Nuclear Environmentalism
The adoption of nuclear power is the first constructive suggestion we’ve heard from the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining & Energy Union for some time. By Nick Cater.
All we need now is for the progressive left to back progress and the reactors could theoretically be splitting atoms by the end of the decade. But, while Australia has abundant reserves of almost everything required for a nuclear future, few rational investors right now would be prepared to shoulder the political risk and inflated costs of so massive an undertaking.
That Australia, and indeed the world, is not already nuclear powered is counterintuitive. Human progress since the 18th century has followed a path of adopting fuels with greater energy density.
Coal has twice the energy density of wood or cow dung. Natural gas is 50 per cent denser than coal. Calculating the energy density of uranium is somewhat complicated for the layman, but rest assured it is a stinking great number.
Density matters, not just for efficiency, but for the preservation of the environment. Fossil fuels saved the forests of North America and Europe from even greater devastation since the power density of coalmines is many times greater than forests.
Two recent books help explain why humankind has diverted from the natural path towards an ever more dense energy future in the past 50 years and how energy-dilute, land-hungry sources like wind and solar came to be seen as smart. They also invite the question of whether nuclear may now have become a lost cause, given the vested interests railing against it and the prohibitive cost of hyper-regulation.
It is not, as some might claim, a rational response to risk, as Matt Ridley explains in How Innovation Works. Coal kills almost 2000 times as many people per unit of power than nuclear, gas 40 times and solar five times since people fall off roofs installing panels. Far more influential is the effect of businesses and nations warding off potential competition and the willingness of environmentalists to act as hired guns.
The origins of the environmental movement’s on-off relationship with nuclear power are explored in all its sordid detail by Michael Shellenberger in Apocalypse Never.
America’s oldest and most influential environmental movement, the Sierra Club, backed the construction of six nuclear reactors on a single site near Avila Beach in California in the mid-60s. The logic: the amount of energy it would produce would rescue at least five other potential sites from despoilment
Within five years, however, an anti-nuclear faction had seized control of the club, which began ruthlessly campaigning to kill nuclear plants in Ohio.
Among them was notorious activist lawyer Ralph Nader. “We don’t need nuclear,” he said. “We have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we’re owning up to.”
In 2012, the club confessed to the dirty little secret that it had accepted $25m from the gas industry to help fund the club’s Beyond Coal campaign. It was chump change for fracking magnates, who stood to make billions from the decline of coal. Yet for this the club was willing to sully its reputation by backing one fossil fuel in a fight against another.
For other prominent anti-nuclear campaigners, the conflict of interest was even more blatant. Governor Jerry Brown and his allies killed enough nuclear power plants in the late 70s to generate almost all California’s needs. At the time, Brown and his father were lobbying aggressively to build a terminal to import liquefied natural gas from Indonesia.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club was fighting to regulate nuclear power out of existence. “We should try to tighten up regulation of the (nuclear) industry, ” wrote the organisation’s executive director, in a 1976 board memo, “with the expectation that this will add to the cost of the industry and render its economics less attractive.”
In that, it has succeeded, concludes Ridley. Nuclear technology, he says, is “a cautionary tale of how innovation falters, and even goes backwards, if it cannot evolve”. Trial and error, the essential ingredients of innovation, are too costly to contemplate. “We are stuck with an immature and inefficient version of the technology, the pressurised-water reactor, and that is gradually being strangled by the requirements of regulators acting on behalf of worried people.”
Regulation has made it impossible to drive down the cost by mass production. Nuclear power stations are built slowly and expensively, like Egyptian pyramids. The answer to the nuclear industry’s woes would be leaders like Ronald Reagan, who deregulated gas production in the US, paving the way for the development of slickwater hydraulic fracturing in the 1990s.
Abundant cheap natural gas has enabled the US to reduce its emissions faster than any other country. Environmentalists began supporting it; not surprisingly, since many were effectively on the industry’s payroll.
Predictably, that love affair waned quickly. They began to make claims about the dangers of fracking so farcical that even those pushing them must have known they were false. Environmentalists were now on the clean energy industry’s payroll and trying to regulate gas out of existence.
There were suggestions of support from Russia too, which feared losing its near monopoly of the market for gas in Eastern Europe.
If Australia were able to seal itself off from these morally vain hypocrisy merchants, we would be in a position to make rational choices about our energy future. We might even be bold enough to allow a competitive market to make those decisions.
A rational solution to the challenges right now would be to remove the regulatory barriers that threaten to make gas extraction too expensive. We would be increasing our long-term options by removing restrictions on nuclear power, and actively encouraging research and development of fourth-generation small modular reactors. Both those decisions, incidentally, would pave the way towards the zero-emissions economy by 2050, a cause to which environmentalists implore us to apply our signatures. Yet our innovation-phobic times, the zeitgeist of catastrophism, threatens to close those options. The charlatanism and self-aggrandisement of environmentalists, one fears, will outlast the wind and sun.