Coal Is the Future?

FROM-The American Spectator

By William Tucker

Three weeks ago I wrote about the Weekly Standard'spublication of an Amory Lovins anti-nuclear tract represented a low point in lack of understanding about nuclear power.

That record didn't stand for long. This month the Atlantic Monthly has topped everything with a cover story by senior editor James Fallows, "Dirty Coal, Clean Future." This will probably stand as an all-time monument to the American intelligentsia's lack of curiosity about nuclear energy.

Fallows, you may remember, started in the 1970s as a Naderite before becoming President Jimmy Carter's principal speechwriter. Then blazing a trail that has become well worn, he jumped ship and wrote an exposé of Carter's ineptness. (It was he who confirmed that Carter spent time scheduling the White House tennis court.) In any event, Fallows landed on his feet, becoming a senior editor at the Atlantic where he has reinvented himself as an expert on computers, China's economic development, and flying his own airplane.

In all these years, however, Fallows has never quite lost his 1970s mentality. Nor has he shed an annoying Thomas-Friedmanesque habit of making points by dropping the name of the latest high government official with whom he chatted. (Unlike Friedman, he does spare us the details of what they were eating.) Without these inflections, he probably never could have written the 8,000-word tome in which he tells us, "Sorry, folks, wind and solar energy are never going to make it. We're just going to have to live with 'clean coal'":

To environmentalists "clean coal" is an insulting oxymoron.… But for now, the only way to meet the world's energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal -- dirty, sooty, toxic coal -- in more sustainable ways… because there is no plausible other way to meet what will be, absent an economic and social cataclysm, the world's unavailable energy demands.

Is nuclear energy anywhere in sight? Fallows does mention it four times, always in passing. The longest reference notes that France has "much heavier reliance on nuclear power to generate electricity. Nuclear plants are expensive and obviously create waste-disposal problems, but they emit practically no greenhouse gases." This, however, appears in parentheses and stands aside from the main argument. Fallows has not the slightest curiosity or information about how nuclear power is developing in the world, or what it is even about.

Measuring America’s Default From World Leadership

FROM-American Spectator
By William Tucker

President Obama came away from the Korean trade negotiations last week looking much diminished. "U.S. Wields Less Clout at Summit" was the typical headline in the Wall Street Journal.

All this was attributed to many factors -- the slow recovery of the economy, the failure of Keynsian spending, Obama's election losses or the Federal Reserve's egregious attempts to promote trade advantages by weakening the dollar. Meanwhile, the Koreans refused to be cowed, saying the fault lay with the U.S., which hadn't given them enough to review the revisions made in the original agreement struck with President Bush.

Much is obviously due to the President's egotism. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out on Fox News, "Obama constantly feels compelled reinvent the wheel." He can't accept anything from previous Presidents but must put his personal stamp on everything. Thus, he felt compelled to rewrite a perfectly suitable trade agreement handed him by the Bush Administration -- and missed a deadline in the process. Meanwhile, Bush was winning loads of admiration by refusing to say a single unkind word about Obama during his book tour --- even as the new President has spent his entire two-year term blaming everything on his predecessor.

If you really want to see one of the underlying causes for America's diminishing role in the world, however, take a look at another set of negotiations taking place in Washington right now between Korea and the U.S. over the 1974 Nuclear Fuel Treaty due for renewal in 2014.

At the time the original agreement was signed, the U.S. was leading the world in introducing nuclear power, the great new energy discovery expected to replace highly polluting coal. Korea, on the other hand, was a poor, Third World country, still recovering from the Korean War and ruled by Park Chung-hee, an autocrat who tried to make himself president for life before being assassinated in 1979.

Now flash forward 36 years. The U.S. has virtually abandoned nuclear technology, not having licensed a new reactor since 1976. We never recovered our nerve after Three Mile Island. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has shrugged off these fears and moved ahead. There are now 60 reactors under construction around the world, 20 of them in China, which only initiated a nuclear program in 2006. France, Russia, and Japan all have mature industries and are marketing their reactors and nuclear technology to more than 30 countries, including Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and many others.

Last year, those mature industries suddenly encountered a fierce new competitor -- South Korea. The Koreans have become a nuclear-happy country. They already get 40 percent of their electricity from nuclear (as opposed to our 20 percent) and are just getting into the business. Until 1995 they had the Japanese build reactors for them. Then they took an old design from Combustion Engineering (now a part of Japanese-owned Westinghouse) and designed the Korean Standard Nuclear Plant, a 1400-megawatt giant that has won praise throughout the world. The Koreans run their reactors at 95 percent capacity -- the only country in the world that exceeds our excellent 90 percent capacity. (We still know how to run reactors, we just aren't allowed to build them anymore.) All those years in which Korean students led the world in math and physics scores are finally paying off. The highest concentration of PhD's in the world is in Seoul.

Last year the Koreans bid against France's Areva and Japan's Westinghouse for the largest contract ever offered -- the job of building four new reactors in the United Arab Emirates. Although Areva and Westinghouse had much longer résumés, Korea shocked the field by winning the bidding at $20 billion. The whole country is now celebrating. Last month the government held National Nuclear Fair to introduce schoolchildren to the technology.

So after thirty years, the position of the two countries is almost completely reversed. Korea is now on the world's cutting edge in nuclear technology while the U.S. is trying to plug leaks in 40-year-old reactors. Yet to our diplomats, nothing has changed. We're still the masters of the universe.

Unfortunately, around 1974, we became obsessed with the idea that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel would lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Spent fuel, you see, contains small quantities of plutonium, the principal material for most nuclear weapons. If we isolated that plutonium during reprocessing, someone might steal it. The source of this anxiety was The Curve of Binding Energy, a book by New Yorker reporter John McPhee, in which his main source of information, maverick physicist Ted Taylor, predicted that "hundreds of explosions a year" could take place in American cities from stolen plutonium. In 1974, India did build a bomb with plutonium extracted from a research reactor given to them by the Canadians. And so, when we signed the agreement with Korea to supply them with nuclear fuel, we stipulated that they could not reprocess it.

On the other hand, reprocessing has become essential to any country such as Korea that is serious about a nuclear future. First, it eliminates the false problem of "nuclear waste" that has tied this country in knots. Reprocessing extracts the spent uranium and plutonium, which can be recycled as fuel, reducing the volume of spent fuel by 95 percent. France stores all its high-level waste beneath the floor of one room at Le Hague while we can't find room to put ours in the whole state of Nevada. Most important for Korea, it has no domestic uranium supplies and must depend entirely on imports. Reprocessing can cut its fuel imports by 30 percent.

While Korea has now moved way ahead of us on nuclear technology, to us it's still 1974. And so, our diplomats are telling the Koreans they can't reprocess their fuel. We're afraid they might make a bomb with it. The Koreans say they are being treated "like criminals" and suggest it's time to look at the relationship "through a new lens." Nonetheless, we're standing on past privilege. After all, this is our technology, isn't it?

Just think, South Korea shares a peninsula with a madman who has already built a nuclear bomb and threatens to use it any time. North Korea has already attacked South Korean ships and crossed the demilitarized zone. It's a wonder South Korea hasn't built a bomb already. Theoretically, it is under our "nuclear umbrella," but consider this. If North Korea dropped a bomb on Seoul tomorrow, does anyone really think we would retaliate by wiping Pyongyang off the map? Wouldn't we appoint a committee to study the matter instead? Wouldn't we have to file an environmental impact statement?

If our "nonproliferation experts" refuse to budge, it's more than likely the Koreans will turn elsewhere. The Russians are already volunteering to supply countries with nuclear fuel and then take it back for reprocessing. "The Russians have a peculiar level of comfort with all things nuclear," said a New York Times reporter recently, apparently not realizing it may be us who has a peculiar level of discomfort. Wouldn't it be ironic if, after fighting a war in which we suffered 50,000 casualties to keep South Korea out of the Soviet orbit, we should now turn them over to the Russians because of our inordinate fear of all things nuclear?

It's a sad story, as old as history -- a young, upstart country with great ambitions for the future confronting an aging society that has lost its nerve and wants to live off the privileges of its past. Only this time we're on the wrong side of history.

Cuda Chomps

“Global Warming” – More Like a Snow Job

Over the last few months, and even again today, very unsettling revelations have come to light about the “settled science” of man-made global warming. With all of these shoes dropping you’d think every member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would be barefoot by now.

One thing after another keeps popping up to further discredit the theory of man-made global warming. The IPCC’s supposedly definitive report proving the theory is riddled with serious errors. The organization has been publicly chastised by everyone from its former chair to the heads of the UK’s biggest funder of climate research and Greenpeace UK. One of the world’s top climate change scientists, Prof. Phil Jones, has conceded that there’s been no significant warming since 1995; that the medieval period may have been warmer than today; and that he’s had trouble even keeping track of raw data crucial to the global warming theory. Yet President Obama still seeks to create a federal office for global warming, and they’re still talking about mandating their cap-and-tax plan that's based on discredited data.

The Obama administration’s environmental extremism also shows up in its aversion to oil and gas development. A true all-of-the-above approach to energy would mean allowing oil and gas explorers to drill here and drill now because America has the proven reserves needed to meet our energy challenges. A new industry study reveals that the federal government's current restrictions on oil and gas drilling in Alaska and off the U.S. coastline will cost us $2.36 trillion through 2029. Think of the millions of U.S. jobs we could create, and how much more secure America would be, if we had a true free market approach to energy independence that allowed us to finally drill!

And though I applaud the President’s newly declared interest in nuclear power, it should be noted that he’s merely following through on loan guarantees authorized during the prior administration. What’s more, while the White House now touts the building of new nuclear power plants, its budget inexplicably calls for cutting funding to the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. A real nuclear energy plan requires a strategy for dealing with nuclear waste storage and recycling.

The man-made global warming hysteria isn’t based on sound science, and the Obama administration’s energy policy isn’t based on sound economics. If the climategate revelations teach us anything, it’s that we need to cool down the rhetoric and fire up our common sense.

- Sarah Palin


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Gonna have to nuke em

FROM-Washington Times

EXCLUSIVE: Energy bill requires doubling nuke use
Low-cost solution unlikely, unpopular

To satisfy House Democrats' low-cost solution to global warming, Americans would have to double their reliance on nuclear energy by 2030 - a target the nuclear industry says is unlikely and that many environmentalists and Democrats dislike.

That is the conclusion of a new Energy Information Administration report that looked at the House Democrats' global warming bill. To produce enough clean energy at a reasonable cost would require construction of dozens of new nuclear power plants, even though no new plant has been built in decades.

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The EIA, in its report last week, projected that to keep the costs of implementing the bill low for consumers - about $339 extra per household in 2030 according to their basic scenario - nuclear energy use would rise from 8 quadrillion BTUs a year to 16 quadrillion, or from 11.3 percent of total U.S. energy to 18.1 percent.

That's the largest projected increase of any source of energy, even topping renewable sources such as wind and solar power, which are supposed to be the hallmark of the bill, and would mean reliance on a controversial technology.

"What this shows is that when you fail to make necessary investments in clean and renewable technologies and in efficiency measures, you are left with using fossil fuels and other anachronistic and outdated technologies, and I include nuclear in that," said Damon Moglen, the climate campaign director at Greenpeace, which opposed the House bill as not laying out a clear enough road map to a clean-energy future.

Other environmentalists blasted the EIA report as "a fantasy."

"This thing is completely so buried in the 20th century it isn't even funny," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, which opposes expanded nuclear power. "To assume that nuclear and carbon sequestration are going to be the low-cost sources of electricity in the future are wrong."

He said EIA underestimated the ability of wind and solar power to expand quickly and cheaply.

But nuclear-energy proponents back the House bill and were pleased with the EIA analysis, saying it shows how critical nuclear energy will be if goals on climate change are to be met without creating massive new costs for consumers.

"You clearly cannot have a credible program to control carbon emissions without expanded nuclear power," said Richard J. Myers, vice president of policy for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry's advocacy arm.

Mr. Myers said the EIA model's projection's are not likely. It would mean 96 gigawatts of new capacity by 2030, while "what's doable" is more in the range of 65 gigawatts, or about 45 new plants, he said.

Still, he said, the model shows that taking options like nuclear off the table means other sources get overwhelmed, and costs rise.

"To the extent you cannot build nuclear at the rate the model suggests is needed ... you are dealing with a world in which electricity costs and natural gas costs are higher than they would otherwise be," he said.

EIA is an independent analysis branch of the Energy Department, and it ran a series of models to test how the global warming bill would play out. The models that relied more on nuclear energy generally had lower impacts on the economy.

Another key variable in figuring the cost to consumers was how much of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions could be "offset" by companies paying for reductions in emissions from other countries.

Under the basic scenario EIA ran, consumer energy prices would rise about 15 percent by 2030. But under a scenario with less reliance on nuclear energy, international offsets and other alternatives, consumer prices could rise by more than 60 percent, and the hit to the U.S. economy would be three times as deep as the basic scenario, EIA said.

Proponents say nuclear energy is safe and clean and offers nearly unlimited potential, while opponents say it's too expensive and the risk of accidents and continued problems of nuclear-waste storage make it an unworthy alternative to increased efficiency and more use of renewables.

While campaigning for president, Barack Obama said he supported nuclear power "as part of the energy mix," but couched it by saying it must be proved to be safe, and the country must come up with solutions for nuclear-waste storage.

Earlier this year, Mr. Obama essentially ended the government's long-standing plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, putting another roadblock in the way of nuclear energy.

The EIA report was requested by Reps. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, and Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, the two chief authors of the House bill. A spokesman for Mr. Markey said other analyses have also predicted increases in nuclear power, though not as high as EIA's projection.

The House bill passed by a vote of 219-212. Senate Democrats hope to act on some sort of clean-energy legislation in the fall, and some senators hope to include in that bill incentives for expanding nuclear power.

Environmentalists were split on the House bill, with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Sierra Club in favor, while Greenpeace was among those opposed.

Mr. Moglen at Greenpeace said the bill left too many open questions about what technologies would be needed, and that left the door open for a big expansion of nuclear. He said that's a reason Mr. Obama "needs to lead on this issue, because it's not right now about the science, it's about the politics. And while Congress dithers, the planet melts."

But groups that supported the House bill said more important than a specific road map is to set the right goals and incentives.

"Rather than trying to project precisely the mix of technologies in the future, it's more important to get the policy right and let the market pick the technologies," said Thomas B. Cochran, director of NRDC's nuclear program.

But he said one key is not to have the federal government subsidize nuclear energy, and instead have it compete on its own merits. He said subsidies are appropriate for research and development on long-lead and high-risk technologies, but said nuclear technology has had 50 years to prove itself already and should be able to stand in the marketplace on its own.