In just the past week, the Department of Energy has handed out $10 billion in conditional loan guarantees for two nuclear and three solar plants, I report over at Wired Science.

My full piece has the nuts-and-bolts (e.g. $8.3 for nuclear, $1.4 for solar) but I wanted to entertain a couple of interesting notions about energy politics here.

First, the solar funding announcement seemed to come as a bit of a surprise for BrightSource. Their executives weren’t waiting by the phone, available for comment, as would normally be the case with something like this. The DOE appears to have made the announcement without much notice, even though the company’s application was first made in 2006. Could it be that Chu and the rest of the DOE were feeling a little blowback from the nuclear loan guarantee announcement last week and needed to get a solar one out there quick? It’s just speculation, but it’s not crazy.

Two, ever since I started reporting on climate and energy, it’s been pretty clear that the coal-heavy southeast was going to be a major problem in trying to get any carbon legislation passed. They have a lot to lose and don’t have anything close to the wind or solar resources of the midwest and west, respectively. Add in that the region is generally pretty conservative and you’ve got trouble.

The question has always been, “What’s the political compromise going to be?” I’d always thought that it would end up being major carbon capture projects, but maybe nuclear power will be the centerpiece of the energy southern strategy.

Something Jim Rogers, the ubiquitous head of Duke Energy, once told me has always stuck. He said that perhaps looking after and containing the waste from a nuclear plant will turn out to be logistically easier than the same operation with CO2. Whether or not it’s true (or remains necessary with improvements in other energy technologies), he was clearly hinting that he preferred nukes to coal plants with CCS in the future carbon-constrained world.

Image: Tier3 solar prospecting tools.

It’s a pretty conventional argument: 1) “no single technology will provide all of the answers,” which is obviously true, and 2) large-scale storage options are necessary for grid-integration.

“[R]emember that wind and solar are intermittent energy sources. The sun isn’t always shining, and the wind isn’t always blowing,” Chu wrote. “Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.”

Which is true enough. I have a lot of hope for compressed air storage, but that’s going to take time to understand and scale up.

There was one part of Chu’s argument that I don’t like, though. He relies on a bogus forecast from the Energy Information Administration about projected future demand to make the case for nuclear.

“While we are working at hard as we can to promote energy efficiency in every part sector of America, it is likely that our energy demand will continue to rise. In fact, the Energy Information Administration projects an almost 20 percent increase in overall energy demand and over 30 percent increase in electricity demand over the next 25 years under current laws.”

As I’ve reviewed here over and over, long-run energy forecasts have been terrifically bad. With some notable exceptions, they have tended to project way too much energy usage over the last 50 years. Yet Chu, like so many others, treats them with far more respect than they deserve.

Using EIA forecasts to justify policy is a convenient way to sidestep having to make a real argument about whether it makes sense to let our energy usage grow or not. Instead, American energy usage growth is seen as inevitable, so that key point doesn’t need to be argued. This is an old and kind of dirty trick. Just check out Philip Sporn using just about the same one in 1971.

And the thing is: you don’t need EIA forecasts to make the argument that Chu does. The need to cut our carbon emissions is a good enough reason to look at nuclear power again, particularly new types of reactors. Compared with burning coal, which is how we generate just under 50% of American electricity, nuclear power starts to look pretty good, even given the problems that people have noted for years.

But no one really knows how much a new plant will cost or how long it will take to build one. And that’s using light-water reactors, which pro-nuclear guys like MIT’s Ernie Moniz say will be the only option for the coming couple of decades. If it takes the high-end estimate of 100 months to build a new nuclear plant — more than eight years — than it may not be possible to build enough nukes to, as Chu puts it, “make a serious dent in carbon dioxide emissions.”

One of them was so good that I wanted to highlight it here (with a couple of links added for non-wonks).

woolie provides a very smart summation of how nuclear power could work for lefties. There is good historical precedent for a Democratic government to push something like this. The whole Bureau of Reclamation, for example.

As a nuclear fan, of course I’m going to point to EDF/Areva as the model. I certainly think there should be a very high level of state involvement in nuclear power; as bedrock functions go, I think electricity is a natural place for a government monopoly, as with other critical infrastructure, where reliability and safety should be the primary concern more than profits. Additionally state financing for these large scale projects works out better, also for indemnity (simpler than something like Price-Anderson), high-level long-term planning, etc. etc. Everything works out better. (In practice, though, you get corporate welfare policies because only republicans are pushing the idea, and privatizing profit/socializing risk is their favorite thing in the whole world.)

Now, even the most ardent of small-d democratic activist must recognize that there will always be some level of local opposition for any public project. You can’t even manage to get wind turbines built in many technically excellent locations because of NIMBY opposition. Not to mention something like Yucca Mtn (which was always a bad idea — glad Obama killed it.) But that’s why we have state and federal elections. Sometimes you can’t let a very small (if well funded and motivated) minority oppose necessary projects based on reasons that are deeply ideological and not open to reconsideration. There are many examples of groups stalling large projects on spurious legal grounds that the investors cut their losses and walk. (Another good reason for loan guarantees and combined construction/operating licenses, etc.)

Look at the health care debate. Republicans are united in ideological opposition for political reasons — they cannot praise any pending reform legislation in any way because it would weaken their position — first, they would have to propose an idea of their own, and second it would chill the rhetoric they use. It’d make it a policy debate instead of an identity politics debate, which (coming from the left myself) I recognize as fruitless and intractable. I think much of the anti-nuclear opposition is in the same vein. Certain subsets of environmental activists have fought hard for their power and influence for years. Nothing wrong with that, I certainly agree with most of their platform. But abandoning one of their core tenets (which was adopted many years ago, before AGW, before modern designs, before hundreds of years of operating experience, convoluted with nuclear weapons, etc.etc.etc) — or even moderating it — would undermine their efforts. Look at the infighting that is currently going on in that community as some people do moderate/change their position on nuclear. So as a nuclear activist, you often come up against an ideological wall that categorically rejects all evidence contrary to an entrenched position.

One thing to note is that many renewable proponents don’t necessarily dislike nuclear power plants. They just don’t see them as the cheapest route to clean electricity over the medium term. There’s a ton of uncertainty of over expensive and how long a new nuclear plant would take to build. Berkeley’s Dan Kammen, a nuclear engineering professor,said that a single new nuclear plant could take 100 months and $10 billion to build at the Google event I attended Monday. MIT’s Ernie Moniz strenuously disagreed, particularly on the timeline. In the long, long term it probably doesn’t matter, but over the next few years — a timespan considered key among climate change scientists — it certainly does.

“So what does that mean?” asked @lostkiwi. “White males are the only ones rational enough to know nuclear power’s a good thing?” Others responded with takes less favorable to the white men out there. Karen Daltin Beninato called it the “Homer Simpson factor.”

Here’s my thought on it. Even though polling always strikes me as somewhere between art and dark art, I do think this one highlights a key aspect of how Americans look at nuclear power.

First, I’m going to posit that most people bring their social beliefs to energy, not the other way around. It’s the rare bird whose social beliefs grew out of the study of electrons. So, the debate over something like nuclear power for most people is a subset of a general debate about that other kind of power.

Nuclear power, by its nature, has to be centralized and well-guarded, so we don’t know everything that’s going on at the nation’s atomic facilities. What that means is nuclear power requires citizens to trust the industrial order to do what’s right by society. It requires faith that the engineers and executives who build and run nuclear plants will do the right thing — and if some unexpected thing goes wrong, they’ll tell us about it, even if it hurts their profits or reputations.

White males have been in control of their/our (I’m half-Mexican) political destinies since the country coalesced. White men built the industrial order. White men also built the bomb and the first nuclear reactors. White men also run the companies who construct and operate the nuclear power plants.

Is it any surprise that white men trust the structures that they control?

Meanwhile, other groups have had less access to power. At times women and minorities have been systematically discriminated against. At the very least, few hold high-ranking positions at General Electrics, Bechtels, and utilities that stand to gain from more use of nuclear power. Not to single GE out, but there are seven women and maybe two minorities on the company’s 44-person executive page.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that women and people of color would have more trouble accepting the beneficence of the white male-dominated industrial order?

Nuclear proponents have failed to grasp that all the studies about nuclear safety in the world don’t mean a thing to the people who don’t believe that the books are honest and uncooked. Instead, nuclear fans just keep saying, “Trust us, it’s safe!” in different ways.

And, apparently, only a majority of white men are willing to believe that.

In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war. The marriage of the bureaucratic of the apocalyptic produces deranged offspring with very detailed models.

One 1960 Atomic Energy Commission report on a prospective 100-person post-apocalyptic “Group Shelter” is a case study of how to render an unthinkable future in the material language of the model railroad builder.

At one level, the report just describes a building that would have air intake and food and dining that could survive a series of nuclear blasts to provide shelter for a few weeks. At another level, it’s an insane fantasy of how to build an island of normalcy when the world has been destroyed. I’m reminded of BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography’s current project on Landscapes of Quarantine, which looks at the spaces that are used to contain prospectively dangerous people or things. Nuclear fallout structures invert the concept of quarantine: It’s not the world that needs to be protected from you but you that needs to be protected from the world. In effect, everything outside the space is disease.

Amidst the talk about withstanding blast pressure of 5000 pounds per square foot and reducing the radiation intensity relative to Out There by a factor of 10,000, we find little hints of the life that was expected to continue within.

The toilets permit “normal water flushing for maximum cleanliness.” Ah, just like home. “Facilities are provided for controlling and dispensing food and for heating soup, coffee, and baby bottles.” That line is about as close to a Hemingway six-word short story as it gets. (Fallout shelter with baby bottles. Used.) “The dining and recreation area is furnished with tables and benches, which may also be used for playing games of various kinds.” But no duck-duck-goose because “physical exertion would raise the body-heat output and increase the shelter temperature unnecessarily.” Thus, it makes sense to limit games to those “requiring little or no physical exertion” like bridge. Of course, “reading material and hobby craft can be utilized to occupy and relax the inhabitants.” Curling up with a book is pretty comforting, sometimes, right?

In the “Operating Manual” for the shelter, there are just the barest hints of the darkness that might encroach into the pinochle games.

As the people are admitted and the living community is organized, the group leader should consider the following sociological aspects affecting human behavior which may require action.

1. Weapons: During an extended period of living under the difficult conditions unavoidably present, there are likely to be psychological upsets among the occupants. Possession of weapons of any sort could be dangerous and perhaps disastrous.

Perhaps the understatement of the century? Living in a post nuclear America equals “difficult conditions”!

2. Beverages: Alcoholic beverages under some conditions are perhaps beneficial and unobjectionable. In the circumstances of living in close confines, care would certainly have to be exercised in the dispensing of alcoholic beverages…

3. Matches and Smoking: Again, the regulation of these items may depend in large degree upon the composition of the community.

In the event of nuclear holocaust, perhaps a smoke and a few dozen beers would be the rational human choices. At the very least, if you allow weapons into your shelter, you’d have to allow smokers a little nicotine.

4. Money and valuables: People entering the shelter can be expected to have brought whatever of their money and valuables they could salvage. Locked storages are provided in the shelter for use at the group leader’s discretion.

Looking back, it doesn’t seem like a serious enterprise to build models of fallout shelters complete with tiny little beds and lockers for diamond earrings and an astroturf covering. Yet we did it. Lee Clarke calls them “fantasy documents.” Because that’s the thing — these are not dystopian visions. In fact, they exclude just about everything that would actually happen in a nuclear war and focus (narrowly, narrowly) on the tiny little space that could still be controlled and normal. The building in the AEC report might not represent a perfect world, but relative to the world surrounding it, it would be an island of Eden.

Realistic? Nope. But what else were you going to do when faced with the possibility of the end of civilization but deal with it with the tools of bureaucratic normalcy. Hold conferences on designing for the nuclear city, have meetings on preparedness, build little high-tech hobbit holes where one could wait for better times. Faced with nuclear war, most people just wake up sweating and go check on their sleeping children. Within organizations, though, the questions lose their existential heft. They enter the hum-drum: It was someone’s job to imagine nuclear war and then design the best escape hatch and periscope for a post-apocalyptic shelter. Humans are amazing.

It’s in this context of the engineering of the post-holocaust that we have to consider nuclear power at this time. These bureaucratic visions of a world after nuclear war were the tamest expression of the fear of nuclear war. Studies came out about the effects of nuclear fear on schoolchildren. The kids said things like, “If I was in school when the bomb dropped and I hid under some wall or something, and I came out alive and came home and found my family was gone, disappeared with everything, who’d want to live anyway?”

The scientists who worked on the bomb project were well-aware that something new was upon the world as a result of their work. Oppenheimer was famously guilt-wracked. Others less so. Alvin Weinberg makes it clear, though, that his redemption went straight through atomic power. Talking about a (loss leader) price list that General Electric put out in 1964, he described his elation at the moral dimension of the commercialization of nuclear power.

I find it hard to convey to the reader the extraordinary psychological impact the GE economic breakthrough had on us. We had created this new source of energy, this horrible weapon: we had hoped that it would become a boon, not a burden. But economical power—something that would vindicate our hopes—this had seemed unlikely… [B]ecause we all wanted to believe that our bomb-tainted technology really provided humankind with practical, cheap, and inexhaustible energy we were more than willing to take the GE price list at face value.

Thus, the very people who might have been expected to rein in the corporate actors — GE and Westinghouse — from getting carried away with outlandishly low cost estimates were part of the same group. They really, really wanted nuclear power to work and on the cheap. How else to balance the apocalyptic visions that lay on the other side of the periscope?

Wow. Take a look at The Ford Nucleon, the fission-powered concept car from a future that really never came to be. As it’s more mockup than anything else, there isn’t much information available about it. But, man, what a symbol of the nuclear craze that swept America during the 50s. You could drive it right up to your house with the swimming pool/decontamination bath.

And yes, this is what our car companies were doing while Toyota and Honda were figuring out how to dominate the industry.

From Ford’s media mavens:

The Nucleon, a 3/8-scale model, provided a glimpse into the atomic-powered future. Designed on the assumption that the present bulkiness and weight of nuclear reactors and attendant shielding would some day be reduced, the Nucleon was intended to probe possible design influence of atomic power in automobiles.

The model featured a power capsule suspended between twin booms at the rear. The capsule, which would contain a radioactive core for motive power, would be easily interchangeable at the driver’s option, according to performance needs and the distance to be traveled.

The drive train would be part of the power package, and electronic torque converters might take the place of the drive-train used at the time. Cars like the Nucleon might be able to travel 5,000 miles or more, depending on the size of the core, without recharging. At that time, they would be taken to a charging station, which research designers envisioned as largely replacing gas stations.

The passenger compartment of the Nucleon featured a one-piece, pillar-less windshield and compound rear window, and was topped by a cantilever roof. There were air intakes at the leading edge of the roof and at the base of its supports.

Cars such as the Nucleon illustrate the extent to which research into the future was conducted at Ford, and demonstrate the designer’s unwillingness to admit that a thing cannot be done simply because it has not been done.

I tell you this up front because it’s true: if you love energy and 50s naivete, you are going to love Adventures Inside the Atom, GE’s nuclear power propaganda comic.

It tells the “thrilling story of man’s greatest adventure in the unknown…and his discovery of nature’s greatest secret” through a nice Platonic dialogue between Ed, a besuited company man, and his eager beaver learner, Johnny. It is also hilarious.

The action starts with old Democritus, the original atomist, in Greece being told that he is “a fool” by a guy in a tanktop.

Then, we learn all about Einstein and Neils Bohr before we get to the Manhattan Project, which features this terrifying drawing of faceless bots creating “a tremendous new industrial city to separate U235 from its chemical twin, U238.”

But then things turn a little lighter and cheerier and more civilian. We hear that this tremendous power will be the greatest thing ever. It’s the pure, childlike heart of nuclear technoptimism shining through. And, honestly, it’s kind of sweet. “Golly, I can see it all now,” is a statement straight from the heart of an entire generation of “nukes,” as they called themselves. The panel on the right — what Johnny can see — is actually Eskimos watching TV inside a well-lit, comfortable igloo with a toaster. (Really? Yup.)

It ends with the panel at the top of this post, Ed telling Johnny he’s “facing a wonderful future” as they stride into the mysteriously glowing General Electric headquarters in Schenectady, New York, on which it is written in all caps THINGS TO COME.

I offer this somewhat sarcastic write up not because I think nuclear power has no place in our power generation mix, but merely to show that as far back as 1948, General Electric was putting a lot of chips on the nuclear bet. Why? They had an engineering know-how advantage because they’d worked with the military during and after the war on military atomic projects.

“The companies sought to transform their competitive advantages in the nuclear field into extraordinary profits (realized quasi-rents),” writes Steven Cohn in Too Cheap to Meter. “In particular they sought to capitalize on their relative monopoly on military reactor design experience; marketing advantages due to existing client relationships with the utilities and and federal energy bureaucracy; and greater access to nuclear scale, vertical integration, and learning curve efficiencies.”

General Electric and Westinghouse were convinced that if nuclear power took off, they’d be sitting pretty. Where anti-nuclear activists have been unkind has been to impute all sorts of nasty motives to the GE and Westinghouse folks. We should remember that the middle of the century was a time where both regular people and big corporations often felt that what was good for the big company was good for America. The country had an enormous industrial workforce — a lot of it part of “Big Labor” — that needed places like GE to work. We’d also just come out of a war in which national industrial capacity really meant something. The world was not globalized to the extent that it is now or even was by the late 70s. It was, as Robert Reich termed it in Supercapitalism, The Not Quite Golden Age.

A few decades later, though, statements like this one from G.E.’s 1972 annual report, were starting to stick in the collective American craw.

“Our potential revenue base in a nuclear plant, for example, is some six times that of a fossil fuel plant because we can supply the reactor, the fuel, and fuel re-loads, as well as turbine generators and their auxiliary equipment.”

As Evan O’Neil (@evanoneil) pointed out this week, too, GE also made appliances, so if they could lock people into a very high-energy lifestyle, the consumers would gobble up space heaters and air conditioners, which would then require more nuclear plants to supply the electricity, and so on. And what was the best way to lock people into high-energy lifestyles? Convince them that the power they were using a lot would be very cheap, so how much you used didn’t really matter.

The nuclear dream was the lynchpin of a half-century long attempt to provide power and convenience for the American public, redeem the horrible “success” of the atomic bomb, and enrich the companies that had helped the war effort. Though activists scored a lot of bodyblows pointing this tripartite plan out, looking at the comic, let’s be honest: GE wasn’t hiding much. Their own propaganda telegraphed just how big their plans were for commercializing atomic power. I bet the Eskimos in that last panel have a freezer… with ice cubes in it.

Putting out comic books to win the minds of the kids made sense, too, because the game was that big and it would have that many innings. GE’s executives knew it could play out over their entire careers and until their children had children. If they were in the atomic power division in the late 40s, it probably did, although certainly not as triumphantly as hoped.

The whole comic is embedded for your perusal below, or you can download Adventures Inside the Atom. I tracked it down at a Department of Energy site dedicated to preserving the history of the Manhattan Project.

As it happens, this is just part one of a series on energy comics. Up next, we’ll look at some nuclear power counternarratives in cartoon form — and whether they got any closer to reality.

I’m a post-nuke baby. By the time I started thinking about the world in the 90s, the Curtain had been pulled back and it was Russian ogligarchs, not generals, that seemed particularly fearsome. Our arsenal — and Theirs — seem kind of anachronistic. Silly, even. If I met one of our nuclear planners in front of a missile silo rising above us into the sky, I’d want to say, almost laughing, “You weren’t ever really gonna use these things, were you?”

And yet, maybe we were.

In writing about the history of energy, I’ve run across a lot of fluffy, black clouds left over from the time of nightly nuclear dreams and nightmares. One that particularly struck me is contained in this 1982 story by Judith Miller (yes, that Judith Miller) about the Postal Service’s 300 page plan to keep on keeping on after nuclear holocaust.

“The officials described an elaborate chain of command under which one of the five regional postmasters general would assume control if Washington was destroyed,” Miller writes. “The headquarters would shift first to Memphis, and then, if Memphis was destroyed to San Bruno, Calif.”

San Bruno, holding it down for the rest of America and the Free World. The Postmasters General commanding his blue shorted troops for the good of the motherland.

Psychiatrist Henry Abraham’s summary of the scheme (tucked into an article on nuclear war’s psychiatric causes and effects) highlights how ridiculous nuclear war becomes when placed inside conventional society.

“The admission of atomic fission into the conduct of contemporary statecraft has inadvertently opened the door to a condition of exfalso quolibet, in which an irrational premise (‘nuclear war is a viable political option’) is carried through to absurd conclusions,” Abraham writes. “Accordingly, the U.S. Postal Service has devised a 300-page plan which suggests, among other items, that shortly before a nuclear war individuals fill out emergency change-of-address forms to help with the mail following the holocaust.”

I, for one, am glad that the USPS was trying to save me the trouble of writing the following letter by providing an easy-to-use form with carbon copies attached for easy filing.

Dear Postal Service, Please forward my mail via this mutant carrier pigeon (see attached) until the end of the Holocast. In the event that roads are available for vehicle transport and/or the carrier pigeon becomes dangerously subversive and must be disposed of, I can be reached in Cave 4, Battle Ground, Washington.

Lee Clark calls plans like this one “fantasy documents” that served merely to soothe a population into thinking that nuclear war (or other disasters) could be managed by sound planning and administrative pluck.

“All such plans are tested against reality only rarely, since, for example, none of the following disasters were believed to be credible events by the organizations involved: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Bhopal, The Challenger, and Exxon Valdez,” Clark writes. “In addition to being untested, the accident mitigation or evacuation plans are likely to draw from a quite unrealistic view or model of organizations.”

An exchange between a Congressman and a Postal Service administrator hauled before a House committee to talk about the USPS nuclear war plan highlights the unreality of planning for disaster.

Congress member: How do you respond to the charge that the Service has no clear conception of an attack?
Planner: I don’t know that I can respond to that.
Congress member: What will you do if no one shows up for work, assuming anyone is left alive?
Planner: I have no response to that, sir.
Congress member: Can you tell us if this plan has ever been test in any way?
Planner: No, sir.

Now, there are supposedly more sophisticated ways to prepare for emergencies. War games, computer modeling, etc. But when a real disaster strikes…

Image: flickr/NateMatias

“We are now engaged in this enterprise,” he wrote in a letter to his staff. “We have mobilized people from every part of the Laboratory for this purpose and, with complete assurance of unlimited support from the Commission, we have put the work into the very highest gear.”

In the end, all they built was the model you see below, which demonstrated “operating principles,” not, you know, fusion. Here’s the longer excerpt from Oak Ridge’s official history:

Planning for a second United Nations Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy coincided with the Laboratory’s advance in fusion research. AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss, determined that the United States should achieve a triumph equal to that of 1955 at the 1958 scientific olympics, threw the AEC’s full support behind fusion research. He hoped that American scientists could display an operating fusion energy device at the 1958 Geneva conference, just as they had displayed a successful nuclear reactor three years earlier.

Components of the DCX exhibit for the 1958 Geneva Conference are loaded onto an airplane.

“I have received a letter from Chairman Strauss exhorting the Laboratory to do everything it possibly can to have incontrovertible proof of a thermonuclear plasma by the time of Geneva,” Weinberg informed Laboratory staff. He went on to say:

We are now engaged in this enterprise; we have mobilized people from every part of the Laboratory for this purpose and, with complete assurance of unlimited support from the Commission, we have put the work into the very highest gear. I can think of few things that would give any of us as much satisfaction as to have Oak Ridge the scene of the first successful demonstration of substantial amounts of controlled thermonuclear energy.

“Spinrad predicted that by the late 1990s almost 90% of new electrical generating capacity everywhere except in Africa will be nuclear, and that fission will supply over 60% of the world’s electricity generation.”

— Vaclav Smil in Energy at the Crossroads, referencing Spinrad’s report, “The role of nuclear power in meeting world energy needs” in Environmental Aspects of Nuclear Power Stations, published by the International Atomic Energy Agency

Nuclear power now supplies about 15% of the world’s electricity. Only two nuclear plants have been added to the U.S. grid since 1990. The last went online in 1996. (Note, though, that 30 new plants are in some part of the licensing process.)