Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what about when those technologies destroy the environment?
In this provocative talk, Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and energy expert, Michael Shellenberger explains why solar and wind farms require so much land for mining and energy production, and an alternative path to saving both the climate and the natural environment. Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization.
A lifelong environmentalist, Michael changed his mind about nuclear energy and has helped save enough nuclear reactors to prevent an increase in carbon emissions equivalent to adding more than 10 million cars to the road. He lives in Berkeley, California. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
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NUCLEAR POWER IS THE ONLY GREEN SOLUTION
We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources, writes James Lovelock – civilisation is in imminent danger. Published in The Independent, 24 May 2004.
Sir David King, the Government’s chief scientist, was far-sighted to say that global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism. He may even have underestimated, because, since he spoke, new evidence of climate change suggests it could be even more serious, and the greatest danger that civilisation has faced so far.
Most of us are aware of some degree of warming; winters are warmer and spring comes earlier. But in the Arctic, warming is more than twice as great as here in Europe and in summertime, torrents of melt water now plunge from Greenland’s kilometre-high glaciers. The complete dissolution of Greenland’s icy mountains will take time, but by then the sea will have risen seven metres, enough to make uninhabitable all of the low lying coastal cities of the world, including London, Venice, Calcutta, New York and Tokyo. Even a two metre rise is enough to put most of southern Florida under water.
The floating ice of the Arctic Ocean is even more vulnerable to warming; in 30 years, its white reflecting ice, the area of the US, may become dark sea that absorbs the warmth of summer sunlight, and further hastens the end of the Greenland ice. The North Pole, goal of so many explorers, will then be no more than a point on the ocean surface.
Not only the Arctic is changing; climatologists warn a four-degree rise in temperature is enough to eliminate the vast Amazon forests in a catastrophe for their people, their biodiversity, and for the world, which would lose one of its great natural air conditioners.
The scientists who form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2001 that global temperature would rise between two and six degrees Celsius by 2100. Their grim forecast was made perceptible by last summer’s excessive heat; and according to Swiss meteorologists, the Europe-wide hot spell that killed over 20,000 was wholly different from any previous heat wave. The odds against it being a mere deviation from the norm were 300,000 to one. It was a warning of worse to come.
What makes global warming so serious and so urgent is that the great Earth system, Gaia, is trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback. Extra heat from any source, whether from greenhouse gases, the disappearance of Arctic ice or the Amazon forest, is amplified, and its effects are more than additive. It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm, and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited. When that happens, little time is left to put out the fire before it consumes the house. Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act.
So what should we do? We can just continue to enjoy a warmer 21st century while it lasts, and make cosmetic attempts, such as the Kyoto Treaty, to hide the political embarrassment of global warming, and this is what I fear will happen in much of the world. When, in the 18th century, only one billion people lived on Earth, their impact was small enough for it not to matter what energy source they used.
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Small modular reactors offer no hope for nuclear energy
In December 2021, the government of Belgium joined an increasing number of countries expressing an interest in building what are called small modular reactors, which generate under 300 megawatts of electrical power — much smaller than the 1000 to 1700 megawatts typical of large reactors that dominate today’s nuclear power landscape.
Belgium’s interest in small modular reactors was paired with a decision to phase out the country’s operating nuclear power plants by 2025, with Prime Minister Alexander De Croo declaring that the decision amounted to bidding goodbye to the old nuclear reactors but looking to nuclear energy of the future.
Does replacing ageing nuclear capacity with these smaller reactors make economic sense and will it happen?
Belgium is hardly alone in being interested in small modular reactors. At the forefront of efforts to commercialize these designs are the governments of the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, all of which provide large amounts of taxpayer money to subsidize their development. These three countries have long histories in nuclear power and are influencing other countries to follow their lead.
Decline in nuclear power
The background to interest in small reactors is the consistently declining share of nuclear power in global electricity generation, from 17.5% in 1996 to around 10% in 2020. This decline reflects the steep falloff in orders for nuclear power from the mid-1980s onward.
Although often blamed on public opposition to nuclear power, especially resulting from the devastating accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the main cause for the drop in nuclear power’s importance has been the steadily rising cost of nuclear reactors and the almost invariable tendency for project construction costs and time to escalate dramatically.
An illustration is the Vogtle project in the U.S. state of Georgia, where two large 1100 megawatt AP1000 reactors are being constructed. These two reactors are among approximately 30 new reactor proposals announced after the U.S. government offered handsome financial incentives for nuclear power plant construction in 2005. Of these, only four reactors moved to the construction stage.
The other project was in the nearby state of South Carolina and also involved two AP1000 reactors. After $9 billion was spent on this project, the utility company abandoned construction in 2017 because capital costs and building schedules had escalated beyond control.
Construction of the Vogtle reactors continues despite the project cost increasing from an initial estimate of $14 billion to over $30 billion, and the plant is still at least two years from completion. This is typical of such projects, and the poor construction record has made nuclear power plants difficult to finance because financiers are unwilling to be exposed to these risks.
The economic challenges of small reactors
Advocates for small modular reactors claim that this strategy will lower costs in the long run. They blame rising costs and delays on the size and complexity of large reactors and on the difficulty in managing the large amount of work they need to construct on-site. Small modular reactors are expected to be cheaper because they will use production line-made modules that will require much less work at the site.
These arguments have superficial attractions and do not stand up to scrutiny. The main strategy for combating nuclear power’s historic lack of competitiveness has been to build ever-larger reactors because the expenses associated with constructing and operating a reactor should not increase in direct proportion to the power generated. Small modular reactors cannot defy this economic logic. The scale economies that will be lost cannot be compensated for by factory manufacturing, and they will cost more than large reactors for each unit (megawatt) of generation capacity.
Experience also suggests that factory manufacturing of modules will not be a panacea. The AP1000 design used at the Vogtle and Summer sites relied heavily on using modular factory-made components, but that reliance did not prevent the large cost and time overruns as well as quality problems that have bedeviled these projects.
There is also a “Catch 22”. The economics will only be tested when large numbers of reactors manufactured on production lines have been built and their cost known. Private industry is not going to take the risk of paying for production lines and buying large numbers of reactors that could well prove uneconomic. So, it will be public money, as it nearly always has been the case with nuclear power, that will be risked.
Renewables are a better alternative
Whether small modular reactors can beat large reactors in terms of economics is not the issue; it is their competitiveness with renewables. While nuclear costs have been relentlessly rising for decades, costs of renewables have plummeted and are now far lower than for nuclear. In its most recent estimate, the Wall Street firm, Lazard, estimated that a new nuclear plant will generate electricity at an average cost of $167 per megawatt hour, over four times the corresponding estimates of $38 and $34 per megawatt hour for new wind and solar energy plants, respectively.
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