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WARMING_TO_NUKES
July 11, 2020
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/12/climate-change-very-hot-year/
In a recent issue of the New York (possibly paywalled)
Review of books, Bill McKibben
came out in favor of nuclear
power-- or more precisely, in
favor of not rushing to shut down
existing nukes before there's some Does that sound obvious? If we've been
clean alternative in place. safely operating a nuclear plant for
decades, keeping it going for another
ten years if at all possible would seem
like a good move, if we're (supposedly)
desperately concerned about reducing
our green-house gas emissions.
But both California and New York
are getting this wrong: they're
planning on shutting down both
Diablo Canyon and Indian Point...
Bill McKibben wrote:
"We'd probably be well advised to keep current
nuclear power plants operating where it's
relatively safe to do so until they can be
replaced with renewables instead of natural
gas-- though at the moment new nuclear power
is ruinously expensive in most places,
existing plants are an important part of the
low-carbon power supply."
My first impulse is to object to the phrase
"ruinously expensive", but the surrounding
caveats are interesting-- if it's only
the case in "most places", I would want
to know what they're doing right in those
*other* places, and the phrase "at the
moment" sounds like a concession that this
may very well be a fixable problem...
"A good summary of the problem came in 2018
from the Union of Concerned Scientists"
Nice to have a reference, though something
a little more detailed would be nice.
"We definitely need to avoid not only natural
gas, which as I have explained previously in
these pages is not the 'bridge fuel' its
proponents contended,"
Which is almost certainly true-- I'll
have to look up McKibben's previous Briefly, (1) "natural gas"
nyr pieces to see if his reasoning is not "clean", just
agrees with mine- cleaner-- past estimates
had it half as bad as
coal, but that's still bad;
(2) there's reason to think
we're *leaking* a lot of
uncombusted natural gas
(in part, thanks to fracking)
which means it's GHG footprint
is worse than we used to think.
"but also the burning of trees to generate
electricity--"
So McKibben has indeed concluded he was
wrong about biomass, but the claim that
this is attributable to the "Planet of AFTER_THE_HUMAN_PLANET
the Humans" film is itself provably wrong.
"... the latest science is showing this so
called biomass energy to be more of a problem I thought this might
than a solution," be a case where
McKibben was
You have to love phrases like "the influenced by the
latest science" used without any "Planet of the Humans"
further attribution. The piece in doc, but actually he
grist has no scientific cites either, got there in 2016:
but it makes it clear McKibben now
believes you can't grow trees fast [link]
enough to make biomass carbon neutral.
(I would think the relevent question "But as scientists did
would be how much land it would take.) begin to do the math,
a different truth
"and that by contrast letting mature trees emerged: Burning trees
continue to grow allows them to soak up put a puff of carbon
large amounts of carbon. into air now, which is
when the climate
I can't say I follow why that would be, system is breaking.
if you're burning more than a year's That this carbon may
growth per year, that's a problem, if be sucked up a
not biomass really could be carbon-neutral generation hence is
as promised. therefore not much
help ..."
I continue to
So, now that Bill McKibben has wonder how it
come out as a pro-non-anti-nuke could be the
(or something), will the usual I.P.C.C.
suspects also moderate their neglected to do
stance? this "math".
If past experience is any guide,
they will instead throw Bill
McKibben under the bus-- a small
sacrifice to avoid heresy against
the anti-nuclear faith.
Bill McKibben better step carefully.
He could already be banned at /r/energy.
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