Pandora's Promise and the Problem of "Solutionism"

Lasrick writes "Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reviews Pandora's Promise, a new documentary that focuses on environmental activists like Stewart Brand who have gone from vehemently anti-nuclear to vehemently pro-nuclear views. Good points brought up by Benedict that weren't really addressed in the film." From the article: "The flaw in the film's approach is its zealous advocacy of one solution — one silver bullet — to meet the tremendous challenges of providing for some nine billion people by 2050, while also protecting societies from the ravages of climate disruption. The kind of thinking that led some of these environmentalists to single-mindedly protest nuclear power plants during the 1970s and 1980s leads them to just-as-single-mindedly advocate a push toward nuclear power 40 years later."

Comments

NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they want nuclear power -- they just don't want it here.

Re:NIMBY

[Charliemopps]

I lived next to a very large nuclear power plant for about 15 years. About the only problem is causes was the warm water from its exhaust caused plants to flourish in that part of the lake. But since my father and I liked fishing it was a great spot. Fish spawned there and their was plenty of cover.

Did it cause problems? Environmental damage? No...
Do I have cancer? no...
Would I be worried if they built one near my home? I'd review the plans, and as long as it wasn't some design from the 1950s I'd be cool with it.
If they were building a coal plant near me, I'd be out in the streets with picket signs the next day.

Try to avoid 9 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

The most important thing for us to be spending our money on is trying to avoid that 9 billion, or at least trying not to go beyond it. Universally available (heavily subsidized) contraception is the first place to start. Secondly try to counter those who actually WANT to increase population numbers, like Erdogan & Romney and their respective religions. Once that's done there'll still be plenty of money left to pay for nuclear power.

Re:Try to avoid 9 billion

[alexander_686]

Unless you are talking about forced sterilization, free contraception has little impact on population growth. The biggest effect it has is to delay when a woman has their first child, not how many they have.

Wealth is one of the better ways to curb population. When people move from abject poverty to poverty child births go up. When people move from poverty to middle class their child births go down. This effect is magnified if you have educated women in the work force. You hit the replacement rate about when everybody needs a college education and said college education costs about as much as a house.

Of course, to produce wealth you need a vibrant economy, which implies a lot more energy use.

Re:Assumptions

[Trepidity]

Empirically, across a pretty wide range of situations, energy efficiency improvements tend to actually increase rather than decrease net energy usage, an observation known as the Jevons paradox.

Re:How is it not a silver bullet?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Hello, nuclear fusion in stars actually has a very LOW power density. It's just that stars are very large. This is why getting fusion to produce power on Earth is so damn difficult, we are not trying to RECREATE the conditions inside a star, we need to SURPASS those conditions.

Not a silver bullet, but a hold-over tactic

[dcmcilrath]

If Fukashima has not occurred, we would be currently looking at a global uranium shortage in the next 5 years as existing major sources (re-purposing from old warheads) dry up and are not replaced with new mines.

Whenever production of power plants comes back on track, we will once again be facing such a shortage.

Yes there are limited reserves of uranium like everything else on the planet, but there is a lot more than 5 years... more like 200 according to this article. This is important because it buys us time to get technologies which are actually clean (looking at you, solar energy researchers) up to the speed of our current energy sources. Or find something else

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energy is like food

[spectrokid]

Best to have a diversified diet. The government needs to do only 2 things: don't subsidize, and make sure every energy form pays for its REAL cost. And that means one motherfucking hefty CO2 tax, and a big piggy bank full of money next to every nuclear plant to pay for dismantling when the time comes.

Re:Disasters

[ducomputergeek]

Really, those two disasters are some how worse than the tonnes of crap we've been pumping into the air unfiltered the past 150 years and continue doing today and at an increasing rate (here's looking at you China).

And there is a thorium fuel cycle that would use up most of that waste while providing plenty of affordable power for next 500 years. Yes it would probably take 20 years to get the first thorium reactors up, running, and certified for commercial use, but politics happen the be the biggest barrier here, not technology. In particular non-proliferation treaties.

Re:Disasters

[h4rr4r]

How is fukushima a mega disaster?

Chernobyl was not an accident, they did everything they could to destroy that reactor. Negligence sure, but no way accidental.

High level waste is not that hot after 10 years, much less 10,0000. Things would those kind of half lives are not that radioactive.

Oversimplifying misses the point

[goombah99]

The summary paints this picture that it's defective motivations that lead people to go from anti nuke to pro nuke. Au contrair. In the 1970s and 1980s it made a lot of sense to be anti-nuke just as it now makes sense to be anti-GMO. Those people did us a huge favor. They forced these industries to account for the unpaid externality costs that they were free ridiing on. The nuke industry was a headlong rush to market paid for with public bonds going into private investors pockets with very little accounting for the costs of downstream waste disposal, the risks of faclities, and under appreciated environmental costs (such as the tennessee rivers being sterilized by excessive heating).

The protestors forced the nuke industry to face a large regulatory and captical risk hurdle to develop new plants. This forced a better accounting even if the actual costs they were including were only proxies for the real costs. IN the mean time the technology has advanced remarkably.

We also have a better grip on the future costs of peower production and an attentiveness to conservation of power that we did no have then. Fracking has come online, renewables are forming a competitive market.

Nuke power now has a good role to play as a major part of a power mix, especially in china where demand is insatiable and the olny alternative is coal.

It makes complete sense to start developing nuclear power under these safe, sober conditions with the externalities properly built into the costs.

thus this is not "soluionism" as a reasoning defect. It's simply good reasoning in both cases. changing your mind as conditions change actually shows these people were not simply hung up on nuclear = evil but rather the nuclear plants of the time in the market of the time were potentially a bad idea.

I'd say GMO and Fracking are at the same level today. There's a gold rush for these with very little accounting for the true external costs (e.g. water aquifer destruction, fugitive methane, and maybe earthquakes, all being uncosted while wars are driving up the price of oil faster than alternatives can replace it. This means market forces now are out of balance and could cause imprudent envirnmental destruction).

But fracking can be done safely eventually but may have to be done away from aquifers and with better technology.

GMO is going to be the next green revolution. But it's fraught with perils. Even the risk of excessive monocropping leading to a potatoe famine like disaster is not absurd. GMO is oversold right nowand is dangerous because of the unkown risk exposure but will be very important later. We need to let a generation of beta testers pass by at very low levels of introduction of GMO before we allow it to spread. By then we will know how to monitor it's hazzards better.