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By Susie Weldon
One of the “godfathers of environmentalism” was in Bristol on Monday with a message that most greens will find both shocking and heretical. Stewart Brand told a 400-strong audience at St George’s, Bristol:
- There was “no hope” of mitigating against climate change;
- Nuclear power was the only way we could provide enough clean energy for the world;
- Cities were greener than the countryside;
- Genetically modified crops were necessary to feed the world’s growing population.
Brand is widely regarded as one of the great visionaries of the environmental movement. Now aged over 70, the American was invited to Bristol as part of the city’s Festival of Ideas.
Stewart Brand: Dire warnings
He outlined the thesis of his latest book, Whole Earth Discipline, in a fascinating and disturbing discussion with the musician and cultural critic Brian Eno at St George’s.
Brand was himself once opposed to nuclear energy and the use of GM. But he says the climate threat is so enormous that we have no choice but to embrace these technologies if we are to avoid a cataclysmic deterioration of the earth’s resources.
Global warming was happening much faster than predicted, he said. The melting of the Arctic ice had begun 30-40 years faster than predicted by climate models. “We are terraforming the earth and we can’t stop,” he said. “There are too many of us doing too much. We can either do it badly or we can do it well.”
Renewable energy was simply not going to be able to produce the amount of energy needed, he said. To produce two gigawatts of energy, a wind farm would need 100,000 square miles and 2.6million turbines, while a solar electric farm would need 30,000 square miles.
In contrast, to provide the same amount of energy from nuclear would take just 3,900 reactors. Nuclear’s lifetime carbon emissions were low (on a level with wind and solar) and its waste was miniscule compared to current fossil fuel plants, he said.
Even better, tomorrow’s reactors would run off the waste produced by today’s nuclear plants. “The US has been burning Soviet nuclear weapons for the last decade,” he said. “Ten per cent of our electricity comes from Soviet nuclear weapons, and we haven’t even started on US weapons yet.”
A new generation of sealed, transportable micro reactors, producing 25 megawatts, was being built and offered the prospect that individual towns would be in charge of producing their own power.
“Lots of power shortages are due to problems in the grid, not to problems with the power plant,” he said.
On GM, Brand said he was persuaded it was “absolutely the way to go. GM food crops have been the most successful breakthrough in agriculture, maybe ever, and are being adopted everywhere except Europe”.
GM was the only way we could achieve serious gains in yields to feed the world’s growing population, he said, but also brought other benefits such as peanuts which did not create allergies, rice which contained cholera vaccine and carrots with as much calcium as dairy products.
Brand’s message may have been heretical to many members of the Bristol audience, who were clearly a well-informed and concerned bunch. But it was impossible not to be horrified by his devastating analysis of the crisis facing us.
Global warming meant global drying, he said – and that meant a future in which countries would fight over resources and to prevent themselves being swamped by huge numbers of environmental refugees.
Brand cited the giant glaciers of the Himalayas as an example. Their summer glacial melt feeds the river systems that supply water to 40% of humanity but they are shrinking due to global warming, producing less water every year.
“What’s going to happen when the people upstream decide to hold on to the water that feeds the people downstream?” he asked. “And some of the people downstream have nuclear weapons.”
Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, £19.99, is published by Atlantic Books.
Further reading
Chris, the technology breakthroughs that are required for storage of wind/solar energy (most likely in subterranean, cooled-liquid H2) are as nothing compared to the breakthroughs required to make the limited global Uranium/Thorium reserves stretch to powering the whole globe at western levels of power usage.
SteveL, the subtext of the US National Ignition Facility is the production of ultra-powerful lasers and micro-thermo-nuclear explosive devices. Hmmm. I wonder what those to could also be used for? No thanks! You wont get me going near that nonsense for the same reason as you wont get me supporting fast-breeder reactors that hand useful plutonium reserves to every country that runs one.
If the choice of futures is one with global warming vs one with every nutty dictatorship armed to the teeth with nukes, micro-thermo-nukes and devastating battlefield lasers then I’ll take my risks with the former, thanks. It’s a matter of risk analysis really. History suggests to me that humans are better able to cope with climate changes than they are with the possession of devastating weapons.
Pure Uranium can only be mined efficiently for a limited time; it takes more energy to extract from the sea than you gain. Thorium-cycle fission would last longer, but there is the small problem that India hasn’t got it to work yet. That leaves MOX Uranium+Plutonium fuel and even fast-breeder processes, both of which have fairly messy recycling processes.
Then there’s fusion. It would be really, really good if we could get this to work, but you have to look at 50 years of work on the Tokamak design, and you have to say “is this the right approach”. The EU projects like ITER think so, but things like the US National Ignition Facility looks more pragmatic to me.
Returning to wind+solar, it’s rare that you get both off at the same time, especially if your solar is actually in the sahara desert and the wind out past Lundy.
-Steve
(not a physicist, but I have worked in High Energy experiments)
There’s a rather glaring problem with wind and solar power. You get nothing when the wind doesn’t blow or when the sun doeasn’t shine. There aren’t as yet any practical means for the large scale storage of electrical energy so you need other power generation to cover those periods when wind and solar don’t deliver.
That means a duplication of generating and distribution capacity which is very inefficient and expensive. If the alternative generating capacity is nuclear then you might as well not bother with the wind and solar in the first place. And if the alternative generation is fossil fuelled then you still have significant carbon dioxide output.
The 4500 million tonnes of uranium in the ocean have an interesting implication: all the known high-grade uranium deposits on land could be mined out, and all their uranium thoroughly mixed into the sea, and the amount in the sea — 3.2 milligrams per cubic metre — would not detectably change.
Moreover, the cost to the people buying it and dumping it would be less than governments make in a year on fossil fuels. A few million affluent civil servants could shut down the world’s nuclear power industry within a year or two, within the time it takes on-site fuel loads to be used up — *if* they believed what ‘w00dburner’ says he believes.
And they would have a financial motive to do it, because each dollar they would spend in this way would return to them several times over as natural gas royalties and taxes.
A billion cars have been built. Why not 5 million wind turbines?
100 square miles of solar collectors in desert space seems easy. What am I missing here?
I believe there’s only 40 yrs worth of uranium for nuclear power, It’s neither renewable nor sustainable and there is no safe method of waste management nor is there any method of decomissioning that doesn’t run into many billions and leave a legacy of concrete wastelands. The only real beneficiaries are the companies that cream off the profits. As usual.
Support for GM and Nuclear? Possibly controversial.
The idea that denser living arrangements (i.e. cities) are better? Spot on. Suburban and countryside living, when most employment is in urban settings, is *deeply* eco-hostile.
I was in the audience on Monday but was not ’shocked’ by anything he said, although I may have been in the minority in that respect. I found his analysis pragmatic and sensible. All options have risks and costs, but as far as we can see, if we look objectively at the available evidence, those associated with nuclear power or GM crops are much lower than the alternatives.