Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (42 page)

One of the founders of the Italian environmental movement, Chicco Testa, has written a book explaining why he has converted to nuclear power.
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He now actively supports Italy’s recent decision to build between four and eight nuclear plants. Italy is a classic case of a country that can benefit from nuclear development. They have no coal, oil, or natural gas. They have limited hydroelectric resources, and they have a growing economy that needs new energy supplies.

In 2009 Stephen Tindale, the former executive director of Greenpeace UK, announced that he now supports nuclear energy. He was joined by three other prominent conservationists: Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury, the chairman of the Environment Agency, Mark Lynas, the author of the Royal Society’s science book of the year, and Chris Goodall, a Green Party activist and prospective parliamentary candidate.
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Among well-known personalities to declare support for nuclear energy are Bob Geldof, the musician and antipoverty activist for Africa, and the late Paul Newman, actor, liberal political activist, and philanthropist.

Although it is not his primary designation, I’m sure U.S. President Barack Obama would call himself an environmentalist. His personal support for new nuclear plants in the United States is perhaps the most effective action to date to help activists and members of the Democratic Party who previously opposed nuclear power to see the wisdom of changing their position on nuclear energy.
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Many Choices in the Energy Palette

Some forms of energy are “on demand” while other forms are intermittent. If you have a large enough woodpile, you can make a fire to heat your home whenever you want. If you store water behind a dam, you can make electricity whenever you wish, so long as you do so sustainably. These are examples of energy on demand.

Solar panels are an intermittent form of energy because you can’t make them work at night or when it is cloudy. The same is true of wind energy; it is only available when the wind blows. If tidal or wave energy were ever harnessed successfully, they would also be intermittent sources of power. Some proponents of wind and solar energy believe we will eventually develop storage systems that convert these technologies into on-demand energy. This may be so but we are not there yet as there is no proven, cost-effective way to do it.

Before we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the various energy choices we have for the future, I will give a brief description of each of the energies we can choose from.

Biomass energy
refers to all energy derived from plants, wood used for cooking and heating, for example.
Biofuel energy
refers to biomass that has been converted into liquid fuel for vehicles. Plants use about seven times as much energy each year from the sun as is consumed by all human civilization. Trees are by far the largest consumers of solar energy. The majority of biomass energy used by people is derived from trees and other woody plants.
Biomass accounts for about 75 percent of all our renewable energy consumption
. The majority of this is fuelwood for cooking and heating in the tropical developing countries, but large amounts are also used in the pulp and paper industry for process heat and drying the pulp. In addition there is a growing biofuels industry that produces transportation fuels.

Hydroelectric energy
starts as the sun’s heat evaporates water from oceans, lakes, and landscapes, transports it into the atmosphere, where it eventually falls as rain at higher altitudes, flows down rivers into man-made dams, and is directed through turbines to make electricity before returning to the sea. Hydroelectric energy provides about 20 percent of electricity worldwide, so between them wood and hydroelectric energy account for about 95 percent of all renewable energy. One of the greatest ironies and logical disconnects of our time is the fact that many “environmentalists” generally oppose felling trees and strongly oppose large hydro dams.

Fossil fuel energy
is by far the largest portion of total energy consumed; about 86 percent of our energy comes from petroleum, coal, and natural gas. These fuels have proven to be the most convenient and versatile for so many applications. Most of the world’s electricity is produced by burning coal and natural gas. Nearly all our forms of transportation are fueled by petroleum products. Most buildings are heated with natural gas and other fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are the primary energy source in manufacturing and other industrial production.

Even though the fossil fuels were originally derived from ancient forests and plankton, grown on solar energy, they are classified as nonrenewable because they do not replenish themselves. At the present rate we will end up consuming more than 300 million years of fossil fuel creation in a few centuries. This is hardly a model of conservation.

Nuclear energy
is unique in that it is a major energy source that is not based on solar energy. Uranium is a naturally occurring element that is slightly radioactive. Natural uranium is composed of two main isotopes: 99.3 percent is uranium-238, which has a half-life
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of 4.5 billion years, O.7 percent is uranium-235, which has a half-life of 704 million years. It is the uranium-235 that produces the nuclear reaction in a conventional nuclear reactor. Uranium is one of the rarest elements in the earth’s crust, but because it contains so much energy it has the potential to provide fuel for thousands of years. One kilogram of natural uranium has the same amount of energy as 10,000 kilograms of coal. One kilogram of uranium-235 has the same energy as 1,500,000 kilograms of coal.

I apologize for the many numbers in the last paragraph. But they are nothing compared to the complexity of nuclear physics and nuclear engineering. We will leave it at that for now, but we will encounter a few more numbers when we discuss nuclear energy in more depth. A nuclear power plant is our most brilliant engineering achievement. Yet a single leaf on a tree is more complex in nature.

Among them, fossil fuels, hydroelectric, nuclear, and biomass energy account for about 98 percent of all our energy use. There are a few other energy technologies that deserve mentioning:

Geothermal energy
refers to two different technologies, both based on the heat in the earth (geo means earth, thermal means heat). One form of geothermal energy, often called “hot rocks,” relies on local areas where heat from the earth’s core comes close to the surface. The Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park is an example. California, Iceland, Italy, and New Zealand obtain considerable energy from geothermal by using the earth’s heat to make steam to run turbines that turn generators to make electricity. Hot rocks geothermal energy is generated by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium in the earth’s interior and is therefore a form of nuclear energy.

The other type of geothermal energy is known as a ground source heat pump or a geothermal heat pump. Nearly half the sun’s energy striking the earth is absorbed at the surface by the land, lakes, and sea. The heat pump, which uses the same technology as a refrigerator, is able to tap into this stored solar energy and use it to heat buildings, to make hot water, and, by reversing the heat pump, to provide air conditioning. This form of geothermal energy can be applied to any building in the world, unlike the hot rocks form of geothermal, which is only practically available in a few locations.

Wind energy
is based on the movement of air in the atmosphere. There are two factors that cause the wind to blow. When the sun heats the earth’s surface this in turn heats the air and causes it to rise. When the air rises, it creates a kind of vacuum that pulls surrounding air in, thus creating wind. The variable heating of the land and sea results in areas of higher and lower pressure in the atmosphere. Air moves from high pressure areas to low pressure areas. The other factor is the earth’s rotation. Because the atmosphere is a gas rather than a solid, it doesn’t really want to follow the surface of the earth as it rotates. This is why there are “prevailing westerly” winds in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The combination of the earth’s rotation and the sun’s heat create the wind and weather patterns that change with infinite complexity.

Wind energy has been used for centuries to power ships for exploration, trade, sport, and pleasure. Windmills were invented to use the natural energy in the air to grind grain into flour and to pump water from wells. More recently wind has been harnessed to produce electricity both on and off the electrical grid. When used off the grid, the energy is often stored in batteries, making it possible to have electricity on demand when the wind is not blowing. When wind energy is fed into an electrical grid, it allows the operators to shut down other electric plants while the wind is blowing. The negative aspect of this is that whenever a wind energy facility is established it is necessary to build a suitable backup plant to produce energy for when the wind is not blowing. The best geographical locations for wind energy will produce about 20 to 30 percent of the energy that would be produced if the wind were blowing at an optimum speed all the time. In other words, when a wind company claims it has installed 1000 megawatts of wind energy, it has really installed about 200 to 300 megawatts. The promotional material invariably talks about the
installed capacity
of 1000 megawatts when, to be more honest, it should reveal that the
capacity factor
is 20 to 30 percent thus actually producing 200 to 300 megawatts.

Solar energy
is derived directly from the sun. There are a number of ways to convert sunlight directly into energy. The most widely recognized is the solar photovoltaic panel, usually just called a solar panel or PV. It produces electricity by converting the photons in sunlight into a flow of electrons from the panel, either directly into the grid or in off-grid applications to a battery that stores the energy for use when the sun is not shining. Even in the best locations solar panels will produce electricity only 15 to 20 percent of the time. This is the most expensive way to produce electricity and also one of the most unreliable.

Sunlight can also be used to heat water in solar water heaters. This is much more cost-effective than photovoltaic panels. In sunny climates it is a very efficient way to produce hot water for washing. China leads the world in adopting solar hot water heating.

Passive solar energy
refers to building designs that absorb, reflect, or store solar heat in a way that reduces the need for heating and cooling with other fuels. Much more use could be made of passive solar energy if our homes and other buildings were better designed with the sun’s daily movement in mind.

To Grid or Not to Grid

The distribution of electricity through the electrical grid represents one of the greatest advances in the history of energy technology. When you think about it, it is almost a miracle that huge amounts of energy can be transmitted through relatively tiny wires over great distances with no moving parts. But, in fact, there are moving parts—quadrillions of invisible electrons traveling through the wires to run motors, charge batteries, power computers, TVs and other electronic equipment, heat our homes, and cook our food.

The grid allows everyone on it to be connected to a number of different electrical plants, often ones based on different technologies. All grids must have sufficient capacity to satisfy peak demand plus a surplus to allow for individual plants to be shut down for repairs or refueling. This provides continuous power to all consumers unless there is not sufficient surplus to deal with demand or in the case of an unexpected failure. Ice storms, tornados, and earthquakes can disrupt the grid for days or weeks while repair crews struggle around the clock to restore power. It is during these events that we come to recognize just how important the grid is to our daily lives. Civilization as we have come to know it would be impossible without the grid.

Many people have a romantic notion that it would be desirable to “get off the grid.” This is no doubt linked to their wish to be independent and self-sufficient. While this is a noble aim in some circumstances, electricity is not one of them. Winter Harbour, the small community I was born and raised in, was off the grid during my childhood. Photovoltaic panels did not yet exist, and wouldn’t have worked very well in a rain forest anyway, so the only choice for electricity was a gasoline or diesel generator. They are noisy, dirty, expensive, and they break down regularly. And the owner of the infernal machine is usually the one who ends up having to fix it.

The hamlet of Winter Harbour is, to this day, divided into two tiny towns, the fishing village and the logging camp. In the fishing village each home and business is separate. The residents, mostly independently minded folks, never did agree on a central “light-plant,” so during my childhood it was everyone for themselves. The personal generator ran only in the evening for lights. Many were the nights when the man of the house had to go out and monkey-wrench the generator in the dark. Refrigeration was only possible with kerosene fridges that needed filling every few days. Freezers were nonexistent and we made toast on top of the oil or wood stove.