Off to Paris
I apologize for not posting here for awhile. I guess this is starting to look like one of those “abandoned blogs” before it even gets started. My excuse is I have been editing the final draft of the book, which is now on schedule to come out in late August / early September. Bartleby Press is doing a great job of rushing it into production. They just chose a cover last week that is a beautiful picture of a pair of cooling towers standing next to a wheat field. In fact there are a lot of pictures like that. We also have one of a pair of towers almost in the middle of a vineyard in France. You can do that with nuclear because it doesn’t have to be surrounded by the mountains of coal you get at a coal plant. You do get “emissions” with a cooling tower, however. My 18-year-old son (who’s a big Obama fan) looked at the picture and said, “But Dad, you’ve still got pollution coming out of those towers.” I had to explain. “Dylan, that’s steam. It’s not carbon dioxide. The thin little wisps of smoke you see coming out of a cooling tower is just water vapor. There’s nothing bad about it.” It’s a distinction that a lot of people find hard to make - including me sometimes. I noticed this at the Zimmer coal plant in Ohio, near Cincinnati. It’s sort of a landmark in America’s energy saga because in 1985 it was 95 percent completed as a nuclear reactor. Cincinnati Gas & Electric had already sunk several billion dollars into it when they decided they would never be able to get an operating license. In those days the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would make you tear apart a reactor and insert some new safety development every time something was invented. And of course there were public protests since everybody was still traumatized by Three Mile Island. Anyway, they switched it to coal and now it puts out its obligatory CO2 and other by-products. It’s a very “clean” coal plant in that most of the sulfur and ash are precipitated or scrubbed out. The smoke is also white but it’s a very dense white, not the cirrus-cloud transparency of steam. I also found the people at the plant who have experience with nuclear all hate Zimmer and with they were working at a reactor - but that’s a different story. It’s in the book.
And while we’re on the subject of the book, I would suggest since this book won’t be out until August you go right now to Gwyneth Cravens’ website and check out her book, Power to Save the World (what a beautiful title), which came out in October. (www.powertosavetheworld.com). Gwyneth is a skilled writer with seven novels under her belt who actually protested the Shoreham Nuclear Reactor on Long Island in the 1980s - generally considered the very nadir of nuclear’s long history. She’s from New Mexico, however, and while visiting her family one time had a chance encounter with a leading nuclear scientist from Los Alamos. He surprised her by defending nuclear and ended up taking her on a long, eight-year Dante-like trip through the country’s nuclear infrastructure. Little by little she realized the truth about nuclear (that’s the subtitle of the book) and has written a beautiful account of her gradual conversion. She’s now touring the country giving speeches and making some headway. None of this is going to happen fast. People will be won over one by one.
So what does any of this have to do with Paris? Well, I’m headed out tomorrow to do a tour of the French nuclear facilities. I realized it would be the capstone to my book. I’ll have to write fast because Bartleby is raring to go to press. I’m going to talk to executives at the offices of Areva, the French nationally owned nuclear company, and then tour the reprocessing facilities near Avignon and the “nuclear waste dump” in Le Hague. The facility (I forget the name of it) is France’s Yucca Mountain. The only difference is that, because the French reprocess - i.e., recycle - their nuclear fuel, they don’t really have any “waste.” The high-level material that can’t be immediately used for something - more fuel, medical isotopes - is all stored in ONE ROOM at Le Hague. That’s all the “waste” from 25 years of producing 75 percent of their electricity with nuclear. People find that hard to grasp. It is hard to grasp. We haven’t really understood how different - how much more highly concentrated - the energy stored at the nucleus of the atom really is. It really has nothing in common with fossil fuels. That’s something I spend a lot of time explaining in my book. You have to - it takes a lot of explaining. I’ll be blogging from Paris - a good way of taking notes.
The French had a slogan when they decided to go nuclear in the 1970s. “We don’t have any oil but we have ideas.” That’s the French for you. Unfortunately, in the U.S. our slogan at the time was, “We don’t have any ideas, but we have lots of coal.” That’s where we are today.
A lot of people point out that France is a very highly centralized country and it’s only because the government owns and runs everything that they’ve been able to “go nuclear.” The same is being said of China - which has a big reactor program, although not big enough. (They’re building a new coal plant every week.) The argument is that this is America and we should decentralize, go with “distributed” power and avoid those big, hulking 2000-megawatt reactors that may require a “nuclear priesthood” to run. (That was Alvin Weinberg’s phrase.) There’s a certain amount of truth to this. One of the things that stalled nuclear in the U.S. is that it was being built and operated by individual utilities - often very isolated utilities that didn’t know what the heck they were doing - and certainly if you take Silicon Valley as the prototype for our economy, it would be better to take this “small is beautiful” approach. That’s Amory Lovins’ approach. He argues that “microturbines” are the answer to our electrical needs. Every household should have a small electrical generator that captures the steam from its turbine and creates all kinds of efficiencies. The grid should be “a thousand points of light,” so to speak, instead of just a few hulking reactors on the edge of the city somewhere.
There’s definitely an appeal to this vision - and Silicon Valley itself is now sinking hundreds of millions into “alternate energy,” which it sees as the “next big thing.” (Personally, I think it’s a bubble that’s eventually going to pop, but that’s investment advice I’m not licensed to give.) But the answer to that, I believe, is that, in an evolutionary situation (which is what we’re in), no solution works forever. There was a very nice article in New Scientist two weeks ago about “Myths of Evolution.” (Search it at http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns.) One of the myths was that “Natural selection leads to ever greater complexity.” On the surface it seems true - human beings are obviously much more complex than bacteria. (The measure is how long it takes to reproduce one.) But it’s not a one-way street or straight-ahead process. Some of the greatest advances in evolution have resulted from greater SIMPLICITY. Once a simple solution to a problem is found, a lot of other more complicated things can be discarded. That’s why we have so much material in our genes that doesn’t do anything - it’s not needed anymore. It’s the same in any engineering task - even writing. Sometimes you can take a whole paragraph to explain something and when you think about it long enough, you realize it can be said better in one sentence. That’s why, if you’re using “track changes,” your discarded material often exceeds your finished work.
Anyway, the point is, Lovins’ vision of every-house-a-microturbine has its own unnecessary complexity. “Small is beautiful” works different ways. The microturbines themselves may be small but the NETWORK they create is far more complex than generating all this electricity in a single power plant. Then of course you have to ask the question, “What’s going to run all these microturbines?” The answer usually is “natural gas” (although sometimes it’s hydrogen manufactured from windmills blanketing all over North and South Dakota.) So what we’re essentially doing is taking one 1000-megawatt (MW) natural gas fired generator and cutting it up into 100,000 pieces so you have 100,000 household generators putting out 10 kilowatts apiece. Now, is that going to do anything to reduce carbon emissions and global warming? How can it? Whatever efficiencies are gained from using the steam will be lost by the thermodynamics of tiny little generators expending waste heat. That’s why we built bigger and bigger boilers in the first place - because there’s less wasted energy. And what will 100,000 natural gas microturbines do for weaning us off fossil fuels?
That’s one fallacy that nuclear opponents all share - that, as Al Gore put it, “Nuclear reactors only come in one size - extra large.” You can build a micro-reactor that puts out 10 kW and it would probably fit in the palm of your hand. We may do that some day when we overcome our fear of nuclear power. But for now it makes sense to build the biggest reactors we can because we’re trying to REPLACE a coal infrastructure that reaches across the entire country (600 major plants putting out half our electricity).
And that brings up another subject that is going to be a very sore point here. That’s the coal industry itself. Anyone who thinks that the almost incalculable advantages of nuclear - its compactness, its ease of transport, its lack of pollution - is going to make the game easy doesn’t understand politics. Aside from farming, no industry is so firmly entrenched in America as the coal industry. There are “coal states” in which the governors and senators do nothing but dream up new ways to use coal. West Virginia is almost entirely run by coal interests - which is why they’ve been able to decapitate 10 percent of the mountains in the state now without much opposition. Ted Rockwell, one of the last of the Los Alamos generation (he was Admiral Hyman Rickover’s biographer) believes that the Nuclear Energy Institute itself is sabotaged from within by the coal industry. “NEI is made up completely of utilities and for every nuclear reactor those utilities own they have three or four coal plants. Do you think they really want to see coal pay its own way by paying a carbon tax?”
That’s why I desperately wish the environmental movement would wake up and join the nuclear industry in a “nuclear-solar alliance” that would try to push a carbon tax through Congress. Neither group is ever going to accomplish it by themselves and when push comes to shove they often end up opposing each other. I read somewhere the other day that John McCain was very good on global warming - he did co-sponsor the McCain-Lieberman Act proposing a carbon tax - but that he had “fatally polluted” his own effort by supporting nuclear power! What in heaven’s name do these people think is going to REPLACE coal in generating 50 percent of our electricity if not nuclear?
That’s why I’m going to France.
I’ve been collecting little bon mots like that (see I’m speaking French already) and wanted to make a list of them. The ability of the mainstream press to ignore the EXISTENCE of nuclear power is reaching monumental proportions. For instance, in the April 28th issue, Time ran a special Earth Day cover story (bordered in green for the first time in its history), “How to Win The War On Global Warming.” A twelve-page special section talking about everything from carbon capture to tidal energy and not a single MENTION of nuclear power. The article even cited nuclear FUSION at one point - that way-down-the-line technology that no one has even been able to prove yet - but not a single word about nuclear fission, which provides 80 percent of France’s electricity and has been with us for more than 50 years. Another example is Jeff Goodell’s recent book, Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future. Goodell, an editor at Rolling Stone, spends 380 pages making a great case about all the horrible things coal do to our environment. Yet here is the one half-sentence that he writes about nuclear power: [A]t least coal plants are not going to melt down in some radioactive nightmare or increase the risk that some Middle Eastern terrorist will get his hands on a few ounces of uranium.” (You could probably get your hands on a few ounces of uranium in your back yard. I think he means plutonium.) A lot of global warming advocates seem to make a point of pride in not knowing anything about nuclear.
So that’s it for now. I probably shouldn’t have gone on for so long here. I just haven’t emptied my head in awhile. The next dispatch will be form Avignon, where we’ll visit the MELOX plant where the French reprocess spent fuel rods into a “mixed oxide” fuel of uranium and plutonium that can be burned in other reactors. (The Japanese just bought a big batch: http://www.areva.com/servlet/cp_kansai_28_04_2008-c-PressRelease-cid-1209133111773-en.html.) Parlez-vous nucleaire?