Ramping up to a Good New Year
Carolyn Porco Supports Nuclear Energy--as did Carl Sagan
Winner of the 2020 AAS Carl Sagan Medal, Carolyn Porco is a world-renowned planetary scientist.
If you don’t follow her, you should. From her Wikipedia page:
She has co-authored more than 110 scientific papers on subjects ranging from the spectroscopy of Uranus and Neptune, the interstellar medium, the photometry of planetary rings, satellite/ring interactions, computer simulations of planetary rings, the thermal balance of Triton's polar caps, heat flow in the interior of Jupiter, and a suite of results on the atmosphere, satellites, and rings of Saturn from the Cassini imaging experiment.[2] In 2013, Cassini data[3] confirmed a 1993 prediction[4] by Porco and Mark Marley that acoustic oscillations within the body of Saturn are responsible for creating particular features in the rings of Saturn.
Fortunately for us earthlings, she has started paying more attention lately to energy and, specifically, the promise of nuclear energy. Her interest has to do with the fact that There is No Planet B.
Today started out as a good New Year for me. Not only did Carolyn follow me on Twitter, she re-tweeted a recent thread where I corrected absurd claims from Auke Hoekstra regarding nuclear power. But the follow-repost weren’t the best part—the most gratifying part her introduction:
Nuclear Power is the energy source of the future, just as (so it turns out), Carl Sagan testified to Congress some 38 years ago:
Nuclear power produces orders of magnitude more useful energy with orders of magnitude fewer commodity (natural resource) inputs, for the longer times, than any engine ever devised by human beings. Log scales; orders of magnitude.
Under the Messmer Plan, France substantially decarbonized its electric grid in a decade without a single solar panel, windmill, battery, or rolling blackout. The Messmer Plan did not require mining to the center of the earth. Power costs in France have been stable for decades. The French fleet is Europe’s electrical energy backbone, especially now that Germany has wrecked its 17 reactor fleet (and the €20/MWh power they made).
Unlike fossil fuels, uranium’s market price is remarkably stable, so much so that there is not all that much money to be made from it. It is an abundant, worldwide commodity. On top of that, its production is not controlled by cartels and corrupt governments. Australia, for instance, has the world’s largest reserves.
Uranium produces so much energy that the world mined enough just in 2021 to produce 3,500 gigajoules of energy. That same year, total world energy consumption was 600 gigajoules. Math is not my strong suit, but I realize that 3,500 is a lot more than 600.
Nuclear power’s largest obstacle has been politics. In turn, the politics of nuclear power is driven by two facts: Nuclear power produces so much energy with so few inputs, that nuclear power does not have a natural constituency (apart from the whole of humanity), yet there are many natural consituencies that oppose nuclear power.
Given limited public understanding of how things work, engineering, risks, physics, and science, public acceptance of nuclear power has been the biggest challenge of all. With the likes of Carolyn Porco turning attention to the topic of energy and nuclear power, I am more hopeful than ever in the future of humanity and the physical Civilization that feeds and protects us.
Super piece. Grateful to people like you in this arena. Most in the West have little to no idea of the consequences of bad energy/environmental policy and how that translates to their daily lives.
Your French example is superb.
Engineering has adequate risk management solutions to the issue of nuclear waste. There is no engineering solution wind/solar intermittency. Digging up the earth's crust to try and solve that with battery storage is a fools errand.