What if i'm wrong - renewables, nuclear (Neil Alexander) Canada

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What if I am wrong? What if they are wrong?

Neil Alexander November 10, 2017

Summer breeze makes me feel fine. Blowing through the Jasmine of my mind.

Oooh …..feeling good already! I do get it. We have been programmed over millennia to appreciate the very important role that the sun and the wind have in our lives. We get feelings of comfort when we experience them. And by association those warm feelings transfer to two of our popular “renewables” making them very seductive. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our problems could be solved by something as natural as light and a gentle current of air?

I, like everyone else, would love to believe.

And what better time to try than now. It happens that these two renewables do not emit greenhouse gases and we believe our most pressing need is to avoid greenhouse gas production. Two plus two equals four.

And so much energy is delivered to us by the sun that it is theoretically possible.

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But then reality kicks in. The sun’s energy is very diffuse and so difficult to harvest. And, while the energy itself is natural, the techniques for harvesting it are very much man made coming with their own gamut of economic, social and environmental challenges.

My belief. And it is a belief supported by all the grossed-up evidence on what is actually happening, is that we are a very long way from being able to rely on wind and solar for our energy needs and that likely we never will.

That’s why I support investment in new nuclear technologies. Not because I like nuclear power, (I steal a rhetorical idea from Winston Churchill on this and describe it as the worst form of power generation known to man, other than all the others) but because I am worried that unless we have something better than wind and solar we will fail in all our decarbonization objectives. Many supporters of the seductive technologies think I am wrong and investment in new nuclear should be stopped.

But what if we invest in new nuclear technologies and I am wrong about wind and solar? What if we can spread our renewables far enough and wide enough to make a difference to our current electricity demands? What if we can spread them even further and even wider to allow us to decarbonize heating and transport? What if we can find a way to cost effectively store electricity over periods of days, weeks even months? What if we can teach people to use electricity when it is available rather than when they want it?

What if after all the concerns there is enough sand (yes, the world is running out of building sand), neodymium and copper to support this expansion? What if all of these things can be done in a way that allows the developing countries to develop with the limited funds available to them and without crippling the economies of the developed nations? What if we can do all this? What if my belief was wrong?

Then in this world, manmade climate change would cease to exist as a problem and we would get on with our lives. Yes, there will likely be a few more nuclear plants built to demonstrate the technology, and an incremental increase in the world’s used nuclear fuel inventory, but so what. Yes, a miniscule amount of money will have been wasted on developing technology that is never really used. But it would be vanishingly small.

Now let’s project forward to a world where no investment in new nuclear took place and the wind and solar guys were wrong about the load their technologies could carry. Likely we will have moved from coal to gas. But the developing nations will have developed and will have increased their power demands. And burning gas to produce electricity will mean we can make no real progress on decarbonizing transport or heat. Emissions will continue to increase.

And, if we are causing climate change with these emissions, the temperature will have risen. We will be crowding into our shrinking land masses, dealing with environmental consequences of our cities being flooded and suffering ever more extreme weather events. There will likely not be enough food as we struggle to relocate crops to suitable climates and deal with disease and pests. And this only if we have not descended into wars over the availability of fresh water.

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In this world, when we finally admit the renewables experiment was a failure, we will look around and find we have few other options available to us. New nuclear if we need it will take decades to research, develop, test, licence and deploy.

Then if we are to have to turn to nuclear I want to turn to the best possible designs, carefully developed, comprehensively tested and demonstrated in controlled conditions with a progressive build out that benefits from evolution to down select the best possible technology.

That is why I support investment in new nuclear technology development. That is why any member of the population should support new nuclear technology development. And that is why even the most ardent environmentalist supporter of wind and solar should also support the development of new nuclear in parallel with their own technologies.

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