Thread by @Leigh_Phillips

Unfortunate article in The Nation, the venerable US lefty mag, that appears not to have been fact-checked, so let’s do that fact-checking, shall we?

There are 10 main claims made by author Paul Hockenos, so it’ll take a bit of a chonky🧵. But here goes:

thenation.com/article/world/…

CLAIM 1: The Ukraine war and fighting in and around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has weaponized its reactors.

THE FACTS: Nuclear reactors are not nuclear bombs and cannot be turned into them.

They do both use the word ‘nuclear’ in their name, but nuclear plants ≠ nuclear weapons any more than they equal nuclear medicine. Relatedly, cotton socks are not the same as cotton t-shirts. Don’t try to pull a sock over your head.

Okay, so maybe they aren’t bombs, but what if a missile accidentally or deliberately hit the plant?

First, let’s remember that if a missile hit, say, a hydro dam or an ammonia storage facility—both essential in any decarbonized economy, incl. a 100% renewables energy system—there would be profound human devastation.

The most deadly electricity-system-related disaster of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam (and 61 other dams), killing 26,000-240,000 people.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banq…

While the Banqiao hydroelectric disaster was the product of a typhoon and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, any country at war could decide to bomb a dam at any time to produce the same result. Should we forswear hydroelectric then?

One of the deadliest industrial accidents ever, the 2020 Beirut ammonium nitrate (for fertilizer) port storage facility explosion killed >220 and left 300,000 homeless. nature.com/articles/d4158…

A general could order an attack on such a depot at any time. By Hockenos’ logic, we should ban fertilizer.

In any case, even if a missile targetted a nuclear plant, as nuclear writer Jeremy Gordon describes in more detail in his own thread, used fuel is not dayglo green goop like in The Simpsons, but solid metal.

https://twitter.com/jrmygrdn/status/1499710707323097095?s=61&t=g3jNtafLaV9w2O6fzkb3Lw

After 6-10 yrs in a pool of water cooling down, it is encased in steel and concrete containers. It’s not flammable or water-soluble. It cannot be vaporized or explode.

More detail here on the wet storage and dry storage process in Ontario, which, after France, has the largest proportion of its electricity mix coming from nuclear (~60% vs ~70%): nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/waste/high…

What about use of waste by terrorists as a dirty bomb? High-level waste is vitrified (‘glass-ified’), and just very hard to disperse via an explosion and vaporization.

Dirty-bomb casualty rates would thus be low, according to a 2002 National Academies of Science report. Why go to all the fuss and bother when just using a gun would likely be more deadly? The real aim is psychological.

So if a malevolent general wanted to cause maximum harm, directing missiles at a nuclear plant would be pretty ineffective. The main threat to human life from a military attack on a nuclear plant would be from the disruption of electricity.

CLAIM 2: Nuclear is not available 24/7 as its supporters claim, as the shutdowns of French reactors this summer show. It’s actually intermittent too.

THE FACTS: Germany is not the only country to have legislated winding down nuclear. Until Macron, France also had a strategy to mothball its plants, to slash generation from 75% of the mix to 50% by 2025. Some of the country’s best performing reactors were shuttered as a result.

Moreover, for >2 decades, France has robbed Peter to pay Paul, forcing EDF to redistribute ~€40B in revenues, largely from low-carbon nuclear electricity, to he.p pay for wind and solar development.

These redirected funds should have, amongst other things, gone towards maintenance. It is really not surprising that financially sabotaged plants starved of upkeep cash run into trouble.

https://twitter.com/laveyne_j/status/1503344304340840453?s=21&t=yibyuFO6MpWvq4zMr4gNQA

There’s an awesome deep dive on all these shenanigans by nuclear engineer and top-moustache-haver @energybants on an ep of the (absolutely vital) @decouple podcast from June:

Re heatwaves raising river temps such that reactors can’t be cooled, this can be solved by adding cooling towers. And as this is primarily a result of regulations protecting river species from thermal ‘pollution’, in such emergencies, lift those regs! npr.org/templates/stor…

If you’re worried about the fishies here, fair enough, but perhaps also consider the birds of prey and bats that get blendered by wind turbines daily. raptor.umn.edu/about-us/our-r…

(Note: this is not an argument against wind energy, and there are ways to deal with this too, but rather a call to be coherent)

And not all reactors are water-cooled anyway. In the UK, for eg, most reactors are gas-cooled. sciencedirect.com/topics/enginee…

CLAIM 3: Germany became dependent on Russian gas because it dragged its heels on the clean energy transition. (Thus presumably an energy mix that was 100% wind and solar would be immune to Russian depredations)

THE FACTS: Germany has not dragged its heels at all, and instead will have spent over half a trillion euros (€520bn) on its Energiewende (energy turn). Meanwhile, France spent 424 bn francs, or ~€107 bn on its Messmer Plan, public-sector buildout of its nuclear fleet.

You can’t run a grid on just wind & solar as the wind doesn’t always blow & the sun doesn’t always shine. If you’re lucky with geography & enjoy a bounty of hydroelectric, you *can* have a 100% renewable grid (like where I live, British Columbia, as well as in Quebec and Norway).

But Germany does not have such lucky geography, so it depends on coal and natural gas to back up its wind and solar and keep its grid firm (firm means basically available whenever elec is needed). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firm_serv…

As a result, by 2021, Germany’s grid had achieved an emissions intensity of 349gCO2eq/kWh, while France’s had one of just 57gCO2eq/kWh.

The reality is that Germany’s shuttering of nuclear instead of adding renewables and more nuclear to its existing, low-carbon nuclear fleet is what has prevented it from weaning itself from the Russian teat.

One of the best ways for Germany and the rest of Europe to give the finger to Putin is to keep its remaining nukes on and restart the ones its shuttered.

The European ecomodernist NGO RePlanet @letsreplanet has produced a solid plan on how this could be done, and fast:

https://twitter.com/letsreplanet/status/1567446744505683969?s=61&t=vqQVWspIexI-lRWuLnntRA

CLAIM 4: The old chestnuts of Chernobyl and Fukushima’s “horrific repercussions”.

THE FACTS: This widespread misinformation is the energy-sector equivalent of defrocked physician Andrew Wakefield’s fraud about MMR vaccines causing autism. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MM…

According to UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the Chernobyl disaster killed 30 people as a result of the initial explosion and acute radiation sickness (ARS) in the following days and months. unscear.org/docs/reports/2…

By 2006, 19 ARS survivors would die, although most not from radiation-related causes, and another 15 from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination.

Zero people died as a result of the Fukushima nuclear accident, and multiple studies have concluded there is no increased risk of radiation-related health problems. @_HannahRitchie has a great breakdown of the evidence for both incidents: ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-d…

But the best way to assess the risk of mortality posed by electricity sources is to consider deaths per unit of energy produced (deaths/kWh) across the full life-cycle of production. And when we do that, we find nuclear to be amongst the safest of sources.

CLAIM 5: For years, 13 nations, including the US and USSR dumped nuclear waste at sea.

THE FACTS: It’s very true that nuclear waste was dumped at sea, under the assumption that dilution would suffice to eliminate risk.

That was Not Cool (even though no high-level waste was dumped).

But the London Convention on marine pollution ended the practice in 1975 outside special permits, and a complete ban was implemented in 1983.

CLAIM 6: Nuclear waste remains lethal for 300,000 years, and so deep geological storage of waste is a TIME-BOMB waiting for anyone on the planet at that time.

THE FACTS: High-level waste (HLW) decays to the level of radioactivity of the uranium mineral ore, which is weakly radioactive, after 1000-10,000 years, not 300,000.

But 97% is not HLW. Most nuclear waste is hazardous as a result of radioactivity for just a few *tens of years*.
world-nuclear.org/information-li…

Most waste is just used fuel, most of which can be recycled. France already does this.

Note that the toxicity of other industrial waste, including from the heavy metals such as cadmium and lead used in the production of solar panels, does not decline over time.

Dumped in landfills or shipped off to developing countries for children to pick over for valuable metals, such solar-panel heavy metals can leach into groundwater. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Wind turbines also have a disposal problem, as the fibreglass blades, which can be as big as 747 wings, can’t be recycled. So they are just buried. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

None of this means don’t use solar or wind, as good regulation should bring their waste disposal problems to an end as it did with ocean dumping of nuclear waste.

Rather, the producers of *all energy technologies* must be responsible for careful disposal of waste products.

Call your Congress member, MP, etc and demand that wind and solar companies pay for deep geological disposal of their products’ waste.

Just kidding ;)

(sort of)

For the remaining 3-4% HLW, deep geological repositories in essence are just returning a toxic substance back to where it came from. Remember that beneath the surface, all sorts of toxic substances can be found completely naturally.

In 1972, in Gabon, a ‘natural nuclear reactor’ was discovered where uranium had begun to fission underground 1.7 bn years ago, producing fission products (‘nuclear waste’) for 100s of 1000s of years.

Neat, hey?

We also already do this sort of returning of substances underground whence they came with mercury, cyanide, arsenic and other industrial waste, and nobody says boo to a goose about this.

What we’re looking for in deep geological repositories are rock formations that have remained stable for hundreds of millions or even billions of years, like for example the stonkingly old, Archean-aeon-old, Canadian Shield. nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/waste/cnsc…

CLAIM 7: Delays and cost overruns constructing new nuclear reactors such as the Vogtle units in Georgia make the technology too expensive and too slow to deal with the climate crisis.

THE FACTS: It’s true there have been delays and cost overruns in the US, UK, France and Finland. The reason is that the US and Europe has mostly got out of the business of building big things over much of the last 4 decades, and this is a big problem for renewables as well.

The phobia of building big things is primarily as a result of two forces.

Neoliberal reluctance by the state to engage in large public works is compounded by a risk-averse private sector that balks at megaprojects if there aren’t significant subsidies or guarantees.

This means that large renewable projects, from offshore wind to hydroelectric dams, ALSO face delays and cost overruns. As will any proposed continent-spanning HVDC transmission lines to try to reduce intermittency.

The largest offshore windfarm in the US, Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, is now projected to cost $2bn more than the original $8bn estimate. heartlanddailynews.com/2021/12/virgin…

Meanwhile, in those places that never embraced neoliberalism to the same extent, or retreated from it, nuclear plants are built on time, on budget, fast. The UAE’s 4-unit Barakah plant, built by Korea’s publicly owned KEPCO, took ~8yrs, or 2yrs/reactor. world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Barak…

So, despite the anti-nuclear article appearing in lefty mag The Nation, what large-scale nuclear needs is a dose of socialism: the state taking the reins as France did with the étatisme of its 70s/80s Messmer Plan, which achieved the fastest decarbonization rate in history.

(That figure is from a classic essay, by the way, by @jamesonmcb, found here:) thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/…

Small modular reactors (SMRs) produced in factories on assembly lines rather than bespoke units constructed on site should in principle require far less upfront capital and so be more market-friendly—and even faster.

But SMR tech does still need the assistance of the ‘socialism’ of industrial policy to de-risk it and take it from pilot projects through to commercialisation.

CLAIM 8: SMRs are inferior with respect to nuclear waste compared to large-scale conventional reactors.

THE FACTS: Sure, SMRs may be a smidge worse in terms of volume of waste per unit of energy produced. But that’s to be expected as SMRs aim for economies of series production not economies of scale. And anyway, as we’ve established: waste isn’t the bogeyman we thought it was.

And SMRs are vital for many decarbonization applications, not least those such as remote resource extraction where neither large-scale reactors nor hydroelectric nor wind nor solar nor geothermal will work.

There’s no zero-carbon world without SMRs.

CLAIM 9: Wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear.

THE FACTS: If you don’t include the cost of backup or storage, and externalize the cost of all the additional transmission required, sure, their price is technically cheaper. But that’s *price*, not *cost*.

And the Left is supposed to be the folks who’ve always pointed out how the price of something is not always the same as cost to society.

For more deets on why levelized cost of elec (LCOE) doesn’t tell the whole story: energyforgrowth.org/memo/lcoe-and-….

As I think @energybants has put it, tents and houses both provide shelter, and tents are far cheaper, so let’s all live in tents!

(Orrr… might there be other services that houses/nuclear provide that tents/wind-and-solar can’t?)

The proof of the pudding is in the eating anyway: until the Ukraine war, nuclear-dominant France had some of the cheapest electricity in Europe while wind-and-solar-and-gas-and-coal Germany had some of the most expensive.

CLAIM 10: Nuclear and renewables don’t play well together because nuclear is unable to ramp up and down in response to wind and solar’s intermittency.

THE FACTS: Both French and German nuclear plants already engage in what is called ‘load-following’, rapidly adjusting their output to match demand. FR: ~2-5%/minute.

Why? In the 1970s, France (and Germany) recognized that if nuclear was going to dominate the grid, it was going to have to be able to respond to the slings and arrows of seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and moment-to-moment demand changes. powermag.com/flexible-opera…

Is this fast enough in a world with a lot more weather-dependent renewables? It could be better, sure, but new builds are conceived with even greater flexibility in mind, achieving more rapid load-following, given the increased role of weather-dependent renewables.

The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s working to make renewables & nuclear more tightly coupled to optimise not just elec but production of hydrogen, desalination, & heat for industry.

You might say nuclear’s ability to ramp up is, er, ramping up. nrel.gov/news/program/2…

And that’s the end of the chonky fact-checky thread!

So remember, kids, now you know: Socialists should back a dose of nuclear, and nuclear needs a dose of socialism. /FIN

@ChrisBurkeShay

If you want more of this sort of progressive, evidence-based environmentalism and not vibes-based environmentalism, check out my first book, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts: a Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff

johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our…

And my second book, co-authored with economist Michal Rozworski, People’s Republic of Walmart, is a popular introduction to the economic calculation debate. It mounts a defence of the feasibility of economic planning (and also of a ‘good Anthropocene’).

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564287/t…