Bruce Sterling On Lovelock's Pro-Nuclear Stance

Robert Berger writes "Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, critic, blogger is also the creator of the Viridian Notes series of emails that comment on articles and websites about global warming. The current Viridian Note 00415: Doom is Nigh (scroll down past the inital links) has inserted his Sterling's pithy comments into Jame Lovelock's assertion that 'Nuclear power is the only green solution.'" (See also this earlier Slashdot post about Lovelock's nuclear apologia.)

Comments

Re:Criticism without Solution

[Stinking Pig]

Yeah. Those "pithy comments" were practically all from the list of fallacies we covered back in Logic 101, lo these many years ago. Too bad Bruce didn't take time from his busy schedule to attend Logic 101, he might have been able to stir up so cogent counterclaims.

I'm no fan of big nuclear reactors, but I am a huge fan of using fossil fuels for materials science instead of energy. It's a limited resource, and it looks to my untrained eye like we're much more able to replace it as an energy source than we are to replace it as a plastics source.

This guy is a crackpot

[iwadasn]

Ok, this is nice, but neither side gives any evidence. Since when does "no it isn't" count as a refutation?

Everything that guy has to say is about nuclear weapons. Well, guess what. WE ALREADY HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS. There, accept it. Get over it. There is no danger of additional reactors turning the US, or China, or India, or Western Europe into nuclear armed powers. NONE, because they already are.

It's easy to tear down someone else's proposal when you don't have on of your own and need rely on nothing but juvenile comebacks. Get some actual evidence. And you know what, even if you count the victims of Hiroshima and Nagisaki against nuclear power (but don't count the victims of conventional warfare against fossil fuels) and you throw in Cherenoble, and maybe round everything up by a few hundred thousand just to be sure, Nuclear killed far fewer people per kWh of energy. It is almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which it might be otherwise. Fossil fuels kill tens (hundreds, depending on how you count) of thousands of people each year.

A nuclear disaster would have to kill tens of millions (at least) in order to even the score. Nobody can even conceive of how that could happen with civilian reactors built to even the most incompetent of standards, like Cherenobl. About the only real possibility is if WW-III breaks out and people start tossing around nuclear weapons (which they already have, and don't need civilian reactors for), and that is far MORE likely if we start fighting over oil.

Just once I'd like to hear a well reasoned out anti-nuclear position. Include some numbers (you know, dollars and cents, lives lost, that sort of thing) and keep them accurate. Include an honest asessment of nuclear waste dangers (assuming various means of disposal) and honest asessments of nuclear proliferation. I have never seen any evidence that civilian nuclear power leads to proliferation, but it seems to be a given for the anti-nuke types. Japan and South Korea both have reactors, and neither has nuclear weapons.

The only scenario the anti-nuke types ever argue against is such a complete straw man. They assume we dump all the nuclear waste into the nation's beer supply, give away spent fuel to everyone with a driver's license, and somehow (though nobody can really imagine exactly how this happens) have lots of melt downs in highly populated areas. Seriously. Assume an even marginally competent nuclear program (needn't be perfect) and then try a comparison with our fossil fuel system. See how that treats you.

It's like comparing against an oil economy where it's assumed that 99% of the oil is dumped raw into the ocean, the rest is burned in the foulest, dirtiest machines imaginable, and that somehow access to oil allows every fool who can rub two sticks together to build a jet fighter with which to kill people. Be serious.

The Thing is though

[GrimSean]

what the hell else are we supposed to do? Sterling is attacking Lovelock based solely on fear of Nuclear weapons - not energy, and a nuclear plant has about as much of a chance of blowing up as my chair does when properly designed. Chernobyl happened because the Soviets let regular Engineers perform a test on a reactor - not Nuclear Engineers who actually would have known what they were doing. Three Mile Island happened because of pure stupidity. A properly designed nuclear plant, with proper safeguards and well trained staff is a fairly safe place.

I think Sterling's comments would have been decidedly better had they actually proposed something else, instead of attacking an idea that is a feasable solution to significantly lowering the emission of greenhouse gasses. I have to wonder if he would have been among the people objecting to wind power because it ruined the view, if he lived in Martha's Vineyard.

Re:The Thing is though

[rebelcool]

The most modern of fission reactor designs are passively safe, meaning they require little to no active safety systems (ie, working cooling pumps) in order to operate.

Toshiba is working a design which requires no crew even. You build a housing, put the reactor in the ground, and in 30 years replace its core fuel element. Several of these put together can power entire towns.

http://www.nuclear.com/n-plants/index-Small_modulr _reactr.html

Re:Criticism without Solution

[cdrguru]

I think Mr. Sterling's real "solution" is disclosed about 80% through the article:

(((How about the relatively simple solution of seven or eight billion of us starving to death? Or how about a few massive heat-wave-boosted lethal epidemics? That ought to put a swift kibosh on energy demand.)))

This is the only real solution according to much of the "Green" philosophy. I agree that it would solve most of the problems - having 1/8 of the population would put us back to where things were in the 1800s (or earlier) and effectively "solve" all of the pollution problems.

Unfortunately, I do not see many of the "Greens" volunteering to be in the first wave of losses to begin this process. If this is truely the way to a sustainable level of development, I see it coming about only as a couple of Green-inspired governments starting the process. Let's see, if Canada and Norway got together and declared war on Germany, France (nukes! bad!) and the US, could they win? Could they start a world war that would decrease the population by the necessary amount? I doubt it, but it would be a start in what could be considered "the right direction".

Are we interested in this as a solution?

Small leakage a health tonic?

[2901]

As opposed to the small leakages of nuclear power, which are a kind of health tonic

This wise-crack got me confused. People sometimes say that there is no safe level of radio-activity, not realising that this is a methodological assumption, rather than an empirical fact. When scientists have tried to investigate this, using the natural variation in background radiation and existing epidemilogical data, they have found that radiation is a health tonic!

Some scientists have speculated that this might even be a real effect, not a statistical artifact. Their idea is that damage from free radicals is a much bigger deal than damage by background radition. Cells have repair mechanisms that get turned on in response to increased metabolism and the consequent rise in free radicals. Lags in the regulation of repair are responsible for much of the damage caused by free radicals, and if radiation upregulated the repair mechanism that could more than compensate for the actual damage done by the radiation.

My guess, from having done research on speech recognition, is that most scientists just don't get how hard it is to do statistics right, and the "tonic" effect of radiation will turn out to be an artifact, probably due to incorrect compensation for regional variations in cigarette smoking.

Meanwhile Bruce Sterling's attempt at sarcasm is a bit of a disaster, revealing that the controversy over the dangers (or otherwise) of low levels of radiation has passed him by.

Re:No....

[slipstick]

I don't know what it's like in Britain but decommissioning costs have been included in North American Nuke plans for quite some time. It's (usually) put on as an extra cost/KW or something like that. In other words the plants are forced to set aside x amount of money for decommissioning.

Re:No....

[sparks]

Part of the reason the UK nuclear industry is in such a bad financial shape is that the Government makes it pay the "climate change levy", on the basis of the amout of CO2 produced to generate a given amount of elecricity.

But wait; the nuclear industry doesn't emit CO2!

I know this sounds stupid, crazy, unreal, but it's absolutely true. The only major source of electricity in the UK which doesn't contribute to climate change has to pay a climate change tax. This is to the tune of 600 million UK pounds for British Energy. That amount is the difference between a 300 million loss and a 300 million profit for that company.

Re:No....

[sparks]

..but yet those same city investors were prepared to absorb the cost of the newer British Energy reactors.

So your point seems to be that old nuclear plants were expensive but newer ones are potentially profitable.

(Remember two things: 1. BE has the full cost of decommissioning set aside and 2. BE was profitable for several years before the climate change levy and NETA came along)

Re:Your numbers a little off...

[ttfkam]

IFA/AFR reactors.

In the course of nuclear power in the US, raw fuel has only used approximately 2% of the fissible energy potential. Much of this material can be taken out of the current storage pools and put to good use in newer reactors and without the previous longstanding concerns of weapons proliferation.

Since IFRs take so long to burn through the fuel, it will take quite some time to go through the waste and weapons material (which can also be used as a fuel source). By the time you get back to actually mining uranium for power again, let alone going to the oceans, a great deal will have passed.

Re:Criticism without Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The waste problem is not completely political. Check out this story about how there are thousands of tons of nuclear waste sludge in South Carolina that simply can't be dredged out and taken to some storage site in Nevada or Washington state.

What I think this is emblematic of: the people who run our nuclear plants are near-morons who don't think about the fact that eventually the plant will shut down and there'll be a lot of deadly stuff left over that there's no good way to dispose of. (And that's ignoring potential leaks or bigger problems when the plant is operating).

While we're on the subject, check out this article about fuel rods which some geniuses lost some time between 1978 and now (yes, it's pretty bad not to even know when you lost that sort of thing).

A few of my favorite highlights:
"would be fatal to anyone who came into contact with it"
"In 2002 a Connecticut nuclear plant was fined $288,000 after a similar loss. That fuel was never accounted for."

Advocates of nuclear power always say, "Well it'd be perfect if it was done right." Really though, we're pretty lucky the shortsighted and careless way in which the nuclear industry in this country operates hasn't resulted in more Three Mile Islands.

Decide for yourself

[moosesocks]

Take a look at wikipedia's List of Nuclear Accidents and decide for yourself weather or not we should be using nuclear power.

The list is either alarmingly long or extremely short depending upon how you look at it.

Some of the accidents are incredibly trivial. Others are pretty darn frightening. It's all a matter of a chain reaction (no pun intended) of bad events happening in succession. Take this one for example:

"September 19, 1980 - An Air Force repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II ICBM silo in Arkansas drops a wrench socket which rolls off a work platform and falls to the bottom of the silo. The socket strikes the missile, causing a leak from a pressurized fuel tank. The missile complex and surrounding area is evacuated and eight and a half hours later, vapors within the silo ignite and explode with enough force to blow off the two 740-ton silo doors and hurl the nine megaton warhead 600 feet (180 m). The explosion fatally injures an Air Force specialist and twenty-one other USAF personnel are injured."

Re:Decide for yourself

[argStyopa]

That's a perfect example:
"September 19, 1980 - An Air Force repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II ICBM silo in Arkansas drops a wrench socket which rolls off a work platform and falls to the bottom of the silo. The socket strikes the missile, causing a leak from a pressurized fuel tank. The missile complex and surrounding area is evacuated and eight and a half hours later, vapors within the silo ignite and explode with enough force to blow off the two 740-ton silo doors and hurl the nine megaton warhead 600 feet (180 m). The explosion fatally injures an Air Force specialist and twenty-one other USAF personnel are injured."


It's a good example, actually.
The explosion and subsequent death/injuries are because of the CHEMICAL explosion and, despite the massive blast, there was never any danger of the warheads either going off or being dispersed in dirty-bomb style.

I'd say that's a testament to the safety of the darn things.

Re:Criticism without Solution

[tehdaemon]

Find a park with a merry-go-round. Get on, spin it, and then try to hit something on the other side of the merry-go-round with a ball. Have fun!

Sterling's Response to the E-Mail I Just Sent Him

[Jakob Eriksson]

*Look, fella, I get to wisecrack about nuclear power
to my own email list if I feel like it. I didn't post that thing on Slashdot,
and not everything that flies off my keyboard into cyberspace
is gonna be solemn, Asperger-style argumentation intended
intended to convince a bunch of Linux freaks.

* If you can't take a joke, take a hike! And if you can
take a joke, then read the friggin' list and get a clue
as to what's been going on there for the past six years,
before you send email to novelists and get
all teary-eyed about your disillusionment.

http://www.viridiandesign.org

bruces

On May 31, 2004, at 9:35 PM, Jakob Eriksson wrote:

Hi Bruce,

I stumbled upon your comments on Lovelock's nuclear power article today. I'd previously read your book "Distraction", and enjoyed it. In particular, I liked your portrayal of the nomads and the political power struggles.

Because I enjoyed your writing, and thus respected you as an author. I was hoping to read a creative and possibly convincing argument against the use of nuclear power. Instead, to my dismay, I was confronted with a series of immature comments, often with very little basis in fact, far from either creative or convincing.

Due to my respect for you as an SF author, I was prepared to take your advice to heart, and to give up the hope of nuclear power, had you shown good arguments for your case. Instead, I'm afraid you've spent all your whuffie (see Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out") on this childish flamebait. Given the comments on /., it would seem I am not alone in feeling this.

You just lost a faithful reader.

Re:Recession = cost doubling?

[tehdaemon]

The problem with wind is as you stated: you get power when the wind blows, not necessarily when you need it. The solution to this problem is simple in theory. Storage. Get some good storage method and wind has no problem.

One storage method that will work in many places is water, on a hill. About 10 cubic meters of water 1000 ft up stores about 1 MWh of energy. This energy is easily stored and released with high efficiency, (pumps and turbines) This can be used easily anywhere there is a mountain 1000 ft high or more, and here in Utah at least, those are in abundance.

I read in another /. post that this is being done in West Virginia, and he had links.