Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (46 page)

The next time you buy a car, buy a modest one with really good fuel economy. Don’t worry about the image your car gives you, just focus on practicality and common sense. Guys usually want a big fancy car with 350 horsepower just to get to work and back. Sure, you can have a stereo with seven speakers and heated seats, but buy a small hybrid or conventional car that gets good mileage. This will give you big savings; a luxury car with a big motor won’t offer such savings. And a small car will use fewer resources and create much less air pollution. Then take the money you save on your car and put a heat pump in your house. The heat pump will probably be in a dark little room in your basement. Lighten up that basement room, paint your heat pump a bright color, put racing stripes on it, and take your friends and family down there and brag about what you have done for the environment. Forget the gas-guzzler as your pride and joy. Celebrate the 50 percent reduction in your personal use of fossil fuels!

Hot Geothermal Energy

As mentioned in the introduction, there are two distinct technologies that use the term
geothermal
. One of these is based on the fact that the earth’s inner heat comes close to the surface in certain locations where the earth’s crust is thin. In some locations it is possible to tap into steam generated from these hot spots and to generate electricity with turbines on the surface. Today 24 countries generate about 0.3 percent of the world’s electricity by this method and scientists believe this could be increased substantially. Five countries—El Salvador, Kenya, the Philippines, Iceland, and Costa Rica—generate more than 15 percent of their electricity from geothermal sources.

Deep geothermal energy may have great potential and is definitely worth investing in as a renewable and sustainable energy resource. Difficulties include the high cost of drilling deep boreholes, uncertainty about the sustainability of the resource, the fact that every site has unique geology and therefore unpredictable circumstances, and the geographically limited nature of locations where it is hot enough to produce steam close to the surface.

In areas where it is not hot enough to produce steam, it is often possible to tap geothermal heat directly for district heating in towns and cities. In 1892 Boise, Idaho, became the first city in the U.S. to develop a district heating system with direct geothermal heating.

Nuclear Energy

Nuclear energy supplies about 16 percent of the world’s electricity, a percentage similar to hydroelectric power. Among the 30 countries with nuclear power plants, 21 countries obtain 15 percent or more of their electricity from nuclear energy, ranging from Canada at 15 percent to France at nearly 80 percent. In the U.S. about 20 percent of electricity is produced by 104 nuclear plants, nearly one-quarter of all the world’s nuclear power. The 439 nuclear plants that operate in 31 countries today are producing clean, reliable, reasonably priced electricity for hundreds of million of people.
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And yet nuclear energy remains the most controversial form of power, so much so that some countries and regions have passed laws against it, either pledging to phase it out altogether or placing bans on further development.

However, there is a powerful sea change under way, which is bringing nuclear energy back into favor and targeting coal as the villain in the piece. This evolution in public opinion and government policy has come about very rapidly. It is due to the convergence of a number of factors, primarily the concerns over global climate change, energy security, and air pollution from fossil fuels.

Nuclear energy came by its controversial reputation honestly. Two atomic bombs killed nearly a quarter of a million people on August 6 and August 9, 1945, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was our first experience with nuclear technology on a grand scale. A deep fear was indelibly impressed into the human consciousness. Now we could annihilate whole civilizations in seconds. Now genocide had become suicide. The course of evolution had been altered and the nature of culture and politics were changed forever.

We will never answer the question, “Was it worth it to avoid prolonging the war?” Many historians believe there would have been far more casualties on both sides if the U.S. had invaded Japan. But we cannot know the outcome of refraining from using the atom bomb. Some say the only reason it has not been used since is because it was used then. Others contend that the existence of nuclear weapons provides a deterrent to mutually assured destruction. Still others believe nuclear weapons are evil, an atrocity waiting to happen, and the sooner we can rid the world of these weapons of mass destruction, the better. This debate will likely outlive us all. But that should not stop us from working to reduce the number and the threat of nuclear weapons.

I visited Hiroshima recently as part of a public speaking tour on nuclear energy. The head of the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum gave me a tour of the exhibits, including models of the city and photographs showing the scale of devastation caused by the bomb. One could not avoid being deeply moved by the personal accounts and images that showed the horrible effects of the bomb on what appeared to be living corpses of men, women, and children. We must never forget.

I was guided to the courtyard where a gas flame burns as a memorial to the victims. Our tour leader explained the flame would burn until the last nuclear weapon was eliminated from the face of the earth. “Do you call it the eternal flame?” came to my lips. My host had to admit that was a good question.

In the wake of World War II, the arms race began with the U.S., Russia, and then Britain and France engaging in atmospheric nuclear testing and a buildup of nuclear weapons to be delivered by bombers and missiles. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the world lived in constant fear that there would be an all-out nuclear war. My generation was born into that world and by the time I came of age, the Beat Generation had had its heyday and the hippy years of the late 1960s had just begun. We celebrated life in the face of the death machine that had been assembled to annihilate us all. Through altered consciousness we escaped into a world best captured by the Beatles film
Yellow Submarine
. Many of us became radicalized and turned against the establishment that was preparing for what seemed like our inevitable annihilation.

In 1953, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had announced the Atoms for Peace program to use nuclear fission to produce energy rather than bombs.
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Many of us believed this had been a cover for the continued buildup of nuclear weapons. Cold War rhetoric made us cynical as did the eventual advent of the Vietnam War. We concluded that everything nuclear was evil and the waste from weapons manufacturing and nuclear power generation was a toxic legacy that would poison our children for generations. We lost trust in the established order, and for good reason. We focused our attention on turning the tide of ever-increasing arms production—more missiles, multiple warheads, and submarines that were so deadly that one alone could wipe out an entire nation (they are still cruising around out there).

Meanwhile the U.S. and many other countries embarked on programs to build nuclear reactors in order to produce electricity. Most of the 439 reactors that operate around the world today were built during the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s. During those early years of the nuclear energy industry, there was an optimistic outlook and it seemed nuclear power would sweep the nations of the world. That all changed at 4.00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, when Reactor 2 on Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, had an accident involving loss of coolant water, which caused a meltdown in the core of the reactor. A wave of fear spread across the country in the aftermath of the accident. I was nearly 2500 miles away in Vancouver when I woke up to the news and I felt afraid. There was no way a nuclear reactor accident in Pennsylvania could possibly harm faraway Vancouver, but I got swept up in the mood of the time.

It didn’t help that the hit movie
The China Syndrome
, starring Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon, had been released only two months before the accident. In the movie, a nuclear plant accident, which results from a meltdown of the reactor core, threatens the world with destruction. The Three Mile Island accident seemed eerily similar; it was as if fiction had suddenly become reality. For days the news was dominated by the unfolding events in Harrisburg. Pregnant women and young children were evacuated, President Carter tried in vain to calm the populace, and then it was over. The containment structure around the reactor, five feet of steel and heavily reinforced concrete, did its job and prevented the radioactive material in the core from escaping into the environment.

In the aftermath of the accident, many follow-up health studies focused on the people who lived near the reactor. In the end there was no negative impact on the public or the workers in the plant.
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In many ways the accident at Three Mile Island turned out to be a success story. It was a major mechanical failure, but no one was injured, never mind killed. Three Mile Island was a huge wake-up call for the nuclear industry, not only in the U.S., but in all Western countries that had reactors. All the safety systems and operating procedures were gone over and strengthened to make sure such an accident would not be repeated. Since then there has not been a meltdown accident in any reactor in the West.

Unfortunately the Soviet Union still lay behind the Iron Curtain in 1979 and the Three Mile Island accident had no effect on its nuclear program. Years earlier the Soviets had begun to build reactors around the country for power production. They took a short cut and simply copied the design of their nuclear weapons production reactors, failing to include a containment structure and adequate safety systems. It was like putting a nuclear reactor in a warehouse. The RBMK class of Soviet reactors was an accident waiting to happen. And it did.

There were four identical reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear complex in the Ukraine. In 1986 a group of engineers was assigned to do a test on Unit 4, which had the best operating record in the group. Ironically, the test was designed to improve the safety of the reactors. When the operators contravened basic safety procedures, the test went horribly wrong and the reactor blew up, breaking through the roof and spewing the radioactive contents of the core downwind over the Ukraine, Belarus, and on to Sweden.
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There, at a Swedish nuclear reactor, alarms went off indicating elevated radiation levels. At first the Swedish operators thought there was a radiation leak at their own reactor. Two days later the Soviets finally admitted there had been an accident at Chernobyl.
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In many ways, Chernobyl was symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the Communist system: secrecy, central control, shoddy engineering, and lack of concern for human life.

It took a week to put out the fire because of the huge graphite moderator in the reactor core. Graphite is pure carbon and when it catches fire it is extremely difficult to extinguish. Thirty-four people died, either during the explosion or from radiation and burns they suffered while trying to put out the fire that continued to spread radiation into the atmosphere for a week after the explosion. When the fire was finally extinguished, a large area downwind had been contaminated with strontium-90, cesium-137, iodine-131, and other fission products.

After the accident the Iron Curtain was opened briefly as the Soviets sought help from nuclear scientists in the West. They helped to modify the other RBMK reactor’s safety systems and operating procedures so such a situation could not be repeated. No other serious accident has occurred, even though the other three reactors at the Chernobyl site continued to operate for 13 years after the accident. Even today there are 10 RBMK class reactors operating in Russia. Thankfully they will eventually be shut down and replaced with reactors with containment structures and better safety systems.

The antinuclear movement in the West used Chernobyl as proof that nuclear energy should be rejected and all existing reactors should be closed. Just as the Cold War was coming to an end, there was a new cause to replace the campaign against the buildup of nuclear weapons. In a way, nuclear energy simply replaced nuclear weapons as the cause of the day. The Greens in Europe made ridiculous claims that 300,000 people had died in the aftermath of Chernobyl. To this day Greenpeace claims that there were more than 90,000 deaths.
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A Chernobyl-like accident could not possibly occur in the reactors operating outside the former Soviet Union. Whereas the Three Mile Island accident involved a loss of cooling water from the reactor that, in turn, caused a meltdown of the core due to the heat of radioactive decay in the fission products, the Chernobyl accident was a runaway nuclear reaction. One of the most serious flaws of the RBMK reactor design is that it has a “positive void coefficient,” which makes it possible for the reactor to experience a rapid, uncontrollable power increase.
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This could not happen in the reactors in the West, most of which are designed to have a negative void coefficient. The Candu reactor design has a small positive void coefficient that is easily managed in the case of a power surge.