Book Review – A Bright Future

“A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow,” by Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist (2019)

Here’s a quick summary of the main points from this excellent book…

The climate crisis is urgent, so we need to rapidly decarbonize our electricity supply. Atmospheric CO₂ concentration has risen from 280 part per million (ppm) before industrialization to about 410 ppm in 2019. The fastest growing energy source is coal. Fracking has brought down the price of gas, which is outcompeting nuclear power on price in some markets. Gas leaks are common, and methane (the main component of natural gas) is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂ in the first decade after release.
Sweden and France have already solved climate change by scaling up nuclear power. Nuclear is proven, scalable, consistent and reliable. From 1970 to 1990, Sweden cut its carbon emission per person by more than 60 percent. At peak, Sweden was building one reactor per million citizens. France, Belgium, and Switzerland made similar advances in nuclear power production. France built 56 reactors in 20 years and enjoys the cheapest electricity in Europe. Almost a hundred reactors in the U.S. today, quietly and cleanly provide power around the clock without oil spills and train crashes, gas explosions, coal mine disasters, or lethal air pollution.
Battery technology limits renewables, and countries relying solely on it to decarbonize have struggled to scale. Solar and wind are important, but they require backup from constant energy sources like nuclear. Solar and wind power are often generated at times where they must be shed (wasted) by the utility and are often unavailable when power demand is high. The world has spent over $2 trillion on wind and solar in the past decade but has seen almost no progress toward decarbonization. What the world already knows how to do in twenty years with nuclear power would take more than a century with renewables alone. The world’s current annual production of lithium-ion batteries would power the world’s electricity needs for about 45 seconds. If you built a new Tesla Gigafactory every year (the first one took five years) it would take 60 years cumulative production to make enough batteries for one day of storage of the world’s electricity. However, even the most high-end batteries do not last longer than 15 years. Note that enough batteries would be needed for months of the long, dark, still winters in some places. A German utility noted “if you look at this when its very cold outside, the wind is rarely blowing and it’s also dark…
We Want More Energy. Despite its low carbon emissions per person, Sweden is top 10 in the world in energy usage per person. Energy conservation cannot be a major part of the solution because the answer is not less energy, but cleaner energy. More than a billion people in the world lack access to electricity. We need to keep making plenty of carbon-free electricity to both address climate change and lift people out of poverty.
Nuclear is one of the safest forms of energy production, based on deaths per unit electricity generated. Advances in reactor design and safety protocols have made modern nuclear plants much safer than older designs, but fear of nuclear accidents is often disproportionate to measured risks. Fukushima and Three Mile Island did not result in any deaths from nuclear power, but the public’s response caused many power plants to shut down or never be built. Much of this missed nuclear capacity was made up by coal, which has killed many people through exposure to emissions from burning coal. Empirical evidence from areas of natural background radiation suggests that low levels of radiation are not harmful and may even be beneficial in some cases. Public policy is generally based on the belief that any amount of radiation exposure is harmful. This leads the public to believe that nuclear power is more dangerous than it is, and it results in ineffective and unnecessarily conservative regulation that stifles nuclear development through increased regulatory burden. Riding in a car is more dangerous than riding in a plane, yet more people fear flying. We must start evaluating risk probabilistically as a society to arrive at the safest energy solution.
Nuclear waste is easily manageable. While spent fuel is initially highly radioactive, very little spent fuel is produced relative to other energy sources, and it could be reprocessed and recycled to further reduce the waste for disposal. The electricity that an American uses in a lifetime could generate 2 pounds of waste with nuclear power, or 136,000 pounds of waste with coal. After the temperature and radioactivity of Sweden’s spent fuel has decreased in storage pools, it will be inserted into cast iron that will be encapsulated in welded copper canisters. These will be packed in clay, inside rock 1,600 feet underground, that has been dry for 100,000 years and stable for almost 2 billion years. Despite the thought and expense that has gone into final disposal designs, interim storage is probably sufficient. It will help reduce the waste volume, and the spent fuel is available for reprocessing to recover additional electricity later.
The nonproliferation system works. There is always plenty to worry about, but we can keep risks extremely low with continuing effort. From 1998 to 2013, about 10 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. came from 20,000 disassembled soviet nuclear weapons. Weapons can be built with plutonium or enriched uranium. It’s easier to build with enriched uranium, but enriching uranium is technically difficult. Countries with civil nuclear power have helped other countries develop it in exchange for signing the Nonproliferation Treaty and submitting to international review.
We need to conserve existing nuclear power capacity, and not let reactors be shut down in response to political pressure and competition with cheap natural gas. The initial capital investment to build a nuclear power plant is high, operating costs are low, and nuclear plants have long lifespans. Because most nuclear generating capacity is replaced by fossil fuels, it is causing CO₂ emissions per person to go up. Pressure to close nuclear power plants does not come from frightened residents near the plant. Nuclear power is economically competitive, especially when considering the costs of climate change and the need for reliable, carbon-free energy.
Notable new technologies include Generation IV reactors, small modular reactors, and thorium reactors (more on these below). These advancements promise to make nuclear power even safer, more efficient, and more flexible. Nuclear power could possibly be used for applications beyond electricity generation, such as desalination and hydrogen production, which could further reduce carbon emissions across various sectors. Second generation reactors have a long and safe operating history, and any country that can build out these reactors in much larger numbers at low cost should certainly consider it.
Expanding nuclear power worldwide is essential for achieving the decarbonization required to limit global warming. China, Russia, and India are expected to play a huge role in developing the next generation of nuclear power capacity. China is scaling quickly, Russia is building and running nuclear power plants in the rest of the world and selling electricity cheaply (5-6 cents per kilowatt hour in some places). They’re also developing designs to run on spent fuel. India is developing three different types of nuclear reactors with special emphasis on thorium reactors, which are proliferation resistant and intrinsically safe.
Carbon pricing makes nuclear more cost competitive. Sweden made great strides in nuclear development thanks to the highest carbon tax in the world. That made fossil fuel energy sources less cost competitive. Carbon taxes are controversial because the cost of carbon emissions is unknown.

My two main criticisms of this book

Climate models are not accurate enough to prove that we need urgent climate action (see “Unsettled”). Climate catastrophizing in the absence of accurate, validated climate models is inappropriate.
The carbon tax works by making nuclear competitive through pricing carbon at an arbitrary level, because we can’t objectively quantify the costs of carbon.

Despite these specific differences of opinion, I love this book for selling the dream well, and conveying many brilliant points and quantitative analyses. I’ll close with a few great factoids:

One pound of nuclear fuel produces more energy than 2 million pounds of coal, and it is technically feasible to produce even more energy with that same pound of fuel as nuclear technology develops.
The “Rebound” effect is when people think things use less energy they use them more.
“You will get a higher dose of radiation living next to a coal plant than a nuclear plant.”