My Climate Change Program Is Better Than Yours: Nuclear Rising
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 02. 9.08
With US presidential primaries nearly over, climate policy has reached the tipping point. All three of the strongest-polling US presidential candidates - McCain (R), Obama (D), and Clinton (D) - each have substantial climate platforms; and, Obama has just thrown the climate gauntlet for the other two to pick up.
U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama promised on Friday to start working on an international pact to reduce global warming if he becomes the Democratic nominee, touting his plan to reduce U.S. emissions as stronger than that of Republican front-runner John McCain.
What makes Obama's climate challenge interesting are two items. One is that he's been talking with Al - a good sign for sure.
"I've been in conversations with former Vice President (Al) Gore repeatedly, and his recommendation, which I think is sound, is that you can't wait until you are sworn into office to get started," Obama told a news conference in Seattle."I think we need to start reaching out to other countries ahead of time, not because I'm presumptuous, but because there's such a sense of urgency about this."
The other is that he's willing to differentiate in terms of macroeconomic theory:
Obama, Clinton, and McCain all support building a so-called "cap and trade" system that would issue big polluters such as oil companies and power producers permits to emit carbon dioxide (CO2), the main gas blamed for global warming.Should the more distant polling Republican Governor Huckabee endorse, or pair up with, McCain, he would dilute McCain's climate mojo, as he is seemingly stuck in your basic drill in ANWR time warp.Under such a system, companies that exceed their CO2 limits must buy more permits to pollute, while those that come in beneath their limits may sell the permits on a market.
Obama said his plan was superior to McCain's because it required companies to buy all of those permits up front -- a process known as auctioning.
"I've been very specific about proposing 100 percent auctioning, which makes an enormous difference in terms of how effective it's going to be," Obama said.
Nuclear power and the US Supreme Court may well become climate debate wild cards which differentiate these candidates. Why ever? Because as this seminal Salon published op. ed piece by Joe Romm points out, the McCain-Lieberman climate bill offers billions in direct taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear power industry. Check out Romm's SCOTUS reasoning for yourself: too partisan for us to dwell on.
The only technological solution to global warming that McCain consistently advocates is nuclear power. In his signature environmental legislation, the 2007 Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, written with Joe Lieberman, McCain wants to devote a remarkable $3.7 billion in federal subsidies to nuclear power plants. According to an analysis by U.S. PIRG, a federation of public interest groups, the money would go for "engineering and design costs, loans and loan guarantees for building three new plants, and direct financial awards for new projects."Yet when Grist asked McCain, "What's your position on subsidies for green technologies like wind and solar?" he said:
"I'm not one who believes that we need to subsidize things. The wind industry is doing fine, the solar industry is doing fine. In the '70s, we gave too many subsidies and too much help, and we had substandard products sold to the American people, which then made them disenchanted with solar for a long time."
Should nuclear power be debated through the Summer of 2008 as the key potential solution for climate change, and if Senator McCain defends his proposed subsidies, that discourse will be framed by nearly a decade of the US Federal government having resurrected cold war era fears of nuclear power as a threat to security: Iraq WMD, Axis of Evil, Iran, Korea, Yellowcake, etc.
Yet, the presidential debates could send a message from the US that nuclear power is what the world needs more of. And Kim Jong Il will be listening. Clean coal - no longer receiving Federal subsidies in the form of FutureGen - is second best. Leaders of North Korea, Iran, and of other developing nations will want the good stuff.
Framing analogy:- A similar thing happened as a result of the use of Agent Orange and Napalm in Vietnam, and use of crowd control gases on US citizens during the Vietnam War years. Public consciousness of chemical risks accelerated into a state of widespread "chemophobia" that was far beyond what Rachel Carson and photos of broken raptor eggs could have been able to accomplish alone.
Via::Reuters, "Obama says stronger than McCain on climate change" Image credit::Sydney Morning Herald, "N Korea's nuclear test backlash" AND Dan Harlow 'Kim Jong Il Puppet'
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- So What's in Obama's Overstuffed Environmental Suggestion Box?
- Electoral Energy
- Sun, Nike, Starbucks and More Meet for Climate Action
- Green Jobs - Let's Seize The Opportunity
Are you honestly comparing nuclear power, which has operated with 104 reactors (with an average like of ~30 year in the US, which represents 31,000 years of combined uptime and zero deaths) with Agent Orange?
Quite frankly I am quite convinced that there are those who would rather drown from rising sea lives than see more nuclear power, just out of sheer spite.
=== author's response follows ===
No.
I drew analogy between an initially reasonable public fear of chemical munitions being translated into a much broader, and ,now ,unfocused anxiety over the superset of all synthetic chemicals, and the generalized anxiety over all things nuclear that flow from 8 years of fear mongering over the risks of nuclear power proliferation (because power stations can provide bomb making materials) in non-western nations.
Go back and read the post again. I think it was fairly clear to begin with.
If our presidential debate sends the message that nuclear power is the answer to climate change, we can only expect developing nations to want more of that technology. "Clean coal" won't be enough. They'll want the good stuff. And then we are back to square one with nuclear proliferation.
"because power stations can provide bomb making materials"
No, Talk to anyone who has a degree in nuclear engineering and they will say that is bull.
You need a nuclear centrifuge to enrich uranium (to about about 4% for power or 90% for a bomb; so it would be easy to tell depending on the size what the intent is)
Or you could make the bomb from plutonium, which would be Pu-239, and is produced from a reactor design that is fundamentally different from a power reactor.
=== author's response follows ===
Yes. But with three critical caveats:
The public does not make the distinctions that a degreed engineer would. Remember that functional illiteracy in the US approaches 25%, and that these relatively non-technical people vote too.
As current events make painfully obvious, power plant operations may be used to camouflage bomb making operations; the expertise to do one supports the other, in part; and, once the uranium ore concentrate arrives in country for power production, it is one step easier to do other things with it.
Then there is the whole dirty bomb thing.
I could go on but you get the idea. It is much more than a technical issue.
But that has everything to do with the lack of international agreements to handle this, it has nothing to do with the risk of nuclear power pre se. You could easily set up a UN program to handle and inventory the uranium fuel for nuclear power, and if there were any deviations you know that it is a sign of things that are up.
Because a similar argument could be used for the pharmaceutical factories, which can be changed over to produce biological weapons. Or chemical factories for chemical weapons.
=== authors' response follows ===
I agree with you fully on this statement.
Think about each candidate's record over the last 8 years, and especially on their respective stances on working with the UN in a lead role (climate or nuclear non-proliferation, take your pick) and you can see a possible split in the campaign debates.
Don't want to rehash the past so much as to get on the table that climate change can either be a unifying or a "wedge" issue, depending on how it is handled by the candidates.
when enriching uranium it is getting it to that first 3-4% that is tough. To enrich uranium to weapons grade (around 90%) is simply a matter of a few more spins in the nuclear centrifuge that is part of a nuclear power plants general facilities.
More nuclear plants means more enriched uranium which has a higher possibility of being diverted for non civilian uses.
(plus, lets not forget dirty bombs)
Barack Hussein Obama has been talking to Al-Jazeera?-Queda? Karl Rove would love it.
In this case, the first image surely tells more than 1000 words. BTW, the last picture is really funny. lol.
Nuclear is not the way to go (though it seemslike it) simply bcause of the economics of it doesnt hold up. Wind turbine power is the way to go.
"Barack Hussein Obama has been talking to Al-Jazeera?-Queda? Karl Rove would love it."
Oh, I see what you did there. Because Obama's middle name is Hussein, he must be in cahoots with them muslim terr-ists who killed all them folks in New York City, and who we had to go bomb in Iraq so's they wouldn't do it agin.
Grow up. Is that the best you losers can come up with?
We expect nuclear power to perform at levels far beyond what we expect from any other source of power in terms of security and environmental protection. This is as true of solar as it is for coal. (What happens to all of the heavy metals in photovoltaics once they're decommissioned? Nuclear materials will be accounted for for the next 10000 years.) As long as that situation exists nuclear power has a valid case for asking for some sort of assistance in attaining those levels of performance.
=== author's response follows ===
Silicon based solar panels often are made out of recycled computer chips and certainly can be made out of recycled solar panel materials. So you conclusion does not apply here.
It does apply, though, for those thin film technologies with short design lives, low mass, and containing cadmium.
Wind turbines are highly recylcable.
"Silicon based solar panels often are made out of recycled computer chips and certainly can be made out of recycled solar panel materials. So you conclusion does not apply here."
Is this mandated by law and built into the pricing of the solar panels as is the case with nuclear power? No. Saying something can be done is not the same as requiring it by law and demanding that the costs for it be added to pricing. I wish that a decommissioning charge were part of the price of most materials, but we just don't put the same sorts of burdens on most things that we automatically do for nuclear power. So long as that imbalance remains I can't see how assisting nuclear power meet those mandates is out of line.
I'm not trying to argue nuclear versus renewable, actually. I really wish that coal was burdened in the same way nuclear is. If coal power had to meet the same sorts of burdens in terms of safety and environmental protection that nuclear does we simply wouldn't be burning coal. It would be far too expensive.
Wow.
John Laumer (the author) should re-read his responses and feel very ashamed.
He is right. The un-educated public does not know the difference between nuclear weapon science and nuclear energy science. The reason is people like him.
How can a person admit to knowing the difference between the weapon and energy science right after writing a widely read article which tries to paint them as the same?
Peope are dying and suffering every day from too much pollution and not enough development. The reason population is still increasing in most of the world is because they don't have fridges, centralized plumming, health care, education, and generally higher standards of living. For God's sake, it doesn't matter how "green" we each live if there is 9 billion of us! We ALREADY use more fresh water than is created naturally each year. We had a "last chance" 30 years ago to bring cheaper, CLEAN energy and industrialization to the world and we made the mistake of letting public fears run amok and chose to polute instead. The scientific community knew it was a catastrophic choice then, but couldn't fight the masses. Chernobyl proved that the absolute worst-case-scenario is far less of a problem than the path we took.
If it sounds like I'm angry, it's because I am.
I am sick and tired of people who pretend to be "Treehuggers" sabotaging our society and removing any remaining chances we have of salvaging any part of our natural planet.
And if it sounds like I'm blaming John Laumer for green house gasses, I AM!
We don't have the option of NOT increasing industrialization in less developed parts of the world - reducing population trumps any pollution reduction attempt. Anyone who doesn't find this obvious should go read a book and learn basic math.
When we finally shift society enough that the masses might tolerate the changes neccessary for our survival, we MUST exploit that opportunity! God has thrown us a life preserver so many times... can we please stop rejecting it because we didn't plant it? We've already planted too much - the poor Earth is so coated with our agriculture & people that we've already left no room for the other big species.
Thankfully, some have made the brave choices and made the mistakes & learned the hard lessons for us (Thank you Russia and France). We have the opportuity to re-focus on non-land-based energy and re-direct our research efforts back into something striving for TRUE zero-impact. Hopefully Bush will mitigate the horrors he's committed with something noble at the end of his reign.
Ok.
It's off my chest.
Censor away.
=== author's response follows ====
No censoring needed. You are civil and only mildly accusatory.
Objectively, the likely stats are that by month's end roughly 800 people will have read the post. Given that your opposing, lengthy opinion has been accepted alongside, I will be very surprised if, after all is said on it, that I will deserved to be classified as one of "those people" responsible for the demise of earth via perverting of global public opinion.
Also objectively, and on the basis that I have studied formally and since then read extensively on 'demographic transition,' yes, it has been common to the developed nations in the latter half of the previous century. The past, however, does not assure the future will conform to the model. Moreover, DTM theory has legitimate critics who argue that the developing nations will not follow the Western model. Suggest you read the rather nice wikipedia summary, especially "Non-Applicability to Less Developed Countries"
Subjectively, I also would like to point out that since this is the first time I have expressed my opinion on this publicly, I can hardly be blamed for nuclear power not being more available than it is currently. Could it have something to do with cost and risk perception in financial markets? Maybe?
If I was a banker, I probably wouldn't fund nuclear. But then I am from Long Island. I grew up in the shadow of the nuclear plant in Shoreham. You know, the one they built, put the fuels rods into, tested, and then NEVER turned on because people in OTHER TOWNS decided they didn't like it being there. That kind of financial loss has a tremendous impact.
In terms of banking, Nuclear is in boat like those of renewables- it is a different but related problem. Both technologies have somewhat higher upfront costs and relatively low operating costs. It is difficult for businesses to get funding for larger-scale renewables projects because these are- for whatever reason- not considered "proven technologies," so that interest rates for loans to build this infrastructure are prohibitively high. It is difficult to get funding for nuclear because of the fear that the investment for which the loans are being used will never be realized.
So it may be we don't need the government to subsidize these things- although it would be nice if they did, I doubt they would make an informed and coherent choice about which technologies to promote. Maybe we just need the government to guarantee loans for non-fossil fuel energy construction. This would ease any financial market fears, and you would see a sustained burst of investment. And as people see these investments actually pay off the government involvement will cease to be necessary.