Before acquiescing to the angry activists of climate change pseudo-science, and the anti-American Left who disdain their own nation because it is better off than some others, we should step back and take a look at our energy needs and resources and rational approaches to their management. 

At the heart of the climate change cult – the worship of the angry weather goddess - is a fundamental failure to recognize what human civilizations are built upon. Or perhaps it is a failure to respect this reality, because … well … civilization is icky (the central thesis of Deep Green Resistance, the self-proclaimed anti-human vanguard), and dry camping is so much fun. Camping "after the fall" will be less fun than before, though, once the freeze- dried entrees run out, and you can't go home for a hot shower, gourmet meal and the latest episode of diverse comedy and self-flagellation on Netflix. With no diesel to run the machinery, we'll fall behind on digging mass graves, the neighborhood won't be fragrant, and bubonic plague is a bummer without antibiotics.

A full critique of DGR ("rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans—even if there is a partial die-off—because at least some people survive."), Extinction Rebellion, and other fringe environmentalists who didn't pay attention in school calls for a book-length digression, and since they appear to lack the physical and morale courage for direct action to advance their genocidal fantasies –we'll leave that for a more quiet and reflective time. It's the more mainstream dedication to a "green" future fueled by sun, wind, moonbeams, and – oddly enough – a rebirth of nuclear power that we'll address here.

Imagining that wind, solar, and nuclear power will restart civilization after we collapse it – globally – with a sudden cut off of fossil fuels is simply, and lethally, delusional. They can pretend that they don't want a mass "die-off" of the human population, but to deny that would the outcome of policies now openly pursued is foolish and irresponsible.

Facts

We'll try to be brief here, because there are reams of information (pearls hidden in piles of disinformation) available on these topics. Here are the salient facts as we see them:

1. Climate change is real. We have temperature records going back to the mid-17th Century, human observations of weather, growing seasons, etc. for millennia before that, and strong scientific evidence that corroborates all that and provides great insights into climate fluctuations since long before modern humans walked the earth. Two things stand out:

    • Just within recent history, there is inarguable evidence of warm and cool periods, the duration and extent of which far exceed the 20th Century warming that has caused all the current fuss. The argument for "anthropogenic" (i.e., human caused) global warming through elevated CO2 emissions should end right there. Northern Hemisphere temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period averaged 2°C higher than today, and the "Little Ice Age" that followed (mid-14th to mid-18th Centuries), saw temperatures averaging (across many smaller fluctuations during that period) about 2°C cooler. In one of the minor shifts during the latter period, detailed records in Western Europe showed a 2.2°C rise in average temperatures over just 36 years, between 1696 and 1732, which was well before the Industrial Revolution, much less those evil coal plants and automobiles. By contrast, the net worldwide warming across the entire 20th Century was about 0.7°C.
    • The engine of temperature change and the rest of earth's climate is solar activity, which is not constant. Compared to the constant fluctuations in solar output, mankind's impact on climate in the last 200 years is negligible. Under the ululations of the apocalyptic-global-warming chorus, there is mounting evidence that the current solar cycle and the immediately preceding ones actually predict significant cooling through the mid-21st Century.
    • To a paraphrase a professor of meteorology and climate we heard back in 1978, when the climate scare of the decade was based on a short-term cooling trend that various Chicken Littles (many of them in the media) took as evidence that the planet was descending into an ice age:

What we fail to recognize without a proper historical perspective is that since about 1800 (approximately the end of the Little Ice Age), the Northern Hemisphere has experienced above all an extended period of mild weather. Temperature extremes flattened, severe weather events decreased in intensity and frequency, and – most importantly – growing seasons were generally stable and predictable for a bit more than 150 years. These were all anomalies, compared to the longer historical record. Those 150 years saw a massive and steepening increase in human population globally, enabled above all else by ample and predictable food supply.

One of first signs that this long spell of nice weather was coming to an end – that we were reverting to the extremes and unpredictability that are actually the norm in Earth's climate – is found in the political history of the U.S.S.R. in the 1950s and early 1960s. Premier Nikita Khrushchev attempted to expand grain production into areas of western Siberia that had never previously been cultivated, based upon multi-year data from his scientific sector that showed conditions since the establishment of the USSR (c.1920) had been stable and conductive to cool-weather grain crops. This program failed, at considerable cost, as reflected in the gaps between expected and actual grain production in those years, because the climate worsened. It wasn't warming or cooling in any identifiable trend, it was just returning to the unpredictable global norm, where year to year fluctuations in precipitation and the length of the growing season led to as many crop failures as successes.

The professor – in 1978 – warned against mistaking short-term fluctuations in any climatic measures for long-term trends. He memorably said, "Right now, the fear is of rapid cooling tipping us into an ice age. A few years from now, we'll have a warm spell that will lead to fears of global warming, and models that will predict disaster. Stay calm and recognize that it's mostly just the natural unpredictability of weather, and the mistaking of short-term trends (anything less than decades or centuries in length) for long-term trends and patterns. It's just the weather."


2. Big picture time. We couldn't say it much better David Archibald did in his 2014 book Twilight of Abundance, so we'll quote him here. Note that while Mr. Archibald has not yet been burned for heresy, the climate change orthodoxy would have, if they could have. You can find lots of critiques of his work and his conclusions by the carriers of the secret flame of climate "truth", but we suggest you just read his book and think for yourself.

"Belief in manmade global warming depends on acting as if the laws of physics are suspended and we are living in a special time in which the climate is unchanging apart from the hand of man. In a sense we actually are living in a special time relative to the last 3 million years, which has been an ice age. The special time we live in is an interglacial period – a temporary respite in that ice age. For 90 percent of the time, the Earth is in a glacial period with much lower temperatures and a much lower sea level …

"We are living in what is called the Holocene interglacial period… For the first 2 million years of the current ice age, glaciations – when temperatures drop and glaciers spread – were about 40,000 years apart. They are now about 100,000 years apart. Thus, there have been some sixty glaciations in the last 3 million years. During each glaciation, sea level may be 120 meters lower than it is currently…

"To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, interglacial periods are short, and then we enter the nasty, brutish glacial periods. The Holocene, now 10,000 years old, is long in the tooth relative to three of the last four interglacial periods. If the Holocene ends up being as long as the last interglacial, the Eemian period, then we may have up to 3,000 years of Little Ice Age-like conditions ahead of us before we plunge into the next glacial period. If not, then the plunge could start any time now."


3. Modern civilization has been built on the Industrial Revolution, which was fueled primarily by coal for its first century, since the early 1900s increasingly by petroleum, and more recently by natural gas and by nuclear power's contribution to electricity generation. Heating, cooling, lighting, industrial processes, and vehicle propulsion from farm tractors to spacecraft all depend upon these sources of energy. The processes that made and sustain modern civilization utilize a finite and nonrenewable reserve of fossil fuels, that are increasingly expensive to extract. We need to separate that key fact from the ideologically driven pseudo-science of CO2 and anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming. If we understand the concept of "peak oil", and recognize that these finite resources, although large, are being consumed at an ever-increasing rate, then we can have adult conversations about energy developments that really do need to begin during the grace period before scarcity and price increases (real ones, not those engineered by misguided governments and the cultish movements that drive them) lead to instability and reduce our options.

However, what we now contend with is the angry-weather-goddess cult driving extreme measures like the "Green New Deal" that insist on a panicked flight from fossil-fuel use into "renewable" "green" energy like wind and solar. Panic is not an overstatement, when we look at hysterical spokespersons like Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg who told us the world will end in twelve years if we don't wake up and crash human civilization before then. How far are we into that 12-year countdown? Who knows? Who believes this tripe enough to care?

Wind and Solar

In the haste to replace coal, oil, and gas as energy sources we are expected to ignore the reliance of the "green" alternatives on the very fossil fuel driven processes necessary to their construction and maintenance. The "carbon footprint" of the production of photovoltaic cells and other solar energy collectors, and of large wind turbines, not to mention electric vehicles, is stupendous. Wind turbines are entirely dependent on manufacturing processes powered by fossil fuels, utilizing petroleum derivatives for their synthetic materials, and consuming substantial amounts of petroleum-based lubricants. Photovoltaics require substantial quantities of rare minerals that are costly and environmentally dangerous to mine and process – extraction that depends on fossil fuel use as well as exploitative child labor and totalitarian regimes like China.

Both solar and wind systems require on average two decades or more of electricity generation to "pay back" the cost of their production, and that is about the useful life of most of these systems. In other words, about the time they have paid for themselves, they must be replaced. Economic viability is not the only consideration in judging energy alternatives, but it is a damned important one.

The greatest drawback is the fact that electricity generated by solar and wind fluctuates with the availability, respectively, of sunlight and of wind velocities high enough to run the turbines but not so high that they have to be shut down. These natural fluctuations unfortunately do not coincide with the peaks and valleys of demand for electricity. When applied on a smaller scale, for example off-grid residences or remote locations, this is not a significant issue. Energy storage systems – batteries – can bridge the gap between production and consumption of energy, on that small scale. Battery storage is impractical (and a social and environmental nightmare, given the cost and resource requirements of battery production) on the scale that would be necessary to buffer wind and solar energy supply into the electric grid. This drawback is becoming more and more apparent as the very small percentage of overall electricity generation from "renewable" sources grows.

Nuclear

Recently, and particularly in Wyoming, we've seen one answer now being put forward by the acolytes of the angry weather goddess: nuclear power. This is deeply ironic in itself, because the political left – the base of support for climate change and other extreme environmental concepts and programs – was consistently and fiercely opposed to nuclear power for decades, until it was seen to offer a lifeline to their pet renewable technologies. Not all branches of the climate change church have gotten the message, as we see, for instance, in Germany's complete shutdown of their nuclear power plants with no replacement online for their lost capacity. But Wyoming is the hoped-for site of a "new" nuclear technology – actually rather old and problematic – that does introduce one new capability. That is thermal storage through the use of molten salts, which can be heated by the reactor, stored on site, and then used to boost the plant's electrical output for a few hours to compensate for the shortfalls of wind and solar when the wind isn't blowing just right, and the sun is not shining. It is a pretty pathetic offering to the weather goddess, but nuclear proponents will take every lifeline they are thrown. The amount of additional energy this system provides is laughably small, but in plants based on this pilot project and enlarged to three times the size and output – in many such plants, built nationwide over the next 30+ years – it might be significant. That's in theory – if the greenies don't force us into the dark and cold much sooner, to save the planet from Greta's demons. Manufacturing, mixing and pouring mass concrete for all those reactors is going to be difficult on solar power.

In a larger sense, neither legacy nuclear power and nor the "experimental" proposals now being funded and encouraged by the federal government and deep-pockets corporations are not an answer to our energy conundrum. Existing nuclear technology – represented by light water reactors across America and in 21 other countries – has major structural problems that have led to its stagnation. New plants are essentially impossible to license and build in America; older plants are receiving overhauls and life extensions, or being decommissioned after exceeding their predicted useful life. With the notable exception of China, few new nuclear plants have become operational worldwide since the late 1980s.

Those poor prospects for the nuclear industry in the U.S. are often blamed on the regulatory climate, and the environmental movement (again, deliciously ironic) that drove that stifling regulatory regime. But there are other problems, equally applicable to "new" nuclear and to the aging, legacy nuclear industry, which even the pro-energy, politically conservative class sometimes does not understand. The "anti-nuclear" crowd for so many years were seen as smelly and irrational and so, even when they raised some of these points, they were mistrusted and ignored. These issues concern economics and safety, and each trace directly back to the U.S. government.

The poor economics of nuclear power

The development of commercial nuclear power was heavily promoted and subsidized by the U.S. in the 1950s. We won't venture into the whys and wherefores of that, but focus on the extent of the continuing federal subsidies which are the only reason nuclear-generated electricity has ever been competitive. The federal government has subsidized the commercial nuclear power industry in all these areas: (1) nuclear research, development, and demonstration; (2) nuclear regulation to protect the public's health and safety; (3) enrichment of uranium to make it usable in commercial nuclear power plants; (4) stimulation of domestic uranium mining; (5) indemnification of power plant owners and others in the industry against nuclear accidents; and (6) accepting responsibility for the permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel. The last two are the most significant.

When American utilities first began planning for full scale, nuclear generating plants in the mid-1950s, they approached high-risk underwriters like Lloyds of London for insurance against low-probability but high consequence accidents. The unequivocal answer they received – even that early in the nuclear era – was essentially "hell, no." They were informed that, yes, they could be insured against catastrophic failure and resultant losses, but that the premiums would be so high as to make the entire project unfeasible. Insurance actuaries are probably the coldest, most realistic assessors of risk on the planet, and this conclusion was irrefutable. The U.S. government's response was the Price-Anderson Act of 1957, still in effect in updated form today. It established a ceiling of costs for catastrophic incidents for which the plant operators would be liable; any losses above that limit ($150 million in 1957, $10 billion today) would be covered by the federal government (i.e., the taxpayers). That protection is still in place, and there would never have been a single nuclear power plant in America without it. No other form of energy generation depends on that kind of open-ended government protection. The others pay their own way.

The second, indispensable form of governmental subsidy for nuclear power is in the longstanding federal guarantee that it would accept responsibility for the long term (multi-hundred year) storage of spent nuclear fuel. This is almost a uniquely American problem, because of government policy that has prohibited the reprocessing and recycling of spent fuel because it produces nuclear materials usable in nuclear weapons. This promise has never been fulfilled; the government has never created a repository for these materials, which requires them to be stored indefinitely on each nuclear reactor site, which creates significant safety and security risks. But because of its historical commitment, the federal government pays to the industry a substantial portion of the cost of this onsite storage, totaling over 9 billion dollars to date. Relieving the industry of the costs of this "back-end" of the fuel cycle is another enormous subsidy, unparalleled in any other energy sector. Without it, the nuclear power industry would be even less competitive.

Safety and Security Concerns

There are continuing concerns about the safety and security of nuclear power plants, and these are closely related to the two indispensable government subsidies we've described. It widely accepted – and confirmed by the well-known examples of Chernobyl and Fukushima and several smaller incidents over the years – that there is a risk of catastrophic failures inherent in nuclear technology. Sane and sober observers accept that these risks are, particularly regarding U.S. reactors, very improbable, but that's only half the equation. No matter how improbable an event is, if the consequences are extreme, they must be addressed. As noted above, these have largely been addressed by the massive federal subsidy established by the Price Anderson Act in 1957.

A category of safety incident hardly anticipated in the early 1950s is the result of the fuel cycle problem. Before the first refueling of the first operational commercial nuclear power plant, the government had accepted responsibility for the highly radioactive and chemically toxic spent fuel, and that was not seen a potential risk, at least for the industry. But since nuclear spent fuel has been piling up at reactor sites for over sixty years now, it is very much a safety and a security concern. Normally, spent fuel extracted from a reactor is stored for several years in a pool of cooling water, constantly circulated by pumps to remove excess heat that would cause the material to burst into flames, potentially create steam or chemical explosions, and scatter highly radioactive materials downwind and/or into water supplies. Once the heat of continuing nuclear decay subsides, the fuel elements are then encapsulated in steel and concrete casks, which are considerably more secure. But in both forms, the salient fact is that spent fuel on reactor sites quickly exceeds both the mass and the total radioactivity of the fuel in the reactor core, and is far less well-protected than the reactor core. Bad actors, whether criminals, agents of hostile foreign nations, or terrorists can and do consider spent nuclear fuel to be attractive targets for direct attack or sabotage; it is far more vulnerable to such action than the heavily shielded reactor cores themselves. There is also the risk of natural disaster, as occurred at Japan's Fukushima plant in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami cut off power to the spent fuel storage pools, resulting in overheating, fire, explosions, and dispersal of radioactivity entirely aside from the massive damage done to the reactors themselves. All it took was the loss of electrical power, which resulted from the shutdown of the reactors, the severing of power lines connecting the plant to the electric grid, and exhaustion of the diesel fuel supply for emergency generators. Has the industry learned from Fukushima and from other, less severe incidents and near misses? Certainly. Has every identified safety and security upgrade been widely implemented, or included in the design of 'next-generation' reactors? What do you think?

Several of the 'next generation' reactor concepts, heavily funded through development by the federal government, and including the Natrium reactor intended for construction in Wyoming, have both positive and negative attributes different than the traditional light water reactors in service today. Without going down deep into that rabbit hole, we'll just say that despite a few 'innovative' features, they are really just commercial applications of concepts that have been built and tested extensively over the years with very mixed results. They are all fueled by U-235 enriched uranium – sometimes enriched to nearly weapons-grade – and some, like Bill Gates' Natrium, have the potential to produce fuel- or weapon-ready plutonium from neutron bombardment of otherwise inert U-238. These 'fast' reactors add a nuclear weapon proliferation and security concern to the several others we've mentioned.

Conclusion

What can we do? What is the alternative to meeting growing energy demand from a growing human population, without eventually running off the cliff of exhausting our finite supply of economically recoverable fossil fuels? That problem is real, but it's far less urgent than the climate change crowd would have us believe. We should prudently use the time we have to explore our options and let market forces ease us into the energy future without government coercion. And in truth, barring unforeseeable emerging technologies the answer may lie in a form of nuclear power that is only beginning to receive the attention it deserves. That is thorium-based nuclear power generation. Thorium is a very abundant element – far more so than natural uranium – and can be used to produce a uranium isotope, U-233, to fuel fission reactors. Other than low cost and availability of thorium, the main advantages over traditional uranium fuel cycle reactors are that they will produce far less radioactive waste, and U-233 is very difficult to weaponize. Many small-scale thorium reactors have been built and operated on an experimental basis, and the first full-scale thorium power generation units are currently under construction in China. These deserve a much larger share of private and public-sector funding and support than the incrementally improved and problematic uranium fuel cycle "Small Modular Reactors" now being heavily promoted despite all their well-known drawbacks.

In the meantime, we should manage our plentiful oil, coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, and renewable energy resources in our national interest, and not to placate the angry weather goddess or those who revel in the prospect of crashing our best-yet political and economic system so they can 'build back' a bleak and impoverished socialist authoritarianism atop its ruins.