That’s been my unexamined assumption as I looked through various non-fossil energy alternatives. Today, though, while researching Three Mile Island (you know, a what-did-really-happen? piece) I ran across an old Oak Ridge National Lab report that made me think a little deeper. Not just about whether energy and risk, but also about the ways that coming from inside the government gave nuclear energy incredible financial and rhetorical advantages over outsider technologies.

Here’s the money chart from that report.

It seemed a little fishy, so I dug in a bit (although far from comprehensively). The researchers used the risk ratings for nuclear power plants found in the Rasmussen Report, which a later ORNL report found underestimated the risk of a serious accident by a factor of 20.

On top of that, one reason solar — all the renewables, really — got such risk ratings comes from the calculated need for “backup” for these systems. “Some solar or wind systems may require energy storage capabilities. When the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, the consumer still needs energy. Storage can take many forms — rocks, liquids, batteries, pumped air or other systems. In the present work, a rock-and-oil system was assumed.”

Further, they assumed that there would be grid backup for all renewables. That means that solar’s risk rating is essentially the average of the energy system plus whatever risk is entailed producing solar panels or thermal plants. Kinda cheap, but still interesting insofar as that’s the only kind of system that we can imagine for the next few decades.

Another lesson you could pull from this report is that coal is a public health not just a global health problem. It’s like an externality generating machine.

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because…

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

He bases his argument on the Kuznets curve, which basically says that as countries’ per capita incomes rise, they pollute more, but after they hit certain thresholds, they start to slide down the backside of the environmental curve. So, you might start out with a horribly polluting chemical plant in a southern China, but once they worker-citizens have some cash in their pockets, they start lobbying for clean up.

It seems, by-and-large, that things tend to follow this pattern for certain types of pollutants, say, sulfur dioxide. But Tierney (through Jesse Ausubel’s work) extends this curve to carbon dioxide. That requires two huge assumptions: one, carbon dioxide is like other local environmental pollutants, and two, that we won’t run out of some key fossil fuels (i.e. oil). CO2, though, isn’t like other pollutants. You don’t become a Superfund site by spewing out too much CO2; humans don’t die from CO2 exposure. Its effects are subtle, global, and long-term. Dealing with CO2 is more like dealing with poverty or institutional racism than it is like dealing with contaminated water. If you’re born into a rich country, you’re part of the problem no matter what you do. And if you’re poor or brown, you’ll probably disproportionately bear the impacts. This doesn’t strike me like the kind of problem that gets solved on its own, even if Ausubel (and Tierney) argue for a hands-off approach.

“Energy systems evolve with a particular logic, gradually, and they don’t suddenly morph into something different,” Tierney quotes Ausubel.

To someone in 1920, that statement would seem totally ludicrous. If you were born in 1890, you likely no electricity and used little crude, except maybe for lamp lighting. Your fuels were wood and food for yourself and grain for your horses. Then, in 1920, you’ve got a coal-fired burner miles and miles away lighting up your home through electrical transmission lines and you’re driving a car burning oil. The system did suddenly morph, even if it can shoehorned into some

But then what do we make of the rapid rise of crude in the early part of the century? Or rapid rise of coal in the last half-decade? Sure, if you bet on status quo, you’ll get it right a lot of the time, but you’ll miss the times of rapid change, the inflection points.

The coal rebound we’ve seen since 2000, which stopped and reversed a decline for coal in the world’s energy system, flies right in the face of the natural “decarbonization” logic that Ausebel argues for. And it could get worse if we run out of oil and turn to coal-based synthetic fuels. The richest country in the world — the US — is also far more carbon intensive than Europeans. That could just be geography (we’re all spread out) but it could mean that people and politics and policy matter more than the economic determinism of the energy system.

“There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else,” Tierney writes. And that may be true. But cheap oil is going away, the impacts of global warming are being felt, coal is growing, and renewables and the grid they need are maturing. We’re at a moment not unlike the one at the turn of the last century where times already are a-changin. We just don’t know how yet.

The rule, approved by the commission in a 4-to-0 vote, requires that new reactors be designed so their containment structure would remain intact after a plane crash, cooling systems would continue to operate and spent fuel pools would be protected.

The industry says that their simulations already show nuclear reactors holding up just fine under such an attack, but the ruling seems to indicate that not everyone is so sure. Post 9/11, nuclear reactors suddenly became more risky, as Vaclav Smil pointed out back in 2003’s Energy at the Crossroads, when he noted that the nuclear industry had been “naive” in the weak defensive measures for which they had advocated.

Risk isn’t just a public perception problem, it’s also a private money problem. Increased levels of risk — even if countermeasures are demonstrated — are just a fact of life for nuclear operators and that’s reflected in the risk premium that Wall Street financiers build into the rates at which they lend them money. The new rule probably won’t help as it could require new construction procedures that will be seen as unproven and thus more risky.

Nota bene: technology risk isn’t the only kind — and the cost per kilowatt hour of an electricity source isn’t fixed solely by technical factors. Society and the contingent events of history count.