HELIOLITH

Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times wrote an op-ed today entitled, “Nukes are Green.” (Link here until archived) Between this essay and Wired Magazine’s similar article in February, I’m trying to understand what is going on with this sudden upsurge in nuclear optimism. Is Cheney diverting energy task-force funds to journalists? You decide. If you make it through to the end, I’d appreciate your opinion as well!

Kristof attempts to distance himself from Washington’s currently abhorrent environmental policy, “So President Bush’s overall environmental policy gives me the shivers,” and then praises him in the same breath, “but he’s right to push ahead for nuclear energy.” Next, he goes on to slam renewables as lacking in commercial deployability. Solar accounts currently for “one-fifth of 1 percent of the nation’s electricity and costs five times as much as other sources.” He dismisses wind as undependable. Reikiman of Seven Generational Ruminations counters that, “…it’s an uneven playing field, because the fossil fuel industry is entrenched and has economies of scale to its benefit that the solar industry can only dream of.” I have to agree, and it’s difficult to believe that Kristof’s spin is much more than spin designed to fuel a rapid expansion in consumption that itself will run up against many environmental obstacles.

As a side note, one of Kristof’s sentences uses a rather baffling logic,

But it’s time for the rest of us to drop that hostility to nuclear power. It’s increasingly clear that the biggest environmental threat we face is actually global warming, and that leads to a corollary: nuclear energy is green.

Using the quick-reference google/answers definition of corollary, we find that corollary is defined as: 1) A proposition that follows with little or no proof required from one already proven. 2) A deduction or an inference. or 3) A natural consequence or effect; a result. Clearly what Kristof meant to suggest was that if we agree that human-generated carbon is the greatest threat to global climatological catastrophe, and while nuclear doesn’t produce carbon, it is therefore is “greener” than coal for example, but only with regard to actual carbon emissions. To globally brand it as green is a careless rhetorical trick that turns logic on its head and lets quite a bit of force out of his own argument early on. Phila of Bouphonia slams him for it too.

A green pushing point for Kristof as well as Wired’s “Nuclear Now” authors Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss is the suitability for nuclear power to generate Hydrogen which is much needed in quantity to power zero-emissions fuel-cell vehicles, one promising technology to deal with our out-of-control vehicle pollution problem. Another forceful argument for a radical energy policy shift is the toxicity and deadliness of current coal-production facilities, which reportedly kill 25,000 people per year (domestically is implied).

Kristof cites improvements in efficiency and safety over the last 30 years as reason enough to rethink our aversion (it’s been since 1973 since the U.S. public has allowed any new reactors to come online). Kristof ends by quoting the famous environmentalist James Lovelock, who has apparently joined the nuclear power bandwagon,

I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy,” Mr. Lovelock wrote last year, adding: “Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our descendents. … Only one immediately available source does not cause global warming, and that is nuclear energy.

The Wired article, Nuclear Now, is really somewhat obnoxious with its in-your-face spin it’s written a bit like something from an ultra-conservative magazine that freely makes jabs at “the granola crowd,” “flannel-shirted environmentalists” and “wilting organics,” while at the same time, the leading full-page illustration depicts a few families dressed in what obviously looks like eco-styled organically grown earthtone clothing, playing and smiling in front of a couple of nuclear towers. It’s an intentionally surreal juxtaposition I suppose, and gets their point across but their aforementioned sarcasm undermines their credibility.

They make the same errors in their reasoning as Kristof did, suggesting that “The more seriously you take the idea of global warming, the more seriously you have to take nuclear power.” Bashing the reader over the head with if you accept the problem, you have to accept MY solution isn’t very subtle. Unless you come from a conservative pro-nuclear perspective in the first place, the article although it looked promising at the outset, seems to preach to the already converted.

In an interesting side column to the main Wired story, Amanda Griscom Little writes a short essay entitled “Green vs. Green” about the issue of nuclear power within culture of environmental activism. She mentions the conversion of Lovelock to the pro-nuclear camp, as well as former Friends of the Earth board trustee Hugh Montefiore, and Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. Griscom Little quickly notes greens major problems with nuclear:
1) Nuclear weapons proliferation that the nuclear industry would potentially worsen
2) The risk of meltdown, which could possibly be placated with vastly improved safety and oversight
3) Secure waste storage, which as many argue is virtually impossible due to the mind-boggling slow decay of Uranium, it would either need to be literally bombproof and leak-proof for hundreds of thousands of years, or be placed in secure interim storage with the hopes of finding a more technologically sound long-term storage plan (which currently does not exist)
4) The toxic pollution caused by uranium mining, which could be cleaned up with the commitment of great resources. A good documentary (from 1985) on the subject of Uranium poisoning in American Indian reservations in the Southwest is Broken Rainbow.

Geoffrey Fettus, senior project attorney at the NRDC, is quoted as being extremely skeptical of the adequacy of plans in addressing these major concerns. “…the devil is in the details, and the industry hasn’t acknowledged that the problems even exist.” A good critique of a recent energy bill proposing subsidies to all of the big energy interests is on the Friends of the Earth website. I’m far from sold on nuclear as a viable option at this point, although I can’t rule it out completely. For more of my thoughts on this subject you can read the conservative energy plan (from MarketWatch) sent to me by a conservative family member and my response.

I would like to see a serious reconsideration of our patterns of consumption, subsidies for alternative investments at the local level, and perhaps, regular personal inventories, using something like the Ecological Footprint test. Try it now and see how many acres of arable land your lifestyle depends upon.