The Age of Sustainability - Issue #7 - We need nuclear like a fish needs a scooter

The second source of grift in the climate discussion, after carbon sequestration which we’ve discussed here and will continue to do, is nuclear power. Suggesting we actually need nuclear power is nonsense and only a suggestion you could make if you didn’t know that geothermal by itself could replace all fossil fuel plants and all nuclear plants and all hydro plants a thousand times over according to a report from MIT, “The Future of Geothermal Energy.” You can look it up. So why are we still discussing nukes? There’s a whole industry that would go away if we wound down nukes. But that’s exactly what we need to do.

Should we go nuclear? Wrong question. Better question: How much electric power do we need and what are the options for getting it? We currently consume about 1.1 terawatts of power daily from all sources. But bringing online things like geothermal power would far outpace the need to nuclear. In effect, given the risks associated with nukes, there is no niche for nuclear power in the portfolio of power sources.

Earth Day 2021 brings with it at least the promise of better efforts at controlling the factors of climate change, especially generation and sequester of CO2. There’s plenty of good news to report too, for instance the absolute decline in the number of coal burning power plants in the US. The DoE or Dept. of Energy says we’re at a 42 year low in coal fired generation and that’s good. Better would be finally eliminating coal plants and replacing them with geothermal.

It’s important to understand that the coal plants being retired now are of the 50 Megawatt vintage and those being built are as big as 3 Gigawatts, much bigger. So the metric to watch is generating capacity and it’s going down though it’s best if we never build them than commission them because they can have a 30-year life or more.

I love this. Just as critics are voicing concerns about Lithium scarcity or recycling it, here’s a story about exactly that. The free market doing its thing, sensing opportunity and taking it. Note the name of the publication. You can’t make this stuff up, it’s a real ecosystem and proof of why the critics of clean energy are wrong.

More grift, though because Barrasso is a medical doctor, you should expect more from him and he should know better than to promote carbon reuse. The problem is that before you can turn CO2 into fibers and everything else he talks about, you have to turn it into a hydrocarbon. Making C-H rather than C-O bonds costs a lot of energy (at least 104 Kcal/mole to be really specific) Green plants do this using sunlight. Humans can do it but only at great cost in energy and money. Never trust a politician on something like this unless he’s quoting a scientist and even then, remember Donald Trump and Covid.