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."
How is it not a silver bullet? (Score:5, Interesting)
If that doesn't happen, it will be because solar undercut the price of nuclear without the waste or security problems... in that case, even better!
In b4 deluge of thorium posts. (Score:0, Interesting)
Can anyone tell me how and end-to-end thorium fuel ecosystem is supposed to work? All of the arguments I hear go like this:
Thorium! Its cheap and abundant
Put it in a special reactor
???
Power!
Well that ??? part is usually described as "fuel reprocessing". Nobody, as far as I can tell, has explained how that should work. And it's not a trivial issue. As far as I can tell, what's coming out the wrong end of a thorium reactor will be a molten salt soup of toxic, possibly very corrosive, and VERY radioactive materials. This is because the thorium breeding cycle can't go on forever, and the stuff needs to be processed to get rid of undesirable reaction byproducts (or refine out desirable ones?)
In any case, the above does not sound very pleasant. It sounds expensive and dangerous and potentially hazardous, a lot like how we store spent fuel rods now.
Re:What else can provide enough clean power? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, it wants the anti-nuclear activists to have a voice.
The anti-nuclear activists have destroyed the prospects of widespread nuclear adoption in more than a few countries, including the United States.
The problem is that their voice has been the only god damned voice, so fuck em if they are crying now about not being able to continue to drown out any discussion.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Interesting)
On the contrary, portable computing (albeit of a larger form factor than the phone) is a tremendous help to a population on the move, because it represents access to both instantaneous news, weather reports, supply points and so on, as well as a vast depth of knowledge, which allows skills to propagate and spread with ease. Think of a question - google the answer. Need to fix a car, search for the schematics and instructions. I did just that last week, never touched the internals of a car beyond the basics before in my life, next thing you know I was crimping electrical wiring together and diagnosing problems, and it worked fine.
You have the largest library, trade school, and university ever imagined right at your fingertips, and believe me knowledge is power. We haven't even begun to realise the implications of this as a society.
And don't ever underestimate the power of communication - Genghis Khan didn't conquer most of Eurasia because his troops were super badass ninjas, he won because his forces had far superor communications than the opposition, due to his fast riders. People able to communicate are people able to work together, and there's not much that can't be done with enough people working together.
I'm not worried about the basics, food, water, energy, we have and will always have a surplus of those. Mostly due to the last part there, with enough energy you can easily get food and fresh water, and we are drowning in energy.
Re:Not a silver bullet, but a hold-over tactic (Score:5, Interesting)
1. You're assuming unlimited exponential growth. In the developed world, power use per person has actually been dropping slightly due to efficiency increases. Population growth has also slowed to pretty much replacement only, so the current increases are only from industrialization of previously undeveloped populations. We'll run out of them sometime as well.
2. You're assuming that the 200 year figures don't take changes in energy sources/growth into account.
3. They're only known reserves at a fairly low price point. Double the price per pound of Uranium and a lot more reserves suddenly appear. Double it again and we have the technology to distill it from seawater economically. It's still an insignificant cost for nuclear power production even at 4X the price. Oh yeah, at around double the price reprocessing and breeding look a lot more economical, so the efficiency at which we use it can increase almost an OOM.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Uranium means it is not a silver bullet (Score:4, Interesting)
"something that is very limited on this planet."
Bullshit. Uranium is ridiculously abundant. There's more uranium than silver, or tin, or cadmium, or antimony.
"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."
Utter and total nonsense. Old warheads are not major sources of uranium, because warheads are fabricated from *plutonium*, not uranium, which is produced in reactors specifically so we can build warheads out of it. There are billions of tons of uranium dissolved in seawater, with another 32000 tons being carried into the oceans by rivers every year. With breeders and/or sane fuel cycles/reactor designs, there's enough uranium to provide our present electrical demands for, literally, millions of years.
And there's three times as much thorium as there is uranium.
"Whenever production of power plants comes back on track, we will once again be facing such a shortage."
Only someone who completely fails to understand what constitutes ore reserves would say such a thing. As uranium prices rise, ore reserves increase, because a higher price for uranium means other sources become economical to exploit. There will only ever be a shortage of uranium *at a given price*, and once that price gets high enough to make extraction from seawater economical, supplies become effectively limitless. And since nuclear fuel is so energy dense, orders of magnitude moreso than chemical fuels, the raw price of ore contributes very little to the cost of electricity coming out of the plant.