Epstein on Nuclear and Geoengineering

I’ve long been a fan of nuclear power and geoengineering. But reading Alex Epstein’s Fossil Future has somewhat chilled these enthusiasms.

Why, you may ask?

By almost any standard, Epstein is exceedingly pro-nuclear:

Nuclear energy… has demonstrated by far the most potential as an alternative to fossil fuels. Like fossil fuels, it harnesses a naturally stored, concentrated, and abundant form of energy. It has a track record of producing relatively low-cost, extremely reliable electricity around the world. It has even shown promising applications for industrial-process heat and heavy-duty transportation (it already powers aircraft carriers, submarines, and giant icebreakers).

Nuclear energy emits no CO2 and, as I will elaborate on in later chapters, has by far the best safety track record of any form of energy.

More:

The catastrophizing of nuclear is particularly notable because unlike the issue of CO2 emissions, where the effects are extremely hard for current science to accurately predict, the science of nuclear energy’s side-effects is straightforward.

I have never encountered any actual researcher in nuclear science who treats nuclear energy as anything resembling the catastrophic danger we are taught to think of it as.

And:

Oil’s amazing energy density makes it the fuel of mobility and arguably the most valued material in the world. Well, the concentration of energy in uranium is more than a million times that of oil and two million times that of coal. Given current technology, in practice it delivers “only” thousands of times more energy density than oil and coal.

To make the potential even more exciting, the raw materials for nuclear are far more abundant in nature than even fossil fuels. So nuclear has massive scalability potential.

While nuclear is currently used mostly for electricity, it has exciting versatility potential, including mobility, industrial heat, and residential heat.

Take heavy-duty transportation. Where mobile nuclear power has been allowed and applied, mostly in military applications, it has performed amazing feats. Modern aircraft carriers can go twenty years without refueling, with all the fuel stored in a relatively small space. Modern nuclear submarines can go for decades without refueling.

In addition to potential for heavy-duty transportation, nuclear has clear potential to generate all kinds of heat, including very high levels of heat for industrial purposes.

So what’s the problem? The switching costs are massive, even spread over many decades:

In the best-case scenario, though, nuclear is still decades away from scaling to become the leading global source of electricity, let alone somehow providing transportation solutions at the level oil can.

To give you an idea of how long it will take to scale up nuclear, to replace all existing fossil fuel energy (of all kinds) with nuclear energy by the end of 2050 would require building four 1-gigawatt nuclear power plants every day starting in January 2022. In the last thirty years, on average, 4 gigawatts of nuclear capacity have been created only every 540 days.

In fact, nuclear is so hamstrung that nuclear energy around the world is declining.

Notice: Multiplying nuclear plant construction by 540x is what we’d have to do to replace existing fossil fuel energy. To allow continued economic growth to 2050, especially in what Epstein calls the “unempowered” and “barely empowered” worlds, would probably require twice that. After all, global energy use increased by roughly 50% between 2000 and 2020.

What about geoengineering? Epstein classifies it as another kind of “climate mastery”:

One potential form of climate mastery that could completely counter truly dangerous rates of warming (if those actually occurred in the future) would be global climate-cooling technology — often referred to under the banner of “geoengineering.”

One type of global climate-cooling technology being explored involves spraying into the upper atmosphere small particles that would slightly decrease the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth.

This would mimic the cooling effect that we know a large volcanic eruption can have. For example, the Mount Pinatubo eruption of 1991 decreased the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by 2.5 percent, with an estimated temporary decrease of 0.5°C over eighteen months. 0.5°C is equivalent to half the amount of total warming since 1850!

Spraying small particles directly into the upper atmosphere would involve the same mechanism while avoiding air pollution. It would also be temporary and reversible (the particles dissipate after a period of time). And the cost of implementation would be very low. This is in contrast to the fossil fuel elimination policies advocated today, which would cause mass death and destruction with no prospect of cooling the planet in the near future — only, if everyone self-destructively agreed to the policies, stopping the planet’s warming.

So what’s the problem? Pushing for geoengineering anytime soon is jumping the gun:

The point of raising this kind of global cooling technology is not to advocate it—it would be justified only if there were indeed a severe global warming problem, and if the technology had been proven to work as intended — but to point out how powerful climate mastery can be.

In other words, excitement over geoengineering is premature. While it’s sensible to immediately accelerate research on geoengineering now, we won’t know if we actually need the technology for many decades.

Needless to say, my support for nuclear power and geoengineering remains strong in absolute terms. Yet now that I better understand the pros and cons of fossil fuels, I see less need for technological transformation to save us.

P.S. I just returned from my back-to-back trips to Japan and the Caribbean. Expect high post volume to resume starting on January 1, 2023.