Ok, so obviously last night I drank a number of bottles of wine and went into drunken hilarity mode on the internet, and shot my mouth off all over the place.
While a general blanket-apology is offered to all, I do generally stand behind what I say. “Always keep a promise sober, that you made drunk” as Hemingway would often say to me.
So,
Nukes. In the news a bit recently, for all the wrong reasons – which has provoked the army of unpaid nuke-industry shills to try to trivialise the disaster that is unfolding. It might be dangerous, it might not be. It looks dangerous – and the fact that nuke companies refuse to underwrite the costs of accidents, as part of the deal they do with governments before they build the things would suggest that the people who should know best, also think they’re dangerous – although they deny it. Money talks; Bullshit walks.
Anyway – I wrote this in 2009 – the site I wrote it for is long gone (don’t believe it when people say “if it’s on the web, it’s there forever”.
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1) It is bad systems design.
With small decentralised units, when technology advances (as it is doing, rapidly) you can swap in new units.
With nuke you’re stuck with a monolithic system for 50 years.
CHP[12] units are already used extensively by EU/Scandinavian countries, 8% of US power is generated using CHP. This is not rocket-science, though could be with the levels of investment that nuclear will cost… just to deal with its waste.
In addition to this, smaller decentralised units are more resilient to outages, are quicker to deploy and quicker to decommission. They create a competing ecosystem of technologies that is under pressure to advance. Nuke doesn’t.
To draw an analogy, Nuke is like a system of mainframe computers (from the 50s), while decentralised micro-generators is an internet of rapidly advancing, competing and evolving systems.
In systems-engineering terms, nuke stations also represent “single points of failure”. They’re less resilient.
From a military/terrorist perspective, they’re a giant “Kick Me” sign.
2) Nuke is dangerous.
Despite what the nuke industry says (you know, the people who last time around said it would be “too cheap to meter”), nuclear power is dangerous. When a fuse blows [1], you have to shut down a portion of the grid. Despite what the nuke industry says, cockups and accidents are happening all the time [2][3][4][5][6]
Nuke lobbyists now claim that it’s safe (funny, they said that last time round) but, (and this should be the first, last and only nail in the coffin of this idea) the UK govt has decided that nuke companies should not be responsible for the costs of cleaning up after an accident because no company should be reasonably expected to handle such a huge expense. This is an admission of risk – no company should have to pay for a Chernobyl… the public should.
This simple fact kills all arguments about safety.
And, once again, it’s privatised profits and socialised risks in a set up that resembles if not a monopoly then a cartel.
3) The economics stink
Nuclear power cannot work economically without massive government (that means you) subsidies. Anyone subscribing to ideas about free-markets should reject nuclear economics as a point of principle.
The potential for (distributed) profit from renewable technology on the other hand is vast – and this is technology that can be happily sold everywhere on the planet, without the paranoia we’re currently seeing over Iran etc. Instead of the benefit remaining in a few (gnarly old) hands, it can be distributed more democratically, planet-wide.
CHP (and other renewables) also offer much greater scope for local control.
Downstream energy savings (ie: efficiency) create huge upstream savings. The idea that our current escalating energy consumption needs to keep escalating at its current rate is nonsense. Amory Lovins’ (from the video above) company recently retrofitted the Empire State Building, reducing it’s energy consumption by 40% [9][10]
That’s a downstream energy saving – in the UK, 60% of energy generated goes straight up as heat. Our systems are inefficient… every watt saved at the wall-point, saves orders of magnitude greater of watts at source.
4) We don’t know what to do with the waste we already have.
Nuke is not clean, it’s incredibly dirty.
The Nuke industry have jumped on the idea that it produces low carbon emissions (and that’s ignoring that extraction/ running/ decommissioning etc are so carbon-intensive that nuke only represents a saving of 8% [13]) to promote the idea that it’s clean.
It’s not.
Nuke waste storage currently costs £1 billion a year, year in, year out, essentially forever. The half lives [7] of nuke waste runs to hundreds of thousands of years. How would you feel if… Oliver Cromwell’s generation say, had invented nuke power and left us with a billion pound a year storage bill? Feel a bit differently about them?
How about Willam the Conqueror?
The Romans?
The Sumerians?
Seems crazy doesn’t it? Look at it this way: one day, tens of thousands of years from now there will be cultures looking back at us as unimaginably distant memories… far far older than the Assyrians, Sumerians etc etc are to us…
…and they’ll still have to be dealing with this crap that ignorant morons from the 20th century left them with. That is our legacy. That’s the tyrrany we’ve already gifted to the future: taxation without representation.
This is assuming of course, that everyone producing this stuff is dealing with it responsibly. Know why the Somalian Pirates are seen as heroes by Somalis? Because EU ships have been dumping nuclear waste off the African coast[8]
Part of the sweetner that the UK govt is offering to the nuke industry to make new plants is to hide the costs of the waste in existing waste programs. They can’t do this without lying to us what the real costs are. Take a look at the history of the nuclear reactor that is being built in Finland [11]
Or to put it another way, they’re lying on behalf of big business, against your interests, again.
5) Centralised control.
You’ve seen what centralised control of dwindling resources (yes, there is such a thing as Peak Uranium, we have at most 50 years worth) did to the 20th century. You really want that for the 21st?
One of the things about renewables is that they’re oligarchy-breakers. They obviate the need for trillion-dollar wars.
They’re representative of participatory cultures (which is what we’re moving into) as opposed to nuke, which is representative of command-cultures (which is what we’re moving away from, but which all of our institutions are firmly entrenched in)
6) Proliferation
Nuke power provides the perfect shelter for proliferation of nuke weapons.
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Why? Why do all this? We already have alternatives – we’re already building them. Why invest all these hundreds of billions into something that is so inadequate?
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[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12731668?nclick_check=1&forced=true
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/03nuke.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss
[4] (UK) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/29/britishenergygroupbusiness.nuclear
[5] (Fr) http://www.euronews.net/en/article/24/07/2008/france-fourth-nuclear-incident-in-a-fortnight/
[6] (De) http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,576550,00.html
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKnxDcIUfdY
[10] http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid598.php
[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
[13] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/nuclear
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Excellent points. I’ve always liked the idea of nuclear power in theory, but I’m beginning to think it should be either fusion (if that ever becomes practicable and doesn’t come with its own set of played-down negatives) or nothing.
Ideally what we want is just some sort of box that sits there and generates power.
But it has to be a small box, and it has to NOT be under the control of a hierarchy – because as one Armando Iannucci once said, “a problem doesn’t really become a problem until other people get involved”.
So here we are again – mission-creep in the Middle East, and again we’re raining down bombs with a 500m blast-radius, all the while saying “military targets, military targets”, and really as any 1st year student rolling a joint on the back of hipster-vinyl-record cover will tell you “It’s all about oil”.
It’s all about uranium, it’s all about water. Any system that is designed so a corporation can control it, is a badly designed system. We’re bigger than that.
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Another guy recently wrote this
http://bjelkeman.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/why-nuclear-power-does-not-make-any-sense/
different points, same conclusion. I think his might be a bit more literate :)
The problem is – every power source has problems.
Wind & Solar are non starters until we have economic power storage on a large scale. Until then wind & solar are pointless because – news flash – it’s not always sunny and windy – they are unpredictable and need gas power backup (the only power source that can be started on demand quickly).
This is why no country in the world can have more than 10-20% wind/solar power – it all has to be backed up from elsewhere (Denmark imports a ton of power from other countries for example).
Fossil fuels have the carbon problem.
Other forms of renewables – such as hydro or geo-thermal are promising – but hydro obviously has environmental implications and can only be built in very limited places. Geo, imho, has way more potential than wind or solar – as it is a predictable power source – though capital costs can be high – it’s one to watch for the future.
If you are going to write this article – you need to say which alternatives you will use – wind and solar are not options; without storage they are a total waste of money and distract us from the real problem.
The choice right now is between nuclear or fossil fuels; pick.
Hate to break it to you, but wind and solar are already happening – so they’re not non-starters. They’ve started.
The big solar farm in Spain http://dvice.com/archives/2011/06/massive-solar-a.php produces power throughout the night by storing energy as molten salt.
As to “If you are going to write this article – you need to say which alternatives you will use – wind and solar are not options”
firstly, solar and wind are already coming online as part of the solution… much more than Nuke is, 2ndly, if you’ll actually read what I wrote, I started with CHP… Amory Lovins take on it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Oqa3bNhTwE&t=3m0s
So ignoring the birds-nest of baseless, citation-free assertions, what you have done (because nuke shills always do) is bought into the nuke/fossil-fuel dichotomy… which the nuke industry, and the media conglomerates (often owned by the same companies that own the nuke companies) are only too happy to sell you.
You’re being duped.
Nuclear shill – nice.
Interesting UK gov document on power storage:
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn306.pdf
Denmark, for example, imported [non-renewable] power from other countries; that is how it had such a high wind figure.
However, whilst storage does work out expensive – it’s actually more viable than I thought – and way cheaper than nuclear (technology is bound to make it even cheaper going forward).
Very interesting videos.
I’ve been looking for someone to change my mind on this – you just did – thanks – you wind shill ;)