Toward a Renewable Chaos: Carbon Imperialism and Disadvantaged Smaller Nations

Net Zero, Climate Action, Build Back Better, and the Great Reset are some of the names for policies aimed at expediting the transition of the global energy sector from fossil fuel to renewable technology. The goal? Saving the planet from climate apocalypse.

But there is a huge hurdle to make this transition a reality. Most of the world’s primary energy comes from coal, oil, and gas.

Fossil fuels dominate the global energy sector, and there is a reason for that: they are reliable, abundant, and affordable. Further, with constant innovations, the amounts of pollutants emitted from burning them have been reduced considerably.

Japan’s clean-coal technology and improved combustion engines in automobiles are two of the many technologies that have reduced pollutants in emissions, making fossil fuels all the more desirable.

In contrast, wind and solar make up an insignificant percentage of the world’s energy consumption.

The renewable contribution to global energy consumption in 2017 was less than 2%. Solar and wind contributed just 7% of the world’s electricity in 2018.

There is a reason for that. Besides being expensive, they are highly intermittent and so are unreliable. Further, wind and solar power cannot be used without backup by fossil fuel-powered energy sources.

Renewable technology, if it involves solar power or wind power, is at best a niche in the overall picture of energy production, and may be used effectively in only limited circumstances.

What is needed is a good baseline power source, and for that the harnessing of nuclear energy is still the most efficient and “greenest” source of power within our present level of technology. There is a great deal of superstition built up concerning nuclear fission power, mostly centering around the use of uranium/plutonium as the fissionable fuel. But the technology exists for the much more abundant element thorium to be substituted as the primary fuel, but unlike uranium or plutonium, thorium is not fissile, that is, it cannot initiate a chain reaction in and of itself when reaching something called “critical mass”. However, in the presence of a small amount of a fissile isotope of uranium (or plutonium), the chain reaction can be initiated in a molten salt solution, and sustained once ignited.

This makes a much more controlled release of energy possible, and is considered much safer that a uranium-fueled atomic pile, which has to have graphite rods inserted into its mass to slow down the generation of neutrons from the atomic decay of of the uranium isotopes. Also, the side reactions that produce plutonium, one of the most toxic of elements known, do not occur with the initiation of fission in thorium-fueled atomic piles.

All this was known decades ago, but the decision was made to go with uranium-fueled power generation plants, because of the side production of plutonium, very useful in production of nuclear warheads. Thorium fueled power plants have been built and found feasible, but there was no side production of plutonium, and the further development was allowed to diminish considerably.

Meanwhile, vast inventories of “spent” uranium fuel rods have been accumulated over time, with problems with storage and eventual decay while in storage, the half-life of the isotopes produced stretching into decades or even hundreds of years. These very same “spent” fuel rods can be used to “seed” a thorium-fueled molten salt reactor, thus initiating the fission reaction that generates the heat necessary to produce electricity, and which in tern leaves only a very small amount of nuclear “ash”, thus eventually “burning up” the stored spent uranium fuel rods, a net win-win for nuclear power.

It is possible, through technology, to make the earth a much greener place than it is currently, but there has to be the will to explore and apply that technology.

Otherwise we become a nation of Luddites.

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