The Social Construction of Ignorance: Gloor and Adams

Social constructionism is a notion advanced by some sociologists that all human beliefs, including the beliefs of scientists, can be explained by reference to social context. Thus facts are nothing more than statements of things people have a agreed to believe. Thus at the bottom all knowledge has an irrational basis.

I find the constructionist view of science to be unsatisfactory, because it does not explain everything that needs to be explained about the power of science to change human society. At the same time the constructionist view helps to explain a lot about attempts to create doubt about views supported by well grounded scientific research.

During an exchange of comments that followed a cross posting on The Energy Collective, of my recent post, Was the Advent of the Power Reactor Premature,nuclear power critic, Stephen Gloor stated to Rod Adams

In you case you are a nuclear denier. Completely and steadfastly refusing to believe that nuclear power is incredibly expensive, cannot be rolled out fast enough to even scratch the surface of climate change, produces toxic waste that must be cleaned up by others and acts as a convenient cover for weapons making.

Gloor then went on to quote as essay by Pascal Diethelm1 and Martin McKee, titled "Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?"

First, let me deal with Stephen Gloor's charges against Adams. Gloor has a tendency to attribute mistakes to people who he disagrees with without documenting examples of the mistakes. In at least some cases the people involved may in fact appear to believe exactly the opposite of what Gloor says they do. Gloor alleges that Adams is

[c]ompletely and steadfastly refusing to believe that nuclear power is incredibly expensive,

Gloor ignores the fact that Adams repeatedly has discussed nuclear costs on his blog. Gloor may not agree with with what Adams says, but given the facts it is unfair to say that Adams is in denial about nuclear costs. Gloor also ignores something that has been repeatedly pointed out to him, namely that the Energy Information Administration has reported that nuclear power is less expensive per kWh than land based wind generation, Sea based wind power, solar thermal power, and photovoltaic power. When the cost of technology designed to deal with the problems of renewable intermittency and its lack of dispatch capacity is included in the cost of renewable energy, nuclear power is far less expensive than renewables.

Rod Adams was one of the pioneers of the idea lowering nuclear costs by factory construction of reactors. In 1996 Adams wrote,

one must realize that the curve is reset to a new value when a new product is introduced and that there must be competition in order to keep firms focused on lowering unit costs and unit prices. In the nuclear industry, new products in the form of bigger and bigger plants continuously were introduced, and, after the dramatic rise in the cost of fossil fuel during the 1970s, there was little competitive benefit in striving for cost reduction during plant construction.

When picking the proper size of a particular product, the experience curve should lead one to understand that high volume products will eventually cost less per unit output than low volume products and that large products inherently will have a lower volume than significantly smaller products.

Gloor claims that Adams is gnores the fact that nuclear power

cannot be rolled out fast enough to even scratch the surface of climate change, . . .

Yet Adams 14 year old proposal to build small easily transported reactors in factories offers rapid scalability of nuclear power with a potential to lower nuclear costs.

Thus far from being in denial about nuclear costs and scalibility, Rod Adams was already addressing the problem 14 years ago.

Gloor accuses Adams of denying the fact that nuclear power

produces toxic waste that must be cleaned up by others

In fact Adams has repeatedly discussed the so called nuclear waste issue, as recently as this month.

Finally Gloor accuses Adams of denying that

toxic waste that must be cleaned up by others and acts as a convenient cover for weapons making.

But John Hogan in a recent Scientific American blog post, noted that not only had Adams acknowledged proliferation concerns, but that Adams had told him that

The spread of nuclear power need not lead to nuclear weapons proliferation. Many countries that have nuclear power plants do not possess weapons. And almost every country that has nuclear weapons today acquired them before acquiring nuclear reactors. (Some commenters on Adams's blog have pointed out that India is an exception to this rule.) More importantly, nuclear power can promote peace by making nations less reliant on outside sources for energy. "You can write the history of world conflicts over the past 100 years as a battle over resources," Adams said.

Clearly then Gloor's claim that Rod Adams is in some sort of denial about nuclear power is unfounded in reality. Rod is not always right about every nuclear related issue, at least about those issues about which we have a disagreement, but Rod is a member of the reality based community. Rod can be counted on to engage in the judicious determination of facts. If there were examples of denial in the Energy Collective discussion, Adams was not the person who had provided them.

Gloor is, on the other hand, not a reliable source of information regarding the views of people with whom he disagrees.