Clean Green Incoherence

 

In 2015, I posted my review of Too Hot to Touch, a 2013 book by William and Rosemarie Alley.  William worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, and he was involved in the search for somewhere to store more than 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods, and 20,000 canisters of military waste.  The challenging objective was to store this extremely dangerous high level radioactive waste in a way that would be absolutely safe for a million years.  The Yucca Mountain site in Nevada was an isolated desert location.  It was not perfect, but no place was perfect.  It was the best choice possible, based on 25 years of research costing $10 billion.  The repository was designed to be 1,000 feet (304 m) below the surface.

The Alleys wrote that fuel rods are used for about six years.  Spent fuel rods remain very hot and highly radioactive.  For about five years, they must be kept submerged in ponds, where cooled water constantly circulates.  Eventually, the hot rods cool off, and can be stored in airtight dry casks, which are much safer.  Dry casks are made of steel and concrete.  The concrete blocks radioactive emissions.  Casks are designed to last maybe 50 years, not a million. 

Permanent storage requires underground geologic repositories that will remain very dry forever, and not be disturbed by earthquakes or terrorists.  In 2022, more than 89,000 tons of spent fuel rods are stored in casks in many states.  If we ever build a repository, all those casks of extremely toxic waste will have to be hauled in from distant locations, with no surprises, if possible.

The Alleys wrote that in 2011, about 75 percent of spent fuel in the U.S. was stored in ponds.  “Many of these pools are full, with some containing four times the amount of spent fuel that they were designed for.”  If a booboo happens, and hot rods are exposed to air, the embedded uranium pellets can oxidize.  If the rods ignite, massive amounts of highly radioactive emissions can be released.  This could result in many cancer deaths, and cost billions of dollars.  The meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were triggered by overheated fuel rods. 

When the Alleys wrote in 2013, there were 440 nuke plants in 31 countries.  At that time, no nation had a permanent high-level waste storage facility in operation.  In 2022, there are 449 plants.  Guess how many nations are using geologic repositories (zero).  One in Finland might open in 2023.

A Wikipedia article on Nuclear Decommissioning described the aging reactors in the U.S.  “As of 2017, most nuclear plants operating in the United States were designed for a life of about 30 to 40 years and are licensed to operate for 40 years by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  As of 2020, the average age of these reactors was about 39 years.  Many plants are coming to the end of their licensing period and if their licenses are not renewed, they must go through a decontamination and decommissioning process.”  Decommissioning is very expensive, and can take many years.

Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.  At that time, Yucca Mountain was the widely supported location for our nuke waste repository.  One crappy day, the Alleys were blindsided by an unpleasant surprise.  In March 2009, Obama’s new Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, told a Senate hearing that “Yucca Mountain was not an option.”  In July 2009, the license application was withdrawn, and all funding for the project was cut.  Game over.

Chu cited no issues, and offered no alternatives.  The Alleys wrote, “Virtually all observers attributed the decision to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain as political payoff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).  Nevada was a swing state in the election, and Obama had pledged to kill Yucca Mountain, if elected.”  He needed Reid in order to push his health care plans through.  Republican Senators blasted Chu with sharp questions about his hasty dumb decision. 

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president.  Wikipedia described his Yucca Mountain policies.  “On March 15, 2017, the Trump Administration announced it would request Congressional approval for $120 million to restart licensing activity at the Yucca Mountain Repository, with funding also to be used to create an interim storage program.  The project would consolidate nuclear waste across the United States in Yucca Mountain, which had been stockpiled in local locations since 2010.”

Then, he changed his mind.  “Although his administration had allocated money to the project, in October 2018, President Donald Trump stated he opposed the use of Yucca Mountain for dumping, saying he agreed with the people of Nevada.”  “On May 20, 2020, Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes testified in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that Trump strongly opposes proceeding with Yucca Mountain Repository.”

In November 2020, voters chose Joe Biden to be the next president.  Biden did not overturn Trump’s policy.  The Wikipedia article continues.  “In May 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that Yucca Mountain would not be part of the Biden administration’s plans for nuclear-waste disposal.  She anticipated announcing the department's next steps in the coming months.”

A year later, in May 2022, an Associated Press story reported that Granholm had not changed her mind.  “The Energy Department is working to develop a process to ask communities if they are interested in storing spent nuclear fuel on an interim basis, both to make nuclear power a more sustainable option and figure out what to do with the waste.  Granholm said it’s the best way to finally solve the issue.  A plan to build a national storage facility northwest of Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain has been mothballed because of staunch opposition from most Nevada residents and officials.”  So, Obama, Trump, and Biden rubbished the Yucca solution, and offered no Plan B.  Sorry kids!

Luckily, hope was on the way!  In February 2019, tree-hugging progressives, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, were galloping in to rescue us.  The answer to our prayers was called the Green New Deal (GND).  An early version of the plan rejected the notion that carbon-free nuclear energy was necessary to fight climate change and keep the perpetually growing economy on life support.  It was simply too expensive, too risky, and there was nowhere to store the waste for all eternity.  The best solution was “clean, green, renewable energy” — mostly solar and wind.

Not everyone agreed.  Shutting down the nuclear industry would mean burning even more fossil energy to keep energy guzzling consumers in the express lane to oblivion.  The downside of solar and wind is intermittency — when the winds calm, or sunbeams disappear, they quit working.  Nukes can consistently produce lots of electricity, whilst emitting no carbon during operation. 

These were the two possible options: renewables only, or renewables plus nukes.  Not worthy of serious consideration was a third option: mindfully confronting our embarrassing addictions — sharply reigning in consumption, turning off the lights, unplugging the gizmos, learning how to walk, and seriously contemplating the dark vibes of our maximum impact lifestyles.

Anyway, the initial anti-nuke version of the GND generated resistance from the Sunrise Movement and other folks.  They wanted to continue using carbon-free nuclear energy, rather than burning even more fossil fuel, and belching even more carbon into the atmosphere.  On May 6, 2019, Ocasio-Cortez felt the heat, saw the light, and developed an “open mind” on nukes.  She was willing to leave the door open on nuclear.  She imagined that newer reactors were far better than the old technology.  Ideally, the long term goal should be to meet 100% of U.S. electricity needs via “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy.”

OK, so that’s what I’ve learned recently.  It’s been a while since I posted new stuff here.  Revising this book is hard on my tired brain.  The above fits into a bigger picture that’s still under construction.  The bigger picture has more components.  We live in an era of conspiracy theories and fake news.  The powers that be are working very hard to assure us that the climate crisis is an annoyance that can and will be solved.  With the transition to clean, green, renewable energy, the consumer way of life can happily metastasize forever.  We’re on the path to a brighter future.  Don’t worry, go shopping. 

I previously posted four sample sections on climate change: [55] [56] [57] [58].  Those sections describe why I perceive that the climate is in a positive feedback loop.  Atmospheric carbon continues accumulating, polar ice continues shrinking, Arctic temperatures continue rising, permafrost continues melting, and many other processes are intensifying in a downward spiral that is out of control.  Even if all eight billion of us suddenly went Stone Age tomorrow, the avalanche of change we’ve unleashed would continue its descent.

An enormous shortcoming in the clean, green, renewable future dream is that it’s essentially electric powered.  Fossil energy is not invited.  Building millions of wind turbines, solar panels, storage batteries, and radically redesigning the global grid would be impossible without the use of technology that requires huge amounts of fossil energy.  All of these gizmos have limited working lifespans.  Periodic replacement is needed.

Electricity cannot generate the intense heat needed to make metals, silicon, concrete, and other compounds.  Mining, smelting, transportation systems, and many other processes cannot be entirely performed using electricity.  You can’t manufacture stuff like machinery for construction, agriculture, high technology, and so on.  Thus, the GND is the opposite of carbon-free.

Lately — and very late in the game — some folks are beginning to push back on the Green New Deal’s magical thinking.  Megan Seibert and William E. Rees discussed its serious shortcomings.  Their report relied heavily on the pioneering research by Alice Friedemann.  Geologist Walter Youngquist was my friend.  The second edition of his outstanding GeoDestinies book is now available as a free 600-page PDF.

Someday my revisions will be complete, and this stuff will all be presented in a neat and tidy manner.  Thank you for your patience!  Have a nice day!

Children of the Sun



All life requires energy to survive, and our primary source of energy is the sun, a fireball of nuclear fusion.  On Earth, the plant people absorb this energy and convert it into simple carbohydrates.  Humans and other animals extract these nutrients from edible plants, and/or from the flesh of plant eating animals.

Alfred Crosby’s book, Children of the Sun, presents a history of how humans access energy.  It’s a good companion to his earlier book, Throwing Fire, a history of projectile use, spanning from thrown stones to nuclear weapons.  Both discuss the rapid acceleration of innovation, population, and ecological impacts.  This growing instability over the centuries is largely off the radar in our day-to-day lives.  Most of our brain cycles are engaged in the here and now, a pushbutton wonderland of nonstop magic.

Crosby reminds readers of the obvious fact that fossil energy is finite, and the large, high quality deposits are approaching their finish lines.  We are making little effort to wrap our heads around the notion that our high-impact energy-guzzling lifestyle has an expiration date.  Instead, we pretend — with all our might — that the here and now is perfectly “normal,” and everything is excellent.

When the spirits of our wild ancestors observe today’s “normal” they see a nightmarish insane asylum.  Powerful historians like Crosby can vaporize the walls of our madhouse, and allow us to perceive the hundreds of centuries of turbulent cultural evolution that preceded our birth.  We can observe the spirit of progress transition from an occasional draft, to a strong wind, and the full-scale hurricane of today.

In the 200,000 years since the first Homo sapiens punched in at the time clock, almost all generations have been wild nomadic hunter-gatherers, living in a manner that was far simpler, and much closer to sustainable.  For almost the entire human saga, this slower, gentler mode was the long term “normal.”  But it wasn’t normal.

Some scholars have speculated that if space aliens had visited 100,000 years ago, humans would have appeared to be ordinary animals of no significance.  Wrong!  We were roasting steaks with domesticated fire, a spooky trick never performed by ordinary animals.  Fire was domesticated prior to Homo sapiens, maybe 500,000 years ago, maybe a million, nobody knows.

When our ancestors burned biomass like wood, they were utilizing the solar energy stored by the tree.  Fire provided some benefits.  It intimidated hungry predators.  It enabled our ancestors to survive in regions outside the tropics.  It made cooking possible, a huge advance.  Cooking partially predigests foods, making it easier for our guts to extract more nutrients from them.  It also transforms a number of inedible substances into edible sources of nutrition.  Chimps spend six hours a day chewing raw foods.  Of course, progress is never free — fire making eventually led to huge unintended consequences, like megafauna extinctions, industrial civilization, the population explosion, and an unstable climate. 

It’s fun to play “what if…”  What if that first fire starter, who learned how to make sparks with friction, had been ripped to shreds by hyenas prior to his or her discovery?  Without fire, furless hominids could not have survived in chilly non-tropical regions.  The snow monkeys of Japan solved this challenge by evolving heavy winter coats.  Would Homo sapiens have ever evolved at all, limited to a raw food diet?  Would the Americas and Europe of today still be human-free wildernesses, home to healthy populations of mammoths, bison, and sabertooth cats?

Over time, our ancestors got better at hunting and basic survival.  When some groups moved out of the tropics, they encountered conditions for which evolution had not fine-tuned them.  They needed tighter shelters, warm clothing, and food storage for the lean seasons.  Clever innovations could increase the odds for survival, and the cleverer we got, the better.  Over the millennia, our addiction to innovation snowballed.  Like an arms race, the groups possessing the most powerful juju were likely to displace or erase the bubbas with inferior juju.

And so, the clever ones spread around the globe.  Growing numbers eventually ran out of uninhabited lands to colonize, leading to growing friction.  Too much cleverness eventually led to what Ronald Wright called “the perfection of hunting.”  By killing megafauna a bit faster than they could recover over the centuries, big game gradually got scarce.  Our menu shifted toward small game, and then to aquatic edibles.

The domestication of plants and animals was another Earth-shaking innovation.  We could now exploit solar energy more efficiently.  More people could live on less land.  Never before had we controlled so much energy.  Population grew, spurring instability.  The enslavement of animals like horses and oxen provided us with pack animals to carry stuff, and traction animals to pull stuff.  No longer was the work in human communities performed solely by human muscle power.  Enslaved animals could be exploited in many ways.

By A.D. 1000, clever ones had learned how to capture more energy with waterwheels, windmills, and sailing ships, but muscle power was still the primary energy.  We were drifting toward the limits of utilizing solar energy via agriculture and burning wood.  As forests disappeared, the clever ones began burning coal.  Eventually, mineshafts reached the water table, and muscle powered gizmos were unable to remove the water fast enough.  So, brilliant lads invented steam engines that could pump water and keep the mines dry.

Until maybe 1700, human society ran primarily on the muscle power of humans and animals.  The steam engine, like the domestication of plants, animals, and fire, was a major advance with horrendous unintended consequences.  The speed of innovation became a constantly accelerating whirlwind — locomotives, steamships, and multiple-spindle spinning machines.  Lighting switched from the flickering hearth fire, to candles, then whale oil lamps, then coal gas, then kerosene, then electric lights.

Steam engines were pushed to the sidelines by internal combustion engines, which were used to power automobiles, tractors, trucks, locomotives, ships, and many other machines.  Gasoline couldn’t run a sewing machine 100 miles away, but electricity could.  We invented generators, installed power grids, built hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power plants.  We invented telegraphs, telephones, radio, television.  The herd grew explosively from one billion to two, three, four, five, six, seven…  Zoom, zoom, zoom…

For a while, the Peak Oil doomsters made us nervous, with their predictions that the production of conventional oil would likely peak around 2005, which it did.  But we got distracted by the growing production unconventional oil from oil shale (fracking) and tar sands, and returned to pretending that we have no limits.  Let’s go shopping!

Thankfully, Crosby provides readers with an embarrassing birds-and-bees talk about EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested).  In the 1930s, the EROEI of oil production was 100:1 — it took one unit of energy to extract 100 units from the underground reserves.  When he was writing in 2006, it had dropped to 17:1.  Today, it’s less.  Low EROEI means that lots of oil will be left in the ground forever, regardless of how high the price eventually rises.  Imagine having a job that paid $100 per day, but the bridge toll to get there was $105.

Crosby offers us no silver bullet solutions.  “Winning streaks are rarely permanent.”  The easiest approach to our challenges is to continue living foolishly and hope for miracles.  The smartest response would be sanity — limit population, cut consumption, live lightly, and abandon nuclear and fossil energy.  “We have every reason to believe that we are capable of environmental sanity; but first we have to accept that the way we live now is new, abnormal, and unsustainable.”  

It’s a short book, and very easy to read — no charts, graphs, or techno-jargon.  Crosby describes the uncomfortable facts of life in a calm and non-hysterical way.  I have zero complaints about it.  It’s an excellent intro to energy.  He briefly discusses the limitations of alternative energy sources.  The limits are more thoroughly discussed in Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society.  The huge downside of nuclear energy is better addressed in Too Hot to Touch.  Other energy-related books include Snake Oil: Fracking’s False Promise, Cadillac Desert, The Big Flatline, The End of Growth, Techno-Fix, and Afterburn.

Crosby, Alfred W., Children of the Sun — A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2006.

Black Gold



Albert Marrin is a history professor who has written dozens books for young readers.  In Black Gold, he discussed the geology of fossil energy, emergence of the oil industry, geopolitics, oil wars, environmental impacts, and future challenges.  I was intrigued by his perspective on geopolitics.

Before World War One, the British navy scrapped many coal-burning warships and began building modern boats that ran on oil.  This gave them a big advantage over the German navy.  The era of industrial warfare had arrived.  Nations with tanks, trucks, and planes could easily smash horse-powered enemies.

America joined the war in 1917, and brought lots of oil.  German ports were blockaded, their war machine ran out of fuel, and they were defeated.  In this new era, for the first time, oil became essential for military success.  Young Hitler grasped this, and so did the British.  A primary objective of the Brits was to seize control of Middle Eastern oil, a yet-to-be developed treasure that made greedy gits giddy.  They succeeded, invented new nations, and found obedient puppets to rule them (and loot them).

Of course, wealth and power frequently turns decent people into obnoxious monsters.  Troublesome puppets were replaced with new ones, Britain got very rich, and the Arabs and Persians developed an intense hatred of Brits.  In World War Two, Hitler launched his oil-powered blitzkrieg, made a beeline for oily Baku, and planned to grab the Persian Gulf.  In this war, American oil once again came to the rescue.

Germany and Japan learned the hard way that running out of oil is for losers.  Everyone knows this today.  U.S. presidents have poured trillions of dollars into maintaining control of oil, whilst jabbering about freedom, democracy, and weapons of mass destruction.  For some mysterious reason, millions of Middle Eastern folks now loath and detest the U.S.

In Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabis are a sect that perceives most of modernity as pure evil.  They don’t look fondly on the lavish lifestyles of the ruling Saud family.  Marrin asserts that the government agreed to subsidize the spread of Wahhabi schools into other regions.  In exchange for this funding, the Wahhabis agreed not to make trouble in Arabia — but trouble anywhere else was OK.  “In short, Saudi oil profits fueled terrorism.”

Russia now controls much of the natural gas that powers Europe, and Western powers are eager for an alternative, a pipeline from the Middle East that bypasses Russian control.  It would be reasonable to conclude that the coming decades are not going to be a sweet celebration of love, peace, and happiness.  Expect big drama as the age of hydrocarbons swirls the drain, climate change pounds the luckless, and Big Mama Nature hurls overshoot overboard.

The rear end of Marrin’s book was annoying.  The book is intended for use in schools.  He recommends that the U.S. should become energy independent as soon as possible.  The best solution, he says, is a combination of fossil fuels and alternative energy — solar, wind, biomass, hydro, geothermal, nuclear (no mention of sharply reducing consumption).  The assumption is that independence is possible, and that the consumer way of life will be free to continue down the path of mindless self-destruction.

Teachers, librarians, and parents should have an above average understanding of energy issues before selecting books on the subject.  These issues are going to have a staggering impact on the lives of the target audience, young readers.  It’s long past time to sit down with youngsters and have a highly embarrassing birds-and-bees discussion about the fact that the abundant energy bubble is going to turn into a pumpkin during their lifetimes.  Preserving their ignorance seems cruel.

In the book, readers learn that nuclear reactors can generate lots of electricity, but they occasionally barf large amounts of radiation all over the place.  Therefore, it’s very important to properly dispose of spent fuel because it’s extremely toxic.  Great idea!  How?  William and Rosemary Alley discussed this issue in Too Hot to Touch.  They note that today “there are some 440 nuclear power plants in 31 countries.  More are on the way.  Yet, no country on Earth has an operating high-level waste disposal facility.”

Obama cancelled plans for the Yucca Mountain site, which was as close to perfect as is possible — after 25 years of research at a cost of $10 billion.  Because it was cancelled, spent fuel rods continue building up, many of them temporarily stored in cooling ponds.  If the circulating pumps for the cooling ponds stop, the water boils, the pool evaporates, and the rods are exposed to air, melt, and release radioactive gasses.  The meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were triggered by overheated fuel rods.

Readers also learn that the U.S. has huge coal reserves, enough for 250 years at the current rate of consumption.  To understand why this is a meaningless statement, watch one of the many versions of Albert Bartlett’s famous lecture, Arithmetic, Population, and Energy on YouTube.  Every student and teacher should watch it.

Read Jeff Rubin’s book, The Big Flatline.  You’ll learn that the production of top quality anthracite coal peaked in 1950, and grade B bituminous coal peaked in 1990.  There is abundant grade C coal, lignite, which is especially filthy to burn.  Since lignite is so low in energy, it cannot be shipped long distances profitably.  It is absurd to use 100 calories of diesel to haul 100 calories of low quality coal.

This is an extremely important issue — energy returned on energy invested (EROEI).  The book doesn’t mention this.  EROEI is also highly relevant to oil.  Rubin and others note that in the good old days of high-profit gushers, it was common to invest one calorie of energy to produce 100 calories of oil (100:1).  By 2010, typical EROEI was about 17:1, and some are predicting 5:1 by 2020.

Rising prices enable the extraction of difficult and expensive non-conventional oil and gas.  At some point, declining EROEI makes extraction pointless, regardless of market prices.  Consequently, most of the oil in Canadian tar sands will be left where it is.  The EROEI of tar sands now in production is about 3:1, and 5:1 for shale deposits.

Readers learn about renewable energy, like wind, solar, and hydro.  See Ted Trainer’s book, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society.  Learn about the significant shortcomings of the various types of alternative energy.  Discover why no combination of them will ever come anywhere close to replacing the energy now provided by fossil fuel.  Discover why we will not enjoy a smooth and painless transition to a sustainable, renewable energy future.

The education system, from grade schools to universities, seems to be largely committed to a “don’t scare the children” strategy.  We don’t want to fill kids with despair about their grisly inheritance.  Also, publishers want to avoid discussions that piss off poorly informed parents, or the politically powerful titans of industry.  The publisher did allow Marrin to drop hints that there might be some trouble in the future.  It’s a touchy game.  Sales can be harmed by too little reality, or too much.  The book’s takeaway message is that we have the solutions for our energy challenges, but we don’t have a lot of time to fool around.  Things will be OK, probably, maybe.  Is that likely?

Marrin, Albert, Black Gold: The Story of Oil in Our Lives, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012.