The title links to the original piece by Steve Clark, published on Bill Moore's EVWorld website and newsletter. Following that is Mr. Clark's piece with my draft response inline.
[sls] My reaction to Steve Clark's piece at EV World is inline, indented, in blue italics and with each response section prefaced with [sls] like this.
In large part I agree with what Mr. Clark writes but, in a nutshell, I think he's considering global energy matters from an insufficiently global perspective. As a result, he sees nuclear energy as largely driven by profligate Western and US lifestyles of extreme energy waste, rather than the real drivers of the need for nuclear energy, which are:
1) increasing population (almost all occurring in the developing world), and
2) new energy to raise people in the developing world from squalor to a reasonable lifestyle.
The amount of future energy use is not as driven by excessive Western lifestyles as one might think. When one thinks that excessive Western lifestyles are what justify nuclear power, one can easily exclude nuclear energy from the mix of sustainable energy technologies for the future because of the economies that people like Amory Lovins show that Western societies (the US in particular) can attain in energy consumption. In the industrialized countries we can have a larger population without increasing our energy consumption because we waste so much energy today.
But that's not true of poor, developing societies. If they increase their populations, they have little energy waste cushion to absorb more people within existing energy consumption levels. In those countries, more people means more energy consumption, period. What's more, as people move from poverty or squalor to something reasonable, they consume more energy, period. There are many more people to be born into the poverty level of energy consumption, and a lot of those will go on to consume even more energy as a function of their advance from squalor to a reasonable lifestyle.
However, humanity cannot continue to add to the load already borne by the atmosphere without potentially catastrophic consequences, so new energy has to be provided in a clean, sustainable manner, of which nuclear has to be a part of the mix.
That's what I try to argue, anyway. If you have the time and inclination to look at my draft response and send me any comments I'd appreciate it.
Welcome to my evolving perspective. Thanks for yours.
DRAFT Steve Sturgill, November 2002 - steve@stevesturgill.com
It is interesting the way studies about the future always seem to make assumptions that lead to the desired conclusions. But what is most amazing about the energy study headed by Martin Hoffert is that he got so many other PhD's to sign on to such nonsense. This doesn't bode well for those of us spending large sums of money to send our kids to college.
In this particular study it goes something like this … If we have a way to meet our current energy needs without huge research programs, how will we fund our future research programs? Let see...if we make the amount of energy we will need an unreachable goal of existing technology...
[sls] What makes Steve Clark feel that projections of energy usage are so dismissible? To say that energy projections are inflated for the purpose of justifying research expenditures is to paint the accused dishonest with a broad brush, and I'm not sure that's justified.
This is the same kind of thinking that proponents of nuclear power use to convince us we need their technology. It says, in effect, that we must have ever increasing supplies of energy or society will laps into the dark ages. The idea that we need nuclear power was best answered by J F Schumacher thirty years ago. " No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make "safe" and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man. The idea that civilization could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all." Small is Beautiful
[sls] The old quote from J. F. Schumacher refers to a "degree of prosperity" that some might use to justify the down side of nuclear power. But it's not a matter of prosperity; rather, it's a matter of survival when considered in a global scope.
Schumacher objects to an immoral legacy of nuclear power, and I agree entirely. This immoral legacy, though, needs not present itself. This is why I specify that I am in favor of modern nuclear power, not every nuclear power. I support a nuclear industry that consumes and transmutes it own wastes (not that a panacea is thus created).
But maybe these guys aren't so foolish. With Mr. "conservation is not for our kind of people so lets build a bunch of nuclear power plants" Cheney, and Bush, thinking he can just take over the oil fields in his dirty little war, in power, maybe these guys just want a piece of this immoral and wasteful spending of tax money. We would have been better off giving it to Enron. They weren't destroying the environment or getting anybody killed and at least they had a wind power program.
There are two ways to look at the energy picture. Supply side and demand side. The supply side looks at increasing world population and the increasing energy use curve we are on and says we will need to meet the "needs" by supplying more energy. No one ever seems to ask the question, "Energy for what?". Will the worlds 5 plus billion people, who don't have shopping mall parking lots lit up at 3:00 in the morning, really suffer if they don't have energy to waste? Is it even possible for all the people in India, China, Asia, South America, and Africa to have 5000 square foot sheet rock palaces with a couple of 300 hp SUVs in the driveway, that they put 20,000 miles a year on? If this was a realistic future scenario, we should be worrying about where we are going to get all the 2x4's and steel, as well as, the energy to run their appliances and get them down the road.
[sls] Energy for what? The question, really, is this: How can humanity continue into the future without spoiling the commons? That Americans (with our sheet rock palaces and SUV's at malls lit up all night) are not the model for the emerging world is obvious, as Steve Clark writes above. From a global perspective, the hugely disproportionate share of energy expended by the USA's 5% of humanity is particularly glaring.
But it's not really the problem. Such profligacy as ours is not the basis for global energy projections.
The problem is the increase in combustion to be caused by a 150% increase in the world's human population in the next several decades. By the time my son, now 12, is my age, 50, there will be almost three of us for every two on the planet today, and for every joule we burned in 1990, we'll liberate two or three largely because of all the new people, and largely because of all peoples' desire to better their condition (which requires energy). Elevating present and future poor out of poverty will take a lot of energy.
I gather that Steve Clark (I keep writing 'Steve Clark' rather than just 'Steve' to avoid confusion with myself; just writing 'Clark' doesn't sound very friendly.) doesn't trust projections of energy use, but the following graphic (which seems entirely reasonable to me) is from a June 1999 report entitled "Nuclear energy - the future climate," from The Royal Society and The Royal Academy of Engineering (introduction here). The chart shows a doubling of global energy consumption (from 1990) within my lifetime, and within my son's lifetime something between a tripling or quadrupling in energy usage, virtually all of the increase associated with increasing human numbers and their aspirations for improved lifestyle.
Note the similarity in the forms of the above energy consumption graph and the below population graph from the Population Reference Bureau.
In both the energy consumption and world population arenas, the largest contributions, by far, will come from the developing world.
Between 2000 and 2050:
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Dec 06 - Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
The fact that 1.6 billion people in the world have no electricity and 2.4 billion rely on primitive biomass (wood, agricultural residues, dung) for power may be shocking, but what is worse is that without radical new policies, the figures will be virtually the same 30 years from now. That is one message of the International Energy Agency's latest World Energy Outlook and "this is not a sustainable future," says IEA executive director Robert Priddle. Although access to electricity is spreading, it is not growing as fast as the world population, and on current trends 1.4 billion people will still be without electricity in 2030, the World Energy Outlook says. And because electricity is relatively expensive when it does arrive, people do not simply substitute it for biomass sources of energy, Many homes in developing countries use electricity only for light and still use wood and other biomass products for cooking and heating. As a result, on current trends the number of people reliant on biomass is expected to rise to 2.6 billion in the next 30 years, at significant cost to human health and the environment because of smoke pollution and reduction of natural biomass resources.
Because biomass will continue to dominate energy demand in developing countries in the foreseeable future, the development of more efficient biomass technologies is vital for alleviating poverty, creating employment and expanding rural markets, the Energy Outlook says. The lEA is a 26-member sister organization of the OECD dealing with energy issues.
IEA, World Energy Outlook, IEA, 2002So, in the next 30 years global human population will increase by about a third, from 6 billion to about 8 billion. Of those 2 billion new souls, 200 million are projected to fall into the group reliant on crude combustion, which is bad in itself both for the unfortunate and the globe. Worse yet (for the globe), this implies that the balance, 1.8 billion more fortunate people, will advance from squalor to something more reasonable, with the increased energy consumption this socioeconomic advance necessarily implies.
The disproportion between population growth and energy consumption discussed above is an entirely reasonable projection.
The consequences of massively increasing combustion are generally regarded as potentially catastrophic. Not only is carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere a serious problem, but soot is now understood to pose almost as large a problem in terms of global climate change. Soot comes from crude combustion, such as practiced by poorer people and societies, from industrialized societies burning diesel for transportation and from other sources. Since soot tends to precipitate out of the atmosphere in far less time than carbon dioxide persists, the displacement of combustion takes on increased appeal for the relatively short term.
The only way to avoid combustion while providing energy is with a mix of clean renewable sources like photovoltaic, wind, tide and similar energy sources, and including nuclear power, which (notwithstanding assertions to the contrary) is renewable and sustainable. In this mix, nuclear power can fill the base load niche since it is a continuously available source of energy, unlike other green sources which tend to be more intermittent.
The global energy supply must be composed of a diverse mix of energy sources, enough of them environmentally benign so as to forestall the trashing of our global atmospheric commons in the next several decades. The author of this paper seems to feel that the global energy mix will be sufficiently benign, diverse and abundant absent nuclear power. That's where we disagree.
If you are of the "cutting butter with a chain saw " mentality, you can reach some pretty strange conclusions about what the future energy needs really are. Perhaps the height of absurdity is exemplified by the Hummer commercial that shows one young woman driving the empty streets of a city in her new military assault vehicle. At twice the price they have already sold more of these monstrosities that GM EV1's. Will this trend of "more, bigger, faster" continue for ever? Not on this finite planet.
[sls] I agree completely, but if the world were awash in cheap, clean energy I'd care a lot less about excesses of individuals and societies.
For years Marty Hoffert has been telling anyone who will listen that we can solve the worlds energy problems by launching huge solar power stations into orbit and beaming solar energy down to earth. Hello Marty. We down here on earth are already using solar power and are satisfied that our ground based technology works just fine.
Amory Lovins, another PhD in physics, has been seeing a different picture in his crystal ball. Years ago, in his book "Soft Energy Paths", he pointed out how wasteful we are with energy. We could save enough by using energy efficiently that we won't need to build ever bigger power plants. We know how to build houses that use one tenth the energy of conventional construction. Someday soon we will realize that we should all be on a softer energy path. In his new report "Small is Profitable" he has looked at distributed renewable power systems and found over 200 ways in which meeting our needs with small solar systems is the more economical and sensible thing to do.
[sls] Amory Lovins is a visionary. I've been aware of Mr. Lovins' work for quite a while, even met him once, and feel that while he is a visionary, the changes he proposes are not particularly pragmatic for the time scale I'm concerned with, which is fairly short. It takes a couple or three generations to change societies to the extent Mr. Lovins' ideas would require. Mitigation of atmospheric degradation has to start now, but Mr. Lovins' ideas, as much sense as they may make, and as much as they may help mold a modern sustainable society, won't get us over the nearer-term hump, in my opinion.
I do agree with the idea that if we don't deploy solar, wind and other technologies to take advantage of all sources of clean renewable energy and quickly implement systems to produce hydrogen from these sources, we will soon find ourselves with an altered climate and short of fossil fuel supplies that are within our control. We are already fighting over the remaining reserves of oil. This will only get worse unless we gain some independence from oil.
[sls] Soon? We're already on that path and we're already seeing the effects. Again I agree, except that I would specify modern nuclear as one of the "other technologies" yielding clean, renewable energy.
The assumption that we have no viable technology that will meet our energy needs is simply wrong. If these scientists come down from their ivory tower they will find that renewable energy is growing at 20-30 percent annual growth rate. Hydrogen technology, the clean carrier for renewable primary energy, is developing by leaps and bounds. Can solar energy meet our needs? Larry Kazmerski of the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden Colorado, points out that 100 square miles of currently available photovoltaic modules can meet America's profligate 800gW electricity needs. Using the abandoned industrial sites of America would provide 90% of the required area. Does it make sense to launch these power systems into space? That might just be an unnecessary step that would increase the energy payback time of PV beyond the present rate of a couple of years.
[sls] 100 square miles of photovoltaics might make perfect sense, but not in isolation. These questions only make sense in a context of diversity. For example, we know that a photovoltaic cell won't generate at night. You have to store energy for non-generating periods, or you have to have a global transmission system to move energy from daylight to dark areas of the globe. Or you have to have other energy sources to provide for when it's dark out. 100 square miles of photovoltaics is a discussion item, not a practical solution.
This is not a simple question. It might make sense to launch power systems into space when considering all the factors that apply.
As I gaze into my crystal ball I predict that the energy "needs" of 30 terra watts, that Mr. Hoffert sees, will never be needed. Since energy is cheap we waste the majority of the primary energy that is supplied to our society. The increasing supply curve we are on at this time will level out and eventually turn back in the opposite direction. If you don't follow energy trends a simple way to know when this has happened is there will no longer be incandescent light bulbs for sale.
[sls] It's interesting that, as the author observes, we tend to waste cheap energy, which is bad, but plentiful cheap energy could help solve so many of the world's problems. To my way of thinking, the idea is to have so much cheap energy available that some of these world problems could be addressed, yet this cheap energy's availability must be atmospherically benign.
30 terrawatts is not an energy projection. Watts are units of power, the rate at which energy flows (how fast not how much). Does the figure represent a tally of all generating capacity, or the instantaneous peak coincident power requirements of the globe?
If the measure is of global generating capacity, then the load it can serve is much smaller than the figure cited because of intermittence - one must apply capacity factors to account for when the sun isn't shining, the air is calm, or when the reactor is down for maintenance and refueling, for instance.
On the other hand, if the measure is of global power requirements, then we will need much more generating capacity than 30 terrawatts for the same reason - intermittence.
It really doesn't matter how many terrawatts of peak load or generating capacity are projected because power capacity does not cause pollution. Energy production and consumption cause pollution, but energy is not measured in the number cited.
I don't know if the 30 terrawatt projection is realistic or not, but whatever that number is, it had better reflect an energy mix composed sufficiently of clean, renewable, sustainable sources. What means "sufficiently?" I don't think you'll get there without modern nuclear power in the mix.
The notion that we are locked into following some future energy use curve, that increases to many times our present wasteful rate of resource depletion, is absurd. What happens if power producers don't supply the estimated 30 terrawatts we will "need" in the near future? Will society collapse? Will "progress" stop? Will we freeze to death in the dark? Not likely, but there may be some physicists looking for a real job.
[sls] The idea of our energy use curve increasing radically is not alarming if provision of this energy is clean and sustainable. In any event, energy use in industrialized countries is almost flat out into the future.
"The notion that we are locked into following some future energy use curve, that increases to many times our present wasteful rate of resource depletion, is absurd." Yes, but that's not what we're talking about. As the charts above show, those referred to in this sentence (ourselves and ...our present wasteful rate...) are not the problem.
The problem lies not with those presently affluent, but with those who aspire to increasing affluence in their increasing numbers from their frequently dismal base. Their needs have to be met without trashing the planet.
What is likely to happen if power producers don't supply the "needs" is that prices will rise, squalor will increase, dirty combustion will go through the roof, and population pressures and human conflict will increase. Wealth is the only thing that gracefully dampens human procreation, and the wealth won't be there if the energy isn't there.
Humanity and the planet require that all atmospherically benign energy sources be brought to bear. To exclude the only technology that can combine large scale and continuous availability (priceless baseline components of a diverse mix) in a green process is to play with a bigger fire than inside the reactors.
