John McCain has called for building 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030 and 100 eventually. Barack Obama’s Web site says, “It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table.”
But to what extent can nuclear power really help achieve energy independence?

There’s a problem about nuclear energy that gets little attention. At present, fossil fuels provide 87 percent of the world’s total energy while nuclear power plants provide just 4.8 percent. (All nuclear power plants currently generate electricity, accounting for about 15 percent of world electricity generation, while fossil fuels produce almost 67 percent of the electricity.)

The best estimates put the amount of uranium that can be mined economically (what geologists call the reserves) at about 5.5 million metric tons, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, today’s nuclear power plants use 70,000 metric tons a year of uranium. At this rate of use, the uranium that could be mined economically would last about 80 years.

Suppose it were possible to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear power. Suppose that we could use nuclear energy to make liquid and gas fuels to power vehicles, and could do this quickly using conventional nuclear power plants.

We would have to build enough plants to increase energy production by 17.4 times, which means using 1.2 million tons of uranium ore each year. At that rate of use, the reserves of uranium would be used up in less than five years.

Geologists also estimate that there are about 35 million tons of uranium out there regardless of the cost of mining it (geologists call this identified resources). With nuclear power replacing all fossil fuels, even these would be used up in 29 years.

Thus, if the goal is to counter global warming by replacing all fossil fuels with nuclear power, this goal cannot be met.

Advocates of nuclear power point out that it doesn’t have to replace all other sources of energy. Let’s consider that approach.

At a recent meeting, the Group of Eight major industrial countries agreed to reduce carbon emissions 50 percent by 2050. Suppose nuclear energy increased just enough each year to enable fossil-fuel use to decline at a constant annual rate, to 50 percent by 2050, while nuclear power therefore increased to provide 50 percent of the world’s energy.

At this rate of use, uranium reserves would run out by 2019, and the estimated maximum of 35 million metric tons of uranium in identified resources would run out by year 2038, gaining us less than two decades.

There are some important caveats. Exploring for minerals is done on an as-needed basis, and large areas of the world may have been little explored for uranium. Every mining geologist and mine corporation executive will tell you that estimates of total reserves of a mineral are just that – estimates – and that the reserves of many minerals always increase over time.

This approach may be all right for the planning time of mining companies, but it won’t work for a long-term global energy strategy based on adequate supplies of uranium.

Considering the enormous costs of building the large number of nuclear power plants that are contemplated to replace fossil fuels, the United States would be courting disaster if it chose this route with nothing but blind faith that there may be a lot more uranium out there if we only look for it.

We need to know a lot more about available uranium resources and where they are. If they are in unfriendly countries, they might not be available at all.
Nuclear power advocates also argue that it is possible to recover significant amounts of uranium from spent fuel. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “In 2004, two-thirds of the uranium used was newly mined; the rest came from civil and military stockpiles, spent fuel reprocessing and re-enrichment of depleted uranium.”

But the amount from spent fuels is not specified, and a reprocessing program to deal with 1.2 million tons of used uranium would be a major undertaking, perhaps not technologically feasible in the near future.

Others suggest that breeder reactors, which produce more nuclear fuel than they use, will solve the problem.

The United States experimented with a few breeder reactors from 1964 to 1994, but they were shut down or work on them halted in the 1990s.
Other nations have tried building them, and some are considering or developing them. But to my knowledge perhaps only one or two breeder reactors are in use and providing electrical energy anywhere in the world, and these are probably not “breeding.”

There are reasons for this: The technology is not there yet, and the reactors are dangerous in themselves, even without considering their potential use in making atomic weapons. They are the kind of nuclear reactors that everybody fears Iran or North Korea might build and use to make atomic bombs.
In sum, the breeder-reactor route, if it is practical at all, is a long way in the future as a major contributor to the world’s energy, and certainly not a way to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels now or in the near future.

The bottom line: From what is known about resources of uranium and the present and future state of nuclear power plants, there is no way that nuclear power can play a dominant role in the world’s energy supply.

This is not to say that it could play no role in a mixed strategy involving many kinds of energy, only that those who continue to press for a greater role for nuclear power must first show that there will be enough uranium to assure that thousands of nuclear power plants built at enormous cost would not soon stand idle – and leave our economy standing idle too.

Dan Botkin

Daniel B. Botkin
Copyright © 2007 Daniel B. Botkin

It has come as a shock to me that some of my fellow environmentalists, and one of this country’s leading newspapers, have recently begun arguing in favor of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and a way to fight global warming. Stewart Brand, according to a recent interview in the New York Times—which calls him one of the originators of environmentalism—is for it and feels “guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power.” The famous British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock has also said that nuclear power is our best choice to combat global warming, and not long ago the New York Times ran an editorial endorsing this kind of power. These opinions are apparently having an effect. The New York Times reported on March 28 that rising concerns about global warming are helping to drive up the price of uranium and leading to a new boom in uranium mining.

If leading environmentalists are for it and the power industry is for it—usually two opposing sides in the environmental debate—then this must be the way to go. Right? But consider these facts:

We would need too many nuclear plants. In the United States, 104 operating nuclear power reactors at 65 sites provide 8% of our energy, while fossil fuels provide 85%. For nuclear power to completely replace fossil fuels, we would need more than 1,000 new nuclear power plants of the same designs and efficiencies as existing plants. This would mean an average of 20 new plants per state.

Today, fossil fuels provide 71.4% of the electricity produced in the United States, while nuclear power plants provide 19.4%. Just to replace the electrical generation by fossil fuels with nuclear energy would require 285 new nuclear power plants of the kind, size, and efficiency of those in use now, and to counteract global warming these would have to be built and put online within a few years. This is just not practical.

Nuclear power is not a short-term solution. The uranium isotope that fuels conventional nuclear plants is a rare mineral—less than 1% of uranium ores. It is so rare that known reserves of it will run out before the end of this century if we greatly increase its use, as is proposed for the United States and the rest of the world. It is unlikely that the amount of uranium required for 1,000 new plants could be obtained at all—and certainly not quickly. Moreover, nuclear power plants are complex and take a long time to build. Even reaching agreement on where to build them is contentious and time-consuming. The fact is, no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant.

In short, if we need to diminish our use of fossil fuels right now—this year, next year, within the coming decade—nuclear power isn’t going to help. It would take a decade or more from planning to going on line for any of these plants to become operational, and it would take a huge effort to site and develop plans for the required number of nuclear power plants.

Add to this that uranium is dangerous. Mining it, transporting it, using it, and disposing of its radioactive waste all pose problems to which we have no satisfactory solutions. Right now there are 70,000 tons of radioactive waste in the United States in temporary holding facilities. This waste (and more to come) will need to be sealed off securely for 10,000 years. The federal government’s plan is to put it underground at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Estimates are that just transporting this waste from the 39 sites in many states where it is now to Yucca Mountain would take one to six trainloads (or truck convoys) a day for 24 years. The Department of Energy plans to have each shipment heavily guarded by police and the military to protect against terrorism. The shipments would go near or through many major cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Omaha, Pittsburgh, and Salt Lake City, as well as right through metropolitan Las Vegas.

The federal government doesn’t have a good plan in place for dealing with all this waste in the meantime. Think the Department of Energy is taking care of all this for us? Think again. A 2005 GAO report said that existing holding facilities would be filled in 2008. That isn’t exactly the kind of long-term planning that nuclear power requires.

Finally, conventional nuclear power plants have limited lifetimes, perhaps 30 or 40 years, perhaps more, but after that they have to be dismantled. Current federal government plans are to remove the less radioactive parts and then seal off the really hot reactor and other materials for 70 to 100 years until they become safe enough for people to dismantle them. That’s a lot of unusable, dangerous reactors sitting around the country, also targets for terrorism.

It costs even more to dismantle a nuclear reactor than to build it. These costs, along with the costs of transporting and policing the wastes, need to be included in calculating the cost of electricity from nuclear power plants. Has anybody made those calculations?
I’ve done research on global warming since the late 1960s and am concerned about the potential effects, so I do hope to see reductions in our release of greenhouse gases. But this clearly isn’t the way.

The question is not whether nuclear power is a viable replacement for fossil fuels. The question is, Why would anybody think it is?

Daniel B. Botkin
Copyright © Daniel B. Botkin 2007

The answer to our energy crisis lies in a farm field in Bavaria, Germany. There, sheep graze beneath an unusual crop: an array of black rectangles mounted on long metal tubes that rotate slowly during the day, following the sun like mechanical sunflowers. This is the world’s largest solar-electric installation, generating 10 megawatts on 62 acres. Scaled up, just 3.5% of Germany’s land area could provide solar energy equal to all energy used in Germany — by cars, trucks, trains, manufacturing, everything! And this would not have to be on otherwise empty land; it could be on rooftops, above parking lots, and integrated with certain kinds of pasture and cropland.

Solar energy collection seems unlikely in Germany’s climate, and even less likely in Bavaria — a landscape famous not for sunshine but for high mountain peaks and beautiful winter resorts. In Munich, Bavaria’s major city, about one-third of the days are rainy all year long, the average January daytime temperature is 34o F, and the average August daytime temperatures a mild 73o.

So why aren’t nations rushing to install solar power facilities? Are costs prohibitive? In 2002 Con Edison built New York City’s largest commercial rooftop solar energy system for $900,000, providing energy for 100 houses. At an average of four people per home, the installed cost is $2250 per person. For the 300 million United States residents, the installation cost would be $675 billion.

The U.S. balance of trade is in the red about $60 billion a month, or $720 billion a year, and much of this trade imbalance is due to the cost of foreign oil. So, for the equivalent of one year’s trade imbalance, the United States could pay the cost of installing solar energy facilities for all domestic electrical consumption.

The war in Iraq — justified, many say, in part to protect our sources of petroleum — has cost an official federal allocation of more than $506 billion. In January, a report by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the total true costs of the Iraq war could be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. For the cost of the Iraq war — or perhaps just one-half or one-quarter of that cost — solar energy systems could have been installed to provide domestic electricity for all the people in America: energy forever!

The numbers become even more amazing for the dry, sunny climate of Arizona. Based on facilities already installed there, covering just 1% of Arizona’s land with these solar collectors would produce electricity for 275 million houses — considerably more houses than exist in the United States.

Solar energy, of course, has many other benefits — primarily independence from foreign suppliers and greatly reduced air and water pollution, including less greenhouse gas. It also offers the option of decentralized energy production, which would reduce the risk to our energy supply from terrorist attacks.

Why isn’t the United States pursuing solar energy production? The conventional wisdom of environmental economists I know is that solar will never be more than a minor player in the energy game. World-famous environmentalist James Lovelock says the same thing. Is it just a mind-set that is holding us back?

Perhaps their information is out of date. The efficiency of solar energy devices continues to improve rapidly: Today’s solar devices convert 17% of solar energy to electricity; not too long ago, these devices converted only 1% to 2%.

Perhaps big power companies stand to lose too much revenue (and control over power distribution) if decentralized generation takes over when solar power is produced on rooftops.

Perhaps, despite the clear need to move away from petroleum, there is just too much money riding on oil production and distribution for us to let go easily. Whatever the reasons have been, the facts tell us that we should wait no longer.

Pros and Cons of Some Energy Sources

Pros and Cons of Energy Sources: More Information

Copyright © 2007 Daniel B. Botkin
From his forthcoming book, Energy Forever: A Voter’s Guide to Energy

Why? The answer lies in a story about whales, whaling, and people, a long time ago. Put yourself back to about 500 A.D. or a few centuries later, and think of yourself as part of a small group of Eskimo struggling northeastward near the Bering Strait and crossing into what is now Alaska. Life for you and your ancestors has been a struggle — living at the margin, barely enough food, hard to keep warm, often without enough energy left over to do much more than think about the next meal. This was the life of most of the Canadian Eskimo at that time, a struggle for existence.

But this particular migrating Eskimo group coming across the Bering Strait recently learned how to catch whales, and developed a technology that made them very successful at it. They invented a clever device, a toggling harpoon made of bone and antlers combined with an inflatable seal skin drag float. The harpoon, like a modern whaling harpoon, slid closed into the flesh of the whale but locked in an open position when the whale tried to pull away from it.

Today, of course, we oppose the hunting of whales. But back then, successful whale hunting led to a fundamental change in the lives of hunters in the cold North. Whale meat gave these Eskimo so much more energy than their neighbors that they were able to do much more than simply hunt and think about their next meal. The successful Eskimo whale hunters used their excess energy supply to conquer other Eskimo — that is, to wage war.

Excess energy allows us to do all kinds of things. Over the centuries, people with an ample energy supply, not needing to use all their energy searching for their next meal and shelter, have, like the whale hunters, used it to conquer other peoples. But they have also used it to paint, to sing, to tell stories, to build monumental edifices.

Modern society has come to rely on easily available energy; we have taken it for granted as we used it all the time for all kinds of things. Today, however, with rising alarm about global warming and the burning of fossil fuels, along with the growing awareness that the supply of fossil fuels is running out, we are casting about for solutions. One widespread view is that we must all scale back our energy use and learn to use as little energy as possible — in effect, go on a long-term, even permanent, energy diet.

As we know all too well, people are not good about sticking to prolonged diets. And in any case, as an ecologist who has done research for years about how animals and plants and ecosystems garner energy, I see the problem differently. Life with a minimum amount of energy is a life on the margin. One of the ways that species have “won” in the struggle for existence — managing to persist while other species went extinct — was by gathering more energy than other species could and using it more efficiently.

In the midst of all the debate over fossil fuels, we seem to have forgotten this fundamental role of energy in life. We think that all we need energy for is to drive our cars, fly around the world, run our electrical gadgets. But more important is that abundant energy is necessary for our way of life, for our civilization. If that energy were to vanish, we would find ourselves once again living at the margin, and might well see the end of many things that we don’t associate with an energy supply, including democracy and the freedom and creativity that leisure makes possible. Thus the search for alternative sources of energy is not simply an environmentalist’s thing, not simply a pet goal of a narrow interest group in our society.

Democracy has existed rarely in the history of civilization — mainly in ancient Greece; then, later, in the Roman Republic; and in our own time, when democracy exists, such as it is, in some of the nations of the world. In each case, these have been periods of abundant energy — for the Greeks and Romans, in the form of slaves, servants, and beasts of burden who provided the energy for a small elite who shared democracy within their limited group.

My fear is that when energy becomes very limited, we will see an end to democracy and to many other aspects of life that we enjoy and take for granted. In short, while some fear that civilization will collapse because of global warming, I maintain that it will collapse if we don’t have abundant energy.

What’s the solution? The answer lies in a farm field in Bavaria, Germany. There, sheep graze beneath an unusual crop: an array of black rectangles mounted on long metal tubes that rotate slowly during the day, following the sun like mechanical sunflowers. This is the world’s largest solar-electric installation, generating 10 megawatts on 62 acres. Scaled up, just 3.5% of Germany’s land area could provide enough solar energy to supply all of Germany’s energy needs — for cars, trucks, trains, manufacturing, everything! And this would not have to be on otherwise empty land; it could be on rooftops, above parking lots, and integrated with certain kinds of pasture and cropland.

The sun may seem an undependable energy source in a climate like Germany’s, and especially in Bavaria, famous not for sunshine but for high mountains and winter sports. In Munich, Bavaria’s major city, about one-third of the days are rainy all year long, the average January daytime temperature is 34o F, and the average August daytime temperature a mild 73o. No matter — the fact is, it works, and it’s been working for several years.

So why aren’t nations rushing to install solar power facilities? Are costs prohibitive? In 2002 Con Edison built New York City’s largest commercial rooftop solar energy system for $900,000, providing energy for 100 houses. At an average of four people per home, the installed cost is $2,250 per person. For the 300 million United States residents, the installation cost would be $675 billion.

The U.S. balance of trade is in the red by about $60 billion a month, or $720 billion a year, and much of this trade imbalance is due to the cost of foreign oil. So, for the equivalent of one year’s trade imbalance, the United States could pay the cost of installing solar energy facilities for all domestic electrical consumption.

The war in Iraq — justified, many say, in part to protect our sources of oil — has cost, in addition to thousands of young lives, an official federal allocation of more than $506 billion. In January, a report by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the total true costs of the Iraq war could be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. For the cost of the Iraq war, or perhaps just one-half or one-quarter of that amount, solar energy systems could have been installed to provide domestic electricity for all the people in the United States forever! The numbers become even more amazing for the dry, sunny climate of Arizona. Based on facilities already installed there, covering just 1% of Arizona’s land with solar collectors would produce electricity for 275 million houses — considerably more houses than exist in the United States.

Solar energy, of course, has many other benefits; primarily independence from foreign suppliers and greatly reduced air and water pollution, including less greenhouse gas. It also offers the option of decentralized energy production, which would reduce the risk to our energy supply from terrorist attacks.

There are those who favor nuclear energy over solar. I can only point out that with solar energy we do not need to worry about deadly “solar leaks” seeping into the ground and water, and we do not need to figure out how to protect the planet from “solar waste” that will remain lethal for thousands of years.

Time grows short. We must turn to new, plentiful, nonpolluting sources of energy, and we must do this quickly, while we still have enough fossil fuels to power the tools necessary to build solar and wind machines. By doing this, we are not just fulfilling some ideological goal of environmentalists, we are sustaining civilization and one of its finest products, democracy.

Copyright © 2007 Daniel B. Botkin

With growing recent advocacy for more nuclear power plants, I have been thinking about a little-known, unique and curious experiment conducted in the 1960s and 1970s at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, NY: the laboratory radiated an entire forest. Back in those cold-war days the danger of a nuclear war and of other releases of radioactive materials seemed real. One response of the Federal government was to sponsor three experiments examining the effects on natural ecosystems of releases of radioactive isotopes, the kind of things that make electricity in nuclear power plants or are by-products of that production.

I was one of the researchers in that radioactive forest. We could work in the forest four hours a day because the radiation was the relatively “clean” kind – from the heavy metal Cesium’s radioactive isotope 137. This produced only gamma rays – rays like x-rays only with much shorter wavelengths and much deadlier. The Laboratory moved the largest source of Cesium-137 that could be handled by earth moving machinery safely into the forest, mounted it on a vertical, movable pole with gadgets that allowed the radioactive material to be lowered into the ground and protected under lead shielding four hours a day.

It was weird and strangely fascinating to walk into that radiated forest after a decade of its exposure. Near ground zero, as the photograph I took shows, all the plants were dead, but they did not decay – the radiation cleaned the area even of fungus and bacteria, earthworms, bark beetles, and other creatures that participate in the decay of dead wood. It was a forest of standing dead trees, somewhat blackened, looking as if it had just burned the day before, but many of the trees had been killed years before.

We hunted around for the hardiest life that could survive the radiation. Within about six feet of the source we found, on the back of a warning sign, a small green patch that turned out to be a kind of algae, called Protococcus, that grows on the surface of damp soils. The hardiest flowering plants were some sedges that could grow in the shadow cast by the standing dead trees.

The plan for nuclear wastes is to avoid such landscapes by burying the used but still radioactive materials. As Vice-President Cheney has acknowledged, exactly how to handle the wastes hasn’t been completely worked out. The leading proposals are to bury them deep in Nevada or some other place out of sight of the nation’s capitol. But the radioactive wastes remain dangerous for 10,000 years. A government task force assigned the job of designing a warning that could be understood by people for one hundred centuries proposed, as one solution, solid structures above the waste depository that were designed to emit mournful sounds when the wind blew. With modern acoustic engineering, perhaps we could design a structure that would play a sad, mournful melody for 10,000 years.

Many physicists and engineers say that this buried waste would be perfectly safe, but just in case it leaked, the warning would be necessary. And imagine the legacy of our civilization if it did leak. Not only would we produce a melody, but if people came to investigate it, they would wither and die. Wow! We could outdo the curses of the Egyptian priests who tried, with little success, to prevent robbing of the great pyramids. And if we do fail to deal with the nuclear waste problem, we might find that we have created landscapes like the Brookhaven National Laboratory experiment, or perhaps worse, contaminated with all forms of radiation including those that linger and get into ecological food chains.

Members of that task force point out that the longest surviving purposeful artifacts of past human civilization have been either graffiti or large structures – like Stonehenge – whose purposes we do not understand. Our contribution to the future of the world would be a message that people would really understand – music and death.

Consider the alternatives. Suppose we put the money proposed for nuclear power plants into solar energy. Solar energy collectors can be placed on roofs of buildings and be pretty much invisible. And because they produced electricity where it was needed, the huge new transmission lines that Cheney has told us are necessary would not be built.

Another alternative is wind energy, but windmills are more controversial. Although they are economically competitive with fossil fuel energy production, some people think they are pretty and some don’t. Wind mills can run in farm and range land. And if a farmer abandoned farming, the land might revert to prairie, with windmills in it.

The irradiated forest at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the problem of creating a warning sign that will communicate danger for 10,000 years bring out the real issues underlying the energy debate: the quality of our lives. If we step back and ask: why do we want electrical energy, automobiles, and airplanes? The answer – aside from money and power to those who run power companies – is to improve the quality of our lives. Why throw out or endanger some aspects of the quality of our lives – human and environmental health and well being – pleasing landscapes, reduced sense of risk – in our attempt to save another part – such as modern technologies of transportation and the advantages of modern computing-based technologies that are based on the use of electricity. Both are deeply meaningful to human beings and to the continuation of civilization.

Many experts argue the numbers, about how much power can be produced, about the economics and cost-efficiency. Before we approach those issues, however, we have to come to terms with the fundamental human values that are the basis of the debate: the underlying and powerful issue of the quality of life and the beauty and health of our landscapes, of nature.

Copyright © Daniel B. Botkin 2003