Al Gore’s Choice & Hurricane Victims Sue Oil Companies
November 10th, 2009
Al Gore’s long-awaited follow up to ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is in bookstores. ‘Our Choice’ is a master plan for fighting climate change. Joining host Mike Tidwell to talk about the book is Joe Romm. Joe is the author of the website Climate Progress and the author of the book Hell or High Water.
Then speaking of high water, we review a lawsuit by victims of Hurricane Katrina against the oil companies that they say contributed to the ferocity of the storm. We speak to Hannah McCrea, the author of the website Warming Law, and F. Gerald Maples, the lead attorney in the case.
If you’d like to hear this edition of Earthbeat – please send us an e-mail
November 13th, 2009 at 2:58 am
I laughed as I heard the discussion between Joe Romm and Mike Tidwell about Gore’s new book. You’d almost think Al Gore’s book didn’t have a chapter on nuclear power. Gore writes that the technology remains “seductive”, but he dumps all over it. “In the world’s debate” Gore says, nuclear is: “the radioactive white elephant in the middle of the room”.
There are many others who would just say it is the elephant in the room. A white elephant is something that is costly and useless, and that is how Gore in “Our Choice” portrays nuclear. But if you go to the sources he quotes from you see a different picture.
He quotes from an M.I.T. study “The Future of Nuclear Power’. According to Gore, this study was “massive”. It was conducted by: “the experts at M.I.T.”. They know. According to Gore, M.I.T. says “nuclear power faces stagnation and decline”.
Now if you read that 2003 study and its 2009 update you find MIT was comparing various baseload power generation technologies and found that nuclear would be competitive with the new coal and gas of today if a price was put on CO2 emissions, as Gore calls for. This makes nuclear the cost competitive low carbon technology of choice. The MIT levelized cost estimates for coal and gas without CCS are 6 – 7 cents a kWhr, with nuclear coming in at 8 – 9 cents. MIT defined “levelized” as “the most common basis used for comparing the cost of power from competing technologies”. The panel published a chart showing that if a price was put on carbon emissions, this cost difference disappears for coal and almost disappears for gas. The price of the fuel itself makes up a far greater percentage of the cost of electricity generated with coal and gas compared to nuclear: as people predict rising prices for fuels of all types, this is a factor in favor of nuclearl. The panel also pointed out that Wall street had assigned a risk factor to loans, given nuclear past history in the US, that would decline with success, if that could be achieved.
One of Gore’s favored technologies is CST, concentrated solar thermal. In “Our Choice”, he describes Desertec, one big project currently being touted which is supposed to generate CST in the Northern Sahara and the Middle East deserts and transmit it north, up new HVDC lines to power part of Europe.
He describes this solar power project, but carefully avoids discussion of what power generated by it would cost per kWhr. This is his approach throughout the nuclear chapter as well. Its as if he didn’t want us to know which type of power was more expensive, even as he assures us nuclear costs too much. If you look up the study for Desertec, you find their own levelized cost estimate for their power to be in the range of 12.8 – 16.7 cents kWhr. Contrast this to the “radioactive white elephant” power at 8 – 9 cents kWhr.
Desertec’s vision is to sell into European grids only at the time of day when the price is the highest. They don’t envision being able to supply competitive baseload. Nuclear is baseload.
Gore presses on with his case. It is fashionable in anti nuclear circles these days to revise history and brand people who look it up as revisionist. Gore is a classier debater than most- all he says in this vein is “in the popular imagination, the blame for all the problems of the nuclear industry is often assigned to two factors – first is the combined effect of … Three Mile Island… and Chernobyl…. second is … long term storage of radioactive waste….”
It wasn’t Three Mile Island, Gore tells us. Gore is sticking with his it failed because its too costly line.
The “real” problem, Gore says, (other than the threat of nuclear proliferation), is the “grossly unacceptable economics of the present generation of reactors”.
Gore dug up a Forbes magazine article that had some great ammunition in it. You will want to read that article to refresh your mind, if you are as old as me, for some insight into why and how the US industry floundered. You couldn’t make stuff like this up. It is astonishing. But the case made in Forbes differs radically from Gore’s case in Our Choice.
Forbes, written in 1985, too early to be revisionist history: “Of all the woes that descended on the U.S. nuclear industry, beginning in 1978 – high inflation, high interest rates, slackening demand, – none was to prove more traumatic than the accident at Three Mile Island”.
Moving right along. Forbes, same article dug up by Gore: “nuclear power is dead – dead in the near term as a hedge against rising oil prices and dead in the long run as a source of future energy. Nobody really disputes that”. You can see why Gore would want to take that quote.
I wonder why he didn’t also take this quote, from the same article: “It wasn’t the technology that doomed nuclear power in the U.S. As experience everywhere demonstrates, the technology is as sound and productive as its promoters always have claimed it would be”.
The article didn’t describe that nuclear power per se was dead: it described that it was dead in the US. It was written to answer the question: “why did the U.S. fail where the French, Germans, and Japanese succeeded?” The article quoted Commonwealth Edison’s Chairman O’Connor: “American engineering, American equipment, American constructors are building plants all over the world and bringing them in at roughly one-quarter to one-third the cost of plants in the U.S. We can do it technically. We have to learn to do it institutionally”.
I mean, I generally agree with Romm and Tidwell about Gore’s book “Our Choice”, it is a great primer. But the chapter on nuclear shows all the trouble so-called “progressives are having with that issue. If nuclear is what they say it is why can’t they come up with better arguments and sources? Why tell me MIT are the experts then argue as if they did not assess what the cost is and expect me not to look it up? Why go to Forbes for a quote and write as if they support you in your belief nuclear can’t work anywhere when what Forbes is saying it only didn’t work in the US?
Gore has, on page 246, a chart taken from what he calls a “now famous” study by McKinsey, the “global GHG abatement cost curve”. In fine print at the bottom it says “adapted”. If you compare it to the actual McKinsey chart as published, you will see: he’s removed the label “nuclear” from the chart. He did it so you don’t see where McKinsey’s assessment of the potential of nuclear power comes in. I’m not making this up.
McKinsey says that nuclear, Gore’s “radioactive white elephant in the room”, the power source with the “grossly unacceptable economics”, is going to be cheaper per tonne of CO2 avoided than wind, cheaper than solar PV, cheaper than solar CST, and cheaper than coal with CCS.
McKinsey publishes different ways of looking at things. Their entire report is a great read. Take a look at their “Capital intensity by abatement measure” chart: nuclear tops all sources Gore touts, except “power plant biomass cofiring”. Gore might not want you to see where nuclear fits in that chart either – it not only shows nuclear as less capital intensive than everything Gore wants but it also shows “Cars plug in hybrid” as the highest capital intensity of all, in terms of capital investment per tonne CO2 abated.
Gore has declared, rightly in my mind, that we face a “planetary emergency”. Stephen Chu stated in his Senate confirmation hearing that “we should look at nuclear with new eyes”. One way I look at this is to ask why is it that people like Gore, who slaved away for years telling us all to listen to the scientists as they warned about the danger of climate change, why does Gore now suddenly want us to ignore the scientists, like Chu, who say the solutions include nuclear?
The decision about nuclear in the US was made when it was not generally appreciated how dangerous emitting CO2 was. Gore has provided civilization with a great service as he succeeded where many others failed in waking people up to the nature of the problem.
Why is he distorting what is known about nuclear power?