Brand’s four issues with environmentalists were:
- Population growth: population has pretty much stopped growing, why do people still complain about it?
- Urbanization: a good thing
- Genetic engineering: also good
- Nuclear power: better than them all! Because it’s the only realistic solution to global warming, according to Brand.
Romm’s response questions some of Brand’s points in reverse order – first, why is Brand so hot for nuclear power? “Before asking the environmental community to embrace nuclear power, let’s really push energy-efficient buildings and factories, hybrids, and renewables like wind for a couple of decades.” Romm should know that there’s a lot of room for improvement there – he was responsible for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Dept. of Energy, whose budget has been in decline (except for the hydrogen mess…)
Second, of course, he gets into the hydrogen economy, which Brand claimed nuclear was ideal for. Romm points out that anything that has enough energy to create hydrogen to replace gasoline will displace four times as much CO2 by using the electric power to displace coal.
Romm’s critique doeesn’t address population or genetic engineering, but on urbanization, he wonders who Brand has been talking to – many environmentalists love cities and their natural efficiency, in transportation and other areas.
Brand’s argument starts by contrasting “romanticism” and “science”, as the powerful and sometimes conflicting driving forces behind environmental ideas. Is he right? And which side do you fall in?
Of course everything has always two sides but the real problem is – as always – with the details.
Nuclear is a viable alternative but unfortunately hydrogen and nuclear cannot replace our use of fossil fuels without massive amounts of new facilities.
And as they say, peak oil and it’s possibly dire economic consequences might be near.
First he says that we should focus more on conserving electric energy so we don’t use as much instead of building new nuclear power plants, and then he complains that using nuclear power to separate hydrogen will be less efficient (in reducing greenhouse gases) than using that nuclear power to replace coal power plants.
Now, I am all for conserving as much energy as possible, as I’m sure Brand is, but Brand’s point was that nuclear power is anathema to many environmentalists. As someone who considers himself an environmentalist (but still thinks nuclear is far better than coal), I receive many messages from fellow environmentalists who want to prevent nuclear power plants from being opened, and do not see many who actually support the creation of new nuclear power plants. Although Romm does not claim that environmentalists already do support nuclear power, it seems that he is asking Brand to avoid asking environmentalists to be pragmatic until everyone else is doing everything they can to conserve power. How is this helpful?
His point about nuclear power is that it’ll happen or not, pretty much independent of what environmentalists say – there’s plenty of momentum from the current US administration, but the utility industry isn’t interested at all, not because of the environmental issues so much as the enormous cost of the things.
If new nuclear plants are built, Romm completely agrees they could help mitigate CO2 – but his point there is they’d do a lot more could displacing coal than manufacturing hydrogen to displace oil.
…one other consequence of the gradual closing down of the nuclear industry I heard talked about at a conference recently, is that once we’ve shut all the plants we will ultimately and very quickly lose the expertise to run nuclear facilities. As such, if/when it’s realised that wind and solar aren’t up to the job of fulfilling our energy needs we won’t have this viable alternative energy source to fall back on.