Living Within Limits - Chapter 15

Nuclear Power

The most obvious alternative to carbon fuels is nuclear energy.  However, there remain some unresolved issues with peaceful human utilization of the power of atoms.

1) Unforgiving Danger - as is well known, nuclear power can potentially be very dangerous.  Though it is unlikely, aside from direct sabotage, that conventional nuclear power plants would ever experience a full-scale atomic explosion, there is the very real danger of radioactive exposure to human beings.  In fact, once the main reactor is in full operation, 'no one can ever go inside the shield, to repair or lubricate or adjust any of the reloading or control equipment inside... if an important part of it becomes inoperable we shut the reactor down and build another one'

2) Unresolved Disposal - nuclear reactors leave behind far more dangerous material, in the form of radioactive waste, than other conventional power plants.  In addition, the disposal of this material is further convoluted by the long half-life of radioactive material.  Unlike traditional waste, there really is no 'away' to throw radiation into, as dumping radionuclides into the desert may result in unintentional contamination of underground aquifers.

The dangers of nuclear energy are so profound, that attempts to quantify the theoretical costs of a potential nuclear disaster have been abandoned after several attempts.  This has, inturn, led to the creation of the Price-Anderson Act, which provides insurance to, and caps the liability of, nuclear energy providers (akin to FDIC and the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund which limits the liability of offshore oil explorers, such as Deepwater Horizon, to $75M).  In my mind, this is a form of corporate welfare, and is asking for future disaster.

The New Priesthood

Alving Weinberg, long-time director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, was one of the most well-known defenders of nuclear power.  Below are his thoughts...

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society.  On the one hand, we offer an inexhaustible source of energy... But the price we demand of society...

We make two demands.  The first... is that we exercise the very best techniques and that we use people of high expertise and purpose... managing and operating our nuclear power plants with people of higher qualification...  The second... (that) we have relatively little problem dealing with wastes if we can assume always that there will be intelligent people around to cope with eventualities we have not thought of...

 The price we must pay for this great boon... is a cadre or priesthood who understand the nuclear systems and who are prepared to guard the wastes... such speculations about 100,000 year-priesthoods must strike an eerie and unreal sound

 Pessimistic translation?  There is nothing wrong with nuclear technology as a viable source of near-limitless energy.  The problem lies in human nature, and our inability to even mentally conceive (much less actually maintain) the notion of a '100,000 year priesthood'.

Living Within Limits - Chapter 14

Jevons's Coal

William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) was one of the first to make the observation that, not only was the population of Britain increasing exponentially, but the consumption of energy per capita (person), was also increasing as an exponential function - in other words, real consumption of energy was increasing as an exponential function of an exponential function.

In his time, coal was the energy source of choice.  Based upon his findings, Jevon predicted the eventual doom of perpetual growth in Britain, due to the eventual exhaustion of economically viable coal.  He never tried to determine the approximate amount of available coal (though he did make educated guesses), but simply based his forecast based upon the idea that, sometimes the exact limit of a resource was not as important as the rate of growth of consumption of it (particularly when something is growing as an exponential of an exponential).

Jevon's predictions never came true (pessimism is a tough business to be in).  Partly, this was because because his 'educated guesses' dramatically underestimated the technological limits of detecting mineral wealth underground.  However, more importantly, we were saved from Jevon's prognosis by the "Drake well", and the discovery of petroleum as a source of energy.


Hubbert's Pimple

M King Hubbert (1903-1989) was a petroleum geologist employed by the Shell Oil company.  He pionered the idea of tracking the amount of effort expended per barrel of petroleum extracted.  More importantly, Hubbert noted, in 1948, that 'the barrels of oil produced per unit effort required for the discovery of the reserves had been decreasing regularly for a long time' (law of diminishing returns).

Unconvinced?  The gulf of mexico BP Deepwater Horizon disaster is the news story of today.  Do you know why they call it Deepwater Horizon?  The rig was designed to drill miles below the ocean floor, which itself is miles below the ocean surface.  Why were they doing this?  Because the shallower regions of the Gulf had already been exhausted, for the most part.  Translation?  Economics forced them to expend more effort to discover & extract more petroleum, than was previously required of them.

Hubert's, like all great thinkers, was not afraid to make his own prognosis.  He believed that a graph of the rate of use of each fossil energy source would yield a bell-shaped curve known as Hubbert's Peak, or affectionately Hubbert's pimple.  He made the prediction, in 1956, that by the early 1970's, oil production in the U.S. would peak - see Oil Shock of 1973 (it also explains why we have an 'idiotic' 55MPH speed limit) and the below graph.

US oil production did in fact peak around 1970.  This graph (created in 2004), also seems to suggest that world production will peak around 2010 (maybe a bit later now, due to economic downturn).  Notice that 'deepwater' sources will be one of the last to be produced (due to difficulty of exploration).