Chicago, 1986:

Anne: “Try this, you’ll love it. Just nuke it first.”

Me: “Ahhh… ummmm…. What?” (loud silence)

Anne (eye rolling): “The microwave. Microwave the damned thing. Honestly, do you Kiwis not speak English?”

Another phrase from a few years ago was “Peak Oil”: you may remember that hysteria, pushed by people who dumped mathematics at age fourteen. Well some of them were so impressed by this concept that they applied it to other things, even uranium, as a way of explaining that we weren’t going to nuke our way out of Climate Armageddon. And it was just as wrong and stupid as peak oil, or even more so based on this graph, from this article:

Breeder reactors can power all of humanity for more than 4 billion years. By any reasonable definition, nuclear breeder reactors are indeed renewable. However, benefiting from this billion-year sustainability requires improvements in reactor construction performance and public acceptance. We have developed and proven breeder reactors in the past, but they remain a small minority of our current fleet.

Advances in seawater uranium extraction would help, but are not necessary to achieve ultimate sustainability, since the nuclear fuel that naturally exists in average crustal granite can handle the first few billion years without trouble.

And that’s talking about all primary energy here rather than just electricity. In most parts of the world, electricity is about 40% of total energy. The rest is for transportation, industrial heat, etc.

There’s a full explanation at the link but aside from the mining numbers, suffice to say that Breeder reactors can take the nuclear “waste” of normal reactors (U-238, Plutonium) and use that as fuel, as well as using Thorium. So let’s get going!

Of course there are a number of reasons why we have not yet got going on vastly expanding this technology, and the well-known ones are nuclear accidents, nuclear waste and the connection to nuclear weapons – or just the word nuclear.

But there is another, more obscure reason, and his name is Amory Lovins. He was not an environmental activist or politician but a scientist, although I would say “of a sort” because although bright he never seems to have completed even a Bachelor’s degree, with most of his qualifications being honourary.

However, this did not stop him from trashing the US nuclear industry on pragmatic terms and pushing what has become known as the soft energy path and Negawatt revolution:

A negawatt is a unit in watts of power saved. It is basically the opposite of a watt. Amory Lovins has advocated a “negawatt revolution”, arguing that utility customers don’t want kilowatt-hours of electricity; they want energy services such as hot showers, cold beer, lit rooms, and spinning shafts, which can come more cheaply if electricity is used more efficiently.
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Lovins called “the soft path”, favored “benign” sources of renewable energy like wind power and solar power, along with a heightened commitment to energy conservation and energy efficiency.

The last twenty years of evolving from incandescent lightbulbs to the awful CFL’s to LED’s, from bar heaters to heatpumps, and with ever-more energy efficient home appliances being forced by regulation, largely derive from Lovin’s theories, although obviously other environmental technologists jumped on board pretty quickly.

In other words Lovin saw no future in focusing on producing power more efficiently. Aside from the easy condemnation of fossil fuel electricity generation in large, centralised plants he also had it in for nuclear power for reasons most others did not note (he’s very much pro-free market):

For example, in the United States, 132 nuclear plants were built, and 21% were permanently and prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems, while another 27% have at least once completely failed for a year or more.
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“Britain’s plan for a fleet of new nuclear power stations is … unbelievable … It is economically daft. The guaranteed price [being offered to French state company EDF] is over seven times the unsubsidized price of new wind in the US, four or five times the unsubsidized price of new solar power in the US. Nuclear prices only go up. Renewable energy prices come down. There is absolutely no business case for nuclear. The British policy has nothing to do with economic or any other rational base for decision making.” – Lovins, 2014

I’ve never understood people who say that “Renewable energy prices come down”, particularly wind and solar, when they require large amounts of costly backup power – costly because they have to be inefficient to ramp up quickly, must have their costs amortised across smaller amounts of power, and sit idle for 20-30% of the time, meaning their capital and maintenance costs are being applied to machinery not fully used. All those costs have to appear in the power price, irrespective of when wind and solar are generating it.

That may not have been obvious to Lovins even in 2014 (although it was to many power engineers) but I’d like to think he’s looking hard at the massive power price increases occurring in nations and regions pushing hard on wind and solar, like Germany, Australia, and California.

But there’s also this criticism of a basic assumption of Lovins:

One of the main points of contention is the assumption by the RMI of a linear relation between improvements in energy efficiency and reductions in aggregate energy consumption. The Jevons Paradox suggests that improvements in energy efficiency actually lead to an increase in energy use, as a result of decreasing cost. This “rebound effect” is downplayed in the analyses performed by Lovins.

As such you may be interested in this 1h 10m video discussion between Dr. Chris Keefer and Mark Nelson, A Hard Landing for Soft Energy about the rising problems with Lovins theories.

Mark Nelson is the managing director of Radiant Energy Group. He holds degrees in mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering, as well as Russian language and literature. Mark offers his critique of Lovins, based on what he identifies as the two main faults that have persisted in Lovins’ argument for decades: 1) that the “soft” and “hard” energy paths are mutually exclusive, and 2) the supremacy of nuclear “problem.”

Key parts if you don’t want to watch the whole thing:

  • 2:30 Amory Lovins background and his energy theories
  • 11:19 Hard and Soft Energy
  • 17:52 Lovins vs Nuclear
  • 24:00 Why Soft Energy
  • 29:09 Economic outcomes of soft energy
  • 42:50 Germany in Lovins

You should also take a look at other video from Keefer’s Decouple website.

But the slow and steady unravelling of the warm and cuddly theory of energy efficiency combined with wind, solar and other renewable power sources, has still not penetrated the Houses of the Holy, which is still running Lovins old ideas, A Nuclear Meltdown At The New York Times

But his article’s basic thesis is that renewables have made continuing reliance on nuclear energy unnecessary, given its costs, lead times, and safety issues. That assertion is wrong on two counts: Intermittent sources of energy (wind and solar) cannot adequately provide continuous generation; and nuclear is only too costly and cumbersome because for 50 years, public opinion and policy have essentially shut down all but relatively meager private research and development in the field.

The analysis of the issues with wind and solar are explored, as they have been elsewhere; the intermittency & backup problems, the build emissions, the fantastic increases in metals mining & processing (more emissions) that will be required to build enough wind, solar and batteries (if you don’t want fossil-fueled “peaker” plant backup) to hit Net Zero, ending with the landfill when they’re scrapped after twenty five years.

But it’s the nuclear aspect that counts for this post, and it goes directly against Lovins zero-sum approach, even for current nuclear tech:

Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear-engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cites findings from the IPCC (Figures 7.6 and 7.7) that over the lifecycle of power plants – which includes construction, mining, transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste — per quantity of energy, the greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power are impressively low — 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and one-fourth of solar. According to him, nuclear power also requires 2,000 times less land than wind and nearly 400 times less than solar. 

That last is important for a small country like New Zealand. And that’s before we get to new nuclear technology that Lovins either never imagined or has not accepted:

But far greater benefits could come from new nuclear technologies funded largely up to now by private capital, including molten-salt reactors, liquid-metal reactors, advanced Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), and microreactors, among others. The $10 billion, 10-year planning and implementation cycle for a large nuclear plant can be cut in half with SMRs and halved again with microreactors.

SMRs and microreactors can be constructed largely in assembly-line facilities according to standardized designs and operated with standardized procedures, a huge advantage. New designs incorporate air-cooling to allow for rapid, safe shutdowns and the ability to bury major portions of prefabricated elements of a power plant for security and safety, the greater ease of managing nuclear waste; and even the possibility of shipping microreactors to a central location for refueling every five to 10 years, rather than dealing with the complex logistics of on-site refueling.

This won’t be an issue for fifty years in NZ, but my bet would be that come 2050 we’re going to start looking hard at SMR’s.

As for nuclear power in general, its time is going to have to come if Net Zero remains the goal – although that may become questionable itself as the public shivers or sweats through massive power price increases that supply blackouts and brownouts (e.g. “load reductions” as in South Africa).