Pandora's Promise and the Problem of "Solutionism" 293
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."
NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course they want nuclear power -- they just don't want it here.
Re:NIMBY (Score:3, Insightful)
while also protecting societies from the ravages of climate disruption.
This is based on a flawed assumption- that the only way to protect society is to prevent disruption of climate. Climate will, ultimately, become disrupted through some mechanism or another. The goal should be to evolve our various societies to the point where humans are mobile enough that civilization can shift to follow the climate. The current goal of keeping the planet in perpetual stasis is foolhardy and unrealistic.
Try to avoid 9 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
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:NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to evolve society so that 50% of the population can pick up and move? So that we not only grown enough food to feed everyone but also store enough to give us a couple years to switch plots and establish new farm land? So that we can all move toward the poles when the average temperatures at the equator are 2-5 degrees C more than they are today? Or will you just install 5 ton central AC in everyone's home, including all the people living on $2 a day? Or did you just mean the rich people? Or do you honestly think we can uplift the 9 billion people on the world so that everyone can afford the ludicrously lavish lifestyle that we all consider normal?
What else can provide enough clean power? (Score:4, Insightful)
The review doesn't disagree that nuclear is a big part of the solution, it just complains that the authors sweep aside all other considerations and doesn't like their attitude toward anti-nuclear activists. In other words, it wants the anti-nuclear activists to have a voice.
What is disingenuous about Pandora's Promise is the way the new judgment is conveyed. The film mocks groups that continue to protest nuclear power, treating one-time colleagues as extremists and zealots. An audience discussion after a preview at the University of Chicago made it clear I was not the only one who sensed the self-righteous tone of the newly converted in the film's narrative. In the end, by dismissing the protestors and failing to engage them in significant debate about the pros and cons of nuclear energy, the film undermined its own message.
Nobody loves nuclear power, but what else can provide sufficient power to the world without damaging the climate? Burning carbon, including natural gas, will cause a catastrophe. Wind, solar and geothermal can't ramp up fast enough to meet power demand, AFAIK. Only nuclear power provides sufficient energy without causing more climate change.
Disasters (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:i bet they all make money from it (Score:4, Insightful)
Natural Gas burns clean. Environmentalists are not against natural gas produced conventionally. They are against fracking because it affects the water table and has been shown to affect seismic activity as well. States that are heavily fracking are playing with fire.
Not a silver bullet, but a hold-over tactic (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [scientificamerican.com] 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
Re: Uranium means it is not a silver bullet (Score:3, Insightful)
With Uranium and something more efficient than the USA's once-through fuel cycle, we have well over a thousand years of energy given current known reserves at roughly today's economic recovery costs. Allow for thorium and breeders and we easily have 10,000 years of energy, all without needing any vast new reserves to be discovered.
In short, you are grossly misinformed. Stop spreading your ignorance around.
energy is like food (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disasters (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is it not a silver bullet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the fact the neither potable water nor arable land are distributed equally about the surface of the earth, there will always be geopolitical conflict over precious resources. So that's not really a problem to worry about.
Re:Uranium means it is not a silver bullet (Score:5, Insightful)
Very limited?
You can recover it from seawater.
Mines will open before the shortage occurs. Markets are pretty going at this.
Re:Try to avoid 9 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Disasters (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Try to avoid 9 billion (Score:4, Insightful)
Contraceptive access is a requirement for controlling population growth, but not sufficient in itsself. It needs education and a cultural change too - the original goals of feminism, to give women an equal status in society where they can (and are expected to) study, work, and have a career of their own. In much of the world this still isn't an option - women are treated as property and incubators. It's no good providing access to contraception if the local culture insults the manhood of any man who uses it, and women are afraid to seek it out for fear they will be labeled as promiscuous.;
I don't know who is more useless... (Score:5, Insightful)
people selling snake oil or people whining about "solutionism".
Since when is a documentary required to promote every possible agenda? I haven't seen the documentary, but I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that it does not ignore nuclear power's downsides, especially considering its focus on previously anti-nuclear environmentalists.
"Solutionism" is a thought terminating cliche [wikipedia.org], a way to dismiss any solution because it doesn't encompass every possible solution. It's a ploy for people who only know rhetoric and politics to wrestle control of the debate from people who know science and engineering.
Consider the vacuous absurdity of the closing of the article:
No one is under any obligation to please you, the head of an anti-nuclear activist group, which is no stranger to zealotry [wikipedia.org]. If you want other options, make your own documentary to promote them. You can make it "fact-based" too!
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think curbing CO2 emissions is expensive, wait until you see the cost of relocating New York City.
Re: Not a silver bullet, but a hold-over tactic (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar energy is not clean, nor will it ever be, unless we find a natural way of converting light into energy. Long way to go.
Hold on, let me ask this tree....
Looking at the progress humanity has made in the past 50 years, the future does not look too good. Since the space/atomic age, nothing fundamentally new has been discovered.
This is completely wrong. There have been tons of fundamentally new discoveries in many fields.
Re:I don't know who is more useless... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. So many of these naysayers, when asked "what do we need to do" advocate drastic reductions in energy use, drastic draconian policies to make it happen, and always in the end come out with the root solutions of "we need a whole lot fewer people on this planet." Their final answer is eliminating BILLIONS of people.
Anyone who advocates that has lost all credibility with me. We can create cleaner power, and we will be cause we need to. Necessity is the mother of invention after all. Getting everyone in the world to go along with "less, less, less" isn't going to happen. We've solved complicated problems before, and we can do it here. I completely agree with the premise that anti-nuclear advocates need to go the heck away.
You dare propose a solution? We love that problem! (Score:4, Insightful)
Solutionism?
Seriously?
How deprived of all faculity of thinking must a movement become to come up with the idea of "solutionism" as a critique? There is a problem and people think about solutions. Any solution would, of course, be reason for existential difficulties of the problem. But the problem is the basis of power of said movements. When the problem goes away, so does the power that came with it, when the movement came into existence and so does the only solution the movement sanctioned: complete austerity and refraining from any use of technology and any interaction with nature as much as in any way possible.
"Solutionism" is the latest, most ludicrous and hopefully last, attempt at defending the only solution "environmentalism" ever came up - by denying the adequancy of any solution of their problem whatsoever. Thus perpetuating their claim to power indefinitely - you know, the UNSOLVED PROBLEMS of technology.
Go and rot in hell.
Oversimplifying misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
Your final point -- that billions need to die -- has a certain (not particularly original) logic to it, and it's a scenario that most people find, um, unpalatable. The most palatable solution I can think of is for everyone, right now, to start breeding less. Replacing yourself should be the absolute maximum. However, that ain't going to happen.
Your characterisation of the environmental movement, however, is deeply flawed. Not surprisingly, since you call them "ecologists". An "ecologist" is someone who studies ecology; an academic pursuit, not a political position or a belief system.
"Environmentalism" covers a broad variety of positions too. There are people who call themselves environmentalists because they object to windfarms on the grounds that they spoil the view. There are people who call themselves environmentalists because they're concerned about the welfare of newts living on a site where a new road is planned. And there are people who call themselves environmentalists because they're concerned about CO2 levels throwing the global climate into chaos. Those people are not the same. Those concerned about CO2 levels generally couldn't give a toss about some wind turbines spoiling a view. Those concerned about wind turbines spoiling the view tend to be climate change deniers.
Me, I believe CO2 levels will continue to rise. Droughts, flooding, loss of coastal areas will result. It will result in migration, and where people can't agree on how to divvy up the remaining resources, conflict and strife. It will be unpleasant, and I would like to see solutions that make it less unpleasant.
Re:Different lessons (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be saying nuclear power is safe because the risks were known, but nobody did anything about them. I say nuclear power is unsafe, for exactly the same reason.
It's more along the lines of "Stop pointing at accident performance for 1967 VW beetles when we want to build modern cars".
I want new nuclear plants so we can finally shut down the end of life plants, as well as the nasty by design coal systems.
Re:Oversimplifying misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Absolutely wrong. Those people allowed the use of fossil fuels to proliferate and poison the atmosphere for DECADES out of a misguided fear of radioactivity. The blame for global warming can largely be placed on their shoulders. Those people made the world a worse place for everyone.
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it is inevitable perhaps we can slow it down. It costs a lot more to move everyone very quickly away from the coast than it does to gradually migrate them away over a long time due to a new opportunities opening up in newly habitable or developed areas.
It's the old "all of nothing" fallacy.
The survival of technological civilization (Score:2, Insightful)
The survival of technological civilization depends vitally on energy supply. Which means that the omni-obstructionists and the arithmetic deniers are, knowingly or by being duped, enemies of technological civilization. The alternative to technological civilization is getting rid of about six billion people on a very short time span.
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic" -- Stuart Brand, not an arithmetic-denier.