Climate interview 4: Nuclear Power
11. What do you think about nuclear energy? Is it safe? How can it be utilized to reach your timeline goals?
Nuclear power generation is currently the major C-free energy source. It is over fifty years old, with an excellent safety record. It’s hundreds of times safer than hydro (dams fail) and thousands of times safer than fossil fuels. Unlike the other expandable C-free sources, most of the beginner’s mistakes have already been made. It took three decades before the efficiency doubled.
France has switched to nuclear for 78 percent of its electricity. Hydro gives France another 13 percent. So France is 91 percent clean, 9 percent dirty—and Texas is the exact opposite. Texans now get 91 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels, almost twice the national average. Switzerland is 1 percent dirty and the U.S. is at 60 percent (electricity only; about 85 percent dirty counting transportation energy needs too).
If France and Switzerland switched their vehicles over to electrical power, they would serve as even better C-free energy models for the world. Much as I admire Denmark’s style of distributed cogeneration and the move to renewable wind and solar energy, there simply isn’t time to scale that up around the world before 2020, given how many coal trains and oil tankers need to be retired.
Too much of the present discussion on climate protection is either pie-in-the-sky or envisages a slow evolution of urban architecture, commuting, energy, and civic virtue. We once had time for such planning. We can still explore on many fronts at once but for 2020 we need to be quickly building something foolproof. For the heavy lifting, that looks like Hot Rock geothermal and third-generation nuclear plants.
12. Any final thoughts or comments?
Even though China now emits more CO2 annually, the U.S. has contributed more, over the years, to the insulating blanket of fossil carbon than any other country (30 percent), yet still resists even baby steps toward energy reform. The rest of the world sees the U.S. as the 500-pound gorilla. (The other gorillas won’t go very far down a path until the big guy finally gets up and comes along.) A colleague of mine came back from an international meeting of climate scientists having overheard someone say that, since he didn’t live in the U.S., he felt impotent to deflect the world from the road to catastrophe.
I’ve emphasized a quick technofix because the window of opportunity is closing on us and we’ve only got one planet to lose. Time is short. And because of starting late, we must get this right on the first try or we may be trapped in a runaway. That’s where we lose existing sinks for CO2 via baking the soil, closing the leaf pores, drought, fire, and ocean acidification. Some carbon sink regions turn into net sources, as when wood decay emits more CO2 than the remaining trees can recapture. We already see that in the tropical rain forests during an El Niño. That pushes up the fever and further accelerates the decay in topsoils, which add more CO2. This accelerates the temperature spike. Like the squeal of a public address system when the speakers are heard by the microphone, it just keeps building up, bringing most activities to a shrieking halt.
Climate change is a challenge to the scientists but I suspect that the political leadership has the harder task, given how difficult it is to make people aware of what must be done and get them moving in time. It’s going to be like herding stray cats, and the political leaders who can do it will be remembered as the same kind of geniuses who pulled off the American Revolution.
Copyright 2007 by William H. Calvin