Energy Visions and Visionary Energy: Carbon Free and Nuclear Free's Roadmapping Service

A book is just a book, right? The answer depends in part on the book in question and in equal measure on the time when the book is available for the public to peruse. Arjun Makhijani's Carbon Free and Nuclear Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy (CFNF) is a dandy volume. To discern both the general response to the work and the ample qualifications that Dr. Makhijani has to write such a book, readers may look here.

CFNF sets out a clear empirical response to the empirical query, "Could the United States, within fifty years and without resorting to nuclear energy, manage a transition away from carbon-based energy, to the point that it released close to zero fossil-fuel carbon into the atmosphere?" The answer is, with little qualification, "Yes, that is possible, and at manageable cost." For another presentation of CFNF's basic points, one might refer to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), which offers a detailed recapitulation of the book here.

As marvelous as this text is in answering a complicated questions honestly and incisively, however, the timing of the effort is the key element of its importance. All the world's peoples, and especially those of us here in the U.S., must in short order evolve a transition away from oil--and arguably other fossil fuels as well. This is a matter of necessity; little or no freedom exists to do otherwise. Thus, because Makhijani's tome offers an indispensable assessment about several core components of what must begin to happen now in regard to energy, it has become popular enough to have a movement percolating around its premises.

CFNF's core components revolve around the following queries:

• Can the U.S. successfully eliminate all or almost all fossil-fuel carbon emissions from all forms of energy use?


• Can a combination of renewable energy sources and conservation, in an affordable way, make up all, or almost all, of the missing fossil-fuel BTU's?


• Must, or should, the U.S. turn to nuclear power for a portion of the carbon based kilowatts and MPG's that we eliminate?

This review/essay first parses the book's organizational scheme and then summarizes how it responds to these central questions. The present book review then examines some of the context of the text of CFNF itself before proceeding to note that even more optimistic scenarios are defensible, given both an accurate comprehension of the author's ideas and analysis outside Makhijani's purview. Finally, this essay closes by suggesting a critically important caveat to all of these kudos.

ORGANIZATIONAL PLAN AND SUMMARY

The initial section of this review synopsizes CFNF in four parts. First comes a look at the preface. Then, a brief capsule on the opening chapter appears. Third, and most extensively, an examination of the seven substantive chapters of the book takes place. Finally, the reader will see a precis of Makhijani's final summary, along with a mention of supplementary material that shows up following this conclusion.

Prefatory Remarks
The gargantuan threat posed by climate change, with big deleterious impacts emerging from fossil fuel combustion, must be a priority. The exorbitant costs, safety problems, and security risks of nuclear power will always remain a part of the technology. Oil represents the primary fossil fuel input, at tremendous economic, environmental, and opportunity cost to this country. While moral and ethical questions are of profound interest and importance in such matters as these, they are outside the bounds of CFNF. The ultimate result of the effort should be a national debate, to consider how to implement change that is going to come, whether we plan it or not.

Introduction

This portion of CFNF 'sets the stage,' first by reiterating and expanding the preface's points about the necessity of a transition from oil. It also looks at a particular slice of history, the post OPEC-and-energy-crunch period in the U.S. Some readers, such as this reviewer, might take significant exception with the idea that OPEC and multinational oil companies represented separate interests, but this does not detract from the utility of the history that this section presents.

It propounds several points in doing this. One noteworthy idea is the security cost of relying on non-indigenous energy supplies. More critical to the purpose of the book, however, is that this period represented a shift from previously sacrosanct assumptions about economic growth. Essentially, the forty years since OPEC and the initial period of stagflation that followed illustrate that a stagnant, or even shrinking, utilization of energy can accompany reasonable, or even robust, expansion in GDP and other measures of material well-being.

The Heart of the Matter

Arjun Makhijani is a crackerjack technical analyst, the worker who makes sense of the empirical basis for decision making. Any competent statistics grad student can make sense of a skein of data. A good numbers-geek can relate a couple, perhaps a few, disparate data streams.

But only a real master can take multiple currents of evidence dealing with intricate interrelationships among various fields, derived from sources not entirely comparable, and involving all manner of assumptions and possible ranges of error, and put all of them together in a way that is compellingly logical, highly plausible, and persuasively narrated. This is what Arjun Makhijani has done in CFNF.

Before breaking down what appears here, a couple of points are apt to note. First, this is not Alice in Wonderland or even War and Peace. The prose is serviceable, but the material is as dry as corn stalks to many people: the only issue is whether citizens are willing to consider these matters of life and death even though they are not as easy to digest as a 'Twitter' post.

Second, CFNF flies in the face of a well-organized, highly funded, and technically astute colossus, in the form of the nuclear establishment (which, by the by, resides in part in the United States Department of Energy). Having had over 400,000 downloads of the free online edition, anyone familiar with said colossus can state with confidence that one of two things must be true.

Either a book like CFNF would face a response tantamount to crucifixion, or it would have to be so powerfully developed as to be, given its qualifications and basic parameters, close to unassailable as a reasonable estimation of reality. CFNF has confronted nothing even remotely resembling crucifixion. Therefore, it is both plausible and technically proficient.

• Chapter Two, "Broad Energy and Economic Considerations," basically offers a set of protocols for considering cost and development factors in the manifestation of different energy sources in an economic context. It justifies a wide array of methods and fixes, in analyzing varied and rarely directly comparable data, that make CFNF's projections not just likely, but much nearer certainty than mere plausibility.


• Chapter Three, "Technologies--Supply, Storage, and Conversion," takes on the various intersecting parameters of actually transforming an energy system so that new ways replace old ways in an orderly and tangible, step by step fashion. This is the part of the monograph that presents the basic elements of different supply technologies and what they are easily capable of providing.


• Chapter Four, "Technologies--Demand Side Sectors," examines aspects of demand in the energy equation. It also makes certain that no one can accuse CFNF of not crossing 't's' or dotting 'i's,' as it looks at each primary sector of demand separately, and breaks many down into sub-sectors--e.g. lighting in the residential and commercial area, jet fuel in the transportation component.

Of paramount import, from the perspective of an onlooker who supports poor and working class communities appears here. Dr. M. rejects out of hand any approach to biofuels that necessitate utilizing food sources to make liquid energy.

CFNF does not dig deeply in regard to industrial usage. The reason for this, Dr. M. explains is that "an end use analysis from the point of technology and efficiency would take a multivolume treatise. Fortunately, such an analysis is not necessary in the context of this study for two reasons. First, it is possible to aggregate the data by the major processes and end uses typical of broad classes of industry. Second, the policy approach chosen here, which is basically to make large users of fossil fuels pay for emitting CO while reducing the total amount of emissions allowed each year, would automatically encourage industry to seek both ways to increase energy efficiency and to increase use of renewable energy."

The reader who would criticize this might reflect. Why did IEER have to pay for this monumental effort at the very same time that DOE and Congress were preparing to offer, long term, hundreds of billions in loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors?

Chapter Five, "A Reference Zero-CO2 Scenario," again adopts a step-by-step, sector-by-sector approach. It discerns how a CO-2 free (or very close to that goal) would in fact be doable given the technical capacities available now and practical developments of cutting edge capabilities that are not yet industrially demonstrable.

• Chapter Six, "Options for the Roadmap to Zero CO-2 Emissions," deepens the analysis of the previous chapter and delves more closely into what technologies, and in what different mixes, are capable of accomplishing the stated goals.


• Chapter Seven, "Policy Considerations," investigates and breaks into comprehensible elements a wide array of possible approaches. Notably, it does this for each critical area of the energy 'map,' from supporting new to deconstructing now standard techniques of energy output.


• Chapter Eight, "Roadmap for a Zero-CO-2 Economy," places the book's projections on a timeline and again takes each energy sector as a case worth examining on its own. It acknowledges the uncertainty inherent in all of the work but warns, cogently, of the huge volatility and wreckage that is likely to result from a "business as usual approach." In fact, says Dr. Makhijani,

"The main choice is whether energy use will become more efficient and more oriented towards domestic renewable resources by deliberate policy or whether it will be driven there willy-nilly by recurrent global crises."

Without doubt, this compression of complicated and rich data and argumentation does not do justice to CFNF. Nor would it as clearly reveal flaws. However, it is a fair summary, and the book is free for any reader who wants a deeper delving, who is skeptical (which Arjun Makhijani, for one, welcomes), or who merely needs more background, context, and so on.

Conclusion

The final chapter begins by reiterating the tripartite basis for the original study: climate-change, energy-security, and nuclear-weapons-proliferation issues. It then produces nine findings in regard to CFNF's core questions. For purposes of brevity, I condense these findings enormously, which are worthy of much closer attention.

Zero-carbon production being key to reducing global warming impacts, a 'hard-cap' on emissions must occur, the energy basis of which is replaceable from varied solar sources (photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, wind, biofuels, and more) and conservation, gains in which are not only even today manifestly available at a level that would fit the conclusions of the study, but also might in many areas be much greater than necessary to support those conclusions, and, although also technically compatible with eliminating carbon, nuclear technologies carry various unacceptable risks, including weapons proliferation, safety problems, and both prohibitive up-front costs and unaccounted external costs associated with high level radioactive wastes.

The final presentation of the body of the book is "the Clean Dozen," key policies for meeting the goals of this book. If I have not already made clear that our survival depends on something like what Dr. Makhijani presents here, let me do so now. Nature might easily extinguish humankind quite rapidly if we don't accomplish the goal of eliminating the fossil fuel inflammation that has fired the industrial revolutions of the past. Every reader with a desire to make this planet habitable by grandchildren ought to read and memorialize these twelve Recommendations of CFNF, adding to them or modifying them as necessary, but otherwise prioritizing their implementation.

CONTEXTUAL OPTIMISM

Without much hedging, therefore, the careful reader can agree that Dr. Makhijani has made an impressive presentation in favor of his case. Moreover, as noted above, the general silence of the atomic establishment about this arguable tour-de-force suggests the plausibility, or even the veracity, of many of CFNF's main points.

However, both online and in person, a few sturdy stalwarts of nuclear pathways have attacked the book. Often their critiques have homed in on how CFNF's projections are overly optimistic, especially as regards the potential scale of solar-based implementation. I might have sought to offer some general reassurances in relation to such objections, but, since I am not a 'technical analyst,' I would have been unable to meet the substance of such aspersions.

Therefore, I e-mailed the author and requested any input that he might have in regard to such matters. He took the time to reply. He noted by way of introduction that

"This kind of issue is often raised by those who favor a small number of large plants, like nuclear reactors, over more modular energy approaches. There are ... different ways to address the issue of the scale of the job in the electricity sector or even the energy sector as a whole - or for that matter any other large sector of industry. It takes a while to actually study the feasibility as distinct from just saying it is (or is not) possible."

He examines three ways to consider this problem so that an assessment is comprehensible.

• "For starters, let's look at the physical scale of the problem and compare it to an existing industry." Here he draws an analogy, using weight and technical complexity to make the comparison reasonable, with a development of a nascent auto industry. Cars equal a certain number of solar arrays. The total production of one is thus comparable to the total production of the other.In this way, from close to nothing--the present pass of solar, thanks, I would add, to lack of democratic policy and the prevalence of a big-business SOP--we might proceed to the availability of the necessary trillions of watts of capacity. After all, in similar fashion, the auto industry grew from modest initial output to the production of hundreds of billions of pounds of automobiles. By recognizing that the first two decades of the process would be a time of maturation, in which a relatively small addition of total capacity would occur, he was able to show that, in the subsequent decades, huge gains annually would be possible, in the same way that the production of any commodity might accelerate from a small base to a huge industry. The numbers added up; the comparisons seemed realistic.

In fact, at a level of total commitment, the estimable Dr. M. estimates that "about double the present US electricity generation" is possible from solar alone in the next forty years. "So the physical challenge is not an issue. The key to understanding this is remembering that a single nuclear plant is a huge, costly and complex machines that takes a long time to plan and build, while solar panels are much more like cars or any other mass manufactured commodity. "

• "Another way to look at it is the total electricity sector requirements over 40 years, independent of technology,...forecast(s)... more tentative than the physical... .But wh(atever technological mix is chosen), the electricity infrastructure (like most other infrastructure) must be replaced over the next three or four decades. ... For simplicity, we can assume (quite realistically) that the growth will be provided mainly by doing things more efficiently. So we must replace the present infrastructure which consists of 1 million megawatts, operating on average about 50 percent of the time (peaking units are mostly idle while baseload units are mostly running at full capacity, and intermediate load units, mostly combined cycle natural gas are somewhere in between). The solar equivalent of this is about 3 million megawatts, or only half the amount what could be produced if the solar PV equivalent of the car industry that supplies the US market were to be built in the next twenty years. For wind, it would be about half that... . It is not only doable - it needs to be done or the US won't have a reliable electricity sector in the future. It is the scale of investments that is important."


• "Finally, one can consider the investment requirements. By all accounts, replacement and modernization investments in the energy sector, and specifically, the electricity sector, will have to be massive. For instance, if one goes solely nuclear (for the sake of argument), and assumes $7,000/kW for a completed reactor, all investments and interest costs included (the minimum cost would likely be) probably ... about $4.5 trillion.

We can do the same calculation for wind, where you need 2.6 kW of wind (assuming 35 percent capacity factor) to equal one kW of nuclear (90 percent capacity factor) and $2,000 per kW. The total investment in generation needed is $2,000 times 1.3 billion kW = $2.6 trillion, much less than nuclear... (even leaving aside needing to add in back-up and other problems with a wind system, and not even considering unaccounted for costs of nukes).

If solar PV is to be the mainstay, its costs will have to become comparable with wind - and they are estimated to reach that in about five years. Concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) is at about the same cost per unit of electricity generated as the typical estimate for new nuclear here - and the costs for CSP, which is just taking off as an industry this year, are going down while nuclear cost estimates keep going up."

His conclusion is simple:

"The scale of the job of maintaining a reliable electricity sector is large, no matter what the choice of technology ... .(Moreover), (r)enewables can create - and are creating - far more jobs and far more carbon-free electricity than nuclear ...(whose) benefits are spread to working people throughout the country as well. I also advocate that efficiency should be at the center of energy policy, but that is another story and not directly relevant to the feasibility issue raised by the pro-nuclear critic."

Yet another basis for optimism is that CFNF purposely advanced extremely conservative estimates of what might be possible. Especially in regard to small scale hydro, for example, a much rosier view than that expressed by the book is possible, as I will report soon. Otherwise, particularly in regard to CSP and cost savings and efficiency, as CFNF notes repeatedly, much greater alacrity and capacity is possible than the text suggests.

Another point that seems intuitively obvious to this writer, and that I did not see in CFNF, is the notion of technological synergy. In particular, the developing intersection among computer science, efficient operational methods/industrial engineering, logistics, electrical engineering, and communications almost guarantee that things will be better than Dr. M's admittedly 'conservative' assessment. Moreover, for various reasons of scale, concentration, and security, such synergy would be less applicable to nukes.

Finally, with nearly half a million downloads, and ongoing demand for workshops and other learning opportunities, the potential exists for a community-level actualization of CFNF premises. For obvious reasons, such informed and populist advocacy will never be feasible with a technology from which atomic bombs and other, cruder weapons of mass destruction are far from impossible to manufacture.

A COMMUNITY-BASED PARTICIPATORY POLICY CAVEAT

The rectitude of CFNF notwithstanding, its pointed and powerful positions are very likely to end in a 'road not taken' unless something happens to enlarge, empower, and activate the nascent movement that seems to be plausible in regard to the book and its positions. This proto-movement currently consists in community educational and activation meetings around the information and analysis of CFNF. One can examine these developments both on the IEER website and via other reportage.

However, without taking anything away from these manifestations of citizen concern and commitment, an observer has to note that they parallel many other such manifestations of concern and commitment in the past--dealing with nuclear weapons, environmental destruction, peace, and other critical issues for human survival. So far, President Obama's 'Change that you can believe in' has yielded next to no tangible alteration of present policies in diametric opposition to the goals of CFNF.

Nor, in the past, despite some positive outcomes, have earlier 'movements'--relying primarily on petitions for redress, selecting better stewards, and presenting information--yielded any fundamental policy transformation. Instead, the corporate agenda, the bureaucratic hegemony of government and business, and the standard-operating-procedure of Wall Street in conjunction with various 'industrial-complexes' have remained in control.

The continuation of such trends today would be a tragedy of immeasurable proportions. It might doom homo sapiens sapiens to extinction. At the very least, a future lacking in anything akin to freedom, democracy, and the pursuit of happiness would become unavoidable.

In this context, following Einstein's advice, we should try something different if we expect different outcomes. The 'muscle' for true social transformation cannot come from above. It can only come from a 'strong democracy' movement that burgeons at the social grassroots. Such a process, in turn, can only occur if we recognize and act on the social-economic parameters of such crises that CFNF examines while participating in the empowerment and connection of actual human communities that stand on their own as a source of political momentum.

A good friend of mine, in times of stress, has been inclined to pose a question to me that is apt for green-energy and social-responsibilities sorts of folks to consider. "Would you rather be right, or would you rather be happy?" What my friend implies with this inquiry is that being right, and hence righteous in my case, is not necessarily conducive to getting along with others.

My response, however, which I have formulated over a period of years is that I hope to be both accurate and sanguine, correct and joyous at the same time. I note this because, for many decades, erstwhile progressive and otherwise honorable and generous people have been right about innumerable matters of politics and policy: from the hydrogen bomb through Vietnam and on down to matters of energy choice, progressive positions have turned out to be conceptually, technically, and empirically superior.

Yet, almost without exception, since the death of FDR and the deep-sixing of his 'New Bill of Rights,' progressive solutions have received short shrift when the political push has yielded to the policy shove. 'Mutually Assured Destruction' in regard to H-bombs, massive escalation in Southeast Asia, and massive loan guarantees for nuclear reactors add up to just a smattering of the evidence available to demonstrate this assertion.

Being correct does not yield policy. Political potency yields policy. Thus, if, like me, progressive thinkers and activists want not only to be right, but also to attain satisfying success in these matters, an orientation to strategy--to an assessment of what will be necessary to attain and then implement policies that reflect the accurate insights that we've developed--must become a first level priority.

Big money has long evinced a political attachment to nukes. This has nothing to do with fiscal viability and everything to do with more deeply rooted political economic factors, matters of historical and social analysis beyond the ken of this essay. However, the attachment itself is incontrovertible: how else explain the loan guarantees and the constant presence at the highest institutional levels of support for nuclear options?

Given that this connection is true, therefore, to be both 'right and happy,' progressives are going to have to put their faith in the only source of 'energy' that can possibly stand up to the money-changers and plutocrats currently in charge of policy. That source of vitality, and conceivably of salvation, is a stronger version of democracy than what currently passes for majority rule in the United States. Turning rectitude into action requires something like a mass movement of communities that demand that 'of the people, by the people, and for the people' shall not vanish from the earth.

In embracing such an orientation, we need not reject our roots. Abraham Lincoln, a corporation lawyer and an early proponent of the same GOP that gave us 'W,' was also a social visionary who recognized the crushing weight of money on the heads of humanity. He also recognized the role that appropriate technology can play in human advancement.

"Of all the forces of nature, I should think the wind contains the largest amount of motive power - that is, power to move things. Take any given space of the earth's surface - for instance, Illinois; and all the power exerted by all the men, and beasts, and running water, and steam, over and upon it, shall not equal the one hundredth part of what is exerted by the blowing of the wind over and upon the same space. And yet it has not, so far in the world's history, become proportionably valuable as a motive power. It is applied extensively, and advantageously, to sail vessels in navigation. Add to this a few windmills, and pumps, and you have about all. ... As yet, the wind is an untamed and unharnessed force; and quite possibly one of the greatest discoveries hereafter to be made will be the taming and harnessing of it."

However, people cannot expect this vision to emerge without struggle and sacrifice, any more than we might have anticipated that slavery would end without civil conflict of the direst sort.

Photo Credits:
Petrol: Public Domain
Climate Change Conference: The copyright holder of this work allows anyone to use it for any purpose including unrestricted redistribution, commercial use, and modification.
OPEC flag: Public Domain
Wind: twicepix
Mine: Michal Osmenda
Metal: Webtreats
Chemicals: Horia Varlan
Textiles: Adalbertop
Community Garden: Artefatica
Protest Movement: Wyntuition
FDR: dbking