Debating the role of nuclear energy in support of a low carbon future

I was invited by Hofstra University to participate in this year's Pride and Purpose debate on the topic "Should Nuclear Energy be Expanded to Help Create a More Sustainable Future?"  I was proud to be able to represent the American Nuclear Society (ANS) who were approached to provide a participant for this topic.  It is new territory for the ANS to engage in an event like this, and also new for me.  Although I am more comfortable giving a public lecture than I am in a debate setting, I thought that the formal structure of this debate would offer me some comfort.

Little did we know, however, that our opposition would include Arnie Gundersen, a professional anti-nuclear activist with a wealth of experience in settings such as these.  Arnie was paired with Heidi Hutner, Associate Professor of English and Sustainability, and Director of Environmental Humanities, Sustainability Studies Program, at Stony Brook University.  My partner was J. Bret Bennington, one of Hofstra's own, Professor and Chair of Geology, Environment and Sustainability.

All of us agreed before we began that the goal was to dramatically reduce our reliance of fossil fuels in the quest for a low carbon energy system, and that this was an urgent need.  Where we disagreed was on just how to accomplish that.

My proposal was a simple one: put a price on carbon to squeeze out fossil fuels and use every low-emission technology we have available.  Hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass, and solar will all have important roles to play in any low-emission future, but nuclear energy cannot be ruled out.  Nuclear energy is clean, reliable and proven - there is nothing else like it!  At the heart of my proposal to rely on an expanded role for nuclear energy is the fact that all signs point to an ever increasing need for baseload electricity generation, and nuclear energy is the only low-emission (clean) source that can provide baseload (reliable) power and be expanded at the rate necessary to make a difference (proven).

Professor Bennington reinforced this point by laying our the severity of climate change and the urgency with which we need to act.  He wondered why we would ever want to rule out a technology that would be useful in combating this grand challenge.

The position of the opposition was somewhat predictable.  Among other things they argued:

• Nuclear energy emits more carbon that renewable energy when considering the full life cycle (ie. not clean)
• We are moving to a different energy system that doesn't need baseload power (ie. who needs old reliable?)
• It will take too long to build enough nuclear power plants (ie. not so proven)

Perhaps in future posts, I'll go into more detail on these and other points that came up, but let me offer a quick summary here.

Clean: Nuclear energy does have to take responsibility for some carbon emissions when considering mining, enrichment, construction, disposal, and everything else it takes to generate nuclear electricity.  However, when the same factors are considered for renewable energy, the differences between nuclear and renewables is in the noise compared to either natural gas or coal.  Some studies show nuclear energy to be less than wind and solar while others studies show the opposite.  For us to bicker about this point is "fiddling while Rome burns" as I said at the time.

Reliable: Arnie invoked analogies to the transition from landline to cell phones and the transition from mainframes to laptops as evidence that our society was moving to a distributed world.  Those analogies fall flat for a number of reasons.  Regarding cell phones, we won't be beaming electricity around wirelessly any time soon and those phones are rapidly becoming extensions of our networked computerized life.  More importantly, the value of our network of laptop computers and smart phones is enabled by energy hungry data centers and a growing array of wires and fiber into our homes that looks much like the electric grid.  Decentralization is simply not a characteristics of our modern communication economy!  Another key factor is the fact that our global populations are ever more urban and the high population density of our cities is not conducive to distributed renewable generation.  As we build up rather than out, we'll need concentrated sources of energy to support those high density living arrangements.

Proven: I was fortunate to have seen a recent analysis by the Breakthrough Institute just a week before the debate that showed clearly that when various national energy initiatives were compared, only nuclear energy policies showed rapid introduction of low emission energy.  Add to that the recent evidence of Germany's failing EnergieWende, and there is no evidence that renewable energy can take us where we want to go.  It was no surprise that our opponents claimed that nuclear would be too expensive and take too long, but had no response to my question about the cost and timeline for achieving our shared goal without nuclear energy.  There is no question that changing our energy system away from fossil fuels will be expensive, but so is the general upkeep of our aging electricity infrastructure.

One question I should have been more prepared for was the generic question about nuclear safety.  I knew it would come up and I had practiced some answers, but when the time came I really missed an opportunity to make a clear point.

After the debate, all four of us went to dinner with some Hofstra students, my host Bob Brinkman, and rhetoric professor Philip Dalton.  Most people I know are intensely curious about how this went given the contentious atmosphere of the debate.  It was no surprise to me that we had a lovely time with a variety of interesting conversations.  In the end, all of the debate participants are really interested in the same thing, and their day-to-day lives are filled with similar experiences - helping children with homework, worrying about their drivers license exams, and awaiting news of new grandchildren.  I sat next to Professor Hutner and I think we began what I hope can be a longer conversation on the impacts of nuclear energy in our world today and in the future.

Energy Tax Breaks

While production tax credits are a questionable way to choose technologies for energy production, they are a valuable way to tackle the real issues of environmental impact. Production tax credits (PTCs) should be wielded in a technology-neutral way that help encourage businesses to pursue environmental goals that are not necessarily perceived as part of their bottom line.

But all that said, the current policy that allows PTCs to be created and expire on an annual basis is the worst of all worlds. If we are going to have an energy policy that relies on PTCs, then we need to make them last as long as the time scales necessary to effect change in energy futures.

Let's first find a way to make PTCs become based on the environmental goals and divorced from the technology. Then, let's make them last for a long time so that we can plan on them and make a difference.

Risk-free Iconography as Energy Policy

I was struck by this paragraph in Sunday's New York Times:

Still, “there’s a huge danger if we try to build public policy about risk-free iconography and storytelling,” Mr. Godin says. “We end up with nuclear waste dumps and ethanol. There really is no free lunch, but that’s a difficult story to tell.”

It is a poignant summary of the whole article, that discusses the role of the wind turbine as an icon of a better energy future. While some of my colleagues might use such an article as a springboard to condescendingly dismiss wind energy, I hope that the above paragraph is appreciated by someone who can help wind energy grow without promising the moon (or all its He-3).

Ode to Joy

One of my favorite pieces of classical music, however cliché, is Beethoven's Ode to Joy. The reason is that it is indelibly imprinted in my brain in connection to a moving film about the fall of the Berlin Wall that I saw at the "Museum at Checkpoint Charlie" in 1992 (and again in '96 or '97).

But this post is on a different topic altogether... today, some dear friends and neighbors are moving away to another state. As they leave, we find ourselves listing all the reasons we are sad to see them go. To be sure, my school-aged daughters will miss their playmates (the new owners have no children) and we will miss the easy and casual conversations in the fence-less backyard. The list of specifics could go on, but it can all be summarized by the neighborly ideal they represented.

It is not about being inseparable best of friends. We have our circle of friends and they have theirs. Rather, it is about being a welcome part of each other's everyday lives - so common and regular that your lives become intertwined in a way that is hard to catalog. In today's world, there are no guarantees that neighbors will achieve this ideal in their relationship. In fact, most conversations are peppered with the extreme opposite - long-soured neighborly relationships in which those daily interactions are despised and avoided.

We will miss them for some time. In more ways that one, some joy has been taken away from our lives.

Talking about nuclear energy

The Wisconsin Public Utility Institute recently hosted a "Power Lunch" on Nuclear Energy. You can find most of the presentations posted there. The whole program was recorded for posterity in two segments. One for the morning and one for the afternoon. I was on the program, both giving a lecture on the nuclear fuel cycle in the morning (2:24:30) and on the panel discussion at the end (1:33:00).

The Pessimism of Youth

When we discussed nuclear non-proliferation in my class on Friday, none of the students could even imagine a world without nuclear weapons. While I admit that I don't expect it soon, I can imagine concrete steps towards it - a trajectory that would not be impossible to begin. I thought I was supposed to be the jaded and cynical one.

Fun engineering design competition - and effective too!

2nd Place Team
Originally uploaded by gonuke

At the 2008 ANS Student Conference @ TAMU this weekend, the organizers did a fantastic job pulling off an engineering design competition. We had tossed this idea around when we hosted the conference in 2004, but it was a huge failure on many levels. The biggest contributor to this success was getting us all into it when we were a captive audience - they also offered big $$ prizes.

Each table got a box of stuff - two thin dowels, a role of twin, some rubber bands, a plastic cup. a small plunger, springs, zip ties, a coil of wire.... and so on, with a small marble. The goal was to create a contraption that would keep the marble moving longest after starting it off. You could release it, but not push it, to start. There were a number of rules (more on that later) to limit what you could or couldn't do. Our table came 2nd.

We went with a simple pendulum supported by a bipod held in place with guy-wires. We suspended the cup and filled it with as much mass as possible. Finally, we put the plunger head upside down in the top of the cup with the marble - the shape of this surface was conducive to keeping the marble moving and wobbling even if the pendulum was slowing down.

Now for the rules - and the pedagogical value. The rules were designed to be simple. They defined what "moving" meant to avoid typical engineer arguments like the earth is always moving so the marble is too - or Brownian motion, etc. They also did not allow the contraption to be fastened to the table. (Some groups feel we ran afoul when we held our box with the endorsement of the judge - they were probably right!) These rules were quite clear an unambiguous. Less clear was the guidance on the size/footprint of the system.

As the instructions were given to us, we were told to fold our box flat and put it on the table - this was the footprint our system had to fit into. Some groups, including ours, took that to mean that the system must be built upon the flattened box. Others just assumed that any system that was smaller than the size of the flattened box was OK and that the box was available to be used as part of the building materials.

At least two pedagogical lessons:

• sometimes rules are vague - you have to interpret them for yourself
• diversity of opinions can lead to better design

Graduate student training

One of the things that I do as a professor is train graduate students to be productive scientists. There are many apsects to this: research, communication, and teamwork skills, and maybe even some teaching experience. The faculty-student mentoring relationship for these skills is well defined. Students expect to pick up these skills and look to the faculty member for help, either from direct instruction and feedback, or by following the example set by the faculty (hopefully a good example). In addition, over time, many people are working on resources to help with this.

But occasionaly I encounter a dimension that is more difficult: personality coaching. On one hand, many aspects of this are related to the other skills mentioned above. But on the other hand, when students have personalities that make it difficult for them to interact constructively with others, they have a hard time acquiring these other skills. It becomes a barrier to many of the other aspects.

More importantly, this aspect of the relationship between faculty and student is not well defined. It somehow seems more difficult to approach a student on this topic. Nevertheless, students who behave poorly can not only hamper their own professional development, but can interrupt the development of other students.

Perhaps there is room to develop resources to help us deal with this aspect too.

Mail Merging Postal Codes

I fought for too many hours trying to merge some labels and have all the postal codes be formatted correctly. Why does it need to be that hard? No matter where I looked, I could not find any information that made it clear how Word intepreted the columns of a data source and why it chose to force them to be numbers. As a result, no matter what I tried, Canadian postal codes came out as the number 0 in all cases. I had to give up...

RIP Oliver

Oliver was hit by a car and died two days ago. While it is true that we didn't always see eye to eye, I will miss having him around. Watching Moira's reaction has been fascinating. She has a very matter-of-fact sense of the whole incident and is anxious to tell as many people as possible about all the details she knows.

I am digging a grave for a soon to be held memorial. The vet suggested 5 ft.... That's a long way down. I think I will aim more for 3 ft, and put a big heavy rock on top.