Natoli| 12.19.08 @ 2:26PM
Nature abhors a vacuum. Ergo, the vacuum created by the atheism of the political left has been naturally filled by a perfectly equivalent worship of the environment. And the priests and priestesses of the political left long ago decided that nuclear power was sinful. Tucker and Schulz choose to commit and/or endorse heresy against the church of the environment, and will be burned at the stake in due course.
The vast majority of people who "know" that nuclear power is "bad" couldn't tell the difference between U-235, U-238 and that rock group from Ireland. Those same people would probably suggest that "critical mass" was something that happens at Catholic churches on Sunday when the priest is complaining.
Back in the year when both "The Deer Hunter" and "The China Syndrome" were up for best picture Oscar, Jane Fonda was interviewed, twice. Regarding "The Deer Hunter", Hanoi Jane bitterly complained that the film was "not historically accurate" and therefore should be shunned and certainly not considered for best picture. Regarding "The China Syndrome", separate interview, Hanoi Jane was asked "physicists have noted that the events in 'The China Syndrome' are contrary to the laws of nature, how do you respond to that", and Hanoi Jane responded "I didn't make a documentary".
So, you see, pigs will fly long before any nuclear power renaissance occurs in the U.S. of A. And you can thank the church of the environment, and every member of the congregation, and the majority of voters last November 4th, for that.
ccc| 12.19.08 @ 4:36PM
Plenty of people live fine and happy lives without religion, gods, or other superstitions; nobody lives without a decent environment. So I'd rather be cautious about making signifcant changes to the life support systems.
What will hold up nuclear devlopment is teaching creationist fairy tales to the next generation, how do you calculate the half life of a radionucleotide if the mandated assumption is the sample can't be more than 10000 years old.
Frank Natoli| 12.19.08 @ 7:36PM
"Plenty of people live fine and happy lives without religion, gods, or other superstitions."
Every time I see that, I recall that the most prolific killers of the 20th century were atheistic states, Chinese, Soviet, Vietnamese, Cambodian and North Korean Communists and German National Socialists. Powerful central government, without the conscience of answering to an all just and all knowing Creator, at the minimum correlates with something very different from "fine and happy lives", and arguably is causal.
In any case, my point is that environmentalism is a religion, a matter of faith, devoid of and often antagonistic to science.
malm| 12.19.08 @ 8:59PM
The truth is those bible thumpers never really bugged me much at all. Those churchy green wanna poke their little noses into everything I do. I live in Rhode Island in the Brown University, and RISD area. You actually do not have to go out and about much to see a Smart Car or two believe it our not. The people I see driving them seem sane, but I'm guessing between their ears are some confused brains. But, well they got the power right now. The kind of power that will make sure I won"t have enough energy power to live a simple, quiet existence. My wife works in a hospital. Does Obama or Pelosi or any of em have a clue how much juice it takes to run a hospital ? Nope. Imagine a brownout when you are inside an MRI machine ? Stuck in there till the wind starts to blow again, sounds like fun. Why won"t some group make a commercial showing that scenario? It is no dopier than what the greens are pushing. The average American will get in then. Never will they read Mr. Tucker's treatise. We must learn to compete for the hearts and minds of the boobocracy. Just reality that must be faced. So let us raise some money and run such spots. Get Harry and Louise back in the public eye. Poor Louise stuck in the MRI tube, old Harry running around trying to do something. Some iron faced bureaucrat saying Harry can't sue cause the government owns healthcare now. It might penetrate a few boob skulls, this approach.
Shooter| 12.20.08 @ 11:28AM
I am 100% percent in favor of clean, safe, reliable, nuclear energy. What I fail to understand is why the nuclear industry does not mount a massive public relations campaign to convince the public of nuclear energy's benefits. Is it a lack of brains, money or both?
Can someone please explain?
Frank Natoli| 12.20.08 @ 4:03PM
"What I fail to understand is why the nuclear industry does not mount a massive public relations campaign to convince the public of nuclear energy's benefits."
You are assuming that we live in a rational world, where the majority of people carefully assemble a complete set of facts, analyze those facts, and arrive at a reasoned conclusion. It is my observation that an infinitesimal fraction of our neighbors and friends have the slightest idea how they arrived at a given conclusion.
In the mathematics world, there are "postulates" and there are "theorems". Postulates are concepts that are accepted a priori. Theorems are proven on the basis of lower level postulates or other theorems. A "good" number system has a minimum of postulates. It is my observation that most people's beliefs are a very large set of postulates and for all intents and purposes zero theorems. Everything is believed as a matter of faith, not science, not rational proofs.
Will Rogers once said "it isn't what the American people don't know that worries me; it's what they do know that isn't true that worries me".
That might as well be the epitaph for America.
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