Nuclear – “Better Call Becky With the Good Hair”

“All my friends are heathens”

The global public energy conversation seems to revolve around a question of “What would you rather die of?” - There are the impending wars for oil and resources; scientists would have you believe that climate change will eventually kill us all, in a myriad of diverse and interesting ways; and then, of course there's the

threat of a looming nuclear holocaust.

The truth is we really “don’t even know the half of the abuse”, but have you heard? We’re in a “clean energy revolution” that will save us all. I joke, but in theory it makes a lot of sense. Fire made us human; fossil fuels made us modern. Could we have fuel, energy and progress without fear? Could we reinvent fire? What if we could make new fire that is safe, secure, healthy and durable? Could we now make energy work without working towards our demise?

I honestly believe that no one knows the answer and actually all we do know is that what we have been doing is mostly wrong.

Where I live in South Africa, it seems like we are some ways away from any truly sustainable energy program and sadly all of the data is either 10years old or tentative and quite vague – so I have had to look elsewhere. There has been a lot of hype about California and it seems like every day a new roof is going up with new solar panels, every neighbourhood is increasingly becoming a parade of electric vehicles in the driveway and wind is a thing. Germany, as Germans do, are improving efficiency and reports that on good (sunny) days it derives half its power from solar. Hell, even India are stepping up and being ambitious, making a commitment to increase its solar energy program tenfold by 2020.

All of this is great and so you might ask: Is this whole sustainable energy problem going to be a lot easier to solve than anybody imagined? -Careful now.

“I know what you did last summer”

We can see that energy from clean energy sources has been increasing over the last 20 years, but when you look at the actual percentage of global electricity from clean energy sources, it's been in decline from 36% to 31%. That 5% decline turns out to be quite a bit - It's the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants the size of Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant, or 900 solar farms the size of Topaz, which is one of the biggest solar farms in the world.

Now, a big part of this is simply that fossil fuels are increasing faster than clean energy - And that's understandable. There's just a lot of poor countries, like South Africa, still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy, but If you care about climate change, baby pandas and grandchildren you’ll sort of be hoping to go in the opposite direction to 100% of our electricity from clean energy sources, as quickly as possible. - Put simply, we need modern fuels.

“Leave this blue neighbourhood”

I can’t help but wonder why then, one of those clean energy sources in particular has actually been declining in absolute terms, not just relatively. Nuclear seemed to be making a comeback, what with Bill Gates (very publically) working with engineers in China and more than 40 different companies racing to build the first reactor that runs on waste, can't melt down and is cheaper than coal. Notwithstanding, nuclear power generation declined by 7% over the last 10 years with most plants being decommissioned and plans for future nuclear generation scrapped.

Why? And does it really matter? Solar and wind have been making huge strides and so you’ll hear a lot of talk about these safer renewables making up the difference for nuclear, but the data just doesn’t agree. When you combine all the electricity from solar and wind, you see it barely makes up half of the losses of decline from nuclear. Data derived by the University of California shows that Over the last couple of years (2013, 2014) the US prematurely retired 4 nuclear power plants and the energy they provided was almost entirely replaced with fossil fuels - Consequently, wiping out almost as much clean energy electricity as derived globally from solar.

Back to California and its reputation as being a clean energy and climate leader - look again. Data from the international committee for climate change found that, in fact, California reduced emissions more slowly than the US national average between 2000 and 2015. The Germans then - surely they're doing a lot of clean energy, but when you look at the data German emissions have actually been going up since 2009. Globally no country (with the exception of maybe Peru or Myanmar) is going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.

I find it interesting that even when you look at countries that have deployed different kinds of clean energy, there's only a few that have done so at a pace considered consistent to dealing with the climate crisis.

“Water under the bride”

The reason we are struggling is obvious - Solar and wind can only provide power approximately 10 to 20% of the time and we need power for hospitals, homes and cities even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We do produce enough energy from that 20% to store a considerable amount for later - but while batteries have made some really amazing improvements lately the reality is that they're just never going to be as efficient as the electrical grid. Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out, you lose between 20-40% of the power. So in trying to deal with all the alternative strategies in place, when the sun goes down and people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and their TV sets, and every other appliance in the house, an energy provider needs a lot of less-sustainable, non-renewable backup.

“The purple Lamborghini lurking”

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has looked at the carbon content of all these different sustainable fuels, and found that nuclear comes out surprisingly low - it's actually lower even than solar, while obviously also providing a lot of power, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - In fact, a single plant can annually provide power 92% of the time, no batteries.

So, Nuclear seems like a great idea. Problem solved?

“Bad Blood”

There's this big problem with it, people really don't like nuclear. A survey done with people from around the world (not just in the United States or Europe) about a year ago found that nuclear is one of the least popular forms of energy. Even oil is more popular than nuclear. And while nuclear edges out coal (in terms of popularity) the thing is that people don't really fear coal in the same way they fear nuclear.

So what are people afraid of? - From what I gather there's really three things: A)The safety of the power plants themselves - fears that they're going to melt down and cause damage; B)There's the waste from them – fears that baby pandas may actually mutate and evolve from radioactive waste; and then C)The association with weapons and that holocaust.

“Just Imagine”

Engineers look at these same concerns and are attempting to find technological fixes. There's a reactor that's coming online now, It's a high-temperature gas reactor. It can't melt down, but it's really big and bulky (which is part of the safety) and nobody thinks it's going to ever get cheaper than the reactors that we currently have.

Reactors that use waste as fuel are really cool ideas, but the truth is we don't actually know how to do that yet. There's some risk that it could actually make more waste, and most people think that if you're including that waste part of the process, it's just going to make the whole machine a lot more expensive and will just add another complicated step.

A report by the climate scientist James Hansen: "How to Make Nuclear Cheap" showed the true potential for nuclear advancements, and in particular, the Thorium reactor, which got me all sorts of giddy and excited. The Chinese advanced nuclear program, working with MIT, UC and Berkeley engineers looks very encouraging - having in mind that the Chinese are nearly able to do with nuclear what they did with so many other things - start to crank out small nuclear reactors on assembly lines, ship them up like iPhones or MacBooks and send them around the world. Until you look at the somewhat disappointing timelines: "We're going to have a Thorium molten salt reactor ready for sale to the world by 2040".

– No rush.

“Cheap Thrills”

There are real questions about how much of this technology will actually be implemented. India, for example said before the Paris climate talks that they were going to do some 30 new nuclear plants. Then in a recent interview, just this week, a government official stated that they're going to do about 5. The truth is that in most of the world (especially the first world) they're not talking about building new reactors, but rather discussing taking existing reactors down before their lifetimes are over. Germany is even actively pressuring its neighbours to discontinue nuclear generation and activity.

Global Estimates indicate that the world could lose half all reactors over the next 15 years, which would wipe out 40% of the emissions reduction we're supposed to get under the Clean Power Plan. Of course, in Japan, they took all their nuclear plants offline and replaced them with coal, natural gas, and oil burning - they're only expected to bring about a third back online.

Going through the numbers for China and India is bleak and demonstrates that the world is actually at risk of losing four times more clean energy than we lost over the last 10 years. In other words, we're not in a clean energy revolution - we're in a clean energy crisis.

Understandable then that engineers would look for a technical fix to the fears that people have, but then you have to consider that these are big technical and practical challenges and that they're going to take a long time to solve. And then there's still the issue of the whether these technical fixes may really solve the fear people have regarding nuclear energy's bad reputation in past.

“Take me to Church”

Despite what people think, it's hard to figure out how to make nuclear power much safer than it is and may not even be necessary - A recent study from the British journal, "Lancet" (one of the most respected journals in the world) stated that: “nuclear is the safest way to make reliable power” and this could be paraphrasing every journal that has investigated nuclear energy.

People are scared of the accidents, but if you actually go look at the accident data for Fukushima and Chernobyl the vast majority of harm is caused by people panicking. - the World Health Organization finds the same: Simply, harm caused isn't actually caused by the machines or the radiation, but by people being afraid.

What about waste? Of course we worry about waste, but the word has no meaning unless you understand wat nuclear waste actually means and how little of it there is. So let’s learn: If you take all the nuclear waste we've ever made in the world, put it on a football field, stacked it up, it would only reach 20 feet high. And now you’ll say: “but it's poisoning people or doing something” – It really is not. It is just sitting there, and being monitored. - By contrast, the waste that we don't control from energy production (we call it "pollution) kills an estimated 7 million people annually, and it contributes to the most severe degree to global warming and climate change.

What about the weapons? Maybe the most surprising thing is that I couldn’t find any examples of countries that have nuclear power and then, "Oh!" decide to go get a weapon. In fact, quite the opposite is true. What you’ll find is that the only way we know how to get rid large numbers of nuclear weapons is by using the plutonium in the warheads as fuel in nuclear power plants. And so, if you really want to get the world rid of nuclear weapons, then we’re going to need a lot more nuclear plants to put it in.

I love nuclear. I think it has immense potential most likely the right kind of potential to save us from the mess we created by burning our way through millennia of development. The biggest issue with nuclear energy is a basic one – knowledge. Fear of nuclear power generation means there is just not enough global demand. We have the technology to crank out these machines on assembly lines, for next to nothing, but there's just not enough people that buy them.

“I know I can treat you better”

I’m in no way against it - and so, let's do solar and wind and efficiency and conservation. But let’s also accelerate the advanced nuclear programs - triple the amount of money we're spending on it. The most important thing, if we're going to overcome the climate crisis, is to keep in mind that the cause of the clean energy crisis isn't from within our machines:

It is the treat of fear, derived from ignorance within ourselves wasting precious time.