Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million).18 By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred.

Nuclear energy's total death.

million people in 2016.21 Nuclear is thus the safest way to make reliable electricity.22 In fact, nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.23 For that reason, replacing nuclear energy with fossil fuels costs lives.

Nuclear energy saves lives.

France spends a little more than half as much for electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions of German electricity.

Nuclear has long been one of the cheapest ways to make electricity in the world. In most of the world, including Europe and Asia, nuclear electricity is usually cheaper than electricity from natural gas and coal.

Between 1965 and 2018, the world spent about $2 trillion for nuclear, and $2.3 trillion for solar and wind. At the end of the experiment, the world received about twice as much electricity from nuclear as it did from solar and wind.

1960s to 2020s - 2x more energy from nuclear, similar cost.

One of the best features of nuclear waste is that there is so little of it. All the used nuclear fuel ever generated in the United States can fit on a single football field stacked less than seventy feet high.

The reason is that the increase in energy from solar and wind barely made up for the decline in nuclear.31 And electricity is just one-third of total energy use, globally. The remaining two-thirds of primary energy consumption is dominated by fossil fuels, which are used for things like heating, cooking, and transportation. Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide

Not all energy is for electricity. Nuclear can provide most of it.

And only nuclear can accommodate the rising energy consumption that will be driven by the need for things like fertilizer production, fish farming, and factory farming—all of which are highly beneficial to both people and the natural environment.

“They can’t have it both ways,” said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel. “If they say this [climate change] is apocalyptic or it’s an unacceptable risk, and then they turn around and rule out one of the most obvious ways of avoiding it [nuclear power], they’re not only inconsistent, they’re insincere.”

Consequently, some activists who were originally focused on nuclear weapons disarmament began displacing their anxieties on nuclear reactors instead.77 Displacement is a psychological concept very similar to scapegoating. The idea is that we take our negative emotions out on weaker objects because we fear the more powerful object. If the boss yells at us, we kick the dog because talking back to the boss is too dangerous. In this case, the nuclear weapons were the boss and nuclear power plants were the dog.

Antinuclear groups sought additional regulations and sued to halt and slow construction. The antinuclear strategy to drive up costs by adding new regulations, or simply demanding new regulations be considered in order to create uncertainty and delay, worked.

All in all, the antinuclear movement managed to help kill in planning or cancel during or after construction half of all nuclear reactors that utilities in the United States had planned to build, even when it was known and acknowledged by everyone, including the environmental groups, that coal plants would be built instead.

The public’s fear of nuclear technology remains the main obstacle to its expansion. Surveys of people around the world find that nuclear is slightly less popular than coal, less popular than natural gas, and far less popular than solar and wind.

Nuclear is less popular than coal.

The Colorado plateau is more naturally radioactive than most of Fukushima was after the accident.114 “There are areas of the world that are more radioactive than Colorado and the inhabitants there do not show increased rates of cancer,” said Gerry.

“Much of the energy is lost in the process of turning wind into electricity, electricity into hydrogen, and then hydrogen into methane—efficiency is below 40 percent. It isn’t enough for a sustainable business model.”

The big oil and gas companies know perfectly well that batteries can’t back up the grid. The places integrating large amounts of solar and wind onto electricity grids are relying more and more on natural gas plants, which can be ramped up and down quickly to cope with the vagaries of the weather.

Linowes and others learned that a wind farm requires roughly 450 times more land than a natural gas power plant.

The wind industry claims house cats kill more birds than wind turbines, but whereas cats mainly kill small, common birds, like sparrows, robins, and jays, wind turbines kill big, threatened, and slow-to-reproduce species like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors.35 In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to several important bird species to emerge in decades.

Birds and wind turbines.

In the end, there is no amount of technological innovation that can solve the fundamental problem with renewables. Solar and wind make electricity more expensive for two reasons: they are unreliable, thus requiring 100 percent backup, and energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.

Solar Impulse’s wingspan was the same length as a Boeing 747, which carries 500 people at close to 1,000 kilometers an hour.64 Solar Impulse could only carry one person, the pilot, and fly less than 100 kilometers an hour, which is why it took two months to complete the trip.

Electric plane.

The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years.66 The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter.

Solar and wind efficiency limit.

Solar panels and wind turbines also require far more in the way of materials and produce more in the way of waste. Solar panels require sixteen times more materials69 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.

Wind and solar waste.

“As solar energy booms in the region, so do expired lead-acid batteries for rooftop solar panels and lithium batteries for solar lamps. E-waste can damage the environment by leaking dangerous chemicals into groundwater and harm people who scavenge recyclable materials by hand.”

Human civilization would have to occupy one hundred to one thousand times more space if it were to rely solely on renewables. “This power density gap between fossil and renewable energies,” writes energy analyst Vaclav Smil, “leaves nuclear electricity generation as the only commercially proven non-fossil high-power-density alternative.”

100x to 1000x more land if we only used renewables.

For example, if the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required.87 By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States.

US and the space needed to power it.

One pioneering study found that in the case of Germany, where nuclear and hydroelectric dams produce seventy-five and thirty-five times more in energy, respectively, than is required to make them, solar, wind, and biomass produce just 1.6, 3.9, and 3.5 times more.

Coal, gas, and oil return about thirty times more energy than they require.

The transition to renewables was doomed because modern industrial people, no matter how romantic they are, do not want to return to pre-modern life.

If just 10 percent of the electricity in the United States were to come from wood-burning biomass power plants, the fuel to power them would require an area of forest land the size of Texas.

Wind energy in 10% would need a Texas size forest.

Direct emissions from burning combined with these adverse land use changes mean that the amount of carbon dioxide released from producing and burning biomass and biofuels is higher than from burning fossil fuels.

The main problem with biofuels—the land required—stems from their low power density. If the United States were to replace all of its gasoline with corn ethanol, it would need an area 50 percent larger than all of the current U.S. cropland.

Biofuels are low density and demand huge area.

Nor do governments require that wind developers disclose when they kill birds and bats, or count the dead. Wind developers have even sued to prevent the public from accessing data about bird kills.

“Wind-rich migration trails used by insects for millions of years are increasingly seamed by wind farms,” wrote Dr. Franz Trieb of the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, in a major report.

In 2012, a Science Advisory Board to the Environmental Protection Agency concluded bioenergy was not “carbon neutral,” which was supported by more than ninety leading scientists in an open letter to the European Union’s Environment Agency.

“Wind turbines are among the fastest-growing threats to our nation’s birds,” a scientist with American Bird Conservancy said a few weeks later,

Vermont not only failed to reduce emissions by 25 percent, its emissions rose 16 percent between 1990 and 2015, in part due to the closure of the state’s nuclear plant, and in part due to the inadequacy of renewables.

The number of wind farms the size of Deerfield that would be needed to replace the lost annual electricity from Vermont Yankee, one of the smallest nuclear plants remaining in the United States when it was closed, would have been fifty-six. At that rate, Vermont will make up for the clean energy lost from Vermont Yankee sometime around the year 2104.

Does it matter? After all, where climate skeptic groups like CEI work to kill climate policies, 350.org and other environmental groups use Steyer’s money to support clean energy, not kill it, right? Wrong. Not only are 350.org, Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF all funded by fossil fuel billionaires, they are also all trying to kill America’s largest source of carbon-free electricity, nuclear power.

Green activists are funded by carbon industries to fight their competition: nuclear energy.

Killing nuclear plants turns out to be a lucrative business for competitor fossil fuel and renewable energy companies. That’s because nuclear plants generate large amounts of electricity.

They have created detailed reports for policymakers, journalists, and the public purporting to show that neither nuclear plants nor fossil fuels are needed to meet electricity demand, thanks to energy efficiency and renewables. And yet, as we have seen, almost everywhere nuclear plants are closed, or not built, fossil fuels are burned instead.

The answer is that he was pioneering the environmental movement’s strategy of taking money from oil and gas investors and promoting renewables as a way to greenwash the closure of nuclear plants.

Climate activists massively outspend climate skeptics.

Climate activists receive more donations than skeptical organizations.

As we have seen, there is no energy leapfrogging. Per capita income remains tightly coupled with per capita energy consumption. There is no rich low-energy nation just as there is no poor high-energy one.

While environmentalists have not had the political power to restrict energy consumption and thus economic growth in rich nations, they have, for fifty years, had enough to restrict it in poorer and weaker ones. Today, the World Bank is diverting funding from cheap and reliable energy sources like hydroelectricity, fossil fuels, and nuclear, to expensive and unreliable ones like solar and wind. And in October 2019, the European Investment Bank announced it would halt all financing of fossil fuels in poor nations by 2021.

World banks make energy more expensive in poor countries.

But then, in the late 1980s, under the sway of green NGOs like World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace, the United Nations started to promote a radically different development model: sustainable development. Under this new model, poor and developing nations would continue to use small-scale renewable energy, rather than large-scale electrical power plants like dams. The World Bank followed the UN’s direction.

NGOs changed world banks and UN policies about infrastructure investment in poor countries.

The United Nations pioneered the notion that poor nations could grow rich without using much energy, in sharp contrast to every other rich nation in the world.

As we saw, the industrial revolution could not have happened with renewables. Preindustrial societies are low-energy societies. Coal allowed preindustrial humans to escape the organic solar energy economy. There was no example in 1987 of any nation escaping poverty with renewables and energy efficiency.

“Time and time again I have seen NGOs and politicians in rich countries advocate that the poor follow a path that they, the rich, never have followed,” he wrote, “nor are willing to follow.”

Malthus was against birth control, viewing it as against God’s plan for humans. He was against social welfare programs for the poor, viewing them as self-defeating. British leaders who justified their policies based on Malthus’s thinking were conservatives.