TalkClimateChange

Welcome to this side of the fence! Not only is the grass greener, but it gets even greener than that when you learn about the potential of thorium to power some really impressive reactors!

Gujarat is also notable for having suffered a devastating earthquake a few years ago, and being the home of the Kakrapar nuclear power station, a heavy-water, unenriched-uranium-oxide model like the ones we have in Ontario.

BP keeps an annually updated Excel spreadsheet file that reports, among other things, how many million tonnes-of-oil-equivalent the world’s nuclear plants have been producing over the years. Keeping in mind that in many of those years a tonne of actual petroleum cost around $200, and the equivalent uranium cost around $10, it’s a little surprising BP is so candid about the hundreds of billions of private oil dollars that might have been.

On those same billions of tonnes of oil that are in the ground that might not have been, governments would also have made some money. They are never candid about this conflict of interest; they don’t say “Nuclear energy has cost us money that would have been dirty, but we really miss it all the same”. No, they say things like “we are eager to see nuclear energy move forward, if it can solve its waste, weapons proliferation, and public acceptance problems”.

G.R.L. Cowan describes what we in the military have often called “damning with faint praise”. By saying something that sounds positive, but has numerous qualifiers, people that engage in this activity can take cover from their true feelings.

In the military, you can kill a person’s career though the use of the technique on a fitness report without ever giving the recipient an opportunity to contest a negative report.

It is also a technique that works well in politics and marketing.

I would also point out that governments are very good at taxing nuclear power generation as well as fossil fuel production. It is the fossil fuel suppliers that benefit more from all efforts to slow the inevitable market dominance of fission power sources.

Rod,

Lets not drop down the “Big Oil” and “Big Coal” conspiracy well again. Perception is such a powerful tool in the energy debate, you can testify to that.

GE Energy sells fossil fuel, nuclear, wind and solar energy products. So they make money on everything and have one of the worst environmental track records around, but because of wind and solar and using the Green Week programming on their NBC network thay have managed to beciome thought of as the Green Corporation.

Perception.

Chevron is a major player in geo-thermal energy development, but as an “Oil” company is evil and stopping all other forms of energy.

Perception.

Nuclear power plants lead to nuclear weapons and megatonnes of irradiated water and waste shipped in black trucks and dumped all over the countryside. When this is not true and Nuclear Waste regulations are the strictest and most enforced environmental regulations there are.

Perception.

Adding to the perception war is not helpful.

Nuclear is a part of the solution and should be used to expand the base load capacity of the electrical grid. We have no other viable CO2 emission free source for this that can create the amount of reliable energy we are going to need in the future.

Wind and Solar( all types) just do not have the efficency and reliability to provide the base load, but can assist in peak times as a inconsistent supplemental source.

I see wind and solar as part of the efficency of consumers, I think new houses should have solar assisted heating or PV electrical systems, maybe a small wind turbine, or geo-thermal but as anyone who has these systems know you are still reliant on the grid to insure a constant supply. Yet the average AGW supporter advocates off-grid living.

Perception.

ClimateHeretic:

You are at least partially correct - GE is in a variety of energy businesses and most of the time it makes some money in each of them.

The weakness in your argument, however, comes on the quantization of the impact and in your understanding of business decision making. If a company like GE sells $300 million worth of nuclear components per year and $3,000 million (3 billion) worth of wind turbines and $10,000 billion worth of gas turbines, which group within the company do you think will get the resources needed to develop new projects and to market their projects? (Of course, the real answer is that there is insufficient information in the above to make a decision without knowledge of the margins in each business.)

When it comes to oil and coal interests, please understand just how big the numbers get and do not limit the scope to the typical “Big Oil” companies. How much money do you think Russia and Saudi Arabia make selling oil and gas each year? (Hundreds of billions to the low trillions.)

How much do you think they would make if nuclear power had grown as rapidly as predicted? What about the state of Wyoming? How much Powder River Basin coal do you think gets moved out of the state every day? Would that number be different if there had not been such an effort to shut down western nuclear plants in the 1980s and to fight every new project starting well before TMI? Who profits from the coal industry - hint, it is not just the mining companies. (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/16/25648/6757)

People that operate in the energy business are long term thinkers and have an Econ-428 level understanding of the economic basis of the law of supply and demand while most observers - like you - still operate at the Econ 101 level. Supply and demand is not a passive law; it is one that must be managed to maximize profits in commodity supply enterprises. It is always worth the effort on the part of established suppliers to limit the entry of new supplies, even if it is a minor player in the new supply.

Oops - need to proofread better. In my last comment change that from $10,000 billion in gas turbines to $10,000 million. Sorry.

Rod,

My GE example was about perception, they are not a green company by any stetch of the imagination, but they are perceived to be.

It has nothing to do with their sales in any one part of the energy division. That was used to illustrate the are involved in each sector, they are not just selling renewables.

But they are perceived to be Green.

I think you maybe missed my point, I am well aware of the amount of money that is involved in the entire oil and gas business globally. If magnitude of business is enought to convict then well they are guilty.

Yet as a victim of the incorrect perception of the nuclear industry I thought you would at least appreciate the simularities.

ClimateHeretic:

As an undergraduate, I studied English and American literature and creative writing. One of my most influential professors beat me about the head and shoulders whenever I used the “passive voice”, the style of writing that bureaucracies encourage. I am also a big fan of mystery novels and have spent many enjoyable hours solving the “means, motive and opportunity” riddle that underlies most of them.

My problem with just talking about the “perception” battle that nuclear faces without figuring out why those false perceptions exist and who worked hard to cement them in people’s mind is that it does not point the way to solving the problem. If you have a leaky boat and simply notice that it is getting wet, but you do not find and fix the root of the problem, you will eventually sink.

I believe that the perception of nuclear is far enough from reality that it took a tremendous, sustained effort - that continues today - to establish that false reality in the minds of millions of normally disinterested people. The individuals and organizations that have the means, motive and opportunity to have made that happen are not the visible anti-nukes - many of whom were complete failures by most conventional measures at the time they became activists.

The individuals with the means, motives and opportunity to establish and maintain a very negative and false view of the history and potential of nuclear fission are those people that are tightly tied in with the established energy sources - coal, oil, natural gas, and biomass. They all stand to lose a tremendous amount of wealth and power if nuclear fission grows at a rate commensurate with its technical superiority. After all, uranium and thorium are plentiful, fission uses no O2 and produces no gaseous emissions, heavy metals contain millions of times the energy density of fossil fuels, and fission heat is directly substitutable for combustion heat in a number of already well established technologies like district heating systems, industrial process heaters, steam engines and gas turbines.

There are, of course, millions of people who make a lot of money in various aspects of finding, extracting, transporting, financing, delivering, and cleaning up after fossil fuel combustion. Like the passengers on Agatha Christie’s classic work, The Orient Express, there are plenty of people willing to stab the victim independently so that it is difficult to accumulate evidence that convicts any one of them of the act.

My solace comes in the knowledge that there are BILLIONS of energy consumers in the world that need what fission can do for them. Those are the interests I want to serve by sharing my knowledge of its power, cost effectiveness and cleanliness. Fortunately, I am only one of many who have decided to work hard on this important task.

Rod,

So let me get this straight you are saying that the fossil fuel industry created the world wide campaign that turned public perception against nuclear energy?

Seems kind of ironic don’t you think?

“I believe that the perception of nuclear is far enough from reality that it took a tremendous, sustained effort - that continues today - to establish that false reality in the minds of millions of normally disinterested people.”

I think that it is more likely that no-one really thought about it too hard.

In the UK after WWII, energy supply was nationalised. Gas and coal were easily accessible and deployable, and population demands (health and welfare) led government to subsidise and moderate the industry.

In the period from the early 60s to the 1990s, average (and expected) indoor temperatures increased from 13oC to around 19oC. Gas was the only viable option to provide this. Oil is a slightly different matter and much of it relates to personal transport. Many rural homes are still reliant on gas canisters etc.

In addition, the environmental movement was just waking up. No-one had heard of climate change, or the problems of oil spills and the like, probably because TVs weren’t so widely available and the internet was years away. But nuclear was big and scary news. Today we are more prepared / willing to accept rapid technological advances.

I would suggest these factors among others contribute to perceptions of fossil fuel monopoly, rather than it being a concerted effort.

I don’t see how that’s ironic. Please explain.

The Irony is simple…

Well lets see the fossil fuel industry is now the target of a public perception campaign using the exact same tactics, albeit different packaging, as what hampered and slowed the Nuclear Power Industry.

Kind of like arming your enemy with weapons to defeat you, does it not seem so to you?

A anti-nuclear activist is no less dedicated than an AGW activist.In most cases they are the same person.

The UK after WWII? Had you yet begun to pay attention when QE2 inaugurated the first Magnox power station, I think it was in 1955? I remember that as a small child about a decade later I saw Patrick McNee — Macnee? — throwing the plug on a vacuum cleaner so that it fell loosely onto a cube of black material that had been, according to the story, stolen from that station or one like it. The vacuum cleaner could be heard to start right up. This seemed implausible to me, although some things that I then found implausible turned out to be true. I was a skeptical child.

GRL Cowan, with due respect you seem to have noticed I said UK after WWII and then totally ignored the rest of it.

One commercial reactor was brought online in 1956 does not negate my point.