Faustian Bargains and the 80 Year Slow Motion Train Wreck

There are moments when abstract concepts become real, and about our survival. We can call these existential moments. I had my existential moment about global warming in 1971 when I heard Jerry Olson talk about the topic at a very informal gathering of people who worked for the ORNL-NSF Environmental Studies Project. Alvin Weinberg had his existential moment about the same subject at about the same time, and with Jerry Olsen initiating him as well. The same year Alvin Weinberg coined the phrase Faustian Bargain to describe the relationship between society and nuclear energy.

Weinberg first used the phrase "faustian bargain in a 1971 speech. In an 1972 Science article "Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Weinberg repeated the content of the 1971 speech. In the article Weinberg wrote,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer -- in the catalytic nuclear burner (breeder reactor) -- an inexhaustable source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. . . .

But the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to. In a way, all of this was anticipated during the old debates over nuclear weapons. . . . . In a sense, we have established a military priesthood which guards against inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, which maintains what a priori seems to be a precarious balance between readiness to go to war and vigilance against human errors that would precipitate war . . .

It seems to me (and in this I repeat some views expressed very well by Atomic Energy Commissioner Wilfred Johnson) that peaceful nuclear energy probably will make demands of the same sort on our society, and possibly of even longer duration.

Weinberg repeated the same message a year later. In the conclusion to his November 1972 Nuclear Safety speech, Weinberg stated,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer - in the breeder reactor - an almost inexhaustible source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. Whereas fossil fuel burners must emit oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and probably will always emit some sulfur dioxide, there is no intrinsic reason why nuclear systems must emit any pollutant - except heat and traces of radioactivity.

Yet Weinberg saw that the benefits of nuclear energy came at a cost,

the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions to which we are quite unaccustomed.

Yet this contention has turned out to be untrue. As I pointed out in a post on this speech, by the time Weinberg delivered it, the molten-salt reactor technology which he had led Oak Ridge scientists in developing was off the table. but that promise has not been forgotten. Yet Weinberg still knew of the unique promise of molten-salt reactor technology.

What exactly was Weinberg getting at with his Faustian Bargain? There are in fact two Faustian Bargains known to literature. The first, found in Marlow's play the Tragic History of Doctor Faistus and Gounod's Opera Faust. In both Faust signs an agreement to obtain the services of Méphistophélès' master Lucifer, during his life, in exchange for the surrender of his soul after death. At the end of the story, Méphistophélès collects on Faust's bargain, dragging him down to hell.

In Marlow's Doctor Faustus, Faustus says,

Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas;

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there
is no truth in us. Why, then, belike we must sin, and so
consequently die:
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera,
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters;
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, and omnipotence,
Is promis'd to the studious artizan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a demigod:
Here tire, my brains, to gain a deity.

This surely does not express the ambition which Weinberg had in mind in his 1971 speech. The end of that Faust is depicted in Gounod's Opera Faust:

There is another Faust tradition, this one linked to the great German poet, thinker and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In a paper written shortly before his death in 2006, Weinberg made explicit his intent to refer to Goethe's Faust.

In Goethe’s play, Faust is assisted and put up to mischief in his endeavors by the devil. This assistance is arranged over the course of the discussion of a number of contract- like arrangements: In the Prologue, Mephistopheles (the devil) suggests to God an experiment with a virtuous human being named Faust. Mephistopheles claims that it will be easy for him to make Faust forget his striving in return for an easy life on Earth. God, reluctantly, agrees to the experiment, knowing that Mephistopheles will fail in his attempts.

Interestingly, Mephistopheles does not explicitly suggest to God a deal that goes beyond Faust’s death. This would be too irreverent towards his master, even for Mephistopheles. God, on his part, does not enter into a contract with anyone else, this would mean to step down to the level of the contract partner. So this preliminary discussion is not a bet or bargain, but in a sense it is part of the ‘‘Faustian Bargain’’.

In Part I of Goethe’s play, Mephistopheles offers Faust a bargain similar to the one that the bridge builders and other innovators were thought to have accepted. His offer, however, is not the experiment he has discussed with God. Mephistopheles suggests to Faust a bargain, his services here on Earth in return for Faust’s soul . . . .

Faust accepts Mephistopheles’s services, leaving open, however, his fate after his death. Instead he offers to make a bet:

Weinberg points our that Mephistopheles encourages Faust to work for greater Energy and speed. The Goal of Goethe's Faust is clearly that of the 18th century Enlightenment,

The restless striving for more power and success derived from knowledge, energy, and other resources; along with the striving for unattainable perfection in love and virtue; are the main themes of Faust II. This Faustian drive is described as an essential element of human existence. It creates wars and suffering, but it is essentially human in the Faustian sense to live for continuous progress.

In Goethe's play, Faust says,

If e’er upon my couch, stretched at my ease, I’m found, Then may my life that instant cease!
Me canst thou cheat with glozing wile
Till self-reproach away I cast, –
Me with joy’s lure canst thou beguile Let that day be for me the last!
Be this our wager!

Weinberg agrees with the economist, Hans-Christoph Binswanger, that Faust's bargain

is that Mephistopheles helps Faust to overcome time, to become immortal by being part of eternal progress, while Faust promises never to rest and never to pause striving for further progress . . . .

In the end Faust’s soul is not left to the devil. The angels, carrying Faust’s remains up into heaven, sing:
"For he whose strivings never cease, Is ours for his redeeming."

Boito depicts the death of Goethe's Faust.

If Weinberg undersood the Faustian Bargain interns of Goethe's Faust, then what was Weinberg striving for? As I have often pointed out in 1971 Weinberg was striving for three things,

* Nuclear safety

* Control over CO2 emissions, which Weinberg understood threatened the future of humanity

* The Development of Thorium Breeding Molten Salt Reactor technology, which Weinberg believed would fulfill his first two goals

In all three goals, Weinberg faced protagonists, Congressman "Chet" Holifield and AEC Reactor Research Director Milton Shaw. Not long after he made the "Faustian Bargain Speech, Weinberg was told by Congressman Hollifeld, that it was time for him to go.

I have attempted to explored the background of Weinberg's Firing on Nuclear Green. Alvin Weinberg was involved in a conflict between National Laboratory Scientists, and the leadership of the Washington DC nuclear elite, including Congressman Chet Hollifeld and AEC Reactor Research Director Milton Shaw. In addition to disagreements over the safety of conventional reactors, the conflict for Weinberg involved a radical approach to reactor safety, which would solve many conventional reactor safety concerns. That approach was embodied in the development of the Molten Salt Reactor. Undoubtedly, what Weinberg had learned from Jerry Olsen in 1971, added to his motivation in the struggle for Nuclear Safety and the development of Molten Salt Reactor Breeding technology. Weinberg's Faustian bargain had as its goal the rescue of humanity, from the consequences of a quest for energy.

During the struggle Washington DC elite were telling the scientists, further striving toward nuclear safety is unnecessary. Weinberg was responding, we have made a deal with society and our side of the deal is not yet complete, and indeed it may take a long time and a lot of hard work to complete. The benefit of the deal to society is a low cost abundant supply of energy. The benefit to scientist are twofold, first they get to explore and to know the secrets of nature. Secondly they get the respect of their fellows for benefiting society by striving to fulfill the bargain.

In 2006 Alvin Weinberg explained,

The image has been used and the phrase quoted over and over again, both because the term was well chosen and because, very often, it has been misunderstood.

The two elements of the Faustian Bargain were both present in the early nuclear enterprise: the temptation of the easy, carefree life it offered (electricity too cheap to be metered), and the bargain it struck (continuous striving was promised). The service electricity provides could be used to pursue progress in all kinds of ways, as long as the obligation was kept to look after the nuclear waste (and, for that matter, other fissionable material as well). If the obligation were shirked, it could, in an extreme scenario, mean the end of humankind.

Weinberg added,

The phrase Faustian Bargain was also misunderstood. The same year that Weinberg’s paper appeared in Science (1972), John W. Gofman wrote an article in which he painted a sketch of what was needed, institutionally, to keep nuclear waste safe (Gofman, 1972). Not only was there a need, in Gofman’s view of the Faustian Bargain, for a perpetual institution (like a priesthood) to look after these wastes, but also everyone had to bow to the whims and wishes of this institution. In other popular publications, the Faustian Bargain was presented not as a human condition, but as a devilish complot by one group of humans to enslave the rest.
The term Faustian Bargain has been used during the subsequent years to characterize many ‘technological fixes’ of immediate problems with potential negative long-term consequences.

Fulfilling the Weinberg's Faustian bargain meant solving all of the problems associated with nuclear power, so that nuclear energy could be made available to the masses without any reason for fear. It also meant solving the CO2 emissions problem.

Weinberg's critics, including Ralph Nader and Amory Lovins were afflicted with a paranoid fear of nuclear power. Even though Weinberg held out the possibility of safe, clean, cheap and peaceful nuclear power as the goal of the Faustian bargain, Nader and Lovins weren't ready to buy the vision. Even if Weinberg's vision could be fulfilled, they weren't buying.

Instead Lovins and Nader held out Fustian bargains of their own. Nether seemed to have experienced the deep existential encounter with Global Climate change that Weinberg had, and both had confused visions of its remedy. Lovins envisioned coal as a non-nuclear bridge to soft energy and thus preferable substitute for nuclear power, that would gradually be replaced by soft energy around 2020. Lovins thus was no opponent of coal to generate electrical power in practice. Thus if anyone ever made a Faustian bargain, Amory Lovins did. Armory Lovins, who was warned about what he was doing by Alvin Weinberg, sold his soul for lumps of coal, and now has lost his soul completely and forever. Lovins soft path failed to offer a path to a carbon free existence, and seemingly never will.

Ralph Nader was always more concerned about the fate of coal miners than about what coal was doing to the environment. Nader's Faustian bargain involved the sale of his soul for government regulation of business and industry. Nader triumphed when General Motors and Chrysler nearly went bankrupt, but his Faustian bargain brought him presidential campaigns that lead to failure in his life's ambition. And for his country, Ralph Nader's crusades have not brought a low carbon non-nuclear coal substitute, and I wonder if he really cares.

Many so called environmentalists, including Ralph Nader, Amory Lovins, David Roberts, Mark Z. Jacobson, and Joe Romm simply ignore problems with "Green energy" solutions. In 2007 I had something of a one sided dialogue with David Roberts, via the comment section of the Grist blog. Roberts relentlessly championed the green technological fixs, and was convinced that renewables and efficiency offered all of the solutions, even when other people raised seemingly raeasonable objections. When those renewable fixes did not make sense, Roberts took big leaps of faith, telling us about miraculous solutions to all the renewable technology problems. I learned quite a lot from the discussion with Roberts, but unfortunately Roberts was not willing to learn anything from me.

Roberts pulled out all of the stops on Green objections to nuclear power. I responded to his objections by pointing out both flaws in Roberts statements of facts, and in his reasoning, as well as the advantages offered by molten salt reactors. Roberts responded by raising the question of scalability and I responded by pointing to the potential for mass production of small MSRs which could be built very rapidly and in large numbers in factors. Roberts appearantly had never heard of factories, and did not understand my point.

I knew about Molten Salt Reactors because my father had worked on the development of the technology over a 20 year period of time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Because he was working under contract, neither he nor I stood to gain any money from MSR development. My father had also made a significant contribution to the development of conventional Light Water Reactors.

I did know enough from my father to know that he considered the MSR to be a remarkable reactor that offered many potential advantages over conventional nuclear power plants. He had found working with Molten Salt Reactors difficult and challenging, and he had made significant contributions to the development of MSR technology.

MSR were safe, could, at least in theory, completely eliminate the problem of nuclear waste, would not increase proliferation, and in factories could be built in very large numbers over a short period of time.

There were significant problems with with the Faustian bargain Roberts offered. The United States Government has had efficiency improvement programs for over 30 years, and while these programs have produced small but steady improvements in efficiency, they have not produced the sort of improvements Roberts envisioned. Roberts did not offer good reasons for expecting future rapid improvements in efficiency. Secondly, economist note that big increases in efficiency sometimes produce increased use of energy. In some instances the increase may be greater than the energy saved, while in other instances the increase only partially offsets the energy savings. Thus efficiency gains, although desirable, may not constitute the sort of energy panacea which the Green Faustian bargain claims efficiency to be.

By 2011 the goals of the Green Faustian Bargain are receiving more and more. It has been repeatedly pointed out to Amory Lovins, that the predictions which he made with respect to the soft energy path, have failed to come to pass. In 2011m human energy needs are still wedded to coal, and to other fossil fuels, contrary to Lovins' predictions. Amory Lovins 1976 claim for coal use in the soft path.
Coal use 2001 to 2010, the reality that Amory Lovins refuses to acknowledge.

The 80 year slow motion train wreck

I use the phrase Slow Motion Train Wreck, to describe the inexorable advance of time from the 1971 Spring day when I first heard Jerry Olsen talk about Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Anthropogenic Climate Change. 50% of the time we had to set things aright then has been lost. We seem unwilling to make the commitment to the "Faustian Bargain" our energy
desires requires of us, if we want to survive. We must strive for a post-carbon energy order. If we are unwilling to strive, we will not survive as a civilization.

In a recent Forbes interview with Michael Tobias (MT), University of California-Berkeley Environmental Scientist Dr. John Harte laid out the dangers:

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarizes the results of these calculations and concludes that under “business as usual” trends in fossil fuel consumption, by 2050 the planet will on average have warmed between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit. . . . hat warming is the result of both the direct heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases and certain feedback processes. The latter will increasingly occur in response to the direct warming, causing further warming. As polar and glacial ice melts and snow cover decreases, temperatures will rise as less sunlight is reflected by our planet and more is absorbed by the remaining, darker surfaces. . . . There are many of us in the scientific community who believe that any number of important feedback processes are not being accounted for in the current IPCC projections. For example, from ice core data informing us about temperatures and atmospheric greenhouse gas levels over the past million years, we know that when the planet warms a little from any cause, it responds by releasing from the land and sea to the atmosphere huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. These greenhouse gases contribute to further warming. Because this process is not reflected in current climate projections, we can expect that there will be further emissions from our soils and our oceans. These will create additional warming beyond what IPCC currently projects. . . . The evidence for these additional feedback effects is starting to pour in. Rising methane emissions from warming tundra soils and waters are being observed, and field research shows that warmed temperate ecosystems release additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Forest damage from wildfires and bark beetle infestation, both of which are triggered by warming, will also result in the carbon stored in trees flowing to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. By some estimates the additional warming could raise mid-century temperatures by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

For most people on Earth, the threat is not get real, and climate change skeptics deny the very possibility that there is any danger to our well being. The Climate change skeptics are offering a Faustian Bargain along Christopher Marlow's lines, "Sell your soul to the temptation to take it easy. Don't pay attention to the voices of scientists that warn of the dangers of climate change". They are willing to sell their souls for any energy headless of what the bargain will cost them. They are assured by Talk radio that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not real, it is a Liberal hoax. Or they are assured by Amory Lovins and Greenpeace that nuclear energy is a deadly illusion that will not rescue us, we will be saved by efficiency and renewable energy.

We have warnings that post-carbon renewable energy plans are doomed to failure, There are enormous problems with solar and wind as a major human energy source. Even if these problems can eventually be overcome by science, it is unlikely that that will occur before 2050 when scientists like Dr. Harte say that we face big and in many respects very unpleasant environmental changes.

But what of the idea that we can save ourselves through efficiency. In 2008 Robert Bryce laid out the case against the efficiency rhetoric. In another article, Bryce was extremely critical of Energy Guru Amory Lovins for his prophecies about the contributions that efficiency can make to solving the carbon problem. Lovins promised a detailed response to Bryce's criticisms, but has never provided that response. Renewable advocates are notorious for not answering their critics.

In a response to a pro-reneables comment, I received on Nuclear Green, I noted,

Anonymous, I do not put great stock in NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory0 studies, because they tend to pass on Renewable Industry propaganda claims as if they were facts, and consistently downplay the bad news in their data. For example, the latest Eastern Interconnect study clearly demonstrated that rising wind penetration would lead to increased electrical costs, but this was not one of the conclusions that was featured in the press release, or in the executive summary. A preliminary finding of the Western interconnect study of wind and solar has been that renewables will primarily displace CCGTs, while leaving coal largely untouched. Thus the carbon mitigation of high penetration wind and solar was much less than would be assumed if we did not have that information, but the NREL study failed to draw the obvious conclusions about the relative carbon mitigation costs of of renewables verses nuclear. I am not impressed by the 30 GWs of German PV. The capacity factor of German PV is likely to be under 10%. That means that the 30 GWs of PV capacity will probably produce under 3 GW years of electricity every year. Displaced generators are likely to be CCGTs, and German cloud conditions will likely requite a large number of OCGTs to be kept spinning. With the looming shutdown of German nuclear plants, the carbon emissions from the operations of of the German electrical system are likely to rise rather than fall. Thus we must consider the opportunity costs of the German FIT. What Germany will have is a hugely expensive electrical system that will almost certainly produce more CO2 than it does now. If PV farms are as cheap to operate as you claim why do they need such huge subsidies?

Thus the Faustian bargain offered by anti-nuclear environmentalists, like Amory Lovins, does not really lead to heaven. Instead it seems to lead straight to an energy hell, with little energy to cope with increasingly challenging environmental conditions.

The situation we face, a disastrous change in climate caused by human-carbon based energy sources, best be described as a slow motion train wreck. From 1971 when I first learned of AGW till 2050, the date which climate scientists say is the cut off point for avoiding, serious, long term consequences, consequences which I call the train wreck, is 80 years. Hence the 80 year slow motion train wreck.

In a review of "NON-NUCLEAR FUTURES: The case for an ethical energy strategy" by Amory B. Lovins and John H. Price, published in Energy policy in December, 1976, Alvin Weinberg pointed to a Faustian bargain Lovins was offering his readers and society,

Despite its title, the book is not concerned with non-nuclear futures. The reader of a book so named is entitled to get from the authors a reasoned description of a feasible non-nuclear future. The authors excuse this omission with the assertion (p159), 'To show that a policy is mistaken does not oblige the analyst to have an alternative policy.' But this is inadequate. This is not dealing with a hypothetical issue, but a real one. It is not enough to point out the deficiencies of nuclear energy; one must deal with the situation that would arise if Lovins and price were successful in their onslaught: should the society indeed turn away from nuclear energy, what then?

Here Alvin Weinberg exposes Amory Lovins' Faustian bargain with our society. Weinberg Ferrets out Lovins' fundamental assumption about energy and society,

(p xxi), 'Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.

Weinberg raised a problem with Lovins' low-energy, high freedom claim, by pointing to an inevitable tradeoff between energy and time. The more energy we have, Weinberg argued, the more freedom we have to control our time. Weinberg pointed to a truth problem in Lovins' argument

So much of the argument is at the border of Science, or even trans-scientific, that one cannot prove the authors to be wrong, any more than one can prove the nuclear advocates to be wrong.

Weinberg put his finger on the greatest single environmental flaw of Lovins' argument, his failure to identify CO2 emissions from energy as a major environmental issue, and his willingness to accept carbon emitting coal as a substitute for nuclear energy. Weinberg wrote,

the authors regard net energy analysis as a convenient device for casting nuclear power in an unfavorable light, a feat they attempt to accomplish by ignoring significant comparisons, - nuclear and non=nuclear of the same doubling time and relative effects of heat release and CO2 release.

In response to Lovins recommending a coal burning bridge between the period when nuclear power was considered acceptable and the time when all energy would come from renewable resources, Weinberg asked,

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning fission free bridge?

Lovins countered that he

worried about the climate effect of the release of CO2

but that nuclear power would not prevent CO2 emissions from high coal use. Clearly then Lovins offered a Faustian bargain with his anti-nuclear energy scheme. In 2010, long after a process which Lovins forecasted would have begun to shift human society from fossil fuels to renewables, coal use for energy continues to rise. If Lovins worried in 1976 about the climate effects of CO2 emissions, he did not worry sufficiently. Lovins Faustian bargain put society clearly on track for a climate disaster, and in 2010 Lovins still has not figured out how to avoid the disaster without nuclear energy. The Lovins Faustian bargain is still in force, and until we are willing to listen to Alvin Weinberg, we will continue to follow Lovins to perdition.

I offer two serenades for those who do not wish to strive to avoid the train wreck:

Faustian Bargains: Weinberg or Lovins?

One of the hazards of coining a memorable expression is wearing it out and continuing to use it after it should have gone out of fashion. Even thinkers as gifted as Alvin Weinberg can develop a mental cramp as far as their own memorable expressions are concerned. Weinberg's phrase "Faustian bargain" is a singular example of the problem. By the early 1970's the Faustian bargain idea had been made obsolete by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory team of reactor scientists, but Weinberg, almost always in the forefront of understanding the implication of new ideas failed to see that the relevance of the Faustian bargain idea was passing as far as nuclear science was concerned. Indeed Weinberg's post-ORNL work was to demonstrate that new Faustian bargains were emerging, bargains which held far more serious consequences than that which people believed they were confronted with by nuclear power.

In the conclusion to his November 1972 Nuclear Safety speech, Weinberg stated,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer - in the breeder reactor - an almost inexhaustible source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. Whereas fossil fuel burners must emit oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and probably will always emit some sulfur dioxide, there is no intrinsic reason why nuclear systems must emit any pollutant - except heat and traces of radioactivity.

Yet Weinberg saw that the benefits of nuclear energy came at a cost,

the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions to which we are quite unaccustomed.

Yet this contention has turned out to be untrue. As I pointed out in my first post on this speech, by the time Weinberg delivered it, the very molten-salt reactor technology which he had led Oak Ridge scientists in developing had made the Faustian bargain concept of nuclear energy potentially obsolete. This is a unique feature of molten-salt reactor technology. Charles Till and Y.I. Chang of Argonne National Laboratory attempted to replicate the MSBR level of safety with the IFR, but there was still a Faustian bargain aspect to the IFR. Sodium burns while molten fluoride salts do not. It is impossible to remove noble gases from IFR fuel during operation, while it is both possible and highly desirable to do so with a LFTR. The LFTR without xenon removal will not reach a one-to-one conversion ratio, and thus will eventually run out of fuel and shut down. The IFR's neutron economy does not require xenon removal, so the Faustian bargain is still in force.

Both the potential safety of molten salt nuclear technology, and its ability to destroy the most dangerous and long lived constituents of nuclear waste, the actinides including the various isotopes of plutonium. offer ways out of the Faustian bargain. Thus in terms of the classic objections to nuclear energy, which Weinberg articulated, the molten-salt reactor offered solutions to the problem of safe reactor design, and nuclear waste disposal. The "Faustian bargain" proved to not be interminable, and the keys to ending it had been developed before Weinberg left ORNL. IFR technology still involves a Faustian bargain despite the claims of its advocates to the contrary.

The Molten Salt Reactor offered truly amazing features as Uri Gat was later to point out in papers he authored with L.H. Dodds. Given the fact that the MSR established that the nuclear communities bargain with society was not inevitably a Faustian bargain. And indeed, IFR advocates would also state that the same is in fact the case with the IFR.

In a review of "NON-NUCLEAR FUTURES: The case for an ethical energy strategy" by Amory B. Lovins and John H. Price, published in Energy policy in December, 1976, Alvin Weinberg pointed to a Faustian bargain Lovins was offering his readers and society,

Despite its title, the book is not concerned with non-nuclear futures. The reader of a book so named is entitled to get from the authors a reasoned description of a feasible non-nuclear future. The authors excuse this omission with the assertion (p159), 'To show that a policy is mistaken does not oblige the analyst to have an alternative policy.' But this is inadequate. This is not dealing with a hypothetical issue, but a real one. It is not enough to point out the deficiencies of nuclear energy; one must deal with the situation that would arise if Lovins and price were successful in their onslaught: should the society indeed turn away from nuclear energy, what then?

Here Alvin Weinberg exposes Amory Lovins' Faustian bargain with our society. Weinberg Ferrets out Lovins' fundamental assumption about energy and society,

(p xxi), 'Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.

Weinberg raised a problem with Lovins' low-energy, high freedom claim, by pointing to an inevitable tradeoff between energy and time. The more energy we have, Weinberg argued, the more freedom we have to control our time. Weinberg pointed to a truth problem in Lovins' argument

So much of the argument is at the border of Science, or even trans-scientific, that one cannot prove the authors to be wrong, any more than one can prove the nuclear advocates to be wrong.

Weinberg put his finger on the greatest single environmental flaw of Lovins' argument, his failure to identify CO2 emissions from energy as a major environmental issue, and his willingness to accept carbon emitting coal as a substitute for nuclear energy. Weinberg wrote,

the authors regard net energy analysis as a convenient device for casting nuclear power in an unfavorable light, a feat they attempt to accomplish by ignoring significant comparisons, - nuclear and non=nuclear of the same doubling time and relative effects of heat release and CO2 release.

In response to Lovins recommending a coal burning bridge between the period when nuclear power was considered acceptable and the time when all energy would come from renewable resources, Weinberg asked,

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning fission free bridge?

Lovins countered that he

worried about the climate effect of the release of CO2

but that nuclear power would not prevent CO2 emissions from high coal use. Clearly then Lovins offered a Faustian bargain with his anti-nuclear energy scheme. In 2010, long after a process which Lovins forecasted would have begun to shift human society from fossil fuels to renewables, coal use for energy continues to rise. If Lovins worried in 1976 about the climate effects of CO2 emissions, he did not worry sufficiently. Lovins Faustian bargain put society clearly on track for a climate disaster, and in 2010 Lovins still has not figured out how to avoid the disaster without nuclear energy. The Lovins Faustian bargain is still in force, and until we are willing to listen to Alvin Weinberg, we will continue to follow Lovins to perdition.

Nuclear Power in the future of Cement Manufacture

Cement manufacture is a significant source of Global CO2 emissions. About 3.4% to 5% of anthropogenic CO2 is emitted from the Cement manufacturing process. The process of manufacturing portland cement requires the burning of large amounts of fossil fuels. In addition the cement manufacturing process triggers the emission of even larger amounts of CO2 as a byproduct of heating raw materials. Lisa J. Hanle, Kamala R. Jayaraman and Joshua S. Smith point out,

Cement is often considered a key industry for a number of reasons. To begin with, cement is an essential input into the production of concrete, a primary building material for the construction industry. Due to the importance of cement for various construction-related activities such as highways, residential and commercial buildings, tunnels and dams, production trends tend to reflect general economic activity.

In addition to the emission of CO2 by burning fossil fuels during the production of cement and the the discharge of CO2 from raw materials during cement processing, the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity used while grinding cement clinkers also contributes to the atmospheric CO2 burden. Burning fossil fuels in cement manufacturing also releases a significant amount of NOX and SO2 gases, creating further environmental problems. There has as of yet been no environmentally satisfactory solution to the cement manufacturing issues, involving the substitution of renewable energy for fossil fuels.

If the international economic industrialization process is to continue during the 21st century, and continue to spread to under industrialized countries, the global demand for cement will skyrocket. Given the current rate of global CO2 emissions by the cement industry, the elimination of CO2 emissions associate with cement manufacture, will play a significant role in the decarbonation of human society.

The relation between cement and CO2 is actually complex. Cement in concrete actually goes through prolonged chemical curing processes, during which over half of the CO2 emitted during the manufacturing process is reabsorbed. Thus the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels during cement manufacture constitutes a separate issue from the CO2 emitted by raw materials, because much of the latter CO2 will later be recaptured later on.

CO2 emissions from materials can be controlled by using a low carbon emissions cement manufacturing process, that might begin with different materials, or inclusion of alternative materials in the raw materials mix. Alternatively carbon recapture could be facilitated during the curing process.

Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels while processing cement materials, can be eliminated use of nuclear power in the heat production process. One approach would be the production a carbon neutral flsmable gas using process heat from a reactor. The gas would then be burned to provide sufficient heat to process cement raw materials. There are decarbonization objections to this approach, Even if the gas manufacturing process is carbon neutral, we may not be assured of carbon neutrality during all stages of handling and use. For example methane has a far more serious greenhouse implications than CO2 does. Methane lossed inadvertantly to leaks is not carbon neutral, as is methane loses due to imperfect combustion. Thus the introduction of carbon based gases into the cement manufacturing process, presents significant challenges if carbon neutrality is the goal.

There would be no such problem if the gas were hydrogen. My well informed readers will recognize that there are problems with the handling and storage of hydrogen, but those probles relate more to the storage of hydrogen than its production. The hydrogen problems can be minimalized if hydrogen is burned immediately after its production.

Nuclear power can contribute to cement manufacture, both by serving as the indirect source of the required heat input, and as a carbon free source of electricity.

Both gas cooled and liquid salt cooled reactors could be useful in cement manufacturer, but LFTRs have the potential to perform the heat production role with the lowest potential cost. The LIFT would be the energy source that is most compatible with high energy post-carbon future. It has the greatest potential to produce industrial heat and electricity at a low cost, while for all practical purposes, energy produced by LFTRs would not be limited by natural forces or supply problems.

If decarbonization is imagined to be adressed on a sector by sector basis. In terms of electrical generation decarbonization can take place by substituting nuclear power for fossel fuel generating systems. In surface transportation, decarbonization can be accomplished by electrification. Space heating can also be electrified, especially through use of heat pumps. Finally energy for the industrial sector can be provided by greater electrification or by nuclear heat inputs.

This vision would assign to nuclear power a predominate role in the production of post carbon energy. It is quite evident that this role could not be fulfilled by conventional light water nuclear technology. First because of the limited avaliability of U-235. By a switich to Generation IV nuclear technology, energy avaliability of current supplies of nuclear fuel would be increased by a factor of 500 or more.

The program endorced by Nuclear Green is highly ambitious. I advocate the use of nuclear powered energy sources in the creation of a globalized high energy industrialized economy. My view is that this program is not incompatible with environmental values, infact it is more consistent with environmental protection than a low energy renewables powered post-carbon future. In addition, a post carbon high energy future would be less likely to produce the political and economic conditions that would lead to war.

Is a high energy, nuclear powered future incompatible with environmental values?

The mainstream of the environmentalist movement has repeatedly disgraced itself with a well nigh fanatic anti-nuclear stance. John McClaughry commented a couple of years ago,

Over Vermont's 230 years several strange political movements persisted long enough to enter the history books. Among them, anti-Masonry, the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement, and the Prohibition crusade all fizzled after initial successes.

The most notable fringe movement still alive today is the crusade against nuclear energy. It is, naturally, focused on Vermont's lone nuclear reactor, Vermont Yankee, that went on line in 1972.

In the face of all science, reason, and experience, the anti-nuclear zealots fiercely maintain that the Vernon nuclear power plant is a standing death threat against the population for miles around, that its pall of radiation will produce deformed children, and that the plant's present owner, Entergy, is a reckless and sinister enterprise making enormous profits while scornfully dismissing the concerns of its likely Vermont victims.

It should be noted that self-styled environmentalists are in the forefront of of the present Quixotic anti-Vermont Yankee crusade. Not long ago, I pointed to anti-nuclear fanaticism as a major cause of an impending breakdown of the Copenhagen climate change conference, which I correctly predicted.

The environmental community has promoted the view that nuclear power is unnecessary and dangerous, and even has called for the replacement of nuclear power plants with CO2 emitting natural gas fired power plants despite the fact that the natural gas extraction process as well as the use of natural gas in the home and in power plants is responsible for the emission of an enormous amount of dangerously radioactive radon gas. Indeed people are exposed to many times more radiation from natural gas than from nuclear power generation.

Environmentalists have repeatedly attacked nuclear power as too expensive, while disguising the fact that their own favored alternatives, including on shore wind, off shore wind, solar thermal and solar photovoltaic are more expensive than nuclear, and pose major reliability problems for a non-nuclear post-carbon the grid.

The purpose of Nuclear Green is not to attack environmentalism. Rather it is to recapture it from the horde of misanthropes, grafters, and ignoramuses, who currently lead most environmental organizations, and their brain dead followers, who recite 40 year old bumper sticker slogans , as if they were the last word on reality. Not only does these people misrepresent environmentalism, but their insane ideology is leading us into a major environmental disaster that could kill millions and perhaps billions of people while damaging the environment they tell us they want to save.

The most significant environmental problem we face in the 21st century is caused by the emission of carbon dioxide gas, a basic waste product of the present carbon based energy technology of the 20th century. Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that continued and rising amounts of Greenhouse emissions will inevitably lead to a significant climate change that would adversely effect global climate. By 1976 Oak Ridge scientists were predicting rising temperatures with greater temperature increases at higher latitudes. Among the accurate predictions that Oak Ridge scientist offered was decreased (global) ice and snow cover, changing cloud cover, localized droughts, with dropping lake levels, melting glaciers, and a long term potential for rising sea levels. I heard all of these long term treats discussed at ORNL in 1971. The Oak Ridge scientists forecast ed a global temperature rise of from 1 to 5 degrees K with each doubling of global temperature. Since that 1976 global atmospheric CO2 emissions have increased by 16% with a and there has been an increase in global temperatures that fall within that range.

None of these predictions have proven false. These ORNL global warming predictions were made at the time of the famous Newsweek Global cooling story. By the way the the environmentalists got things every bit as wrong as Newsweek did, In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote

The greenhouse effect is being enhanced now by the greatly increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the last century our burning of fossil fuels raised the level some 15%. The greenhouse effect today is being countered by low-level clouds generated by contrails, dust, and other contaminants that tend to keep the energy of the sun from warming the Earth in the first place.

At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump.

Other environmentalists were equally as clueless about the threat posed by CO2. In a 1976 review of Amory Lovins' (with John H. Price) book, "NON-NUCLEAR FUTURES : The case for an ethicaI energy strategy." Alvin Weinberg chided Lovins for failing to consider the value of nuclear power as a CO2 mitigation tool.

energy itself is a villain: less energy is better than more energy, not merely because the environment can absorb only a limited energy load, but also because (p xxi), 'Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.' High-energy futures mean centralised futures, and this is anathema to the authors (p ll0): an 'energy-intensive society' leads .to a highly centralized, highly bureaucratized, high technology society, very vulnerable to internal as well as external disruptions . . .'. . . . since nuclear energy is primarily a source of centralized electricity generation, the authors dislike of energy, electricity, and centralization merge in their dislike of nuclear energy, quite apart from whatever technical and social shortcomings it might have.

Weinberg was especially critical of Lovins attack on nuclear power for its waste heat, and pointed out the heat problem stemming from the discharge of 30 times more CO2 from the coal fuel cycle.

Lovins proposed the use of coal as a fission-free bridge to his soft-energy solutions, and Weinberg asked

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning fission free bridge?

Lovins responded to Weinberg's point that

Dr Weinberg and I both worry about the climatic effects of CO2 more than about those of heat release (which I nowhere claim is'an imminent danger'). Indeed, his group's recent studies show that rapid growth in energy (especially electricity) use means such a large coal burn that COz limits arrive discouragingly soon whether we use fission or not.

Yet despite his worry, Lovins seems not to have found a viable solution to the coal/CO2 problem during the next generation, when America and indeed the world, came increasingly to rely on the coal burning bridge while soft path electrical solutions were deployed much more slowly than Lovins had anticipated. Thus Weinberg's 1976 nuclear path would have undoubtedly lead to lower CO2 emissions that Lovins soft path did. Despite his mid 1970;s forecast that by 2010 CO2 emissions would be rapidly becoming a thing of the past, Lovins's soft path solution has so far failed to control CO2 emissions globally. Indeed in Europe the highest per capita CO2 emissions as well as the most expensive electricity is found in Denmark which has adopted Lovins soft path, while France, which has adopted Weinberg's nuclear path has far lower cost electricity and the lowest per capita CO2 emissions rates in Europe.

Thus we see that during the 1960's and 1970's Environmentalists greatly underestimated the CO2 problem while Oak Ridge scientists, including long time ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg did not. The anti-nuclear stance of self styled environmentalist was in fact far more damaging to the environment, via the CO2 and chemical emissions of fossil fuel burning energy technology, than the high nuclear energy option would have been. In practice Alvin Weinberg, was a far better environmentalist than Amory Lovins or Paul Ehrlich.

It is thus a huge environmental blunder to juxtapose nuclear power to environmental well being. Yet mainstream environmentalist continue to do make this mistake, much to the detriment of the environment, and further jeopardizing future success in the war against climate change. It is my view that environmentalism is a vitally important path to the human future, but that environmentalism has been hijacked by self styled environmentalists who are more interested in their own quixotic anti-nuclear agenda, than they are in dealing with major environmental issues like global climate change. Mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and Friends of the Earth, by their repeated attacks on nuclear power are placing the future of the environment as well as the future of the people who make the Earth their home in jeopardy.

Alvin Weinberg, Prophet of CO2 Driven Global Warming

December 2015 Update: Becky has called my attention to the continued relevance of this post.  It is foundational to the project I undertook when I started the Nuclear Green Blog.

2009 Update Note: This post was one of the first I wrote for Nuclear Green in December 2007. Because it deals with the early history of studies of carbon mitigation and Alvin Weinberg's far sighted views on post-carbon energy forms are still relevant to recent discussions on energy, I felt reposting a slightly revised version of my original post was in order.

I have told the story before of my proto-internship in the ORNL-NSF Environmental Studies Program in 1970-71, and hearing there, for the first time about the problem of CO2 emissions and AGW. I no doubt heard it first from Jerry Olson, an ecologist, who was part of an ongoing ORNL research effort on the global carbon cycle. In addition to alerting me, Olson appears to have been the first to alert Alvin Weinberg, who was the Director of ORNL until his politically inspired firing in 1973. When, in 1974, Dixie Lee Ray brought Weinberg to Washington to serve as Director of the Office of Energy Research and Development, his focused shifted from reactors to the relationship of energy to CO2 emissions. I have recently started looking at a collection of Weinberg's papers that is available online. Weinberg's papers reveal him to be a thinker of great depth, and range. What I find most interesting about Weinberg's papers is the role that CO2/global warming played in his discourse after his firing from his position of Director of ORNL in 1973. For the rest of his progessional life, Weinberg warned us, of the dangers that we faced from CO2. In 1974 Weinberg published a major paper on the energy economy is the prestigious journal Science. In "Global Effects of Man's Production of Energy," Weinberg set out his case on the long term consequences of the human commitment to carbon based fules. In 1975 during testamony to congress, Weinberg again laid out his global warming concerns. In 1975 Weinberg returned to Oak Ridge where he led the Institute for Energy Analysis until his retirement in 1984. During that period, the IEA was a major center for the study of energy on climate, and of energy alternativives. In 1977 Alvin Weinberg was named the chairman of a National Study Group on the Global Effects of Carbon Dioxide.

Today Weinberg's views on CO2 and global warming seem prophetic. In a 1976 paper "Economic Implications of A US Nuclear Moratorium. 1985 to 2010," which Weinberg co-authored with Charles E. Whittle, Alan D. Poole, Edward L. Allen, William G. Pollard, Herbert G. MacPherson, Ned L. Treat, and Doan L. Phung, reveal to us exactly how accurate Weinberg's vision into the future was. In the paper Weinberg and his associates assessed the the economic and environmental consequences of moratorium on nuclear construction in the United States. He assumed that no new reactors would be ordered after 1980, but that reactor construction would continue till about 1985. He then looked at the consequences to allow continued operation of reactors on line by 1985. Weinberg tried to think out the implications of the cessation of new reactor construction.

Weinberg and his associates understood that if reactor construction ceased, power companies would construct more coal fired power plants to meet consumer demand for electricity. Weinberg assumed that consumer demand would be driven by two factors population growth, and economic growth. He also assumed that technological changes would increase the efficiency of electrical use, but that these efficiencies would not offset the increase in demand.

Weinberg saw

"four levels of environmental trade offs as a result of shifting the additional fuel requirements from nuclear to coal after 1985."

The first level of effect was what he called global. There were two componants:

(1) Proliferation: Countries wishing to rely primarily on the nuclear option can do so whether or not the United States abandons nuclear power. Thus, a domestic moratorium on nuclear energy would have little effect on proliferation unless the rest of the world abandoned nuclear power.

(2) CO2: Should 20 percent of the world’s fossil fuel be burned, the CO2 concentration might double; this could lead to unacceptable changes in the world’s climate. A U.S. moratorium per se would have little effect on this possibility; however, loss of the nuclear option through much of the world,’which is a conceivable consequence of a U.S. moratorium, might make it more difficult to respond quickly to a perceived danger from higher CO, levels in the atmosphere.

Weinberg and his associates believed that

the effect of a moratorium (on reactor construction) adopted only by the United States would be marginal and secondary: marginal because reactors would be available from other countries, secondary because of the influence of the United States on world nuclear energy policy (including decisions by others to follow suit).

It is no longer possible for a single nation to influence significantly the possibility of proliferation through a unilateral capacity to supply nuclear power systems. On the other hand, the extent to which the U.S. influence on worldwide nuclear policy would be diminished by its withdrawal from nuclear power development could result in less rigid international regulation and inspection.

But their observations on CO2 were extraordinary:

The ultimate constraint on the burning of fossil fuel may be the climatic impact from atmospheric CO, buildup. This, of course, is a global problem; what the United States does during the next 30-50 years is likely to contribute little to total global atmospheric levels. Nevertheless, increasing reliance on fossil fuel by such a large consumer as the United States poses a prospect of severe climatic shifts that cannot, in principle, be dismissed. The extent to which a nuclear moratorium would aggravate the buildup of CO, must therefore be examined.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affects the thermal radiative balance of the planet and through this balance the global climate. On the basis of the best atmospheric models now available, a doubling of the atmospheric CO, would result in a global average surface temperature increase of 1.5-2.4 C, with greater increases in the high latitudes. Although models of the type used in these studies predict present global climate surprisingly well, a number of significant variables are not included. Consequently, the results must be regarded as preliminary until additional information and more reliable climatic feedback mechanisms can be properly included.

During the past hundred years, the annual global production of CO, by burning fossil fuels has grown nearly fiftyfold. It now stands at 18 x 10(9) tons, which is about one-tenth the amount accounted for by the annual net primary fixation of carbon by terrestrial plants. This production appears to have caused an increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Since 1958 observers at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii have monitored atmospheric CO2 content, and the 1975 measurements show an average CO, concentration of 330 ppm (in the latter part of the nineteenth century it was 290-295 ppm). The measurements show annual increases for each year, averaging about 0.7 ppm during the late 1950s and early 1960s and up to 1 .O ppm or more in recent years.

The cumulative production of C02 since the end of 1957 and the observed increase in CO2 are plotted in Figure 8. The upper set of points indicates the increase in concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that would have occurred if all CO, produced from fossil fuels and cement since 1957 remained airborne. The lower set of points represents the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

The paper added:

Almost any reasonable scenario for future global energy demand yields continued increases in atmospheric C02, but the resulting concentrations do not appear to reach levels that will cause severe climate alterations before 2000. However, little complacency should be derived from this, since continued energy demands during the first few decades of the next century will push atmospheric C02 concentrations to levels which warrant serious concern, even for the low energy growth case. The inertial effect in energy supply systems makes it clear that decisions made now on the nuclear/nonnuclear issue will have an impact reaching many years into the future.

The authors also observed

that the time when atmospheric CO, concentration will become crucial is early in the twenty-first century.

They expected

"an increase of 62-73 ppm over the 1958 value of 315 ppm by 2000. "

Then they added,

"atmospheric concentration of 375-390 ppm may well be a threshold range at which climate change from C02 effects will be separable from natural climate fluctuations. "

An increase of 150-225 ppm by 2025 (concentration of 465-540 ppm) should certainly result in recognizable climate change if such changes are ever to occur. The consequences of an increase of this magnitude in atmospheric C02 make it prudent to proceed cautiously in the large-scale use of fossil fuels."

In both nuclear proliferation and CO2/global climate change Weinberg and his associates were clearly correct. In 1974 India exploded its first nuclear device bomb without possessing American reactors. Other nations followed in developing nuclear weapons programs without relying on American designed and built power reactors. South Africa which actually assembled 6 nuclear weapons during the 1980's, using a locally designed uranium seperation technology. Pakistan built nuclear weapons without using American reactor technology from the 1980's onward. Pakistan is believed to have stolen technology from the West, and also received some technological help from China. North Korea was able to construct nuclear weapons with Pakistani help. Iraq's nuclear weapons programs were blocked by Israeli military action in the 1980's, and by international pressure and military actions since the 1990's. Iran received Pakistani help in developing an apparently ongoing nuclear weapons program. Libya also received Pakistani help on developing a nuclear weapons program, but is believed to have dismantled that program a few years ago, after an agreement with the United States. Israel acquired nuclear weapon making capacity during the 1960's with some French assistance, but without American reactors.

Weinberg was also correct about the implications of an American reactor construction moratorium for CO2 emissions. The world wide demands for energy has increased rapidly, and as of December 2009, with that demand predominately having been filled by coal burning power plants.

Weinberg and his associates foresaw the possibility of reactor accidents including a core melt down. He also envisioned the deaths of coal miners in accidents.

Some of their predictionsd are amazingly accurate. For example, they foresaw that

The decade 2000-2010 is the period of rapid deployment of the new supply technologies and/or stringent conservation measures. In this period world oil and gas production is expected to peak and begin to decline.

They predicted that in 2000 the price of oil would be $25 a barrel. The price actually ranged between $22 and $28 a barrel. They foresaw that a moratorium on reactor production after 1985 would increase OPEC's power.

The paper suggested

In the very long run, the society may have only solar energy and nuclear power as its major energy options. Solar energy, especially as a stand-alone electric system, presently appears to be much more expensive than nuclear energy.

This study disclosed several areas where additional research is needed: (a) specific regional impacts from alternative energy strategies; (b) the feasibility of mining multibillion tonnages of coal; (c) potential long-range environmental impacts, particularly that of CO, ; and (d) long-range asymptotic energy supply and demand beyond 2010.

and noted some implications of the solar choice, that are still not addressed by the current energy discussion:

insofar as solar may impose an intermittency on our pattern of living, an all-solar energy system would seem to be far from a totally “free” society. What may ultimately be at issue is freedom in the use of time. The nuclear society, with its high energy potential, allows us to use our time without regard to energy availability. The price we pay for this freedom is the necessity to organize and manage the nuclear system so as to avoid recognized potential hazards.

The consequence of failing to listen to Dr. Weinberg's excellent advice in the 1970's is that the world faces a global CO2 - energy crisis in 2010 without the tools to take deal with it. Continued hysteria about the alleged liabilities of nuclear power still block our path to a low carbon future, and so called energy experts have as of yet not come to terms with the solar cost issues that Alvin Weinberg pointed to a generation ago.

Two paths to Copenhagen: Weinberg and Lovins

In 1975 Alvin Weinberg left his final post as an energy administer, that of energy programs research director for the Federal Governments, a post he only held for a year. Weinberg was not yet ready to retire, and founded his own think tank, the Institute for Energy Analysis, where he conducted long-range analytic studies of energy issues, until his retirement in 1984. During his year in Washington, Weinberg had attempted to alert Congress to the long range danger of Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. Much of his subsequent research at the Institute for Energy Analysis was focused on the consequences of choosing alternative energy paths. Shortly after his return to Oak Ridge,

Weinberg meet the youthful Amory Lovins, whom he invited to Oak Ridge to present his views.

Alvin Weinberg does not like what he hears

By the mid 1970's Lovins had emerged as a major force in shaping public discussion of energy issues. Lovins continued to exert great influence for the remainder of the 20th century and beyond. But in the mid-1970's he had just been released from exile in England. The termination of the of American involvement in the Vietnamese War meant that young Amory Lovins no longer needed to pose as an Oxford student in order to evade the American draft.

Early in the 1970's Lovins had been recruited by environmental firebrand, David Browers, to represent Browers' group, "Friends of the Earth, in the UK. Brower had by that time joined the anti-nuclear camp, and Lovins proved an extremely gifted anti-nuclear propagandist. Lovins had studied enough physics, to talk a good game with none scientist. In 1975 along with fellow environmentalist John Price Lovins published "Non Nuclear Future The case for an ethical energy strategy".

In December 1976 Alvin Weinberg published a searching review of the Lovins-Price book in the journal Energy Policy. Weinberg's critique of "Non-Nuclear Future" is telling. His language is precise and descriptive. No punches are pulled. Weinberg speaks of Lovins "Savage attack on nuclear energy, which is "more unrelenting for being couched in Lovins impeccable prose.Weinberg observes,

Despite its title, the book is not concerned with a non-nuclear future.

Then Weinberg quotes Lovins and Price, who justified the absence of an account of the non-nuclear future by claiming,

'To show that a policy is mistaken does not oblige the analyst to have an alternative policy.

Weinberg observed,

But this is inadequate. They are not dealing with a hypothetical issue but with a real one. It is not enough to point out the deficiencies of nuclear energy; one must deal with the situation that would arise if Lovins and Price were successful in their onslaught: should the society indeed turn away from nuclear energy, what then?

Weinberg waste no more ink in getting to the crux of the issue. Have Lovins and Price, or has anyone, presented a tenable non-nuclear future? And indeed this central question, which Alvin Weinberg asked 33 years ago, remains the central question for the Green paradigm.

Weinberg pointed three central issues for Lovins and Price, three foci - energy, centralization, and electricity - that curiously go much beyond nuclear fission. Weinberg quotes Lovins and Price:'

Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.'

And an

'energy-intensive society' leads to a highly centralized, highly bureaucratized high technology society very vulnerable to internal and external disruption.

Weinberg observed:

For them, energy itself is a villain: less energy is better than more energy, not merely because the environment can absorb only a limited energy load, But because society cannot handle it!

But why energy, Weinberg asks, and pointed to Hitler's use of the radio for political propaganda. The technology of mass communications was, Weinberg maintained a far greater threat to freedom than centralized poeert generation.

Weinberg pointed to another paradox. People who have access to high energy societies, have greater freedom in their control of their time. Lovins appeared to be disturbed by thermal generation systems, which are relatively inefficient. Lovins appeared to believe that waste heat from energy systems placed a heat burden on the atmosphere.

Weinberg pointed out that that CO2 from burning fossil fuels in generating plants would contribute 30 times as much heat to the atmosphere as the heat produced by thermal generation processes. Weinberg noted that there were trade offs between convince and efficiency in energy use, and that more efficient energy uses might require incontinent levels of capital investment. Weinberg acknowledged the importance of protecting the environment against disruption, but suggested that this was not an absolute value, and that there might well be situations where other values intruded. These might include human health, human life, and time.

Time was a repeated mantra in Weinberg's thinking about energy. For Weinberg, efficient time use requires energy. And the effectiveness of Weinberg's appeal to time efficiency must be judged by the answer to the question, how frequently did Amory Lovins travel by auto or by aircraft, when he had other less environmentally intrusive but slower methods of transportation available? Weinberg was not so impolite as to raise the issue, but Lovins had visited Weinberg in Oak Ridge in October 1976, and it is doubtful that he had made the journey by bicycle. Indeed I suspect that Lovins probably made the trip from Knoxville's McGee-Tyson Airport to Oak Ridge and back in Weinberg's car. Nor does Lovins bicycle from Colorado to Washington, when he testifies before Congress. Weinberg did not regard Lovins as a hypocrite because he chooses time efficiency over environmental protection. Rather Weinberg is making the point that in practice Weinberg and Lovins agree that time efficiency justifies intrusion into the environment.

In his response to Weinberg, Lovins claimed,

My social philosophy and values bear little resemblance to the ones Dr Weinberg describes.

In fact Weinberg's description was largely made up of quotes, words that that Lovins had written. Lovins attempted to argue that his book was not about the future but about ethics.

The bulk of the book is indeed best described by its subtitle, ethical energy strategy, but I am sorry that Dr Weinberg did not mention its long thematic Introduction, .Non- Nuclear Futures', perhaps the most important part of the book. Both there and (at far greater length) in ,Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?, (Foreign Affairs, October t976)

In fact much of Weinberg's review was directed to ethical issues that Lovins had raised. Did Lovins not notice this? Of course one of the rewards for being ethically obtuse, is that one does not have to argue questions about ones own ethical inconsistencies, in the course of debate on ethical Weinberg pointed out,

"time is precious, a limited resource,"

and added that

'one should be willing to exchange some environmental insult for the freedom to use time as one chooses. . . . such a choice is a free one freedom ought not to be sacrificed with the easy assertion that the heating of the atmosphere by waste heat is an imminent danger.

Weinberg repeatedly notes that Lovins neglect a significant ethical issue posed by the generation of CO2 by burning coal.

The Authors should compare the amount of heating from CO2, as well as the heat effluent from fossil fuel plants, with the heat from nuclear plants I must conclude that the authors regard net energy analyses a convenient device for casting nuclear in an unfavorable light. A feat they accomplished by attempt to accomplish by ignoring the really significant comparisons between nuclear and non-nuclear, of the same doubling time and relative effects of heat release and co2 release.

Finally Weinberg asked,

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning, fission free bridge?

Lovins responded that he was worried about CO2, and professed to believe that so much coal was going to be burned anyway that CO2 emission reductions from nuclear power would not matter. Lovins offered no other remedy for mitigation of CO2 releases, perhaps relying on his famous foreign policy paper, which argued that burring coal in large power plants would gradually be replaced by more efficient micro power generators, something that still has not happened over a generation later.

We must also ask, "did Lovins really not notice that the questions about time and choice were directed against his ethical argument?"

Lovins claimed of Weinberg, "His values and mine are undeniably different." Yet was this the case? Not in the questions of efficient use of time, for Lovins had chosen in October 1976 to intrude on the environment by flying to Oak Ridge, the very choice Weinberg acknowledged he would make.

The real ethical issue then was not about such choices, it was about integrity. I must her intrude with the observation that Alvin Weinberg was a man of great integrity. Weinberg was fired as Director of ORNL in 1972 by the political and administrative establishment of the AEC, because Weinberg had refused to back down over nuclear safety. During the 23 years I spent in Oak Ridge as a boy and man, I never once heard Weinberg's integrity questioned. In the course of reviewing Lovins' book, Weinberg had not accused Lovins of bad faith but had pointed to questions, which if considered, brought Lovins' integrity into question. Weinberg had in fact paid attention to the subtitle of Lovins' book. What Alvin Weinberg pointed too in his December 1976 review of Lovins book was to point to its a deep inconsistency, its deep confusion. Lovins had built his entire “ethical” case for his opposition to nuclear power on special pleadings. Weinberg in effect challenged Lovins to demonstrate that his views were derived from a coherent ethical theory, whose tenants Lovins was willing to apply to himself.

Lovins chose to not respond to Alvin Weinberg in 1976, just as he later chose to not respond to Robert Bryce and David Bradish, Debate is not Lovins forte, sales is. Now there is nothing wrong with being a salesman, His sales pitch succeeded beyond all measure.

During the upward glide that took Amory Lovins to his 1977 meeting with Jimmy Carter, Alvin Weinberg invited to Amory Lovins to his think tank in Oak Ridge. There Lovins presented an early version of The Path Not Taken, and as Weinberg had done on many occasions, he began to question the young man. Weinberg found Lovins articulate, but "so wrong headed". Weinberg thought Lovins "longed for a simpler world". In his own way, Weinberg who regarded himself as a friend of Lovins, was far kinder to Lovins, than Vaclav Smil has been.

Weinberg's forte was to get the best out of scientists and thinkers. In doing so, he would first ask to hear what the scientist had to say, and then offer a response. At ORNL it was well know that if Weinberg offered you the criticism that you were wrong headed, you best ought to listen to avoid humiliation later own. Not that Weinberg would do the humiliation. Rather that the mistakes which Weinberg had caught would cause a scientist's career to suffer. But when your mistakes come from telling people what they want to hear, your career may flourish rather suffer.

It was Alvin Weinberg, a trained biologist as well as physicist, who understood ecology in a way Lovins never did. Weinberg understood the danger of CO2 emissions and had warned congress about global warming. During his brief stay in Washington, Weinberg pushed for CO2 research. When Jimmy Carter chose coal over nuclear power, Lovins did not utter a word of protest, but Weinberg wrote of the choice:

The difficulties and risks of the nuclear path we have been delineated often and in detail. Of these, proliferation of nuclear weapons probably poses the greatest risk, though-one must always remember that power reactors and chemical plants provide a sufficient, a not necessary, technical basis for proliferation. The major risk in the coal path is the possible CO catastrophic. In a way this is the coal analogue of nuclear proliferation: it is global, uncertain, possibly catastrophic. Thus we see the dimensions of the dilemma: the two energy systems upon which we are expecting to depend, at least over the medium term, are flawed to a degree that is at present essentially impossible to fully estimate, and that indeed may never be fully possible to estimate. To those who embrace coal as a fission-free bridge to a solar future, the CO question should inject a note of prudent concern: we can turn the phrase around and ask whether fission based on reactors of current design perhaps will have to serve as a coal-free bridge to a fusion, breeder, or solar future. We must also consider the possibility that both nuclear energy and coal will be judged by future generations to be fatally flawed and the question, "Can we make it on solar energy alone?" will have to be rephrased: "How can we make it on solar energy alone?"

There were consequences for using the cover Lovins provided as Weinberg understood. Although energy efficiency did improve over the next generation, so did CO2 emissions from electrical generation. Lovins, of course, never fought against coal the way he fought against nuclear. During the next generation Lovins triumphed, and Alvin Weinberg's concerns were largely forgotten. Yet if society seemed to follow Lovins lead, rather than Weinberg's, it was because society wanted to follow that path, not because of Lovins leadership or his prescience. Lovuns, unlike Weinberg was not gifted with foresight.

Energy and a Broke Country

When countries go broke they run the printing presses to print more money. In the United States money is not literally being printed, it is created by the Federal Reserve System. The money being used for the economy bail out is being created. Not a dollar of it was lying in the all too empty coffers of the US treasury when the crisis broke. I will not point the finger of blame at anyone, least of all one of my Dallas neighbors. Lets just say that some very bad decisions have been made during the last few years.

It is not just the government that is broke. The whole country is broke. Businesses are going under. Not just mom and pop on main street, but businesses that are national institutions. The Chicago Tribune has just gone down in enormous debt. General Motors has run out of money, and will not last till the end of the year without rescue. The banking system would have completely collapsed by now, were it not for a massive intervention by the government. The crisis could have been very easily worse that the collapse that triggered the great depression, and it may yet be.

Individuals are broke too. The crisis began because a lot of people in the United States were too broke to pay their mortgages. Who would have believed that the international financial order could be brought down by some bad Main Street loans in the US. It was! When workers begin to loose their jobs, the loose their ability to pay their debts, and as the job loss increases, more and more bad debt piles up, until the system begins to crash.

Historians say that the Great Depression did not end until the start of World War II, when war time spending made the factories hum again. But the Government started World War II with very little debt. Today the Government is deep in debt.

In this catastrophic financial situation we face an energy crisis of enormous proportions. First we are going to soon begin to run out of oil. That has been predictable for a long time. Secondly burning fossil fuels produces huge amounts of CO2, which will force climate change on us. Even if it didn't there are pressing reasons for eliminating coal fired generation of electricity. There are significant health and environmental consequences of burning coal. People who live near coal fired power plants have significantly more health problems than people in other areas do. Coal related health care costs effects local residents, employeers and insurance companies. In addition the price of coal is rising. Coal exacts indirect tolls on the economy Therefore there are compelling arguments for the replacement of coal in electrical generation quite asside from the possibility of climate change.

It is also the case that many coal fired power plants are old and reaching the end of their useful life, and will have to be replaced. Thus the expense of replacing coal fired power plants cannot be avoided. The only question then is what technology to use. As I have noted the country is broke, and power plants have to be built as cheaply as possible.

Current estimates of the future costs of nuclear power plants indicate very high capitol costs, but the same cost inflation factors that will effect the cost of nuclear plants will also inflate the cost of renewables including solar and wind generating systems, probably to a greater extent. The cost of base equivalent power with solar and wind is very expensive, and future costs are likely to rise with inflation rather than drop as renewable advocates assume. It seems unlikely that a virtually bankrupt country like the United States will be able to afford the expensive fixes offered to thenational generating system, by either reneables or conventional nuclear power any time soon.

I have argued in the past that LFTR technology has a very significant potential to lower the capital costs of nuclear power plants. Mass production of transportable reactors will lower nuclear manufacturing costs. Innovative siting approachs such as under water or underground siting, and recycling old coal fired power facilities can also lower costs. Small transportable reactors can be wildly dispursed. Small LFTRs can be clustered, creating the equivalent of a large coal or nuclear power plant, but with greater thermal efficiency. Not only would LFTRs provide a low cost alternative to expensive renewables base load power, but they would provide a very superior and less expensive alternative to current old fashion and expensive Light Water Reactors.

LFTRs produce little to almost no nuclear waste. They have many attractive safety features, and pose no danger to the public. LFTRs are also recognized by the International Atomic Energy Agency as proliferation resistant. And the fuel for LFTRs cost almost nothing. Thorium is the basis for the LFTR fuel cycle. At present enough wasted thorium sits above ground in mine tailings, to power the American economy for hundreds of year. There is enough easily recoverable thorium in the crust of the earth, to provide the human economy with all its energy needs for millions of years. Thus LFTRs constitute a sustainable energy source.

Thus not do LFTRs answer all of the traditonal objections to nuclear power, but they will do it at a far lower cost than traditional Light Water Reactors, and renewable power systems.

Thus because the United States is broke, it has no option other than to choose the lowest cost post-carbon power system. But it turns out that the lowest cost choice, the LFTR is also the best choice, the choice that will involve the fewest compromises.

The Green Road not Taken

Not far west from the ruined community of Cefn Croes, lies the Snowdonia Mountains of Wales, the site of one of the United Kingdom's most beautiful National Parks. It was to Snowdonia in 1971 that a young Amory Lovins came at the behest of David Brower. Young Lovins, a three times college drop out with an unearned MA from Oxford - don't even ask, suffice to say Oxford does not issue earned MA's in physics, the appropriate earned degree for Lovins would have been a BSc, which Lovins never received - who, that is Lovins, had a short while ago had become acquainted with environmental firebrand Brower. Brower was in the UK to participate in the organization of the UK branch of the Friends of the Earth. Lovins' youthful interest in experimental physics had diminished, and he was open to a new direction in his life. According to Lovins, it was Brower who encouraged him to drop out of Oxford, and persue a career that began with a Brower commissioned book on the Snowdonia Mountains.

Brower had originally been pro-nuclear, having seen nuclear power as a more environmentally friendly than the Glen Canyon Dam, but during the late 1960's Brower had signed on to the anti-nuclear movement. Lovins' ideas appealed to Brower:

"Amory set a standard by inventing the soft energy path, which challenged everything," says Brower. "He said America had too much energy, that the hydro-nuclear-coal-electric grid was silly, often unnecessary, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, dangerous, and uneconomical, that the peaceful atom was a myth masking a bloated war machine. This shook some of us, but Amory had the figures to back himself up. He always does."

It was Lovin's very bright idea to apply Ben Frankiln's saying "A penny saved is a penny earned," to energy. For Lovins, a watt saved was a watt earned. Lovins gosple of efficiency struck a deep cord in the American psychie. The belief in efficiency as an economic solution is an old one in the United States, and is called Hooverizing after the 31st president of the United States, who was a great proponent of efficiency and enemy of waste. Lovins is very much a one trick poney, and that trick is the word efficiency. In 2007, Lovins wrote that triumph over climate change, “will not cost you extra, it will save you money, because saving fuel costs less than buying fuel.” "A penny saved is a penny earned." There must be something more to it you say. Perhaps not. Robert Bryce recently asked polymath, Vaclav Smil,

In your writings, you point out how many times Amory Lovins, the energy efficiency advocate who heads the Rocky Mountain Institute, has been wrong in his predictions regarding the adoption of renewable energy. I laughed out loud when I read your line, 'Inexplicably, Lovins retains his guru aura no matter how wrong he is'.  Why has Lovins been wrong so often? And why does he continue to get so much fawning press coverage?

Smil responded,

Amory has become a celebrity after wholesaling his fairy-tale of "soft" decentralized small-scale energies as THE solution (with its deep countercultural, Berkeleyish appeal), and it is the first law of celebrity-hood that, right or wrong, coherent or not, you retain the status. Combine that with the just-noted mass scientific ignorance of the population and with Amory sleek offerings of no-pain solutions (nothing will cost anything, or as he famously put it, abating climate change for fun and profit) and you have new believers signing up every time he speaks. By the way, by this time we all should have been driving nothing but Lovinsian hypercars (something like 200 mpg, made like new Boeing 787s solely from carbon composites) whose conceptual design he launched more than a decade ago; have you seen any?

According to Bryce, Smil attributes to Lovins numerous failed predictions including:

1. Renewables will take huge swaths of the overall energy market. (1976)
2. Electricity consumption will fall. (1984)
3. Cellulosic ethanol will solve our oil import needs. (repeatedly)
4. Efficiency will lower consumption. (repeatedly)

Smil, of course, knows all about Jevons and his famous energy efficiency paradox the paradox which Lovins ignores.   If knowledge and accuracy were not Lovins strong points, what he did offer was not wisdom, but the belief that energy solutions could be bought at little or no cost, simply by fighting waste.   Thus politicians can avoid making hard choices, retailers owners can put a few Photovoltaic modules on the roves of their stores, and home owners can drive to Sams' to purchase compact fluorescent light bulbs, each in perfect realization that there is no solution to the energy crisis that energy efficiency would not fix. 

Amory Lovins' ascent into the regard of the leadership of the Democratic Party was amazingly swift, and only superficially difficult to explain. Lovins rehabilitated Hooverization among Democrats, without ever mentioning Hoover's name. When Herbert Hoover told the country that it could end the great depression by fighting waste, Democrats scoffed. When Amory Lovins told Jimmy Carter that an energy depression could be avoided by fighting energy waste, Democrats rejoyced. Hard choices, likely to be unpopular with the voters, could be avoided. That was Amory Lovins message to politicians. One could speak of Lovins glide to the top. In October 1976 Lovins had his essay, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken? published in Foreign Policy. Within a year Lovins was in the White House chatting with Jimmy Carter about Energy issues. The next day, Carter announced to an exited audience that he was considering alternative to nuclear power. For Carter Lovins offered both a personal and a political out. As a young naval officer Carter had been given the frightening assignment of helping with the clean up after a major Canadian Reactor accident in 1953. Working in such frightening circumstances could very well effected Carter's views of nuclear power. Although historians usually attribute Carter's resignation from the Navy to the death of his father, Carter's Chalk River experience could have been more of a factor than he acknowledged.

Carter also had political reasons for wishing to discount nuclear power. Amroy Lovins provided Carter with political cover. Thus by November 1977 Amory Lovins was a force to be reckoned with, despite the slight intellectual foundation for his reputation.

I would not for one moment hold Lovins responsible for the decline of the fortune of nuclear power in the United States. The decline of the United States nuclear establishment began in 1969, when Amory Lovins was hiding from his draft board at Oxford. Politicians wishing to cut the fat from the budget, or placate environmentalists, or a public that feared the China Syndrome, could always use Lovins as a cover. So Lovins has been accorded glory for his bad advice, and jets all over the planet in a quest to save it from Global Warming. The Lovins gospel is that we don't have replace fossil fuels with expensive, dirty and dangerous nuclear power, and we can actually save money at the same time. Fossil fuels can be replaced by efficiency. If we need more electricity than we can save through efficiency, the sun and wind - both of which are free - will do the rest. Be happy, don't worry about energy shortages.

During the upward glide that took Lovins to his meeting with Jimmy Carter, Alvin Weinberg invitedto Amory Lovins to his think tank in Oak Ridge. There Lovens presented an early version of The Path Not Taken, and as Weinberg had done on many occasions, he began to question the young man. Weinberg found Lovins articulate, but "so wrong headed". Weinberg thought Lovins "longed for a simpler world". In his own way, Wienberg who regarded himself as a friebnd of Lovins, was far kinder to Lovins, than Smil was.

Weinberg's forte was to get the best out of scientists. In doing so, He would first ask to hear what the scientist had to say, and then offer a response. AT ORNL itwas well know that if Weinberg offered you the criticism that you were wrong headed, you bst ought to listen to avoid humiliation later own. Not that Weinberg would do the humiliation. Rather that the mistakes whichWeinbery had caught would cause a scientist's career to suffer. But when your mistakes come from telling people what they want to hear, your career may flourish rather suffer.

It was Alvin Weinberg, a trained biologist as well as physicist, who understood ecology in a way Lovinsnever did. Weinberg understood the Danger of cO2 emissions and in 1974 has warned congress about global warming. During his brief stay in Washington, Weinberg pushed for CO2 research. When Jimmy Carter chose coal over nuclear power, Lovins did not utter a word of protest, but Weinberg wrote of the choice:

The difficulties and risks of the nuclear path We have been delineated often and in detail. Of these, proliferation of nuclear weapons probably poses the greatest risk, though-one must always remember that power reactors and chemical plants provide a sufficient, a not necessary, technical basis for proliferation. The major risk in the coal path is the possible CO catastrophc. In a way this is the coal analogue of nuclear proliferation: it is global, uncertain, possibly catastrophic. Thus we see the dimensions of the dilemma: the two energy systems upon which we are expecting to depend, at least over the medium term, are flawed to a degree that is at present essentially impossible to fully estimate, and that indeed may never be fully possible to estiate. To those who embrace coal as a fission-free bridge to a solar future, the CO question should inject a note of prudent concern: we can turn the phrase around and ask whether fission based on reactors of current design perhaps will have to serve as a coal-free bridge to a fusion, breeder, or solar future. We must also consider the possibility that both nuclear energy and coal wi l l be judged by future generations to be fatally flawed and the question, "Can we make it on solar energy alone?" will have to be rephrased: "How can we make it on solar energy alone?"

There were consequences using the cover Lovins provided as Weinberg understood. Although energy efficiency did improve over the next generation, so did CO2 emissions from electrical generation. Lovins, of course, never fought against coal the way he fought against nuclear. If society seemed to follow Lovins lead, rather than Weinberg's, it was because society wanted to follow that path, not because of Lovins leadership or his prescience. Lovuns, unlike weinberg was not gifted with foresight.