Sometimes Environmentalists Get In Their Own Way
Here’s one of a few articles I’ve come across recently that reminds me of an important, if unsettling fact: in many cases, environmentalists are their own worst enemies. The most obvious cases of this may be here in California, one of the most progressive states in the union. Anyone would look at the political demographics here, and the sheer number of people who care about the quality of our natural environment, and think that getting a permit to build something with a net positive environmental impact would take about 15 minutes. Wrong.
Want to convert the municipal solid waste that’s filling up our landfills and leaching into our groundwater into fuels or electricity? Want to build a large solar or wind farm? You better be prepared to spend a mint in legal fees, and steel yourself to battle a bureaucracy that will fight you – not for weeks or months, but for years or decades.
One would think that anything that creates 10 pounds of good for an ounce of bad would be something of a no-brainer. Now yes, of course, this is an oversimplification; I’m aware that there are important subtleties at play in certain cases.
But most of these ideas don’t strike me as at all subtle. Want gigawatts of solar, displacing the same amount of electricity from coal and gas, at the ecological expense of repatriating some desert tortoises? If that sounds like a slam dunk, think again. Such initiatives are met with the same type of vitriol as the mountaintop removers face back east.
Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t find it credible that intelligent and well-meaning people can think and behave like this. In fact, this subject came up in this morning’s breakfast meeting with an eco-journalist. He said something that I find eerily reminiscent of my current book project: “Just follow the money.” In particular, he suspects that the biggest donors to the Sierra Club, for example, are actually traditional energy folks who are totally thrilled to see alternative energy projects being stalled for years on end.
I need to look into this. In the meanwhile, if readers have any thoughts on the matter that they’d like to share, please have at it.
Fossil folks are shrewd operators – look at the way oilman Rockefeller used the reformist Prohibition movement to outlaw his ethanol competition.
Look at the way the oil companies deliberately organized to close regulation-compliant refineries – in order to squelch supply and raise prices – and then blamed environmental regulations for the lack of refining capacity.
In light of history’s thick catalog of abuses by these enormous paper tigers — from Beechnut’s counterfeit “Apple Juice” made of colored sugar water (and no apple juice), to the outright purchase of our democratic republic’s “public servants” by “corporate persons” — very little would now surprise me.
I’m not a cynic, and I prefer to think of myself as a realist, but we’re looking at realities that would make a cynic blush.
“Want to convert the municipal solid waste that’s filling up our landfills and leaching into our groundwater into fuels or electricity? Want to build a large solar or wind farm? You better be prepared to spend a mint in legal fees, and steel yourself to battle a bureaucracy that will fight you – not for weeks or months, but for years or decades. ”
Change a few words and it would be similar to the methods used by the anti-nuclear crowd to boost the cost of nuclear energy so that it could be labeled too expensive.
It seems as though the same powerful interests are arrayed against anything non-fossil.
The difference between Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and the present form of nuke plants – pressurized water with uranium/plutonium fuels – is that an accident (or terrorist act) with a CSP plant won’t risk the lives and livelihoods of all the creatures in the surrounding landscape and for hundreds of miles downwind, or produce dangerous wastes that remain deadly for millennia.
It’s also worth noting that the simple construction and decommissioning of a nuke plant are exceedinggly costly all by themselves, and the process of mining and refining the fuel is nothing to sneeze at.
The problem associated with nuclear power is that we have chosen the wrong nuclear technology. Actually, we have already mined enough uranium to last for many decades. Our current nuclear technology extracts less than 1% of the available energy from the uranium fuel and discards the rest as waste.
During the refining and enrichment process, most of the U238 is discarded as waste because our current nuclear technology cannot use uranium that is not enriched.
The reason we are using such a poor nuclear technology is that R & D was stopped. Therefore, we did not prepare better nuclear technologies for implementation.
Compounding the problem is that there has been no effort to educate the public regarding nuclear power. Therefore, few people are aware that better nuclear technologies are available. So, instead of pushing for the development of better nuclear technologies, people condemn nuclear power.
What are these new and better nuke designs, and where are they presently in place and proven in a power station application?
I herewith quote from my own previous post:
“The reason we are using such a poor nuclear technology is that R & D was stopped. Therefore, we did not prepare better nuclear technologies for implementation.”
It made no sense to halt R & D at the very point when it looked as though continuing R & D would result in implementing nuclear technologies that would solve most of the problems associated with pressurized water reactors (PWRs).
The nuclear technology which I see as the most promising is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). You can easily do your own research on that via google searches, but also check out this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
There are detractors. When reading material written by the detractors, examine it very very carefully. Some detractors do not understand LFTR technology since they have neglected to study it; they assume that the thorium will be used in reactors similar to PWRs which use uranium. Although that can be done, that has nothing to do with the LFTR.
There is also the integral fast reactor (IFR), although I see the LFTR as better. However, there should be a plan “B” so R & D on the IFR should continue. I recommend the book “Plentiful Energy” by Till and Chang. It explains IFR technology in far more detail than most people would want to know. It barely mentions the LFTR and does so in such a way that seems to indicate that the authors do not understand the LFTR.
It is not surprising that you and most other people are unaware of these technologies; the media do a lousy job if informing the public of what they need to know to push the politicians to make good decisions. Thus, most people think that the PWR is the only possible nuclear technology.
In the EU, huge amounts of solar power have been and are being installed on rooftops. There are no desert tortoises on rooftops, and the power is generated far closer to the point of use.
Craig,
I’m not so sure about the conspiracy. I think there are blind zealots on both sides of the aisle… and any time one side starts to “win” the organizations that are set up have to go further afield to start justifying themselves.
The labor unions did it in the 80’s and 90’s, crashing hundreds of industries where the workers were fairly compensated and the industry was struggling in the international market…
The Sierra Club won their battles in the 70’s and 80’s, but their focus is not well suited for the global-warming campaign… So they fight for tortoises and fight over gas fracking and fight to stop nuclear power and fight GM agriculture… all nonsense that serves to worsen the environment, but all easy to target emotional-style battles that can motivate their membership and continue to justify their organization.
All of this pales compared to the complete idiocy spewed by the tea-party or NRA that desperately seek to justify itself in the face of a center-right moderate president… But all organizations face this period of stretching or reaching to justify themselves after they won the battles which first brought the organization into being.
Here is a link that includes information on what developing nations are doing with nuclear power:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512461/developing-nations-put-nuclear-on-fast-forward/
Some of the information is conflicting and misleading. However, it is important to note that if we here in the U.S. continue to neglect nuclear R & D, we are likely to be left behind and will be forced to pay other countries for the technologies what we should not have stopped developing.