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Nuclear power issues and choices
Book Reviews Nuclear Report
Power
Issues and Choices
of Nuclear
Energy Policy Study Group (Chairman:
S. M. Keeny)
Ballinger Publishing Company, Cambridge, Mass., 1977, xvii + 418 pp, f11.00/818.15 (cloth) A nation sitting on some 40% of the non-communist world’s uranium reserves, and intent on promoting a reactor system which is dependent on plentiful uranium supplies may be expected to take a different view of future nuclear policy from that of less well endowed nations. Nuclear Power Issues and Choices is the report of a Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group under the Chairmanship of Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr, and sponsored by the Ford Foundation. As such it clearly played a part in determining the present American ‘throw away’ nuclear fuel policy. Short-term economic issues viewed in a most parochial context appear to be the dominant factors in planning future strategy and the fast breeder is relegated to a minor role as insurance against possible future energy costs if additional energy reserves do not become available. Indeed (p 94) the importation of uranium by the United States is cheerfully contemplated. Despite these conclusions, disturbing as they may be to the development aspirations of other nations, the book is a source of well presented and up to date factual information, including the nearest one has seen to a realistic assessment of the comparative risks and environmental impact of coal and nuclear fuels. Predictably the Light Water Moderated Reactor is the only system considered in addition to the Fast Breeder, but even then the balance is markedly in favour of nuclear power. Yet the authors appear to support the myth that nuclear weapons development is largely dependent on the availability of spent commercial reactor fuel for reprocessing, which is demonstrably incorrect from the history of the nuclear weapons programme in the United States and elsewhere. The problem of nuclear waste management is treated realistically as are the prospects for new alternative energy sources. The book is well written and bears few signs of having been produced by a committee; it is good value for money. It assumes a uniformly modest standard of technical knowledge which should make it comprehensible to the informed layman. The ‘Choices’, however, are those open to the United States rather than to the rest of us. S. E. Hunt
Soft Energy Paths: Toward Amory
Penguin
a Durable
Peace
B. Lovins
Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, UK, 1977, 231 pp,
95P Energy or Extinction?
The Case for Nuclear
Energy
Fred Hoyle
Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, London, 1977, 81 pp. fl.50 These two books reflect in some measure a most important decision that should be made in principle within five years if those of us in industrially advanced countries with more than forty years to live are to be spared considerable inconvenience and discomfort: do we aim at an energy policy
60
FUEL, 1978, Vol57,
January
that can last for a millenium at least, and if so, do we aim in the first place mainly at atomic fission, or at a mix of simpler technologies primarily employing direct solar energy and its partial derivatives wind and wave power? Lovins writes persuasively in favour of the second choice. To him a hard energy path is one involving large-scale technology; a soft energy path is flexible, resilient, sustainable and benign (also a mixture of small-scale methods scaled to the needs of the consumer). The two are not technologically incompatible but they are said to be so otherwise (e.g. in demands on capital and in social effects). He argues that the soft path has many advantages as well as eventual cheapness, and apparently that a unit of energy thus produced is more socially effective than a unit of ‘hard-path’ energy. He maintains that economic comparisons of ‘soft’ methods should be made with the replacement cost of a hard path when existing resources run out, which leads to a very different picture from the usual ‘economic’ comparison. As often happens, both books share a conviction of urgency: Lovins (not greater than 20 years) because the upward trend of the hard-path energy consumption renders reversal without hardship increasingly improbable and because delay will increase tensions between haves and haveriots;; Hoyle because the decision must be made before fossil fuels effectively run out (less than a hundred years with the enhanced world consumption he recommends). And neither is really enthusiastic about the eventual possibility of fusion power, Lovins on principle, and Hoyle because a long-term viable system must fuse only deuterium nuclei, which requires temperatures (already very high) an order of magnitude higher than fusing deuterium with tritium, and corresponding further losses and delay. Lovins recommends decentralization, and gradually raising energy prices to more realistic levels in terms of future substitution. (Even human labour costs, he says, are three times those of inanimate energy.) Technical decisions are urgent. Labour costs and high capital costs are pressing on the available reserves of effort in the U.S. Electricity is a great offender, particularly by being used in part for lowgrade applications. U.S. energy savings, probably by factors of 3 or 4, are possible (x2 by 2000 A.D.); they are a much cheaper and better method of cutting the increasing energy ‘gap’. Even a modest U.S. conservation effort could reduce primary energy demand to 101-126 x 1Ol5 Btu p.a. ~lO*” J p.a.). A projected soft-path curve leads to 75 x 10’ B J p.a. in Figure 2-2, but the projected hard-path curve leads to 225 x lOIs J p.a. (Figure 2-l), both in 2025 A.D.; i.e. conservation could turn the curve downward instead of upward! The usual methods of renewable energy production are proposed, with newer methods of using coal to cover the transition period. Thus fossil fuels would be used mainly to buy time. Soft paths could involve everyone, being in general simple to install, service and comprehend. Lovins maintains that there are cost advantages in soft paths to both the U.S. and Europe even now. He points to the big ‘political’ costs of hard technologies (also of soft ones if their initial introduction is delayed until drastic changes are needed). This book attempts to discuss too many aspects of this complex subject to avoid some superficial treatment, but its general relevance is most clear. Detailed faults are difficult to pinpoint except where relatively unimportant. The author underemphasizes the outstanding technical problems (e.g. in solar heating, and the dispersion of pollution sources in the transition period), and the political resistance to changing a way of life. But in 20 years time change will become more difficult, not less. Critiques by ‘moderate’ authors of an earlier article have
Power
Issues and Choices
of Nuclear
Energy Policy Study Group (Chairman:
S. M. Keeny)
Ballinger Publishing Company, Cambridge, Mass., 1977, xvii + 418 pp, f11.00/818.15 (cloth) A nation sitting on some 40% of the non-communist world’s uranium reserves, and intent on promoting a reactor system which is dependent on plentiful uranium supplies may be expected to take a different view of future nuclear policy from that of less well endowed nations. Nuclear Power Issues and Choices is the report of a Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group under the Chairmanship of Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr, and sponsored by the Ford Foundation. As such it clearly played a part in determining the present American ‘throw away’ nuclear fuel policy. Short-term economic issues viewed in a most parochial context appear to be the dominant factors in planning future strategy and the fast breeder is relegated to a minor role as insurance against possible future energy costs if additional energy reserves do not become available. Indeed (p 94) the importation of uranium by the United States is cheerfully contemplated. Despite these conclusions, disturbing as they may be to the development aspirations of other nations, the book is a source of well presented and up to date factual information, including the nearest one has seen to a realistic assessment of the comparative risks and environmental impact of coal and nuclear fuels. Predictably the Light Water Moderated Reactor is the only system considered in addition to the Fast Breeder, but even then the balance is markedly in favour of nuclear power. Yet the authors appear to support the myth that nuclear weapons development is largely dependent on the availability of spent commercial reactor fuel for reprocessing, which is demonstrably incorrect from the history of the nuclear weapons programme in the United States and elsewhere. The problem of nuclear waste management is treated realistically as are the prospects for new alternative energy sources. The book is well written and bears few signs of having been produced by a committee; it is good value for money. It assumes a uniformly modest standard of technical knowledge which should make it comprehensible to the informed layman. The ‘Choices’, however, are those open to the United States rather than to the rest of us. S. E. Hunt
Soft Energy Paths: Toward Amory
Penguin
a Durable
Peace
B. Lovins
Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, UK, 1977, 231 pp,
95P Energy or Extinction?
The Case for Nuclear
Energy
Fred Hoyle
Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, London, 1977, 81 pp. fl.50 These two books reflect in some measure a most important decision that should be made in principle within five years if those of us in industrially advanced countries with more than forty years to live are to be spared considerable inconvenience and discomfort: do we aim at an energy policy
60
FUEL, 1978, Vol57,
January
that can last for a millenium at least, and if so, do we aim in the first place mainly at atomic fission, or at a mix of simpler technologies primarily employing direct solar energy and its partial derivatives wind and wave power? Lovins writes persuasively in favour of the second choice. To him a hard energy path is one involving large-scale technology; a soft energy path is flexible, resilient, sustainable and benign (also a mixture of small-scale methods scaled to the needs of the consumer). The two are not technologically incompatible but they are said to be so otherwise (e.g. in demands on capital and in social effects). He argues that the soft path has many advantages as well as eventual cheapness, and apparently that a unit of energy thus produced is more socially effective than a unit of ‘hard-path’ energy. He maintains that economic comparisons of ‘soft’ methods should be made with the replacement cost of a hard path when existing resources run out, which leads to a very different picture from the usual ‘economic’ comparison. As often happens, both books share a conviction of urgency: Lovins (not greater than 20 years) because the upward trend of the hard-path energy consumption renders reversal without hardship increasingly improbable and because delay will increase tensions between haves and haveriots;; Hoyle because the decision must be made before fossil fuels effectively run out (less than a hundred years with the enhanced world consumption he recommends). And neither is really enthusiastic about the eventual possibility of fusion power, Lovins on principle, and Hoyle because a long-term viable system must fuse only deuterium nuclei, which requires temperatures (already very high) an order of magnitude higher than fusing deuterium with tritium, and corresponding further losses and delay. Lovins recommends decentralization, and gradually raising energy prices to more realistic levels in terms of future substitution. (Even human labour costs, he says, are three times those of inanimate energy.) Technical decisions are urgent. Labour costs and high capital costs are pressing on the available reserves of effort in the U.S. Electricity is a great offender, particularly by being used in part for lowgrade applications. U.S. energy savings, probably by factors of 3 or 4, are possible (x2 by 2000 A.D.); they are a much cheaper and better method of cutting the increasing energy ‘gap’. Even a modest U.S. conservation effort could reduce primary energy demand to 101-126 x 1Ol5 Btu p.a. ~lO*” J p.a.). A projected soft-path curve leads to 75 x 10’ B J p.a. in Figure 2-2, but the projected hard-path curve leads to 225 x lOIs J p.a. (Figure 2-l), both in 2025 A.D.; i.e. conservation could turn the curve downward instead of upward! The usual methods of renewable energy production are proposed, with newer methods of using coal to cover the transition period. Thus fossil fuels would be used mainly to buy time. Soft paths could involve everyone, being in general simple to install, service and comprehend. Lovins maintains that there are cost advantages in soft paths to both the U.S. and Europe even now. He points to the big ‘political’ costs of hard technologies (also of soft ones if their initial introduction is delayed until drastic changes are needed). This book attempts to discuss too many aspects of this complex subject to avoid some superficial treatment, but its general relevance is most clear. Detailed faults are difficult to pinpoint except where relatively unimportant. The author underemphasizes the outstanding technical problems (e.g. in solar heating, and the dispersion of pollution sources in the transition period), and the political resistance to changing a way of life. But in 20 years time change will become more difficult, not less. Critiques by ‘moderate’ authors of an earlier article have