A few years ago the Swedish energy minister and the head of a Swedish labor union were brought together in a short television debate about nuclear energy. Almost every sentence that Madame Energy Minister uttered contained the expression renewables, and caused me to think of something that the great American president Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: “repetition of a lie does not transform it into the truth”. Of course, in her case it was not a lie but a misunderstanding. A serious misunderstanding based on a comprehensive ignorance about energy and energy economics.
Furthermore, as the gentleman from the labor union – who is now the Swedish Prime Minister – pointed out, he grew up in Northern Sweden, and though winter temperatures in that part of the country sometimes reached minus twenty-five degrees (or even lower) centigrade, he had no memory of air currents of such strength that they would guarantee the sustained motion of wind turbines. I often skied in northern Sweden many years ago, and my son did a part of his military service in that region, but neither of us can recollect a wind strength and consistency that would justify abandoning nuclear energy in favour of wind turbines that, on the average, provide rated (or nameplate) power less than twenty five percent of the time. (In other words, their capacity factors are on average less than 0.25, and sometimes much less.)
There is another item that everyone should be aware of. I do not know of any country, in any part of the world, where decision makers, rank and file politicians, academics with access to the corridors and restaurants of power, break dancers, rappers, moonwalkers or anybody else have talked as much about a major expansion in the use of renewable energy as in Sweden, and in addition have tried to give foreigners the impression that much has been done and even more will be done with renewables in the near future. In reality – with the exception of hydro (waterpower) – hardly anything is being or has been done, because suggestions for greatly modifying the present Swedish energy profile to provide for more renewables, in conjunction with less nuclear energy, are scientifically absurd.
I perhaps should mention that Madame Energy Minister was not a representative of the political party that I would vote for if I voted in Sweden. Of course, maybe that doesn’t make a difference, because the last Social Democratic prime minister in Sweden, a sometimes intelligent man named Göran Persson, went so far as to call nuclear energy “obsolete”. This kind of mistake is natural or typical, and not just where the vote-getting process is concerned, because in a democracy everyone is encouraged to express their opinion on all sorts of topics, even though in this case the prime minister’s opinion overlooked the likelihood that the nuclear reactor may someday be judged the most important invention of the 20th century.
Here I can point out that when Mr Person’s curiously eccentric and inaccurate statement about obsolescence was made, the cost and price of Swedish electricity was among the lowest in the world, while the cost and price of electricity in the promised land of wind energy, which as you probably know is Denmark, was (and still is) among the highest. Thanks to Germany’s preposterous Energiwende (= Energy Transition), Denmark and Germany have the highest electricity prices in Europe.
If necessary, I might still be able to read a small amount of German, however I would never pick up a newspaper or journal in order to find out what is going on in the heads of the German Chancellor and her foot soldiers, which includes closing Germany’s nuclear facilities. I sometimes tell myself though that the one time student of physical science, Angela Merkel, must have at least an inkling of the economic fiasco that would result from dumping nuclear, and trying to replace it with renewables and/or imported electric power. But votes are votes, and if she prefers chilling out in the Reichstag to watching (on her wide-screen TV) her political rivals staring across the table at charmers like Sarkozy and Berlusconi, she evidently feels that she has no choice but to accept what the great American songwriter Irving Berlin called ‘Doing what comes naturally’, which in this context means initiating an energy program that makes no technical or economic sense whatsoever.
I like to think that at the present time most countries are filled with people who are intelligent and sensible enough to realize how misguided Chancellor Merkel’s plans happen to be, although you can never be certain. What everyone reading this should remember is that where energy economics is concerned, even highly educated men and women can lose their way, and not just with nuclear energy. In my lecture on oil at the National University of Singapore, I informed my audience that the war in Libya was about oil, and not protecting what the ignorant Secretary General of NATO called civilians, but I am afraid that my powers of persuasion failed me on that occasion.
Recently a French Prime Minister, Monsieur Fillon, reaffirmed that “France’s goal is first of all to ensure its energy independence”. The opinion here is that ensuring the energy independence of countries like France, Germany and Japan can only be done by at least retaining their nuclear inventory, assuming that independence is to be accompanied by continued prosperity. Moreover, you can be as certain as I am that no industrial country on the face of the earth can afford to abandon nuclear. I don’t feel a need to argue this however, because French and Japanese energy specialists are smarter and more sophisticated where their domestic energy matters are concerned than I could ever be. I have also heard that regardless of what French politicians say or think before the cognac starts going around the table, French nuclear kingpins expect to profit handsomely from the foolishness being launched by Ms Merkel and her energy experts.
I engage in many polemics about energy in my articles, lectures and especially my books. I also have long conversations with myself on the subject, usually in the silence of my lonely room, This might be why I once received a number of strange mails from a Catalan engineer (who says that he is a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) informing me that a large team of experts at MIT (which may have included the present U.S. Secretary of Energy) have produced research on the cost and desirability of nuclear energy that – in his opinion – casts some scepticism on my humble work on these subjects.
Their research casts no scepticism on my work, because I doubt whether persons like Energy Secretary Moniz are capable of understanding my work. The calculations made at MIT or IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) or CIT (California Institute of Technology) or the storefront university that gave me my economics degree may or may not be correct for the short run, but as for the long term – where the issue is mainly economics – they are probably as wrong as the Dean of Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology thought that I was when he expelled me from his school for failing physics and mathematics (both twice), and told me to never come back.
Wrong because there are no electricity generating assets on the horizon that are as flexible as nuclear reactors when it comes to providing large amounts of reliable electric power. Flexible in what way? How can someone look at a nuclear facility and talk about flexibility? The answer is that flexibility in this context means the ability to greatly improve the technology and economics of future generations of reactors, although admittedly improvements might also be made where wind and solar equipment is concerned, especially if ‘energy storage’ (with nuclear supplying the energy to be stored) actually makes the progress that many observers have started talking about, or even if renewables can operate in harmony with future generations of nuclear.
But there is another factor that needs to be absorbed. In the courses in electrical engineering that I busied myself with after being readmitted to IIT, I studied a number
of fascinating topics, but there is no law or hypothesis that is more applicable to the real world than what might be regarded as the first law of neo-classical economics, which is that given a ‘package’ of things that a person likes, almost everyone would prefer more to less. That law will ensure that a nuclear retreat by e.g. Germany will eventually collapse, and will someday be transformed into a nuclear advance that includes the adoption of the breeder reactor. I think that I should mention, however, that a Japanese gentleman once eagerly explained to me that that approach could eventually involve a lot of plutonium, while on the other hand, a number of physicists have assured me that this is NOT certain. In any event, I sincerely hope that the breeder Mr. Bill Gates is financing is managed in a way that it does not interfere with that gentleman’s income and bank accounts.
Some observers believe that a commercial breeder will never be developed. I once heard this from the particle physicist Michael Dittmar, whose interesting paper is listed in the references. In my opinion though, large commercial breeders are a certainty, and there will be plenty of them in Russia and China before the middle of this century. Readers with an interest in microeconomic theory should examine a paper by Fabien A. Roques et al (2006), which considers nuclear a hedge against uncertain fossil fuel prices, and also suggests that it might be fruitful to view energy as a ‘public good’ (like e.g. streetlights and defence). I certainly can accept that, since it is clear to me that where energy is concerned, governments and private manufacturing firms should cooperate in the same way they did in the U.S. during the last world war.
I make a point of claiming that with nuclear installations located domestically, you know almost exactly what access you will have to e.g. electricity over very long time frames, while with other energy resources there can be large uncertainties, especially about prices. This is why Finland, with Norwegian gas on one side of that country, and Russian gas and coal on the other side, decided to buy the largest reactor in the world from Areva of France. Apparently Finland will also purchase one more large reactor, and perhaps two. If you want to know why, although Finland’s experience with Areva was not commendable, consider the following: Finland has one of the best educated populations in the world, and they are capable of understanding that rejecting nuclear is equivalent to playing the energy fool?
Many people are afraid of nuclear energy, which I regard as a reason for being positive to that resource. If they were not afraid, dismissed caution, and instead wanted a reactor on every street corner, I would have a problem exposing myself to the silly warnings, empirical blunders, and the kind of shocked expressions I provoked at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris) when, at the end of my lecture on oil, I put in a cheerful good word for nuclear. In nuclear intensive Sweden and France, the record shows everyone with a desire to avoid lies and make-believe that nuclear can deliver the goods, although if decision makers become careless, like putting reactors in the wrong place (as in Fukushima) it could someday destabilize portions of the global economy (as is possible in Europe now) by causing the abandonment of verifiably safe reactors.
References
Banks, Ferdinand E. (2015). Energy and Economic Theory.
London, New York and Singapore: World Scientific. (2007). The Political Economy of World Energy: An Introductory Textbook. Singapore and New York: World Scientific’ Constanty, H. (1995).
‘Nucleaire: le grand trouble’. L’Expansion (68-73). Dittmar, Michael (2011).
The future of nuclear energy: facts and fiction. The Institute of Particle Physics, Zurich. (Conference paper, Jan 21, 2011).
Léveque, Francois, Jean Michel Glachant, Julian Barquin, Christian von Hirschehausen, Franziska Holz and William J. Nuttal (2010).
Security of Supply in Europe: Natural gas, nuclear and hydrogen.
London: Edward Elgar Patel, Tara (2011). ‘France won’t build nuclear reactors to make up for shutdowns in Germany.’ Bloomberg (Bloomberg
Economic News).,Roques, Fabien A., William J. Nuttall, David M. Newberry, Richard de Neufville,
Steven Connors (2006). ‘Nuclear power: a hedge against uncertain gas and carbon prices.’ The Energy Journal, (Volume 27, No 4).
Zaleski, C. Pierre (2005). ‘The future of nuclear power in France, the EU and the world for the next quarter-century’. Conference paper, University of Paris – Dauphine).
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