When I was a boy, my parents would
sometimes take my sister and me camping in the desert. A lot of people
think deserts are empty, but my parents taught us to see the wildlife
all around us, including hawks, eagles, and tortoises.
After college, I moved to California to
work on environmental campaigns. I helped save the state’s last ancient
redwood forest and blocked a proposed radioactive waste repository set
for the desert.
In 2002, shortly after I turned 30, I
decided I wanted to dedicate myself to addressing climate change. I was
worried that global warming would end up destroying many of the natural
environments that people had worked so hard to protect.
I thought the solutions were pretty
straightforward: solar panels on every roof, electric cars in every
driveway, etc. The main obstacles, I believed, were political. And so I helped
organize a coalition of America’s largest labor unions and
environmental groups. Our proposal was for a $300 billion dollar
investment in renewables. We would not only prevent climate change but
also create millions of new jobs in a fast-growing high-tech sector.
Our efforts paid off in 2007 when
then-presidential candidate Barack Obama embraced our vision. Between
2009–15, the U.S. invested $150 billion dollars in renewables and other
forms of clean tech. But right away we ran into trouble.
The first was around land use.
Electricity from solar roofs costs about twice as much as electricity
from solar farms, but solar and wind farms require huge amounts of land.
That, along with the fact that solar and wind farms require long new
transmissions lines, and are opposed by local communities and
conservationists trying to preserve wildlife, particularly birds.
Another challenge was the intermittent
nature of solar and wind energies. When the sun stops shining and the
wind stops blowing, you have to quickly be able to ramp up another
source of energy.
Happily, there were a lot of people
working on solutions. One solution was to convert California’s dams into
big batteries. The idea was that, when the sun was shining and the wind
was blowing, you could pump water uphill, store it for later, and then
run it over the turbines to make electricity when you needed it.
Other problems didn’t seem like such a big deal, on closer examination. For example, after I learned that house cats kill billions of birds every year it put into perspective the nearly one million birds killed by wind turbines.
It seemed to me that most, if not all, of
the problems from scaling up solar and wind energies could be solved
through more technological innovation.
But, as the years went by, the problems
persisted and in some cases grew worse. For example, California is a
world leader when it comes to renewables but we haven’t converted our
dams into batteries, partly for geographic reasons. You need the right
kind of dam and reservoirs, and even then it’s an expensive retrofit.
A bigger problem is that there are many other uses for the water
that accumulates behind dams, namely irrigation and cities. And because
the water in our rivers and reservoirs is scarce and unreliable, the
water from dams for those other purposes is becoming ever-more precious.
Without large-scale ways to back-up solar energy California has had to block electricity coming from solar farms when it’s extremely sunny, or pay neighboring states to take it from us so we can avoid blowing-out our grid.
Despite what you’ve heard, there is no “battery revolution” on the way, for well-understood technical and economic reasons.
As for house cats, they don’t kill big,
rare, threatened birds. What house cats kill are small, common birds,
like sparrows, robins and jays. What kills big, threatened, and endangered birds—birds that could go extinct—like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors, are wind turbines.
In fact, wind turbines are the most
serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The
rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds
never evolved to deal with.
Solar farms have similarly large
ecological impacts. Building a solar farm is a lot like building any
other kind of farm. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife.
In order to build one of the biggest
solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull
threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.
As we were learning of these impacts, it
gradually dawned on me that there was no amount of technological
innovation that could solve the fundamental problem with renewables.
You can make solar panels cheaper and
wind turbines bigger, but you can’t make the sun shine more regularly or
the wind blow more reliably. I came to understand the environmental
implications of the physics of energy. In order to produce significant
amounts of electricity from weak energy flows, you just have to spread
them over enormous areas. In other words, the trouble with renewables
isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.
Dealing with energy sources that are inherently unreliable, and require large amounts of land, comes at a high economic cost.
There’s been a lot of publicity about how
solar panels and wind turbines have come down in cost. But those
one-time cost savings from making them in big Chinese factories have
been outweighed by the high cost of dealing with their unreliability.
Consider California. Between 2011–17 the cost of solar panels declined about 75 percent, and yet our electricity prices rose five times more
than they did in the rest of the U.S. It’s the same story in Germany,
the world leader in solar and wind energy. Its electricity prices
increased 50 percent between 2006–17, as it scaled up renewables.
I used to think that dealing with climate
change was going to be expensive. But I could no longer believe this
after looking at Germany and France.
Germany’s carbon emissions have been flat
since 2009, despite an investment of $580 billion by 2025 in a
renewables-heavy electrical grid, a 50 percent rise in electricity cost.
Meanwhile, France produces one-tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as Germany and pays little more than half for its electricity. How? Through nuclear power.
Then, under pressure from Germany, France spent $33 billion
on renewables, over the last decade. What was the result? A rise in the
carbon intensity of its electricity supply, and higher electricity
prices, too.
What about all the headlines about
expensive nuclear and cheap solar and wind? They are largely an illusion
resulting from the fact that 70 to 80 percent of the costs of building
nuclear plants are up-front, whereas the costs given for solar and wind
don’t include the high cost of transmission lines, new dams, or other
forms of battery.
It’s reasonable to ask whether nuclear power is safe, and what happens with its waste.
It turns out that scientists have studied
the health and safety of different energy sources since the 1960s.
Every major study, including a recent one by the British medical journal Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity.
Strange as it sounds, nuclear power
plants are so safe for the same reason nuclear weapons are so dangerous.
The uranium used as fuel in power plants and as material for bombs can
create one million times more heat per its mass than its fossil fuel and
gunpowder equivalents.
It’s not so much about the fuel as the
process. We release more energy breaking atoms than breaking chemical
bonds. What’s special about uranium atoms is that they are easy to
split.
Because nuclear plants produce heat
without fire, they emit no air pollution in the form of smoke. By
contrast, the smoke from burning fossil fuels and biomass results in the
premature deaths of seven million people per year, according to the World Health Organization.
Even during the worst accidents, nuclear
plants release small amounts of radioactive particulate matter from the
tiny quantities of uranium atoms split apart to make heat.
Over an 80-year lifespan, fewer than 200 people will die
from the radiation from the worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl, and zero
will die from the small amounts of radiant particulate matter that
escaped from Fukushima.
As a result, the climate scientist James Hanson and a colleague found that nuclear plants have actually saved nearly two million lives to date that would have been lost to air pollution.
Thanks to its energy density, nuclear
plants require far less land than renewables. Even in sunny California, a
solar farm requires 450 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear plant.
Energy-dense nuclear requires far less in
the way of materials, and produces far less in the way of waste
compared to energy-dilute solar and wind.
A single Coke can’s worth of uranium
provides all of the energy that the most gluttonous American or
Australian lifestyle requires. At the end of the process, the high-level
radioactive waste that nuclear plants produce is the very same Coke can
of (used) uranium fuel. The reason nuclear is the best energy from an
environmental perspective is because it produces so little waste and
none enters the environment as pollution.
All of the waste fuel from 45 years of the Swiss nuclear program can fit, in canisters, on a basketball court-like warehouse, where like all spent nuclear fuel, it has never hurt a fly.
By contrast, solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste.
We tend to think of solar panels as
clean, but the truth is that there is no plan anywhere to deal with
solar panels at the end of their 20 to 25 year lifespan.
Experts fear
solar panels will be shipped, along with other forms of electronic
waste, to be disassembled—or, more often, smashed with hammers—by poor
communities in Africa and Asia, whose residents will be exposed to the
dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.
Wherever I travel in the world I ask
ordinary people what they think about nuclear and renewable energies.
After saying they know next to nothing, they admit that nuclear is
strong and renewables are weak. Their intuitions are correct. What most
of us get wrong—understandably—is that weak energies are safer.
But aren’t renewables safer? The answer is no. Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants.
In other words, the energy density of the fuel determines its environmental and health impacts.
Spreading more mines and more equipment over larger areas of land is
going to have larger environmental and human safety impacts.
It’s true that you can stand next to a
solar panel without much harm while if you stand next to a nuclear
reactor at full power you’ll die.
But when it comes to generating power for
billions of people, it turns out that producing solar and wind
collectors, and spreading them over large areas, has vastly worse
impacts on humans and wildlife alike.
Our intuitive sense that sunlight is
dilute sometimes shows up in films. That’s why nobody was shocked when
the recent sequel of the dystopian sci-fi flick, “Blade Runner,” opened
with a dystopian scene of California’s deserts paved with solar farms
identical to the one that decimated desert tortoises.
Over the last several hundred years,
human beings have been moving away from matter-dense fuels towards
energy-dense ones. First we move from renewable fuels like wood, dung,
and windmills, and towards the fossil fuels of coal, oil, and natural
gas, and eventually to uranium.
Energy progress is overwhelmingly
positive for people and nature. As we stop using wood for fuel we allow
grasslands and forests to grow back, and the wildlife to return.
As we stop burning wood and dung in our
homes, we no longer must breathe toxic indoor smoke. And as we move from
fossil fuels to uranium we clear the outdoor air of pollution, and
reduce how much we’ll heat up the planet.
Nuclear plants are thus a revolutionary
technology—a grand historical break from fossil fuels as significant as
the industrial transition from wood to fossil fuels before it.
The problem with nuclear is that it is unpopular, a victim of a 50 year-long concerted effort by fossil fuel, renewable energy, anti-nuclear weapons campaigners, and misanthropic environmentalists to ban the technology.
In response, the nuclear industry suffers
battered wife syndrome, and constantly apologizes for its best
attributes, from its waste to its safety.
Lately, the nuclear industry has promoted
the idea that, in order to deal with climate change, “we need a mix of
clean energy sources,” including solar, wind and nuclear. It was
something I used to believe, and say, in part because it’s what people
want to hear. The problem is that it’s not true.
France shows
that moving from mostly nuclear electricity to a mix of nuclear and
renewables results in more carbon emissions, due to using more natural
gas, and higher prices, to the unreliability of solar and wind.
Oil and gas investors know this, which is why they made a political alliance with renewables companies, and why oil and gas companies have been spending millions of dollars on advertisements promoting solar, and funneling millions of dollars to said environmental groups to provide public relations cover.
What is to be done? The most important
thing is for scientists and conservationists to start telling the truth
about renewables and nuclear, and the relationship between energy
density and environmental impact.
Bat scientists recently warned that wind
turbines are on the verge of making one species, the Hoary bat, a
migratory bat species, go extinct.
Another scientist who worked to build that gigantic solar farm in the California desert told High Country News,
“Everybody knows that translocation of desert tortoises doesn’t work.
When you’re walking in front of a bulldozer, crying, and moving animals,
and cacti out of the way, it’s hard to think that the project is a good
idea.”
I think it’s natural that those of us who
became active on climate change gravitated toward renewables. They
seemed like a way to harmonize human society with the natural world.
Collectively, we have been suffering from an appeal-to-nature fallacy no
different from the one that leads us to buy products at the supermarket
labeled “all natural.” But it’s high time that those of us who
appointed ourselves Earth’s guardians should take a second look at the
science, and start questioning the impacts of our actions.
Now that we know that renewables can’t save the planet, are we really going to stand by and let them destroy it?
