A billion loonies here, a billion loonies there…

Yes, soon it adds up and you’re talking real money, but the there are other things to consider. People in Ontario, Canada tend to not give much thought to their heavy reliance on nuclear energy. Although they are likely to worry about the price tag of future projects, the important questions have little to do with money. The issue is whether sticking with nuclear will be a lost opportunity to develop better ways to generate electricity, avoid the damage to the industry that will come with the next nuclear catastrophe (wherever it is), end the accumulation of nuclear waste and stop nuclear energy’s role in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

A recent editorial in The Toronto Star shed some welcome light on Ontario’s dependence on nuclear power. Since Fukushima, the major media in other nuclear-energy-dependent states (France, U.S.A, Japan, U.K) have given fairly extensive coverage to legitimate public concerns about regulatory capture, safety, costs of new facilities, upgrades and decommissioning, and whether it would be better to pursue other alternatives.

The province of Ontario relies on nuclear energy for about half of its electricity supply, but the media coverage since Fukushima has been relatively tame and scarce compared to other nations where nuclear is a large player in the energy mix. I haven’t seen everything in the Canadian media, and I can’t prove a negative, but in Canada there seems to have been a relative lack of interest in nuclear news during a time when it was on the front pages everywhere else.

In one report, I even saw an industry spokesperson thanking the local media for getting the story right since the Fukushima disaster. She didn’t seem to notice how embarrassing this compliment might be for a professional journalist. Yet, oddly, the journalist smiled and didn’t notice that she had just been called a lapdog.

Similar to the way they launched a real estate bubble right after they had watched the real estate market in the US implode in 2007-08, Canadians have a boundless ability to engage in “it’s-different-here” thinking. We think we are more progressive than the Americans, better governed, more rational, more egalitarian. The whole world wants to immigrate to Canada, supposedly. Our nuclear power plants must be better too, so why worry or ask questions?

Thus the media took the power companies’ word for it when they said vaguely that “lessons have been learned” from the Fukushima catastrophe. They never explained what improvements were made during the extensive safety reviews because doing so would have implied that decades had gone by with the plants exposed to unnecessary risks. Fortunately for the power companies, the media and the public were too complacent to ask probing questions.

To some extent, the lack of concern is understandable and deserved. There haven’t been any nuclear accidents in Ontario’s generating stations, and they use heavy water reactors that are much less vulnerable to the meltdown than the light water reactors used in Fukushima (also used in New York State, on the American shore of Lake Ontario). However, I doubt the Ontario public even cares enough to have learned about this difference. Another factor is that the public hasn’t experienced any massive earthquakes or tsunamis that would give the matter any sense of urgency.

Furthermore, the Canadian regulators and power companies have never come close to the awesome depths of arrogance, corruption and incompetence exhibited by the nuclear village in Japan. In Canada, we don’t hear reports of organized crime rings getting contracts to do the most dangerous cleanup operations during plant maintenance. We don’t hear of these sub-contractors rounding up day laborers (homeless and nameless people who disappear after the job), to be exposed to radiation on cleanup jobs that the power companies are too stingy to carry out safely. We don’t hear stories about such casual workers dying from leukemia without disability compensation and health care (for details, see The Nuclear Mafia Derails Democracy in Japan). Perhaps this was a fatal error made by the nuclear industry in North America: Because nuclear energy was managed with a relatively high regard for safety in a somewhat functioning democracy, when the technologies were exported, there was a flawed assumption that the safety culture could be exported as well.

In spite of the safety record in Canada, there are still good reasons for people in Ontario to think more seriously about their commitment to nuclear, and especially about the heavy dependence on a source of energy that cannot be replaced quickly in an emergency.

Cost

Nuclear has enormous multi-billion-dollar up-front costs that somehow manage to not scandalize a public that is so quick to see waste everywhere else. This was the subject of the editorial in The Toronto Star that pointed out how a cancelled gas generating station had become a political scandal for having “wasted” $585 million. Another report in The National Post noted with outrage:

“The estimated cost of tearing up contracts with the developers of the gas plants and building new energy projects in Napanee and Lambton has soared to at least $585 million, far above the $230 million McGuinty and the Liberals had been claiming.”

The outraged writer of this analysis seemed not to notice that his own wording implied that the “wasted” costs include the cost of building the generating station in a different location – in other words, what it would have cost anyway, had it been built in the original location. The editorial in The Toronto Star pointed out the gas plant scandal pales in comparison to recent and upcoming expenses of overhauls to the province’s nuclear fleet. The figures from the report are arranged in the table below:

		A	B	B/A
Nuclear Power Plant	date of estimate of repair costs	estimate of repair costs CAN$	actual cost of repairs CAN$
Point Lepreau, New Brunswick	2008	0.75 billion	2.4 billion	3.20
Pickering, Ontario	2000	1.30 billion	2.6 billion (repairs not yet complete)	2.00
Bruce, Ontario	2005	2.75 billion	4.8 billion	1.75
Darlington, Ontario	2010	6 – 10 billion	?	?
Cost of obtaining only an estimate of the Darlington repair costs: $1 billion
The original estimate of construction cost of Darlington was $3.95 billion; the final cost was $14.4 billion, 3.64 times more expensive than the estimate.
According to the B/A column, the historical average of final repair cost vs. estimated cost is 2.31. Thus we could estimate how wrong the estimate of Darlington’s repair cost will be. Actual costs can be estimated to be 2.31 times more expensive than the original estimate – thus a final cost likely to be between $13.8 billion and $23.1 billion.

 Major Power Generating Companies in Ontario

	Generating Capacity (Megawatts)
	nuclear	hydroelectric	thermal
Ontario Power Generation	6606	6996	5447
Bruce Power	6300	----	----

(The canceled gas thermal plant would have contributed 800 megawatts in this mix.)

For perspective, it is worthwhile to see these costs in context of the annual Ontario budget. For 2013-14 there is a $127.6-billion spending plan with a projected deficit of $11.7 billion. Ontario’s debt will grow to $272.8 billion. The big ticket items are $48.9 billion for health, $24.1 billion for education, and $10.6 billion for interest on debt.

So we could say it’s a bargain to spend $20 billion or so for a service delivered over decades, to keep the juice flowing for a province with a GDP of $600 billion. No electricity, no economy. It certainly makes the cost of the gas generating station seem like peanuts, though a consideration of its worth has to take account of its generating capacity – 800 megawatts, or 13% of the capacity of Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. Nuclear proponents stress that the up-front costs are huge, but the fuel is cheap. With a thermal station, it is the opposite, so over time it’s hard to say which is more costly. Thermal stations allow for flexibility. Because they don’t involve huge sunk costs, they can be shut down in the future if better options become available.

Curiously, none of the media reports explains why the construction and repair costs are conceived as part of the provincial government budget. The power companies were privatized in the 1990s, so one would assume that costs would be recovered by selling electricity to customers. Perhaps the government is lending the money up front, and taking legal liability for accidents and regulatory decisions to cancel or change plans, but it’s hard to understand why the Darlington repairs would be considered as part of the provincial budget. Ratepayers and taxpayers are the same people, so it feels like a tax when everyone has to pay for an essential service one way or another, but it is misleading to say the overhaul of the nuclear fleet is a government cost, unless something goes terribly wrong and the government has to compensate radiation victims and evacuees, or pick up the tab for projects that fail to deliver the promised services.

So, no, cost is not the issue, if the nuclear fleet could operate cleanly and efficiently for the next few decades. The point I make here is that there is a good chance that nuclear could fall out of favor for numerous reasons besides cost.

Future Disasters Could Lead to the Demise of the Industry

Fukushima and Chernobyl are the acknowledged nightmare disasters, supposedly the worst possible events that the nuclear industry promises will never happen again, but in a certain sense, the real nuclear energy accident that matters hasn’t happened yet. The victims of Chernobyl and Fukushima didn’t really matter to those who were interested in maintaining nuclear power. They were small populations of rural people - nobodies living in political systems that could ignore them. When a catastrophe happens near Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Washington, London or Paris, the “fallout,” in every sense of the word, will be different. When the radionuclides are landing on the children and grandchildren of the political and financial elite, the evaluation of what is acceptable risk will be somewhat altered. The costs arising from a level 7 accident (worst on the scale) in France is estimated to be €430 billion by l’Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN). But it seems like complete guesswork to say what the economic and social impacts could be. Much would depend on the way the wind was blowing and where the fallout rain came down.

I state this also as an eventuality, not a hypothetical. There is a long record of near misses in the operation of American nuclear plants, and flood risks equal to the tsunami risk in Japan are still being ignored. There is no reason to believe that the nuclear regulatory system functions any better than the financial regulatory system (see Gar Smith’s Nuclear Roulette for a full accounting of regulatory capture and risks in the American nuclear fleet). When the disaster happens, public support and financing for nuclear power will dry up, and it won’t matter which utilities have good safety records or superior technology.

Waste and Environmental Impacts

The nuclear industry likes to repeat the falsehood that nuclear energy is clean and carbon free. Ontario’s Ministry of Energy carefully states:

”Nuclear power is a reliable, safe supplier of the province’s baseload generation needs, accounting for about 36 per cent of the province’s installed electricity capacity. Nuclear operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and it produces about 50 per cent of the electricity generated in Ontario. Nuclear power does not produce any primary [italics added] air pollution or release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

The key word here, unlikely to catch the attention of a casual reader, is primary. Pronouncements on the websites of Ontario power companies don’t even bother with such hedging in their claims that nuclear is clean or that no member of the public has ever been harmed by the nuclear industry in Canada. There are numerous indirect polluting impacts in the nuclear supply chain. The air in Toronto is cleaner than it used to be since Ontario shut down coal-fired generating stations, but that doesn’t mean nuclear is without its own environmental impacts.

In Port Hope, a small town one hour east of Toronto, a billion-dollar decontamination project is underway to clean up the mess left over several decades by Cameco’s nuclear fuel facility. Canadian taxpayers, including those from provinces that never used nuclear energy, pick up the tab while the corporate polluter carries on with concerns, one of which is its role a major partner in Bruce Power.

In the Northwest Territories and Northern Saskatchewan, native people who worked in the uranium mines suffered from high rates of lung cancer and their lands were contaminated. Conditions for miners have been improved compared to those of the early years of the industry, but the historical record of abuse and neglect is deplorable. Heather Tufts summarized the issue this way in her article The Impacts of Uranium Mining on Indigenous Communities:

“The climate change debate positions nuclear power as a partial solution to carbon emissions according to some scientists and politicians. Uranium mining speculation lacks comprehensive health and safety regulations while the ethics of Canadian exported uranium, which can lead to depleted uranium used in zones of war, needs greater scrutiny. Abandoned uranium mines and the subsequent hazards experienced in forgotten communities have been virtually ignored in Canada leading to tragic, unmitigated circumstances.”

In addition to the health consequences, which were never officially acknowledged or compensated, the tailing ponds left from these mines are extremely toxic, radioactive dumps for which there has been very little attempt at remediation. A short report by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War summed up the situation:

“Saskatchewan's Premier in the 1970s, Allan Blakeney, was quoted as saying: ‘On the issue of radioactive waste disposal we have had to make a leap of faith and assume that a satisfactory means of disposal will shortly be found.’ Several decades later, there is no satisfactory solution - only a longer list of failed attempts. The first phase of the clean-up of Saskatchewan's abandoned uranium mine sites was only announced in 2007 and is estimated to cost $24.6 million [2.4% of the amount for Port Hope cleanup]. The growing volume of nuclear waste poses a safety and health risk for generations to come.”

The spent fuel disposal problem, still with no permanent solution (though the latest proposal is to bury it near the shores of Lake Huron – go here to learn more or sign the petition), gets relatively more attention than the mining waste problem that exists in the open air at mines worldwide. Furthermore, unlike Port Hope, the local communities in Saskatchewan are not full of quaint heritage homes that attract the hearts of Toronto realtors. This environmental blight is entirely beyond the awareness of the Canadian public, so it will never get its own billion-dollar cleanup project.

Graffiti in Toronto's upscale Forest Hills (March 2013), referring
to the GE-Hitachi nuclear fuel processing facility a few kilometers
away in a more downmarket part of town.

In addition to the hazards and carbon fuel involved in uranium mining, there are energy inputs and environmental costs at all other stages of the nuclear energy system - fuel processing, fuel enrichment, fuel transport, plant construction, plant decommissioning, spent fuel cooling, transport and disposal. The enrichment process has been a particularly well kept dirty secret. Massive amounts of fossil fuels and CFC coolants are used to enrich uranium, and the CFC gases used were an exemption from the Montreal Protocol of 1987. [see Makhijani et. al] To say that nuclear is clean is highly misleading – a frequent deliberate distortion of nuclear promoters. We can compare the energy return on investment (EROI, how much energy input is needed to get X amount of energy out of a technology) of nuclear with other ways of generating electricity, but there is not likely to be any consensus on the figures. There are too many variables, and too many ways for advocates on various sides to make their own interpretations. Nuclear might come out with a better EROI, but only if we devalue the environmental burden and risks that will be placed on future generations. If a nuclear plant or spent fuel storage pool is destroyed in a war or accident, then nuclear energy will be seen in the future as a foolhardy and devastating mistake. It is wrong to judge nuclear energy's value only by the standards of the minor catastrophes that have happened so far.

Proliferation

People in the nuclear energy industry reject the linkage between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. It is theoretically possible that humanity could forsake nuclear weapons but use enriched uranium and plutonium only for “peaceful” purposes. Yet the historical record shows that almost every country that builds nuclear power plants also wants nuclear weapons, or the ability to manufacture them in the event that their coverage under a nuclear umbrella should become unreliable. Alternatively, they become complicit, with or without intention, in spreading proliferation risks. Canada’s claim to fame is to have sold CANDU reactor technology to India, which India quickly used to launch its own weapons program. All nuclear reactors produce waste that can potentially become fuel for nuclear weapons or sub-critical radiological “dirty” bombs.

If nuclear fuel is cheap, it is largely because of the economies of scale created by the weapons industry of the Cold War. For example, since the 1990s, the American nuclear industry has been getting cheap fuel from Russia taken from decommissioned nuclear weapons. The infrastructure for fuel processing and enrichment was established by and paid for by the U.S. government, primarily for weapons production. (Ontario's heavy water reactors used to use non-enriched uranium, but they now use slightly enriched uranium made in America.) The creation of a nuclear power industry was a way to make use of the existing plants and regain some of the costs of building weapons. Without the government interest in producing weapons, it is doubtful that private investors ever would have been interested in pursuing a form of energy production that was so dangerous, and expensive, and difficult to manage safely in a way that would make it acceptable to the public. For that feat, we needed governments to impose it on us.

Technological Change

Nuclear power might be perceived as cost effective over the long haul, if everything goes well, but the large initial costs make this a very big gamble and a potential lost opportunity to pursue other options. Nuclear power is said to be the ocean liner of energy types. Once it is built and on its way, it cannot change course, no matter what icebergs appear in front of it. The Titanic metaphor is perhaps why this problem is referred to as “sunk costs.” Take the Japanese government now (and, as Henny Youngman would plead in the joke about his wife, I say “please”). The world’s worst nuclear accident has contaminated the northern half of the country. Everyone knows a massive earthquake could strike anywhere. It has become painfully obvious, even to nuclear proponents in other countries, that nuclear power cannot be done safely in this kind of seismic zone, but still the government, the bureaucracy and the corporations invested in nuclear are determined to make use of their sunk costs. Prime Minister Abe wants a restart “as soon as the safety of nuclear plants can be guaranteed.” He thinks this means “soon” but he doesn’t realize that for all disinterested and rational observers, it means “never.”

The hazards of getting committed to sunk costs have been made apparent not only by Fukushima but also by a rapid change in the price of other energy sources. A glut of natural gas has reversed the “nuclear renaissance” that was underway just a few years ago. Several American nuclear plants have closed down, and more are likely to follow. New projects are stalled because private capital and the insurance industry are not interested. And who knows what else could come along at any time? This month there was news of a breakthrough in solar energy that is going to be a “game changer” according to the inventor and the experts who have seen his plans. The technology is under patent application at the moment, so little is known about it. However, this is what a report in McClatchy Newspapers had to say:

“… the previously undisclosed invention has yet to be constructed and fully tested. But John Darnell, a scientist and the former congressional aide who has monitored Ace’s dogged research for more than three years and has reviewed his complex calculations, has no doubts. ‘Anybody who is skilled in the art and understands what he’s proposing is going to have this dumbfounding reaction: Oh, well it’s obvious it’ll work,’ said Darnell, a biochemist with an extensive background in thermodynamics. ‘Ron has turned conventional wisdom about solar on its head.’”

If this innovation, or others in energy storage and efficiency, deliver on their promises, nuclear power plants might soon be regarded like other steam engines of the past.

Early 20th century steam engine.

Late 20th century steam engine.

Sources:

Arjun Makhijani, Lois Chalmers, Brice Smith, Uranium Enrichment: Just Plain Facts to Fuel an Informed Debate on Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Power, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, October, 2004.

Jose Etcheverry, “Cancellation of Ontario Gas Plants Pales in Comparison to Nuclear Repair Costs,” The Toronto Star, May 9, 2013.

Ontario Power Generation.

Bruce Power.

Ontario Ministry of Energy.

Javier E. David, “Nuclear Power Falters, Engulfed by 'Cauldron' of Bad Luck,” CNBC, May 13, 2013.

Keith Leslie, “Dalton McGuinty testifies that it was his decision to kill gas plants at cost of $585-million,” The National Post, May 7, 2013.

Gar Smith, Nuclear Roulette: The Truth about the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth, 2012.

Greg Gordon, “Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy 'Breakthrough,’” McClatchy Newspapers, May 8, 2013.  

Heather Tufts, “The Impacts of Uranium Mining on Indigenous Communities,” Peace, Earth and Justice News, February 12, 2010.

Richard Wilcox, “The Nuclear Mafia Derails Democracy in Japan,” Dissident Voice, August, 2012.

Vincent Thimonier, “Nucléaire: un Fukushima français changerait-il la donne?” Lyon Capitale, May 13, 2013.

“Hibakusha Worldwide: Northern Saskatchewan, Uranium Mining Site,” International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 2012.

National Post News Files: Ontario Budget, May 2013.

“Ontario budget 2013: 10 Highlights,” The Toronto Star, May 2, 2013. 

Enviros, Pro-Nukers and Global Warming Skeptics: A Love Story

We know the stale dichotomies of modernity: left and right, liberal and conservative, constrained vision versus utopian vision. Yet the world is actually much more complicated. The extremities not only touch; they elbow, jostle, hook up, spawn weird offspring, then ditch each other to move on and look for better options.

This can be seen in the strange love-hate triangle that has emerged between environmentalists, nuclear energy advocates and global warming skeptics. The latter two can best be viewed as male suitors competing for the acceptance of the environmental movement. Let’s call these actors Ned, Fred and Ellen, and just think of N as in nuclear, F as in fossil fuel, and E as in environmentalism.

Ned and Fred know that they both have a serious reputation problem, and they would desperately love to win the hand of Ellen. If they could do so, they would bask in the nurturing glow she casts, and win the blessing of the angels and the approval of the public. Some serious positive re-branding comes from winning the hand of she who stands for all things good and nurturing. The suitor that wins Ellen's heart will prosper and multiply. Every king needs a queen. If you win the heart of she who stands for Mother Nature, you win the game.

Yet Ellen is a fickle creature, in no rush to settle for the least bad choice when the stakes are so high. She has been burned before. She is skeptical about global warming skeptics, and unconvinced that nuclear energy could be safely expanded to a scale that would satisfy mankind’s lust for energy. So she waits, and her suitors begin to seethe with resentment.

What is she anyway, they ask, other than a bloated lobby supported by Hollywood celebrities and wealthy urbanites? These people have no idea what it is like to earn a living off the land and truly manage the earth’s resources for the betterment of the common folk. They work from lawyers' offices and bureaucracies in Washington and Brussels, locking up vast tracts of productive land so that it can be preserved in its “natural” state, and this very act of preservation worsens the problem by removing land from active human management. Ellen is a prima donna, an expensive and puffed up princess consuming the very thing she claims to preserve. But still, she stands for the elusive goal of a better world, a solution, and they need her.

And so one strategy is to belittle the competition. Ned says only he can avert the calamity of climate change caused by Fred. Fred says the climate science is all flawed, the solar system and the earth are too big, and time is too vast for a couple centuries of fuel-burning to have made a difference. Sure, we must conserve and develop clean alternatives, but Fred is not the culprit here. “Work with me,” he says, “and forget about Ned’s false promises.”

But Ellen remembers Chernobyl, the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Fukushima and the Athabasca Tar Sands. Ned and Fred are both too quick to overlook the harm they have caused and duck responsibility. Their entreaties, their feckless mansplaining and condescension leave her cold. They are stale and lacking in imagination. Radioactive waste piling up everywhere, or particulate matter in our lungs? Really? Are these the only choices, the price we have to pay for the so-called benefits of our way of life? There’s got to be another way. Better to wait than to settle for one of these two.

And Ned and Fred should know it’s hopeless to go on courting her, and they are each aware that their counterarguments are mutually destructive. While Ellen turns away, they are left to spout their views in their respective narcissistic echo chambers. At heart, the seducer’s quest is all about self-love anyway. And as much as Ned and Fred are antagonists, they must admit it is the bromance that keeps them going. Deep down, no matter how they self-deceive about wanting the best for the next generation, they love each other for being on a as competitors on the same team, on a mission to advance the corporate interests of their respective sponsors and cheerleaders.

A fine example of an attempt to strut and woo the environmental movement is in the marketing underway for the new film Pandora’s Promise, due for wide release in June 2013. The film is a strained attempt to re-brand nuclear as an environmental savior, as if the only choice were between fissile fuel and fossil fuel.

Like many documentaries these days, it is not a documentary in the traditional sense. There is no attempt to be objective, or to look at the issue from many facets. Documentarians used to stand back, let their images speak, and interview people on all sides of an issue, leaving the audience to make up their own minds or leave the theater with unresolved questions. Now, the only approach in films such as this is to be having a thesis and a passionate belief that it is correct. Then the director proceeds to select only the evidence that fits. The best examples of the genre feature the middle-aged apostate acting as auteur. In Waiting for Superman, it was a formerly avid supporter of public education who saw the light and took to promoting charter schools and demonizing public school teachers. And it wasn't just a lone director exploring a topic that captivated him. The project was backed by wealthy donors and groups that had a shared view of how to proceed with education reform. It was a pure propaganda piece.

Pandora’s Promise seems to be another entry in this dismal trend. It was shown at the Sundance Festival, and it is presently going through advance publicity as showings at select university campuses. The trick is to the create buzz among the select few whose opinions matter, then they are unleashed onto social media before wide release of the film. This stealth marketing campaign is supposed to change the parameters of the global conversation about what it means to be an environmentalist.

The writers at Beyond Nuclear have already done a critique of the film’s flaws – not only in terms of its content but also the people behind it and the hype around it. For example, the film claims to feature several “leading environmentalists” who were once anti-nuclear, but it turns out they were never much of either, except in their own recollections.

The Beyond Nuclear report gives details on the numerous omissions and distortions in the film that strive to make nuclear energy seem harmless, affordable and manageable. For example, the director Robert Stone visits a spent fuel storage facility in France and perpetuates the sunny description of it that he has been told by the people hosting his visit. Beyond Nuclear had a contrary assessment:

“… Stone’s self-confessed ‘aha moment’ [occurred] when he was ‘granted entry into a room in France (the size of a basketball court) where all the waste from powering 80% of the country for 30 years is stored.’ But this room, located at the La Hague reprocessing facility, contains in vitrified form only 4% of the country’s high-level waste, and none of the intermediate and low-level waste, none of the plutonium or contaminated uranium, nor of course the waste still at, and being generated by, France’s operating reactors. (The French nuclear industry exempts irradiated and reprocessed reactor fuel from being classified as ‘waste.’ It ‘could be potentially reused at an undefined time in the future’ allowing for the misrepresentation made to Stone at La Hague). The premise for making the film was therefore based on, at best, a mistaken impression.”

The Beyond Nuclear report also notes that the film is supported by The Breakthrough Institute (BTI), and that it prominently features the viewpoints of many of this organization’s members. The BTI has a strange record of wanting to cover all of the anti-environmental angles, while attempting to position itself as the voice of a redefined environmental movement that can accommodate the energy desires of a global population of 10 billion. Ironically, they have a record of both denying anthropogenic climate change and promoting nuclear as the only solution to it. Beyond Nuclear cites a report by thinkprogress.org:

“… they [BTI] spent the past two years dedicating the resources of their organization to help kill prospects for climate and clean energy action — and to spread disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional leaders, Waxman and Markey, leading climate scientists, Al Gore again, the entire environmental community and anyone else trying to end our status quo energy policies.”

The Beyond Nuclear report notes how the press releases for Pandora’s Promise have been continually revised and removed from the film’s website. As anti-nuclear critics note every outrageous claim or quote from a fake “expert,” the producers issue new promotional material to tone down the language and look for ways to say things that won’t be immediately ripped apart by critical reviewers.

In the present version of the official trailer, Michael Shellenberger, president of The Breakthrough Institute, says of his past beliefs, “To actually believe in nuclear power was, by definition, to be a dupe.” I am yet to see the film, but based on what has been presented on the official website and the critical reviews of it, and on what I know about this issue (see previous post about the argument made by the organization Don’t Nuke the Climate), I have to conclude that Michael Schellenberger’s younger self would not approve of what he has become. He is, indeed, a dupe. And the public is duped if they believe his self-description as a leading global thinker on energy, climate, security, human development, and politics. He is described this way only on the website of the organization that he is president of, and by a few right-wing publications that find him useful. None of the leading environmental organizations recognize him as a prominent in the field, nor do they endorse nuclear as a solution to climate change. Almost all of Shellenberger’s publications listed on the BTI website are self-published right there.

The director Robert Stone defends the film’s title by pointing out that in the myth Pandora finds hope in the end. This is, of course, after having unleashed all the evils in the world. The opinion we form of nuclear energy depends on when we think the time of hope has arrived, or will arrive. Have all the evils been unleashed, with nuclear now offering us hope for a better future? Or will hope arrive at some time in the future, after enough nuclear catastrophes have convinced us to abandon this toxic technology?

It is to the credit of those who deny anthropogenic climate change that there has not yet been a piece of propaganda like Pandora’s Promise that argues that fossil fuels are the only hope for solving the demand for energy while averting nuclear catastrophes. They know there is no way to put lipstick on that pig. The best they can do is acknowledge the problem, promote green initiatives in the industry, and try to cause as little harm as possible. Long before anyone worried about climate catastrophe, it was well known that hazards like acid rain and particulate smog were causing horrific damage to the environment and human health. These were always reason enough to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

Some climate skeptics, whether one agrees with them or not, have at least taken the respectable approach of not trying to re-brand themselves as environmentalists, or ingratiate themselves with the environmental movement. They are more willing to just kick it in the teeth to make their point.

One example of this is Elizabeth Nickson’s book Eco-fascists: How Radical Conservationists are Destroying our Natural Heritage (published most aptly by Broadside Books). The author puts herself on the side of skeptics who say that climate science is flawed, but doesn't go into details of how it is flawed. In any case, this isn't the focus of the book. I have doubts about some of the points she makes, and while the subtitle is fine, labeling opponents as fascists is a famously cheap rhetorical tactic. Nonetheless, she has written a valuable tear-down of the excesses of the environmental movement.

She describes the insidious bureaucratic creep of the movement in rural communities, using her home on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, as an example. What once started out as a well-intended effort to preserve the island turned it into a flashpoint for ideologues on all sides of land use debates. Regulations, and jobs for regulators, expanded until there was a crippling and expensive process in place for residents who wanted to make even the most minor changes to their properties. Her story describes how she ultimately had some influence in getting the community to roll back the bureaucratic excesses.

Eco-fascists also describes the perspective of land holders throughout the American West who claim they have been deprived of their livelihoods by remote entities, whether they were government, corporations, or environmental groups. The latter erred mostly because of the mistaken belief that land could be preserved if humans just abandoned it and let it go back to nature. However, since the early “noble savage” beliefs of the environmental movement, the science has progressed. 
We now know that before Europeans came, the land was intensively managed by human inhabitants. According to Nickson, the neglect of this history has led to a situation in which large tracts of land are preserved, left unmanaged and removed from contributing to the lives of people who used to work them. Now there are regular catastrophic forest fires in Colorado, for example, which could be happening because of climate change, or because the forests are no longer culled and managed properly. According to this view, the environmental movement has in many cases been the unwitting shock troops that hastened the economic collapse of rural regions. When land owners are bankrupted by regulations and the decline of the local economy, corporate farms and government institutions come later to buy land from those who are forced to sell cheap.

Nickson may be right to reveal these negative effects of preservation efforts, but she seems curiously hellbent on laying all the blame on this one factor, as if the chemical and radioactive pollution of the 20th century was just a little thing that happened on the sidelines. Yes, the original inhabitants of North America had more of an environmental footprint than we once believed, but it can't compare with that left by the industrial age and a population of 300 million. 
The most curious omission in Eco-fascists is that the nuclear history of the American West is never mentioned. The author wrote a great deal about the abuse of the good folk of the American West by remote, powerful institutions (the worst of which seem to be law firms working for NGOs), but if she had really wanted to point to a villain, there are no better examples than the litany of abuses by the nuclear weapons and nuclear energy industry: the uranium mine disaster at Church Rock, New Mexico (more radiation released than at Three Mile Island), still poisonous nuclear facilities at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Los Alamos, and the millions of people affected by bomb fallout from atomic tests in Nevada.

After reading the book, I couldn't surmise whether Elizabeth Nickson would be against the expansion of nuclear because, if the climate science is bunk, nuclear is not a necessary alternative to fossil fuel. Or would she lump the anti-nuclear movement in with all the aspects of environmentalism that she despises? These questions underscore the chaotic state of flux among the alliances and conflicts forming around energy policy. The multilateral nature of the conflict ensures chaos, which delays meaningful steps toward solutions.
In spite of what the people at 350.org hope, there is not likely to be a smooth transition to a less energy-intensive and less populous world. A return to the conditions of the past might be forced upon us by circumstances, and the road back will not be pleasant. Likewise, the attempt to satisfy demand for more energy will be disastrous. World population grew exponentially after the industrial revolution, not before. Energy inputs enable population growth, so increasing the energy supply ultimately solves nothing. In the past, without huge inputs of fossil and fissile fuels, population growth was always limited by what the sun could turn into food, and what food could turn into animal and human work.

With this, we are back full circle to 1972 and a founding publication in the early days of the environmental movement: The Limits to Growth. In 2010, it was reassessed by Nørgård et al. who called it a "pioneering report," saying, "its approach remains useful and… its conclusions are still surprisingly valid... unfortunately the report has been largely dismissed by critics as a doomsday prophecy that has not held up to scrutiny." Time will tell.

Sources:

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Vintage Books, 2006.

Linda Pentz Gunter, Pandora’s False Promises: Busting the Pro-Nuclear Propaganda,’ Beyond Nuclear, May 2013.

Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows, William W. Behrens, The Limits to growth: A report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, Universe Books, 1972.

Elizabeth Nickson. Eco-fascists: How Radical Conservationists are Destroying our Natural Heritage. Broadside Books, 2012.

Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, Richard W. Hazlett, The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Joe Romm, Debunking Breakthrough Institute’s attacks on Obama, Gore, and top climate scientists, Climate Progress, June 17, 2009.

Jørgen Stig Nørgård, John Peet, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, “The History of The Limits to Growth,” Solutions for a Sustainable Future, 1, no. 2, 59-63, February, 2010.

Linda M. Richards, “On Poisoned Ground,” Chemical Heritage Magazine, Spring 2013.

Mycle Schneider and Yves Marignac. Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing in France: A research report of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. April 2008.

Pandora’s Promise. Official website for the film.

The Two Abes

Is the Abe government afraid of bad news leaking out before this summer's Upper House election?

Honest Abe	Shinzo Abe

Japan’s LDP government, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has an ambitious reform agenda, but it cannot be fully implemented unless the LDP gains control of the Upper House of the legislature in the summer election of 2013. The agenda, referred to now as Abenomics, is an economic policy based on expanding the money supply in order to cause inflation that will, it is hoped, shrink government debt and devalue the currency in order to boost exports and stimulate domestic demand. Critics say this policy could fail to produce its desired effects and could lead to higher interest rates that will cause Japan to default on government debt. Interest on debt is presently at about 1%, yet interest payments consume 1/4 of government revenue. With each 1% rise in interest rates, one more quarter of the budget would have to go to interest payments, and, obviously, there are only three quarters of the whole left to play with. The architects of the plan say it won’t cause a rise in interest rates, but so far they offer no convincing explanation why this won’t happen when creditors will want a rate of return higher than Abe’s 2% inflation target. In order to hold onto power, the LDP have to win the next election before any negative effects of the new policies appear. The strategy for this spring appears to be to spend whatever borrowed funds are necessary to make Abenomics look good for the time being, win the Upper House, then worry about the consequences later. Damn the torpedoes.

Since the LDP came back to power, there has been a powerful public relations campaign to support the new economic policies. It appears to be a well-coordinated conspiracy among government, big business, the bureaucracy and the national broadcaster NHK, in addition to various boosters in the private media. It has been extremely successful from a psychological point of view. Voter support is high, and the stock market is up 20% (coincidentally the same figure by which the yen has been deliberately devalued), even though corporate earnings are yet to show any sustained positive results.

There is a good chance that all of the optimism could evaporate at any time, and the prime minister seems to know this. The LDP strategy includes instructions not to speak of specifics before or during the summer election campaign, and the conspirators are taking expensive measures to keep voters and investors happy over the next few months.

The government has announced, for example, that this summer, unlike the last two summers, the public will not need to cut back on electricity consumption. Nothing has changed in the dire circumstances of the Japanese energy problem in terms of the balance of payments, and the global imperative to reduce carbon emissions is still there, even though the Japanese government has too many immediate problems to even think about global warming anymore. This summer will be as hot as previous summers. Fuel imports are still hurting the balance of payments and nuclear plants are still offline. If anything, the problem is worse because the weak yen makes fuel more expensive. But none of this matters to the Abe government. The only thing that will be different this summer is that the LDP desperately wants to have control of both houses of the legislature, so payment of the higher energy costs can just be pushed down the road. Abe does not want voters to be reminded of the Fukushima catastrophe while they sweat through summer heat on their way to the polling booth. It is essential to make them think happy days are here again, at least until September.

In addition to the announcement about the electricity supply, Abe has promised that benefits of his policy will be felt by the working man and woman only after this summer because he has "asked" companies to pass on their yet–to-be-realized earnings to employees, which, he fails to mention, would imply lower profits and a reversal of the present run-up in the stock market. Workers can expect to see a summer bonus, apparently, but there is no mention beyond that of permanent salary increases. I suspect that even if companies don’t have increased revenues with which to pay bonuses, there will be a few token examples touted in the media to make it look like the policy is working. A few flagship companies will take out loans if necessary to support the party they want to see elected, probably with back-channel financial support for agreeing to be the poster children for Abenomics. Such is the lockstep nature of the government-bureaucracy-corporation-media machinery. And it will probably work. In this country, you can fool most of the people all of the time.

A report in The New York Times this week (Japanese Exports Rise, but Demand for Goods Is Lackluster) provides some interesting data from the Japanese Ministry of Finance about what is affecting Japan’s worsening trade deficit. Much of it indicates that Abenomics is failing already and not likely to deliver on its promises.

These are the highlights of the report:

• In the fiscal year ended March 31, imports exceeded exports by a margin of 8.17 trillion yen, or $83.4 billion at current exchange rates... That was almost twice as large as the previous year’s deficit, also a record.
• … surging imports of Chinese-made smartphones and computer chips helped give Japan a $40.7 billion bilateral trade deficit with China last year.
• At the same time, exports to China dropped 9.1 percent as a flare-up in tensions over disputed islands in the East China Sea prompted … anti-Japanese boycotts. 
• … sales of Japanese automobiles and auto parts led a 10.4 percent rise in exports to the economically recovering United States, the ministry said…  Japan recorded a $54 billion two-way trade surplus with the United States.
• Thursday’s figures surprised some analysts by showing that Japanese exports did not receive a noticeable lift from the sharp depreciation of the yen under the economic recovery plan put forth by the new prime minister, Shinzo Abe...
• …despite the yen’s declines, however, Japan recorded a trade deficit last month of $3.7 billion, more than four times as large as the trade shortfall in the same month the year before. It was the largest deficit ever recorded in the month of March.
• Over all, Japanese exports fell last year by 2.1 percent to $652 billion while its imports rose 3.4 percent to $736 billion, the ministry reported.
• Imports of fuel, which account for more than a third of Japan’s total imports, surged last year as the nation’s atomic plants remained idled from the March 2011 nuclear accident. The ministry reported a 14.9 percent increase in imports of liquefied natural gas… and a 5.3 percent rise in imports of petroleum.

If fuel imports represent 1/3 of the $736 billion spent on imports, this equals $245 billion. Fuel imports (gas and oil) increased about 20% because of the nuclear shutdown, so this means they went from about $204 billion to $245 billion. Thus the extra paid for fuel was $41 billion of the $736 billion spent on all imports; that is, only a 6% addition to the cost of all imports. Oil is priced in US$, so the problem was worsened by the deliberate devaluation of the yen, which coincidentally lost about 20% of its value. However, crude oil prices went from $105 to $88 from April 2012 to April 2013, which more or less negates the effect for Japan of the devalued yen – the balance of trade would be worse if oil prices had not declined.

On the other hand, imports of natural gas increased more than imports of oil, and the price of natural gas went from $12.50/MMBtu* in March 2011 to $15.90 in March 2013 - a 27% increase (with a peak of $17.20 in June 2012 – a 37 % increase). These increases have been made more expensive by the devaluation of the yen that started in the autumn of 2012.

Data on oil prices: http://oil-price.net/dashboard.php?lang=en Data on natural gas prices: http://ycharts.com/indicators/japan_liquefied_natural_gas_import_price *MMBTU = one million BTUs (British thermal units)

Another factor that had nothing to do with currency and energy prices was Shintaro Ishihara shooting his mouth off about the Senkaku Islands throughout 2012. The Noda government followed up by handling the situation badly, and the damaged relations with China caused exports to China to drop off. Ishihara’s crackpot outburst might have done as much damage to the Japanese economy as the tsunami and three nuclear core meltdowns. Then again, without his antics, the tsunami and the nuclear crisis, the trade deficit might have been much the same, depending on factors beyond Japan’s control. The negative demographic and economic trends had begun well before the tsunami rolled ashore in 2011.

The conclusion to draw from all these factors is that the loss of nuclear energy was almost an insignificant factor. Before 2011 it produced only 20-30% of electricity. The extra carbon fuel used to replace that loss can’t amount to much of an increase of overall fuel imports that were used before 2011 for electricity, transportation and industrial uses. If it works out to requiring the import of an additional 5-10% more fuel, and this is crippling to the economy, a conservation campaign, aimed not only at electricity but transportation too, could eliminate the problem. In the long term, there is so much more that can be gained in improved energy efficiency and investment in renewable resources.

If fuel imports really were the dreaded enemy of recovery, Abe would not have embarked on a deliberate devaluation of the yen. What every honest economist knows is that the cost of imported raw materials doesn’t matter as long as you can produce a sufficient amount of value-added manufactured goods for export and produce a trade surplus. This can then be used to finance government borrowing. That is the goal of Abenomics, and if it fails, it means only that Japan can no longer sell as much to the world as it used to. When the Japanese establishment blames the situation on the loss of nuclear power, it is just further evidence of its ineptitude and ignorance, or a shameful unwillingness to tell the public truthfully what the data implies.

The fact that stands out from the Ministry of Finance’s data is that the trade deficit was twice as large as the previous year’s deficit. Energy consumption has not doubled in this time, neither in quantity nor price, so it is not the main factor working against Japan’s economic revival. The more likely causes are demographics, inefficiency, lack of innovation, the rise of economic competitors, inept diplomacy and mismanagement of alliances.

Sources:

"Abe Says Incomes Should Begin To Rise After Summer," Nikkei.com, April 18, 2013.
Martin Fackler, "Japanese Exports Rise, but Demand for Goods Is Lackluster," The New York Times, April 18, 2013.
"Gov't may not request power-saving across Japan this summer," Mainichi Japan, April 17, 2013.Yoko Kubota, "Look to Japan's ageing industrial sprawl for roadblock to Abenomics," Reuters.com, April 22, 2013.