White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

After 40 Years, Environmentalists Start To See the Nuclear Light

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Although very little happened, Nov. 24 was a red letter day for the nation’s nuclear power industry. No new nuclear reactors were purchased, no breakthrough in treating nuclear waste was announced, and the Obama administration did not declare that it would pay for new reactors.

Instead, the source of the industry’s happiness was The Washington Post leading Page One with an article that detailed how the environmental movement, after 40 years of bitter opposition, now concedes that nuclear power will play a role in averting further harm from global warming.

Mind you, not every environmental group has come around, but the feared and respected Natural Resources Defense Council has allowed that there is a place for nuclear power in the world’s generating mix and Stephen Tindale, a former anti-nuclear activist with Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom, has said, yes, we need nuclear.

For the nuclear industry which has felt itself vilified, constrained and damaged by the ceaseless and sometimes pathological opposition of the environmental movement, this changing attitude is manna from on high.

No matter that the environmentalists, in opposing nuclear since the late 1960s, have critically wounded the U.S. reactor industry and contributed to the construction of scores of coal and gas-fired plants that would not have been built without their opposition to nuclear.

In short, the environmental movement contributed in no small way to driving electric utilities to the carbon fuels they now are seeking to curtail.

Nuclear was such a target of the environmental movement that it embraced the “anything but nuclear” policy with abandon. Ergo its enthusiasm for all forms of alternative energy and its spreading of the belief —still popular in left-wing circles — that wind and solar power, with a strong dose of conservation, is all that is needed.

A third generation of environmental activists, who have been preoccupied with global climate change, have come to understand that a substantial amount of new electric generation is needed. Also some environmentalists are beginning to be concerned about the visual impact of wind turbines, not to mention their lethality to bats and birds.

Of all of the deleterious impacts of modern life on the Earth, it is reasonable to ask why the environmentalists went after nuclear power. And why they were opposed to nuclear power even before the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the catastrophic 1986 Chernobyl reactor failure in Ukraine. Those deserved pause, but the movement had already indicted the entire nuclear enterprise.

Having written about nuclear energy since 1969, I have come to believe that the environmental movement seized on nuclear first because it was an available target for legitimate anger that had spawned the movement in the ’60s. The licensing of nuclear power plants gave the protesters of the time one of the only opportunities to affect public policy in energy. They seized it; at first timorously, and then with gusto.

The escalation in environmental targets tells the story of how the movement grew in confidence and expertise; and how it added political allies, like Ralph Nader and Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

The first target was simply the plants’ cooling water heating up rivers and estuaries. That was followed by wild extrapolations of the consequences of radiation (mutated children). Finally, it settled on the disposition of nuclear waste; that one stuck, and was a lever that turned public opinion easily. Just mention the 240,000-year half-life of plutonium without mentioning how, as an alpha-emitter, it is easily contained.

It is not that we do not need an environmental movement. We do. It is just that sometimes it gets things wrong.

In the days of the Atomic Energy Commission, the environmental groups complained that it was policeman, judge and jury. Indeed.

But environmental groups are guilty of defining environmental virtue and then policing it, even when the result is a grave distortion, as in the nuclear imbroglio. Being both the arbiter of environmental purity and the enforcer has cost the environment 40 years when it comes to reducing greenhouse gases. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Disruptive Technologies and the Agenda They Set

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The copper-wire telephone is in danger, traditional advertising is drying up and health care costs are through the roof and rising. What is the villain? Well, it’s technology; particularly, “disruptive technology.”

Disruptive technologies are devastating to established order. And they underlie Congress’s consideration the most wide-ranging legislative challenges it has faced since the New Deal: health care and energy.

Hugely effective but expensive new medical technologies, like magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear therapies and artificial joints, threaten to bankrupt the nation’s health care system. At the heart of the health care debate lie the escalating costs for these new technologies and how to shoulder and control them. The rudimentary solution is to get the well to pay for the sick, in the way that Social Security seeks to get the young to pay for the old.

After health care, Congress has to consider energy and its leitmotif, climate remediation. Here, too, it is faced with new technology forcing the issue. Even as the Senate contemplates taking up the House-passed bill, with its heavy emphasis on renewables, new drilling and discovery technologies are tipping the energy balance towards natural gas and away from other competitors like wind and nuclear power. Ironically, at one time, nuclear power was a disruptive technology that threatened to elbow out coal.

In electricity, Congress can force the market away from the disruptive technology toward something it favors for social and political reasons, like solar or wave power. The cost is simply passed on to the consumer.

As for transportation, the energy imperatives are dictated by the forces of infrastructure and sunk cost. In the long term, there are four options that will keep the wheels turning:

1.plug-in hybrids leading to full electric-powered vehicles;

2. hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles;

3. ethanol-powered vehicles and;

4. compressed natural gas-powered vehicles

These options are not created equal. Hybrids are here but the batteries are expensive, and the plug-in option dictates that the car sits in a garage or a parking lot that is equipped with plugs for charging. Also, the batteries decline with time and cannot be used after they lose about 30 percent of their design capacity. If you live in a high-rise, plugging in your vehicle is not yet an option. Ditto pure electric vehicles.

Hydrogen is a darling technology of the green community, which marvels that it is emission-free except for water. Trouble is, there is hydrogen aplenty in nature but not free-standing; it has to be extracted from hydrocarbons, like natural gas, or from water, with huge electrical input. Why not use the gas or the electricity directly?

General Motors markets a duel-use vehicle that can run on E85 (85-percent corn-derived ethanol). This fuel was a favorite of President George W. Bush; but the environmental impact of putting so much farmland down to corn for fuel and the effect on corn prices has taken the bloom off ethanol.

Natural gas–which can be used in a modified gasoline engine and has been made more abundant by revolutionary horizontal drilling technology–is advocated by T. Boone Pickens and others. It has come late to the transportation fuel wars because of fears of shortage, now proved groundless. Natural gas is not without emissions, but these are about half of those of gasoline. And it may be the big energy disrupter.

Congress, reluctant to pick winners for fear of also creating losers, intends to throw cash at every option in the hope that the market can make the choice later. But the market is not immaculate–and less so in energy than almost any other commodity. Electricity has to move down a finite number of power lines, and transportation fuels depend on the nation’s 160,000 gas stations for market entry. You can expect the gas station infrastructure to, say, provide replacement batteries, charging points, hydrogen terminals or natural gas compressors. But can you expect it to provide all of these?

Maybe the gas station, rather than being the vital element in the new energy regime, will be rendered obsolete by disruptive new technologies that allow gas compressing and electric charging in home garages and commercial parking lots. Maybe the hybrid of the future will have a compressed-gas engine and plug-in capacity, and all this will be achieved without the traditional gas station. Technology enhances, modifies and improves, but it is hell on established order.

Leon Trotsky said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Congress ought to know that technology, disruptive technology, is interested in it. –For the Hearst/New York Times syndicate

 

Bad Energy Vibes from Obama, Odd Ones from McCain

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Memo To Sen. Barack Obama: Beware of your friends and their opinions.

For example, Rep. Edward Markey was on a Sunday talk show allegedly defending your position on offshore drilling. But, in fact, the Massachusetts Democrat was defending his own long-held and irrelevant views. You just had an epiphany on campaign finance. Now, you need to have one on energy. At this point, the world needs oil and will need it for many decades. True, the United States will not get any new oil from the outer continental shelf for 10 years, and it will only account for about 4 percent of our needs as long as it lasts. But even that is essential.

Memo To The Friends Of Sen. John McCain: Just when you thought your candidate had settled down to be George W. Bush Lite, he up and proved that old mavericks cannot change their ways. McCain split the difference on oil by reversing himself on outer continental shelf drilling and remaining adamant on not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This put Tom Ridge, the former homeland security chief, on the spot on a Sunday talk show. Ridge simply could not explain the inconsistency of McCain, whose presidential bid he supports.

No matter what you believe should be done, the irrefutable fact is that the world is in a terrible energy bind–and all the indications are that the world energy situation may get worse.

Politicians of the left want to believe that there are technologies ready to come on line, and they are being squeezed out by old-line energy companies. They place their faith in what are referred loosely as “alternatives,” which include solar, wind and geothermal power. These they see as being the equivalent of low-impact aerobics. Painless and environmentally neutral. These politicians oppose the burning of coal and have no coherent policy on oil and gas. They choose to believe that the current high price of oil is a combination of oil company greed, Wall Street speculation, and the Bush administration’s appeasement of the Saudi royal family.

Conservative politicians have as much problem facing reality as their liberal colleagues. They have an inordinate faith that current off-limits drilling areas, both in the ocean and on land, will produce untold quantities of energy for the United States. They have considerable faith in new technologies that will clean up coal, find oil at ever-greater depths, and exploit gas hydrates on the ocean floor. They also believe that oil shale in the West, abandoned in the 1970s because of the environmental consequences of mining and the shortage of water, will replace Saudi Arabia.

One thing the left and the right do agree on is that plug-in hybrid vehicles are going to help a lot. The theory is that they will make a big dent in the 20 million barrels of oil that the United States gulps down every day; that is 10,000 gallons of gasoline every second, according to John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company.

There is an energy establishment, and it is of one mind on energy challenges. This is the thrust of its thinking:

l Energy conservation is essential

l The outer continental shelf should be explored aggressively, along with federal lands

l ANWR should be drilled immediately, and a natural gas pipeline from Alaska should have priority

l Nuclear power is the best substitute for the coal now being burned and to replace geriatric plant

l Coal gasification is the best way to burn coal

l Wind power works and should be encouraged; in particular, storing wind energy as compressed air needs research

l Liquefied natural gas imports need to be boosted

l The search for new technologies needs to be relentless

l Energy producers, from oil companies to wind farms to electric utilities, need consistency in public policy

The unsaid addendum to the establishment thinking is that Obama needs to get some energy advisers who have a solid purchase on the Earth, and that McCain needs to listen to his advisers. In 1974, governments fell like ninepins as the global economy was battered by high energy prices. The battering next time may be much worse.

 

The Shocking Truth about Future Electric Supply

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TORONTO — “Nobody knows de trouble I see,” goes the Negro spiritual. It could have been playing as background music in Toronto, where the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) held its annual convention this week. Things are not terrible for the U.S. electric utility industry at the moment. But the industry’s future is more uncertain than it has ever been.

The challenge facing the industry is that we are using more electricity than ever before, with our bigger homes that have more appliances and gadgets. To meet future demand, according to Jeffry Sterba, chief executive officer of Albuquerque-based PNM Resources, the industry will need to spend $800 billion. Not only is it unclear whether it can raise this amount of money, in a time of constrained credit, but it is also unclear what expenditures public policy will sanction. Consider:

l The future of coal, which accounts for more than half of U.S. electricity production, is uncertain. It is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases, and the future promise of “clean coal” is yet to be realized on a large scale at an affordable price.

The second hope for coal, carbon capture and sequestration is a hot topic in electric utility circles. But David Ratcliffe, chief executive officer of Southern Company, confesses that it has been oversold, and it will be many years—if ever—before the technical and legal issues of diverting carbon dioxide and storing it by the millions of tons underground. The uncertainty has already caused 60 new coal-fired power plants to be canceled, according to speakers at the EEI convention.

l Nuclear power, a longtime favorite of utility executives, still faces public antipathy, and the cost of building the plants has gone up as the American engineering base has declined. The large steel forgings that are required for the construction of nuclear power plants can no longer be made in the United States. They must be imported from Japan at great expense.

Also the U.S. nuclear industry, thriving in the 1960s, has been sold off. Where once there were four U.S. companies that offered nuclear power plants, now General Electric is the only one, and it is in partnership with Japan’s Hitachi. The once mighty Westinghouse Electric is owned by Japan’s Toshiba. And the other vendor is France’s Areva. Only Ratcliffe’s Southern Company is sure that it is going to build two nuclear units. Other companies, including Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, have expressed interest in about 14 new plants—only about half of these are likely to be built.

The Nuclear Energy Institute reckons the nation needs a whopping 65 new nuclear plants to meet new demand and to allow for the retirement some of the more than 100 operating reactors.

l Wind is a bright spot. Wind power has proved more effective for most utilities than they thought, and they are now scrambling to find ways to store wind power as compressed air. But while the West and the North have good wind conditions, the Southeast suffers stagnant air at the time it most needs electricity: the summer. It is an energy option that is not open to every utility and because of its dispersed nature, it is not as manageable as a large coal-fired or nuclear plant.

l Then there is natural gas, which is the most desirable fossil fuel. In the past 25 years, the use of natural gas to turn utility turbines has grown exponentially, from 0 to 30 percent of generation. The trouble is that there is not that much indigenous natural gas around, and there are demands on it for home heating, cooking and fertilizer manufacturing, which are seen as higher uses than making electricity.

This has led to a boom in the import of liquefied natural gas from Asia and the Middle East. But James Rodgers, chief executive officer of Duke Energy, which is a large gas seller as well as a major electric utility, says that this is a dangerous route. By the time the gas gets here, after it has been liquefied and transported in an oil-burning tanker, Rodgers says it is only 20 percent less polluting than coal. Worse, he says this will harness U.S. electric rates to the global cost of oil and gas. That way he sees ruin.

Like their compatriots in the oil industry, utility executives talk a lot about technology coming to the rescue. But so far, there has been nothing that suggests a revolution akin to the one that transformed telephony is in sight. The only really happy thing here in Toronto is the realization that the plug-in hybrid car is coming, and that it will boost utilities’ revenues by recharging overnight when there is a surplus of electricity.