Three weeks ago I
wrote about the Weekly
Standard’spublication of an Amory Lovins anti-nuclear
tract represented a low point in lack of understanding about
nuclear power.
That record didn’t stand for long. This month the
Atlantic Monthly has topped everything with a
cover story by senior editor James Fallows, “Dirty Coal, Clean
Future.” This will probably stand as an all-time monument to the
American intelligentsia’s lack of
curiosity about nuclear energy.
Fallows, you may remember, started in the 1970s as a
Naderite before becoming President Jimmy Carter’s principal
speechwriter. Then blazing a trail that has become well worn, he
jumped ship and wrote an exposé of Carter’s ineptness. (It was he
who confirmed that Carter spent time scheduling the White House
tennis court.) In any event, Fallows landed on his feet, becoming a
senior editor at the Atlantic where he has reinvented
himself as an expert on computers, China’s economic development,
and flying his own airplane.
In all these years, however, Fallows has never quite lost
his 1970s mentality. Nor has he shed an annoying
Thomas-Friedmanesque habit of making points by dropping the name of
the latest high government official with whom he chatted. (Unlike
Friedman, he does spare us the details of what they were eating.)
Without these inflections, he probably never could have written the
8,000-word tome in which he tells us, “Sorry, folks, wind and solar
energy are never going to make it. We’re just going to have to live
with ‘clean coal’”:
To environmentalists “clean coal” is an insulting oxymoron.… But
for now, the only way to meet the world’s energy needs, and to
arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is
to use coal — dirty, sooty, toxic coal — in more sustainable
ways… because there is no plausible other way to meet what will be,
absent an economic and social cataclysm, the world’s unavailable
energy demands.
Is nuclear energy anywhere in sight? Fallows does mention
it four times, always in passing. The longest reference notes that
France has “much heavier reliance on nuclear power to generate
electricity. Nuclear plants are expensive and obviously create
waste-disposal problems, but they emit practically no greenhouse
gases.” This, however, appears in
parentheses and stands aside from the main argument.
Fallows has not the slightest curiosity or information about how
nuclear power is developing in the world, or what it is even
about.
Instead, Fallows is telling his equally uninformed
audience in the gentlest or manners that their dreams of a solar
and wind utopia are all forlorn. Quoting Robert Bryce’s
Power Hungry,he notes that,
despite all the subsidies and mandates we have pumped into wind and
solar construction, “the absolute increase in total electricity
produced by coal [between 1995 and 2008] was about 5.8 times as
great as the increase in wind and 823 times as great as the
increase from solar.” Even if wind and solar “doubles or triples,
the solutions we often hear the most about won’t come close to
meeting total demand.” Thus, coal is the future.
Even that is not really true. Without nuclear, we are
likely to go instead with natural gas. Drawing on recent
discoveries in shale formations, utilities have been building gas
plants as the course of least resistance. All this leaves us
tremendously vulnerable to rising gas prices, since the price of
fuel makes up 90 percent of the cost of gas-produced electricity —
as opposed to 25 percent in nuclear, where most of the expense is
in construction. Utility executives regard these gas investments as
extremely shortsighted, but what can you do? It’s the only thing
government and environmentalists will allow. California, which is
already ten years further down this road, gets 40 percent of its
electricity from natural gas, twice the national
average.
What defines Fallows’ argument, however, is his
extraordinary lack of understanding of what nuclear is about.
“[A]fter a century in which medial diagnosis and treatment,
computer and communications systems, aerospace and nanotech
industries, and nearly every other form of technology have
routinely achieved the magical,” he writes, “energy production is
essentially what it was in the time of James Watt. With the main
exception of nuclear-power plants and the hope-for future exception
of practical nuclear-fusion systems, we mostly create electricity
by burning something that was once underground - coal, oil [or]
natural gas.”
That’s like saying that, except for the invention of the
gasoline engine, we essentially drive around the country in the
same way we did in horse-and-buggy days.
Let’s talk a little science here. Burning coal or any kind
of combustion for that matter means transforming infinitesimally
small amount of matter into energy in the
electrons that surround the nucleus of
the atom. These transformations take place according to Einstein’s
formula, E = mc2. But the electrons make up only 0.01
percent of the mass of the atom. The remaining 99.99 percent is in
the nucleus. That means the energy we can draw out of the uranium
nucleus is 2 million times as much as we
can get from the same volume or weight of coal or any fossil
fuel.
Here’s what that looks like in everyday life. A
1,000-megawatt coal plant is fed by a mile-long, 100-car “unit
train” arriving at the plant every 30 hours. Coal now constitutes
more than half the country’s railroad freight. On the other hand,
refueling a 1,000-MW nuclear plant requires a fleet of six
tractor-trailers arriving at the plant with a new load of fuel rods
once every 18 months. Does that seem like
an improvement over James Watt?
Fallows discovers this in China but doesn’t grasp the
significance:
Another government energy expert in Beijing said that the only
serious limit on how fast Chinese power companies can increase
their use of coal is the capacity of the country’s transportation
system.… “Right now railroads are at capacity, you have entire
highways being blocked with coal trucks, and the problems cascade,”
[he said.] Part of the reason China has committed some $80 billion
over the next decade to build light-rail networks across the
country is to get human passengers off the main rail lines, opening
up more capacity to move coal.
In all these discussions with Chinese officials, however,
Fallows somehow never manages to discover that the Chinese are also
building 30 nuclear reactors — more than half the 55 under
construction in the world. Among them are four Westinghouse
AP1000s, a model for which our Nuclear Regulatory Commission has
not yet managed to approve the design.
China is building a whole “nuclear city” at Haiyan. It has
reverse-engineered the AP1000s and developed a reactor of its own
design. Within five years, China will probably join France, Russia,
Japan and Korea in marketing reactors around the world. At that
point, the worldwide
Nuclear Renaissance will kick into high gear.
All Fallows manages to discover in his many trips to
China, however, is a single experiment in sequestering coal
exhausts. He suggests the Chinese build more of these
for our benefit. We’ll provide the
research and they can build the actual plants, since environmental
opposition and bureaucratic lethargy make it impossible to build
anything in this country anymore. “China is where the
world’s ‘doing’ now goes on, in this industry and many others,”
Fallows concludes. “Power companies from America, Europe, and Japan
are fortunate to have a place to learn.” Indeed. We will also be
fortunate to have a place to buy as well.
In painting himself into this coal corner, Fallows
perfectly embodies a generation of Americans that came of age in
the 1970s and for whom the defeat of nuclear was a seminal event of
their lives. Since then they have relegated nuclear to a far corner
of the mind, embalmed in 1970s dogma. Except for Germany, though,
the rest of the world has overcome this fixation and is moving
ahead with nuclear. Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan,
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, South Africa,
Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia all have programs to build
reactors.
In a horrible sense, then, Fallows may be right. As the
dream of wind and solar energy turns out to be a fatuous illusion,
the U.S. may end up stuck with coal and natural gas for another
generation. At that point, the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese,
Russians, and French will rescue us by designing and building for
us nuclear reactors. It will be a humiliating outcome for the
country that invented the technology. It won’t be cheap,
either.
