Photo: U.S. Army

I’ve worked on Naval and other defense energy issues for over three decades (not one) and served on both Defense Science Board task forces on DOD energy strategy, reporting in 2001 and 2008. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ energy leadership and similar efforts across all Services and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense reflect the recommendations of those task forces and of similar studies by prominent retired military leaders (e.g. “Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security“) and the Secretary of Defense’s JASON science advisory group.

The Naval War College has posted Mabus’ remarks at his June 7-8, 2011 Current Strategy Conference, and addresses the previous day by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, Marine Lt. Gen. G.J. Flynn, and myself. These four talks will help James to understand that the military energy revolution has nothing to do with fads or the “latest fashion” or political correctness, did not result from executive branch nudging, but emerged internally and straightforwardly, chiefly in President G.W. Bush’s administration, from field commanders’ requirements for combat effectiveness and force protection.

I agree with James that alternative, ideally autonomous, fuels (and impliedly their efficient use) are highly desirable for expeditionary use. This is a force protector as he rightly states: Oil logistics is one of the Marine Corps commandant’s biggest casualty concerns, and over a thousand U.S. servicemembers have died in convoy attacks in the past decade, mainly hauling fuel that is mainly wasted. Convoys no longer needed can’t be attacked. But saving or displacing oil in the battlespace is also a force multiplier, a force enabler, and a source of transformational realignments from tail to tooth that can ultimately reach multi-divisional scale and save many tens of billions of dollars a year. For all these reasons, from Lt. Gen. James Mattis’ 2003 appeal to “unleash us from the tether of fuel” to Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer’s 2006 operational request from Anbar Province for a “self-sustainable energy solution,” field commanders have eagerly pursued ways to displace oil, both through efficient use and through substitute supplies. They’re starting to succeed: DOD is now probably the world’s largest single buyer both of oil and of renewable energy. My 2010 article [PDF] in Joint Force Quarterly (the magazine of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) summarizes these issues and opportunities in their strategic context.

James ridicules the Marines’ potential use of a truck-mounted opportunistic converter of local biomass, such as illegal poppies that would otherwise be destroyed, into tactical fuel. His objection is that the feedstock could otherwise feed people. People don’t eat poppies any more than they eat prairie grass, forest wastes, rice straw, or fielded forces’ own trash. Nor do these feedstocks raise land-use issues. Indeed, U.S. forces are striving to switch Afghan farmers from growing poppies to growing food and other crops.

Even stranger are James’ suggestions of using “a fold-up solar panel” to “heat a tent,” or using a “giant windmill … three stories high” to run a forward operating base and “be picked up by enemy radar” (I hadn’t realized the Taliban were hiding radar sets in their beards). Were he familiar with the fifth-generation expeditionary energy systems pioneered by the Marines’ XFOB (Experimental Forward Operating Base) at Twentynine Palms, he’d realize their hardware choices are tactically appropriate, highly advantageous, far less conspicuous and vulnerable than fuel convoys, and being enthusiastically adopted in theater.

He then conflates expeditionary renewable sources of electricity (displacing petroleum-fueled, convoy- or airlift-supplied, high-signature gensets) with his misplaced concerns about large-scale U.S. first-generation biofuel production. They’re unrelated. Military biofuel interest emphasizes long-term mobility; fueled gensets are now being displaced more by efficient use and photovoltaics, plus small-scale wind, hydro, etc. where suitable.

James cites two of my books but misrepresents their content. My 1977 book Soft Energy Paths (to give it the correct title) didn’t propose using “domestic crops” to make “one-third of our fuel oil,” nor did it advocate making biofuels from corn, grapes, hops, or any other food crops. What it actually and correctly said on p. 44 and pp. 124-125 was that farm, forest, and urban wastes could be cost-effectively converted to enough biofuel to run “an efficient U.S. transport sector” (it referred specifically to gasoline). The National Academies and many other authoritative bodies later reached similar conclusions. James’ land-use figures misleadingly assume obsolete first-generation biofuels and processes, food-crop feedstocks, and inefficient vehicles; mine didn’t.

He’s similarly muddled about my team’s 2004 Pentagon-cosponsored book Winning the Oil Endgame. It showed how to get the U.S. off oil, again without displacing any cropland, but it didn’t propose, as James claims, “running the entire electrical grid on wind and sunshine.” That book was about oil, not electricity, and the two were less than 3 percent related then, less than 1 percent today. Nor did Winning the Oil Endgame propose, as he states, using renewables to save biofuels and natural gas in electricity generation (which uses virtually no biofuels) to use in transport. Rather, it showed how investing in electric demand response could save power-plant natural gas to displace oil in industry and buildings (plus 1.8 percent in transport). The book’s biofuel analysis (pp. 103-110 and 162-164), again based on woody, weedy, and waste feedstocks rather than on food crops, showed that displacing U.S. oil use in 2025 needn’t interfere with food or fiber production nor harm soil fertility, based on the land-use calculations he claims I never did and on modern agronomic evidence.

Perhaps James is anticipating Rocky Mountain Institute’s detailed new synthesis “Reinventing Fire,” to be published by Chelsea Green this October. That detailed study does indeed integrate oil with electricity. It shows how to get the U.S. completely off oil and coal by 2050 at a $5 trillion lower present-valued cost than business-as-usual, led by business and driven by market forces. One of the keys is indeed 125 to 260-mpg-equivalent autos, using a breakthrough competitive strategy based on electrified, lightweight carbon-fiber vehicles. James seems skeptical of the possibility of inventing those. However, they were already invented in 1991 and designed by 2000. James might not be aware that BMW, Audi, and VW have announced 2012-13 volume production of such vehicles, at efficiencies up to 230 mpg for VW’s two-seater, and that BMW has publicly confirmed our thesis that the saved batteries pay for the carbon fiber.

James concludes: “Let’s get real about the solutions. The job of the m
ilitary is defending the nation.” Precisely. Since he retired from the Naval Reserve a generation ago, the uniformed leadership has come to understand that comprehensive, systematic, and aggressive adoption of energy efficiency and appropriate renewables is at the core of their national-security mission. The Air Force-America’s No. 1 or No. 2 airline-and the Navy, like leading civilian airlines around the world, have been prudently exploring and testing third- and fourth-generation biofuels that show promise of lower and more stable long-run prices than oil. Our 2008 Defense Science Board task force concurred.

Losing some of the military market for oil (less than 2 percent of U.S. oil use) may slightly incommode James’ colleagues and former employers in the oil business (besides his national-security background, he was reportedly a vice president of Mobil and an economist for Conoco, but the WSJ oddly didn’t say so). But many major oil companies too are investing in advanced biofuels. Indeed, the world’s biggest distributor of biofuels is Shell, whose former chairman, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, joined with George Shultz in writing the forewords to Winning the Oil Endgame, and whose U.S. and Upstream Americas President Marvin Odum wrote a foreword to Reinventing Fire.

I would therefore very respectfully suggest to James that his contributions on military energy would carry more weight if he more carefully examined what I actually wrote and what DOD is actually doing.

Nuclear plants: unsafe, uneconomic, and unnecessary.Photo: Thomas Anderson

As heroic workers and soldiers strive to save stricken Japan from a new horror — radioactive fallout — some truths known for 40 years bear repeating.

An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors. The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can’t contain 90 percent of meltdowns. The U.S. has six identical and 17 very similar plants.

Every currently operating light-water reactor, if deprived of power and cooling water, can melt down. Fukushima had eight-hour battery reserves, but fuel has melted in three reactors. Most U.S. reactors get in trouble after four hours. Some have had shorter blackouts. Much longer ones could happen.

Overheated fuel risks hydrogen or steam explosions that damage equipment and contaminate the whole site — so clustering many reactors together (to save money) can make failure at one reactor cascade to the rest.

Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: As Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, “No acts of God can be permitted.” Fallible people have created its half-century history of a few calamities, a steady stream of worrying incidents, and many near-misses [PDF]. America has been lucky so far. Had Three Mile Island’s containment dome not been built double-strength because it was under an airport landing path, it may not have withstood the 1979 accident’s hydrogen explosion. In 2002, Ohio’s Davis-Besse reactor was luckily caught [PDF] just before its massive pressure-vessel lid rusted through.

Regulators haven’t resolved these or other key safety issues, such as terrorist threats to reactors, lest they disrupt a powerful industry. U.S. regulation is not clearly better than Japanese regulation, nor more transparent: Industry-friendly rules bar the American public from meaningful participation. Many presidents’ nuclear boosterism also discourages inquiry and dissent.

Nuclear-promoting regulators inspire even less confidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) 2005 estimate [PDF] of about 4,000 Chernobyl deaths contrasts with a rigorous 2009 review of 5,000 mainly Slavic-language scientific papers the IAEA overlooked. It found deaths approaching a million through 2004, nearly 170,000 of them in North America. The total toll now exceeds a million, plus a half-trillion dollars’ economic damage. The fallout reached four continents, just as the jet stream could swiftly carry Fukushima fallout.

Fukushima I-4′s spent fuel alone, while in the reactor, had produced (over years, not in an instant) more than a hundred times more fission energy and hence radioactivity than both 1945 atomic bombs. If that already-damaged fuel keeps overheating, it may melt or burn, releasing into the air things like cesium-137 and strontium-90, which take several centuries to decay a millionfold. Unit 3′s fuel is spiked with plutonium, which takes 482,000 years.

Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away; the only one whose ingredients can help make and hide nuclear bombs; the only climate solution that substitutes proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers. Indeed, nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection.

Here’s how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about two to 10 times less carbon savings, 20 to 40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings (“cogeneration”), and renewable energy. The last two made 18 percent of the world’s 2009 electricity (while nuclear made 13 percent, reversing their 2000 shares) — and made over 90 percent of the 2007-08 increase in global electricity production.

Those smarter choices are sweeping the global energy market. Half the world’s new generating capacity in 2008 and 2009 was renewable. In 2010, renewables, excluding big hydro dams, won $151 billion of private investment and added over 50 billion watts (70 percent the total capacity of all 23 Fukushima-style U.S. reactors) while nuclear got zero private investment and kept losing capacity. Supposedly unreliable wind power made 43 to 52 percent of four German states’ total 2010 electricity. Non-nuclear Denmark, 21 percent wind-powered, plans to get entirely off fossil fuels. Hawaii plans 70 percent renewables by 2025.

In contrast, of the 66 nuclear units worldwide officially listed as “under construction” at the end of 2010, 12 had been so listed for over 20 years, 45 had no official startup date, half were late, all 66 were in centrally planned power systems — 50 of those in just four (China, India, Russia, South Korea) — and zero were free-market purchases. Since 2007, nuclear growth has added less annual output than just the costliest renewable — solar power — and will probably never catch up. While inherently safe renewable competitors are walloping both nuclear and coal plants in the marketplace and keep getting dramatically cheaper, nuclear costs keep soaring, and with greater safety precautions would go even higher. Tokyo Electric Co., just recovering from $10-20 billion in 2007 earthquake costs at its other big nuclear complex, now faces an even more ruinous Fukushima bill.

Since 2005, new U.S. reactors (if any) have been 100+ percent subsidized — yet they couldn’t raise a cent of private capital, because they have no business case. They cost two to three times as much as new wind power, and by the time you could build a reactor, it couldn’t even beat solar power. Competitive renewables, cogeneration, and efficient use can displace all U.S. coal power more than 23 times over — leaving ample room to replace nuclear power’s half-as-big-as-coal contribution too — but we need to do it just once. Yet the nuclear industry demands ever more lavish subsidies, and its lobbyists hold all other energy efforts hostage for tens of billions in added ransom, with no limit.

Japan, for its size, is even richer than America in benign, ample, but long-neglected energy choices. Perhaps this tragedy will call Japan to global leadership into a post-nuclear world. And before America suffers its own Fukushima, it too should ask, not whether unfinanceably costly new reactors are safe, but why build any more, and why keep running unsafe ones. China has suspended reactor approvals. Germany just shut down the oldest 41 percent of its nuclear capacity for study. America’s nuclear lobby says it can’t happen here, so pile on lavish new subsidies.

A durable myth claims Three Mile Island halted U.S. nuclear orders. Actually they stopped over a year before — dead of an incurable attack of market forces. No doubt when nuclear power’s collapse in the global marketplace, already years old, is finally acknowledged, it will be blamed on Fukushima. While we pray for the best in Japan today, let us hope its people’s sacrifice will help speed the world to a safer, more competitive energy future.

Whole Earth Discipline, by Stewart Brand (Viking, 2009)I have known Stewart Brand as a friend for many years. I have admired his original and iconoclastic work, which has had significant impact. In his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto (Viking), he argues that environmentalists should change their thinking about four issues: population, nuclear power, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and urbanization. Many people have asked me to assess his 41-page chapter on nuclear power, so I’ll do that here, because I believe its conclusions are greatly mistaken.

Stewart recently predicted that I wouldn’t accept his nuclear reassessment. He is quite right. His nuclear chapter’s facts and logic do not hold up to scrutiny. Over the past few years, I’ve sent him five technical papers focused mainly on nuclear power’s comparative economics and performance. He says he’s read them, and on p. 98 he even summarizes part of their economic thesis. Yet on p. 104 he says, “We Greens are not economists” and disclaims knowledge of economics, saying environmentalists use it only as a weapon to stop projects. Today, most dispassionate analysts think new nuclear power plants’ deepest flaw is their economics. They cost too much to build and incur too much financial risk. My writings show why nuclear expansion therefore can’t deliver on its claims: it would reduce and retard climate protection, because it saves between two and 20 times less carbon per dollar, 20 to 40 times slower, than investing in efficiency and micropower.

That conclusion rests on empirical data about how much new nuclear electricity actually costs relative to decentralized and efficiency competitors, how these alternatives compare in capacity and output added per year, and which can most effectively save carbon. Stewart’s chapter says nothing about any of these questions, but I believe they’re at the heart of the matter. If nuclear power is unneeded, uncompetitive, or ineffective in climate protection, let alone all three, then we need hardly debate whether its safety and waste issues are resolved, as he claims.

In its first half-century, nuclear power fell short of its forecast capacity by about 12-fold in the U.S. and 30-fold worldwide, mainly because building it cost several-fold more than expected, straining or bankrupting its owners. The many causes weren’t dominated by U.S. citizen interventions and lawsuits, since nuclear expectations collapsed similarly in countries without such events; even France suffered a 3.5-fold rise in real capital costs during 1970-2000. Nor did the Three Mile Island accident halt U.S. orders: they’d stopped the previous year. Rather, nuclear’s key challenge was soaring capital cost, and for some units, poor performance. Operational improvements in the ’90s made the better old reactors relatively cheap to run, but Stewart’s case is for building new ones. Have their economics improved enough to prevent a rerun?

On the contrary, a 2003 MIT study found new U.S. nuclear plants couldn’t compete with new coal- or gas-fired plants. Over the next five years, nuclear construction costs about tripled. Was this due to pricey commodities like steel and concrete? No; those totaled less than one percent of total capital cost. Were citizen activists again to blame? No; they’d been neutralized by streamlined licensing, adverse courts, and Federal “delay insurance.” The key causes seem to be bottlenecked supply chains, atrophied skills, and a weak U.S. dollar — all widening the cost gap between new nuclear power and its potent new competitors.

Today’s main alternatives aren’t limited to giant power plants burning coal or natural gas. Decentralized sources provide from one-sixth to more than half of all electricity in a dozen industrial countries and, together with more efficient use, deliver the majority of the world’s new electrical services. Booming orders did lately raise wind-turbine and photovoltaic prices too, but they’re headed back down as capacity catches up; PVs got one-fourth cheaper just in the past year, and reactor-scale PV farms compete successfully in California power auctions. New U.S. wind farms — “firmed” to provide reliable power even if becalmed — sell electricity at less than typical wholesale prices, or at a third to a half the cost utilities project for new nuclear plants.

Rather than viewing nuclear power within this real-world competitive landscape, Stewart simply waves away its competitors. He praises efficient use of electricity, but rejects it because he says it can’t by itself replace all coal and power all global development. He also dismisses wind and solar power, and omits small hydro, geothermal, waste/biomass combustion, all other renewables, and cogeneration. Yet worldwide these sources make more electricity than nuclear power does, and for the past three years, have won about 10-25 times its market share and added about 20-40 times more capacity each year.

The world in 2008 invested more in renewable power than in fossil-fueled power. Why? Because renewables are cheaper, faster, vaster, equally or more carbon-free, and more attractive to investors. Worldwide, distributed renewables in 2008 added 40 billion watts and got $100 billion of private investment; nuclear added and got zero, despite its far larger subsidies and generally stronger government support. From August 2005 to August 2008, with new subsidies equivalent to 100+% of construction cost and with the most robust nuclear politics and capital markets in history, the 33 proposed U.S. nuclear projects got not a cent of private equity investment.

Nonetheless, Stewart rejects all non-nuclear options, for four fallacious reasons:

• Baseload: Wind and photovoltaics can’t keep the lights on because they can’t run 24/7.
• Footprint: Photovoltaics need about 150-175 times, and wind farms from 600+ to nearly 900 times, more land than nuclear power to produce the same electricity.
• Portfolio: We need every tool for combating climate change, including nuclear power.
• Government role: The climate imperative trumps economics, so governments everywhere must and will do what France did — ensure that nuclear power gets built, regardless of economics or dissent.

I believe each claim is unsupportable:

Baseload: The electricity system doesn’t rely on any plant’s ability to run continuously; rather, all plants together supply the grid, and the grid serves all loads. That’s necessary because no kind of power plant can run all the time, as Stewart says they must do to meet steady loads. I repeat: there is not and has never been a need for any particular plant or kind of plant to run all the time, and none can. All power plants fail, varying only in their failures’ size, duration, frequency, predictability, and cause. Solar cells’ and windpower’s variation with night and weather is no different from the intermittence of coal and nuclear plants, except that it affects less capacity at once, more briefly, far more predictably, and is no harder and probably easier and cheaper to manage. In short, the ability to serve steady loads is a statistical attribute of all plants on the grid, not an operational requirement for one plant. Variability (predictable failure) and intermittence (unpredictable failure) must be managed by diversifying type and location, forecasting, and integrating with other resources. Utilities do this every day, balancing diverse resources to meet fluctuating demand and offset outages. Even with a largely (or probably a wholly) renewable grid, this is not a significant problem or cost, either in theory or in practice — as illustrated by areas that are already 30-40% wind-powered.

Footprint: Stewart understates nuclear power’s land-use by about 43-fold by omitting all land used by exclusion zones and the nuclear fuel chain. Conversely, he includes the space between wind or solar equipment — unused land commonly used for farming, grazing, wildlife, and recreation. That’s like claiming that two lampposts require a parking lot’s worth of space, even though 99% of the lot is used for parking, driving, and walking. Properly measured, per kilowatt-hour produced, the land made unavailable for other uses is about the same for ground-mounted photovoltaics as for nuclear power, sometimes less — or zero, for building-mounted PVs sufficient to power the world many times over. Land actually used per kWh is up to thousands of times smaller for windpower than for nuclear power. If land-use were an important criterion for picking energy systems, which it’s generally not, it would thus reverse Stewart’s footprint conclusion.

Portfolio: The one paper he cites as proof that we need all energy options (Pacala & Socolow’s “Stabilization Wedges“) actually says the opposite. There is no analytic basis for his conclusion, and there’s strong science to the contrary. We can’t afford to stuff our energy portfolio indiscriminately with some of everything, and we shouldn’t: some options are less worthy and effective than others. The more you fear climate change, the more judiciously you should invest to get the most solution per dollar and per year. Nuclear flunks both these tests.

Government: If nuclear power isn’t needed, worsens climate change (vs. more effective solutions) and energy security, and can’t compete in the marketplace despite uniquely big subsidies — all evidence-based findings unexamined in Stewart’s chapter — then his nuclear imperative evaporates. Of course, a few countries with centrally planned energy systems, mostly with socialized costs, are building reactors: over two-thirds of all nuclear plants under construction are in China, Russia, India, or South Korea. But that’s more because their nuclear bureaucracies dominate national energy policy and face little or no competition in technologies, business models, and ideas. Nuclear power requires such a system. The competitors beating nuclear power thrive in democracies and free markets.

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Stewart’s reputation and his valuable prior contributions to clear thinking for a better world may win his nuclear views some attention. Yet judged on its merits, not his history, this nuclear chapter’s assertions can only worsen climate and security risks.