During a public lecture in San Francisco last month, Jared Diamond, the mega-selling author of "Guns, Germs and Steel,'' became the latest and most prominent environmental intellectual to endorse nuclear power as a necessary response to global warming.
Addressing an overflow crowd at the Cowell Theater about why some societies fail and others don't (the theme of his most recent book, "Collapse''), Diamond three times cited global warming as a threat that could ruin modern civilization. During the question period, he was asked if he agreed with Stewart Brand, whose Long Now Foundation was sponsoring the lecture, that global warming posed such a grave threat that humanity had to embrace nuclear power.
It was a delicate moment, because Brand, the former editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue, was on stage with Diamond.
"I did not know that Stewart Brand said that," Diamond replied. "But yes, to deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power." Nuclear, he added, should simply be "done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents."
"I did not expect that answer," Brand said.
Neither, it seemed, did much of the audience. Overwhelmingly white and affluent, they had nodded reverentially at everything Diamond said -- about the self-destructiveness of ancient civilizations that leveled forests (Easter Island) or eroded soils (the Mayans) in pursuit of short-term gain, about the need for America to rethink its "core value" of consumerism if it hopes to survive. They had applauded when Diamond mocked President Bush's see-no-evil approach to environmental protection. Yet here was Diamond urging an expansion of nuclear power, a technology most environmentalists regard as irredeemably evil.
"Deal with it," crowed Brand as the crowd sat in stunned silence. It was smug but useful advice, for this debate is bound to intensify. The Bush administration and much of Congress are pushing hard to revive the nuclear industry, which provides 20 percent of America's electricity but has not had a new reactor order since 1974.
In June, Bush became the first president in 26 years to visit a nuclear power plant, the Calvert Cliffs facility near Washington, D.C., where he endorsed nuclear as an "environmentally friendly" energy source. His administration's 2006 budget increased nuclear power funding by 5 percent, even as it cut overall energy funding.
Congress followed suit in its recent energy bill. Besides giving the nuclear industry $7 billion in research-and-development subsidies and $7.3 billion in tax breaks, the bill contains unlimited taxpayer-backed loan guarantees and insurance protection for new reactors.
Diamond may not agree with Bush about much, but their shared support for nuclear power hints at the other factor that will drive the future debate. As the United States experiences more killer heat waves and out-of season hurricanes like this summer's, more Americans will recognize what the rest of the world has long accepted: Global warming is here, it will get worse, and the costs will be enormous. As we cast about for alternatives to the carbon- based fuels that are cooking our planet, nuclear power seems to be an obvious answer.
As Vice President Dick Cheney observed in 2001 when defending the administration's energy plan, which urged constructing hundreds of new nuclear plants, fission produces no greenhouse gases.
But the truth is that nuclear power is a weakling in combatting global warming. Investing in a nuclear revival would make our global warming predicament worse, not better. The reasons have little to do with nuclear safety, which may be why environmentalists tend to overlook them.
Environmentalists center their critique on safety concerns: Nuclear reactors can suffer meltdowns from malfunctions or terrorist attacks; radioactivity is released in all phases of the nuclear production cycle from uranium mining through fission; the problem of waste disposal still hasn't been solved; civilian nuclear programs can spur weapons proliferation. But absent a Chernobyl-scale disaster, such arguments may not prove to be decisive.
In an atmosphere of desperation over how to keep our TVs, computers and refrigerators humming in a globally warmed world, economic considerations will dominate. This is especially so when dissident greens like Diamond and Brand say nuclear safety is a solvable problem. Diamond is correct that France has generated most of its electricity from nuclear power for decades without a major mishap.
Dissident greens concede there are risks to nuclear power. But those risks, they say, are less than the alternatives. Coal, the world's major electricity source, kills thousands of people a year right now through air pollution and mining accidents. Coal is also the main driver of climate change, which is on track to kill millions of people in the 21st century -- not in the sudden bang of radioactive explosions but the gradual whimper of environmental collapse as soaring temperatures and rising seas submerge cities, parch farmlands, crash ecosystems and spread disease and chaos worldwide.
Fear of such an apocalypse led the British scientist James Loveluck to become the first prominent environmentalist to endorse nuclear power as a global warming remedy, in 2003. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace (who left the group a decade ago), soon echoed Loveluck's apostasy, as did Hugh Montefiore, a board member of Friends of the Earth, UK. All three were criticized by fellow greens. Likewise in the United States, the movement's major organizations remain adamantly anti-nuclear. But environmentalists on both sides of this argument are overlooking the strongest objection to nuclear power, even as the nuclear industry hopes no one notices it. The objection is rooted in energy economics, hence the oversight.
As energy economist Joseph Romm argued in a blog exchange with Brand, "It is too often the case that experts on the environment think they know a lot about energy, but they don't."
The case against nuclear power as a global warming remedy begins with the fact that nuclear-generated electricity is very expensive. Despite more than $150 billion in federal subsides over the past 60 years (roughly 30 times more than solar, wind and other renewable energy sources have received), nuclear power costs substantially more than electricity made from wind, coal, oil or natural gas. This is mainly due to the cost of borrowing money for the decade or more it usually takes to get a nuclear plant up and running.
Remarkably, this inconvenient fact does not deter industry officials from boasting that nuclear is the cheapest power available. Their trick is to count only the cost of operating the plants, not of constructing them. By that logic, a Rolls-Royce is cheap to drive because the gasoline but not the sticker price matters. The marketplace, however, sees through such blarney. As Amory Lovins, the soft energy guru who directs the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado think tank that advises corporations and governments on energy use, points out, "Nowhere (in the world) do market-driven utilities buy, or private investors finance, new nuclear plants." Only large government intervention keeps the nuclear option alive.
A second strike against nuclear is that it produces only electricity, but electricity amounts to only one third of America's total energy use (and less of the world's). Nuclear power thus addresses only a small fraction of the global warming problem, and has no effect whatsoever on two of the largest sources of carbon emissions: driving vehicles and heating buildings.
The upshot is that nuclear power is seven times less cost-effective at displacing carbon than the cheapest, fastest alternative -- energy efficiency, according to studies by the Rocky Mountain Institute. For example, a nuclear power plant typically costs at least $2 billion. If that $2 billion were instead spent to insulate drafty buildings, purchase hybrid cars or install super-efficient lightbulbs and clothes dryers, it would make unnecessary seven times more carbon consumption than the nuclear power plant would. In short, energy efficiency offers a much bigger bang for the buck. In a world of limited capital, investing in nuclear power would divert money away from better responses to global warming, thus slowing the world's withdrawal from carbon fuels at a time when speed is essential.
Mainstream environmentalists do argue that energy efficiency, solar, wind and other renewable fuels are better weapons against global warming than nuclear is. But they will fare better if they go a step further and point out that embracing nuclear is not just unnecessary but a step backward.
Even so, a tough fight lies ahead. As the energy bill illustrates, the nuclear industry has many friends in high places. And the case for nuclear power will strengthen if its economics improve. The key to lower nuclear costs is to reduce construction times, which could happen if the industry at last adopts standardized reactors and the Bush or a future administration streamlines the plant approval process.
On a more fundamental level, any defeat of nuclear power is likely to be short-lived if America does not confront what Diamond calls its core value of consumerism. After all, there is only so much waste to wring out of any given economy. Eventually, if human population and appetites keep growing -- and some growth is inevitable, given the ambitions of China and other newly industrializing nations -- new sources of energy must be exploited. At that point, nuclear power and other undesirable alternatives such as shale oil will be waiting. (For the record, that is Brand's rejoinder: future demand growth makes nuclear, as well as efficiency and renewables, necessary. Diamond did not respond to an e-mail request for comment.)
Environmentalists have been afraid to talk honestly about consumerism ever since a cardigan-clad Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for urging people to turn down their thermostats in the 1979 oil crisis. But now that our species, through our carbon-fueled pursuit of the good life, has turned up the planet's thermostat to ominous levels, it's time to break the silence. We don't have to freeze in the dark, but neither can we keep consuming as if there's no tomorrow.
Mark Hertsgaard's books include "Nuclear Inc." and "Earth Odyssey." Contact us at [email protected].
