Tuesday, July 8, 2008

A Response To Rod Adams

A few days ago, Rod Adams left an interesting comment on my discussion of the history of nuclear safety. Rod raised some issues that were both interesting and complex. I disagreed with one of Rod's arguments, that is that Nader's opposition to nuclear power power was somehow tied to the Texas oil industry.

Rod Adams asked me:

Answer: I have looked at the interplay of economics and technology more from a purely historic perspective. I did some study on how the development of a technology driven transportation systems in the 19th century United States was related to its economic and social developments. I have little doubt that economic demands lead to the 19th century development of steam powered technology. It retrospective we see that steam technology – rail roads and steam ships - emerging rapidly in response to economic demands, and that both economies and society were profoundly effected by that development. For example, the building of railroads on the Great Plains of the United States opened them to commercial farming, which in turn brought hundreds of thousands of European immigrants to the United States. Thus it could be argued that the 19th century development of steam technology was indirectly responsible for half of the population of Norway leaving that country and settling in the United States. From the viewpoint of the history of ideas you could trace the beginning of this immigration process back to 18th century in Glasglow, when a mechanic, James Watts applied physics to improving the efficiency of the steam engine, thus revolutionizing steam technology.


Answer: The anti-nuclear movement had several sources. First was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s and 60s. A second source was opposition to placing power reactors in environmentally sensitive locations. A third source was the concern of nuclear safety researchers about reactor safety, and the belief that the AEC had prematurely shutdown nuclear safety research. I have pointed in Nuclear Green to the conflict over reactor safety between the AEC and the leadership and staff of several national laboratories in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. The scientist who were concerned about reactor safety were not opposed to nuclear power, and in fact had already done much to make reactors safer. It is clear from Three Mile Island that reactors were far less dangerous to the public than coal fired power plants. The issue for the scientists was whether reactors could and should be made safer. In fact the history of nuclear safety makes clear that the scientist won their case, and that new reactor designs have become progressively safer. There is a cost for making LWRs safer. Building safety into complex reactors whose fundamental design is not inherently safe is expensive. And we both know reactors can be both simpler and safer, if you take water out of the reactor. Thus both the Pebble Bed Reactor and the LFTR are safer than the LWR and their safety does not increase reactor price.

The “Ban the Bomb” movement was a source of both people and ideas for the anti-reactor crowd. My suspicion is that young Ralph Nader may not have been involved in the “Ban the Bomb” campaign but he was sympathetic to it. He still supports nuclear disarmament. The contribution that the “Ban the Bomb” people made to the anti-Nuclear movement was to spread confusion between reactors and atomic bombs. Helen Caldicott is a major example of that sin. The “Ban the Bomb” crowd have also spread considerable confusion about reactors as nuclear proliferation tools.

No doubt the South Africans looked at using reactor grade plutonium from the Koeberg nuclear power plant as bomb making material, the Helen Suzman Foundation reports

“The connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear power stations is slight, almost as slight as the connection between the lead in batteries and bullets. An atomic bomb requires either 90 per cent Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239. Since natural uranium contains only 0,7 per cent U-235, you have to enrich it, which is difficult, expensive and conspicuous. Koeberg only has enrichment to 3,5 per cent, which is why it is impossible for it to explode like a bomb. The apartheid government enriched uranium to over 90 per cent and made several atomic bombs at Valindaba near Pretoria. To say that Koeberg was a front for the bomb programme is rather like saying a nunnery is a front for a brothel: the two activities are so different it would have fooled no one.”

“The plutonium in Koeberg’s waste is next to useless for weapons, and none have ever been made from such reactors. Now that apartheid has gone and we have joined the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, nuclear power without nuclear weapons fits in perfectly with our new democracy, as it does in Sweden, Finland and Japan.”

Finally, the anti-nuclear wing of the environmentalist movement has an agenda, that positively ignores the public interest. Nader appears to have made common cause with the anti-consumer David Brower, Amory Lovins crowd. Thus far from bring consumers low cost electrical energy the Nader-Lovins crowd have brought California consumers in the name of anti-nuclear energy efficiency the most expensive electrical power in the country.

Rod Adams: I have pretty much convinced myself that the nuclear industry came under attack BECAUSE it was technically so much better than the competition that the people selling fossil fuels could not allow any kind of fair competition. Now, some would tell me that I am crazy to try to link Nader to the fossil fuel establishment, but here are some items for thought.  

Answer: I have little doubt that Nader could, if he wished to, take a large amount of money from coal and oil interest. Nader has kept the financial operations of his non-profit “public interest” agencies secret. Thus Nader could receive large amounts of money from Coal interest and no one would know. Also Nader could be paid off through speaker fees. Recall that Nader admitted being worth nearly $4 million in 2000, despite earning only $15,000 a year during most of his career. Where did the money come from? Probably speaking fees and book sales. The $4 million is quite possibly only a small part of Nader’s wealth. I suspect that he has millions more tied up in retirement plans with Nader non-profit fronts. Saint Ralph will be well taken care of in his old age.

There would be a motivation on the side of the coal interest to “help” Ralph Nader. During most of his career Nader judged the coal producers with a very different set of standards than he judged the nuclear industry. Nader was a Johnny-come-lately to the anthropogenic global warming issue, and he has largely ignored the health and environmental issues implicit in burning coal in order to generate electricity. This is an amazing lapse for one who claimed to have the public interest at heart. Although Nader has made issues of mine safety, and tax avoidance by mine owners, he never consistently applied the criteria which he applied to the nuclear industry to the coal industry. Thus Nader was guilty of holding double standards in judging energy sources.


Answer: The Nader’s were Maronite Christians. At one point Maronites were in a majority in Lebanon, but during the 19th and 20th centuries most emigrated from Lebanon. Nearly half ended up in all places, Brazil, but a quarter came to the United States. The Maronite were a minority who were repeatedly assailed and who repeatedly assailed other religious groups in Lebanese society. There were several civil wars in Lebonan during the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Civil War of 1976 to 1991 it is said that “By the end of the war, nearly every party had allied with and subsequently betrayed every other party at least once.” Thus Maronites come from a world of conflict, treachery and mistrust.

One of the most important things about Lebanese society is the extent to which mistrust hobbles the development of what we would call civil society. There is no public interest in Lebanon. For at least the last few hundred years, the Lebanese have repeatedly fallen into Civil Wars. The acquisition of power within Lebanese society is seen as a danger to everyone, because it might lead one group to dominance over other groups. Thus a standard strategy is to mistrust and create mistrust for the powerful. Mistrust of the powerful is a recurrent theme in Nader's thinking. Human power is created by centralization of control, in Nader’s world view, and he believes that the function of the states is to check the dangerous organization of centralized power that is not in “public hands.” For Nader there is a fundamental conflict between “the public interest,” and the concentration of power in business hands.

Who is dangerous in Nader’s views? It the people who small business owners fear, larger competators, businesses and industries. In addition Nader fears the power of scientist, whose language he does not understand.

Nader’s central strategy is to spread the mistrust he feels for businesses and industries, and to organize efforts to control the misconduct he suspects them of. This tracks nicely with Lovin’s desire to decentralize the production of electrical energy, by in effect making everyone his or her own power company. This is impossible with nuclear generated electricity, hence Lovins opposes the nuclear option. Curiously Loving believes that highly centralized wind farms, and solar generating facilities are examples of decentralized distributive generation. It would, of course, be a mistake to expect sanity from Lovins. Nader like Lovins ignores the big business aspects of renewable power generation, and ignore the cost to the public of renewable energy. Lovins like Nader is a small business owner. Both have built their businesses by selling bad ideas. Both have convinced the ideological Left that they are champions of human freedom. In fact neither is. Both are champions of highly subsidized business, whose operations end up costing the public lots of money in terms of their electrical expenses.

Nader, in his own life story is the little guy who takes on the powerful. His weapons are stories of the powerful’s misconduct and his plan to reign them in, plans which involves government regulation.

RA: 2. One of his earliest campaigns was against the first popular small car built by an American manufacturer.   

Nader has hardly been a genius in his perception of the global warming issue. Nader totally ignored the case for fuel efficiency and CO2 control in his attack on energy efficient cars. In addition to the economical and sporty Corvair, Nader launched an attack on a paragon of fuel economy the VW bug. Even Nader’s staff protested that the VW was not really unsafe, but Nader stuck to his guns. Truth did not matter to Nader, neither did global warming, what mattered was that the power of auto manufacturers be diminished and that Nader appear to be the Hero of the drama he had created for the media. Attacking the big guys was always a means of getting Nader’s name in the paper or on television.


Answer: I am not sure what you mean by the statement, “he was working for the University of Texas Law Review.” My step-daughter studied law at the University of Texas Law School. I believe that the Texas Law Review is a student publication that is staffed by University of Texas Law School students. Nader, as far as I can tell did not publish any articles in the Texas Law Review, although several book reviews related to Nader did appear in the TLR in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I have been able to find a reference to anything that Nader wrote for the University of Texas Law Review. University of Texas Law students and their professors are quite a liberal group collectively. The TLR is not a front for the Texas Oil Industry and would not serve as a conduit for Texas oil money.


Answer: There was some Texas interest in nuclear power, but coal was regarded as cheaper, and there is a lot of coal in Texas. Texas electrical producers ended up building a lot of expensive coal fired electrical generating plants, with increasingly expensive Natural Gas backups.


Answer: The use of oil in electrical generation was not a big deal to the oil industry. Not all that much oil was used in electrical generation to begin with, and coal was the big beneficiary of the attack on nuclear power.


Answer: I would not disagree with that statement, except to say we need to test it. From the viewpoint of constructing history, it has to be supported by facts that demonstrate the opposite is untrue. That is that demonstrate that Nader was not befriended by interest groups, whose interests he directly or indirectly served. Let me give an example of the sort of evidence we need. Daily Kos blogger A. Siegel identified that the Chicago based Joyce Foundation was serving as a conduit for money for pro-coal propaganda activities. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/29/185847/96
Grants were given to a number of organizations with environmentalist and anti-nuclear credentials, including:



URL: www.catf.us

URL: www.IWLA.org


URL: ww.ucsusa.or

Length: 1 year
URL: cuboard.org

URL: www.catf.us

URL: www.wiendecade.org

Great Plains Institute for Sustainable Development
Minneapolis, MN Amount: $437,500.00 Length: 21 mos.
URL: gpisd.net
To support the efforts of its Coal Gasification Working Group.

URL: www.nwf.org/

URL: www.nrdc.org

Ohio Environmental Council, Columbus, OH, Amount: $113,750.00
Length: 21 mos.


Rockefeller Family Fund New York, NY Amount: $50,000.00

URL: www.cows.org

Establishing a coal or oil connection to the anti-nuclear movement would require a great deal more such evidence. It is more likely that anti-nuclear activist have a prior animosity toward nuclear power that is fundamentally irrational. For a generation they failed to weigh the cost of using coal by the same standards they used to judge nuclear energy. Thus we find Alvin Weinberg writing in the 1970’s about the long term consequences of using coal. Thus in 1977 Weinberg wrote:
“The concentration of C02 in the atmosphere is more strongly tied to the utilization of coal than to that of oil and natural gas simply because the coal resource is so much larger than the oil and gas resource. . . . Thus even if all the oil and gas were burned, the C02 concentration would be increased only by 30 percent; whereas if coal
equivalent to the reserve base is burned, the C02 concentration would increase by 80 percent.”

Weinberg added:

"If we look at the matter in broadest terms, we find ourselves beset with a profound dilemma. The difficulties and risks of the nuclear path have been delineated often and in detail. . . . The major risk in the coal path is the possible CO catastrophic. In a way this is the coal

We ought to consider this. Alvin Weinberg saw something in 1977, that Ralph Nader and Amory Lovins didn’t, that a benign neglect of the problems of a coal based energy future could lead to catastrophic climate change. Nader had access to Weinberg’s thinking about the energy future, and thus has no excuse for not being aware about the threat that CO2 generated by fossil fuel use posed for global climate. Lovins was also aware of Weinberg's thinking. Weinberg was clearly trying to take into account the arguments about the energy future posed by Nader and Lovins, and if anything, Weinberg was overly concerned by the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

It goes without saying that neither Nader or Lovins were overly conserned about climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.


donb said...

A very thoughtful post on the motivations of those who oppose inexpensive and plentiful energy that can be had from centralized generation using nuclear fuel.

I think there is a secondary motivation. I believe that Nader, Lovins and others of this ilk believe that energy consumption is a necessary evil. Thus increased energy consumption is immoral. Inexpensive and plentiful energy would only aid increased consumption, thus anything that might supply it is also immoral.

I have on my desk Henry Ford's book Today and Tomorrow (©1926). In the book, he is much concerned with waste. He is concerned that every bit of material and tooling get used as efficiently as possible. But he also spoke of NOT using resources, and how that is a waste. And how NOT using energy to make lives easier is also a waste of something of vast worth - a person's life.

Charles Barton said...

The deeply hidden agenda of the anti-nuclear movement is the mistrust of human empowerment. The thrust of civilization since the enlightenment has been the increasing empowerment of common people through the mechanical capture and control of physical energy. James Watts was far from being an obscure Glasglow mechanic, was a central figure of the Enlightenment, who work profoundly transformed human civilization Figures like Nader and Lovins want to reverse the course of civilization, which means to disempower people.

Civilization makes waste. Archeology is nothing more than the investigation of himan waste from past civilizations.

donb said...

Charles Barton said:

A profound observation. I think the key here is that the individual is empowered by his control of physical energy. Perhaps if Nadir, Lovins et al. were in control of how/when/where/why individuals use energy, they would object less to its generation and use. Since they don't have this direct control, they have to work indirectly by limiting the amount of energy an individual can control.

Charles Barton said...

Nadir and Lovins would certainly like to remove energy use choices from human individuals and place them into the hands of regulators who would make choices more amenable to Nader and Lovins. They would also like for the disempowered people to praise them for their wisdom.

Anonymous said...

The motives of the anti-nuke crowd are derived from the movement's origin in anti-war activities. Most of the people who opposed nuclear power do not understand it, and dont want to, but they are really afraid of it. This fear factor is what gets the crowds out to rallies and demonstrations. I find it interesting that this fear is not restricted to one country or society. It is just as strong in Russia as it is in South Africa, or Canada. Fear seems to be really easy to ignite, and it takes a long time to dissipate. It is especially powerful when the thing you are afraid of is unfamiliar, unseen, all powerful, and big. I think this fear will decrease as more reactors are built and people get used to seeing them. The anti-nuke hysteria will die out in ever quickening cycles as nuclear power expands. We are just at the beginning of this transformation.

Charles Barton said...

Randal, I have little doubt that an irrational fear of nuclear energy has much to do with public response to the anti-nuclear campaign. But how do we explain Nader and Lovins, intelligent men who should have known better? I don't think we can account for their behavior, by claiming that they were driven by an irrational fear of nuclear energy. Their stance nuclear power was tied to a wider world view. We need to account for that.

Rod Adams said...

The Environmental movements obtained far too much power and influence to have been motivated by a desire to disempower civilization. I will buy, however, that their power came from people that were afraid of putting too much motive power into the hands of individuals.

Those people's wealth and power came from having a huge body of oil, gas and coal addicts.

I think that the fearful image for them associated with "The Bomb" was a single aircraft, manned by just a few people, carrying more firepower than huge clouds of planes used to bomb Europe.

The huge clouds of planes required an industrial power plus lots of fuel, a single plane required much human ingenuity that would be relatively easy to replicate - especially if others could see what did not work so they could avoid the expense of the technical dead ends that were the major cost of the Manhattan Project.

I am more and more coming to the belief that energy consumers need to realize that energy producers do not share their interests.

Anonymous said...

Wasnt the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament originally established as a Soviet-bloc-controlled front organization?

That would explain why they opposed nuclear power as well as nuclear weapons - because Western nuclear power would make it harder for the Soviets to earn badly-needed hard currency by exporting natural gas.


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