NEI Nuclear Notes

Updated Editor's Note: The next big date on the Pandora's Promise calendar is November 7 at 9:00 p.m. U.S. EST. That's when the film will make it's cable television debut on CNN . A crew from the cable network visited NEI a few weeks ago, and we anticipate that you'll see a number of features about the future of the nuclear energy industry air over the next several weeks. Be sure to watch on November 7, and join us on Twitter as we participate in a real-time chat about the film using the #PandorasPromise hash tag. Editor's Note: Here at NEI, we're keeping a close eye on  Pandora's Promise , a documentary film by Academy Award-nominated director Robert Stone about how many prominent environmentalists have changed their minds about nuclear energy because of concerns about climate change.  The film was produced independently from the nuclear industry. Among the financial backers of Pandora's Promise are Richard Branson and Microsoft co-founder Paul A...

Note: Be sure to look at all of Nuclear Notes’ coverage of this important movie, most notably Eric’s review below. Should you trust a “review” of Pandora’s Promise , Robert Stone’s new movie on nuclear energy, from this particular site? Well, that’s up to you to decide. If I thought the movie terrible as a film going experience, there would still be a lot to say about it – and I wouldn’t want people who have waited a long time for a pro-nuclear movie to avoid it on my account unless it was a briar patch of lies. But Pandora’s Promise is good. It’s skillfully made, accessible to an interested general audience (in both style and content – this isn’t a dry dissertation) and it maintains a simple interview approach – shots are composed but the compositions are largely determined by the subjects – it isn’t as tightly controlled as an Errol Morris special. And it allows a more complex point-of-view than is usual for a subject vulnerable to blunt polemics – for example, it ...

Robert Stone behind the camera. It was back in 2006 that NEI Nuclear Notes published its first post with the title, " Another Environmentalist for Nuclear Energy ." At the time, I could certainly have understood how a statement like that might seem more than a bit unbelievable. Environmentalists? Supporting? Nuclear? Energy? Wasn't the environmental community unanimously opposed to nuclear energy?  But what I had begun to see at the time was a growing understanding on the part of a number of thoughtful people about the size and scope of the challenge before mankind. How do you support a world with a growing population that aspires to enjoy the same standard of living that we've grown accustomed to in the developed world? And how do you do it without causing catastrophic damage to the planet? It's was that conundrum that led environmentalists like Patrick Moore , James Lovelock and the late Rev. Hugh Montefiore to reconsider their position on nuclear ene...

This evening in Pleasantville, NY at the Jacob Burns Film Center , Robert Stone's new documentary, Pandora's Promise , will have its New York premiere. Following the screening, Stone will have a discussion with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of Riverkeeper about the film. The discussion will be moderated by Andrew Revkin of the New York Times . NEI will be in attendance, and we'll be following the discussion live via our Twitter feed, @n_e_i . Please check in around 9:00 p.m. U.S. EDT for our live coverage. So Where Can You See Pandora's Promise ? The official opening will be in New York City on June 12 at  Sunshine Cinema  on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Two days later, on June 14, the film will open in an additional 15 cities nationwide ( Atlanta ,  Berkeley ,  Boston ,  Chicago ,  Denver ,  Houston ,  Irvine ,  Los Angeles ,  Minneapolis ,  Philadelphia ,  San Diego ,  San Francisco ,  Seattle ,  St. Lou...

Continuing on Friday’s critique of Amory Lovins’ latest study , our following post delves into discussing if wind and solar are baseload technologies. Funny enough, Lovins’ rebuttal of this myth completely misinterpreted what Stewart Brand said about baseload in his nuclear chapter and apparently ended up agreeing with Brand in one case. The “baseload myth” Here’s the quote from Brand’s book that the Lovins study has a problem with (p. 80 and 81): “’Baseload,’” she [Gwyneth Cravens] explains in the book, “refers to the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock, rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of customers.” … Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants. This claim ...

Seed Magazine has an interesting set of articles that roost under the title: The Lesser Evil: Nuclear or Coal? Well, you have to give a magazine room to gin up its content. Gwyneth Cravens, author of the Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy , offers an entry : Wind and solar are too diffuse and intermittent to provide baseload, and they require backup, mainly from fossil fuels. Nuclear has about the same carbon footprint as wind but is astronomically more compact and efficient and operates at 90 percent capacity (coal: 53 percent capacity; wind: 34 percent). Nuclear waste is therefore tiny in volume. The world’s entire annual inventory could fit in one large townhouse. Nuclear waste recycling, done abroad, drastically reduces volume, radioactivity, and the need for long-term disposal. Civilian nuclear plants have never produced atomic bombs. That doesn’t sound like a lesser evil, that sounds like a good. We admit that, just as Cravens can make us purr like ...

Discover Magazine has just published an article, "Is Nuclear Energy Our Best Hope?," written by Gwyneth Cravens. The pull quote: [James] Lovelock explained that his decision to endorse nuclear power was motivated by his fear of the consequences of global warming and by reports of increasing fossil-fuel emissions that drive the warming. Jesse Ausubel, head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, recently echoed Lovelock’s sentiment. “As a green, I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for nature,” he wrote. “To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy such as wind, water, and biomass cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.” All of this has led several other prominent environmentalists to publicly favor new nuclear plants. I had a similar change of heart. Fo...

Yesterday on WNYC-FM's Brian Lehrer Show, Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy , made a joint appearance with Jim Riccio, Nuclear Policy Analyst for Greenpeace . Normally, I'd suggest that you take a listen, but given the fact that Riccio spent most of the interview talking over Cravens and not letting her get a word in edgewise, I'm afraid there's not much to recommend it. However, there was one point of contention between the two guests that I think bears closer examination. At one point during the interview, Cravens made the point that there hasn't been any other core meltdowns of a commercial nuclear reactor in the U.S., at which point Riccio started berating Cravens about Fermi 2, and how she should have read a book by John G. Fuller called We Almost Lost Detroit concerning the accident. Fermi 2 is a 1,098 MWe General Electric boiling water reactor owned by DTE Energy and currently still in operation. There has ...

It looks like Adam Blinick's post at TNR has kicked off a little debate. Over at The Atlantic , Matt Yglesias had this to say: We'll be weaned off the dastardly power, perhaps, with nuclear powered cars? What about plug-in hybrids ? The idea here is simple: If you generate electricity with a non-emitting source like nuclear, you can power plug-in hybrids while cutting the emission of carbon and other particulate matter like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide, which would deliver the added benefit of helping to avoid acid rain. Yglesias continues: I have no problem with the idea that putting a proper price on carbon might lead to good things for the nuclear power industry, but the issue in practice is that nuclear advocates are busy demanding large subsidies. It makes sense to some extent to subsidize clean sources of electricity, but we should target subsidies on really, truly clean sources of power -- and nuclear's not that. The idea that dastardly anti-nuclear activist...

After hearing John Edwards declare his outright opposition to nuclear energy during Tuesday's Democratic debate in Nevada, Adam Blinick of The New Republic wrote ... Gwyneth Cravens's illuminating Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy dispels many of the myths about nuclear energy that Edwards' position helps prop up. For example, she notes coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear ones. (In fact, humans get more radiation from medical x-rays or flying round-trip from New York to L.A. than living near a nuclear plant). Also, Cravens argues that nuclear energy plants are almost completely risk-free regarding nuclear weapons proliferation (it's a different enrichment process) and potential terrorist attacks (U.S. plants are simply too secure). She also makes the argument that we likely have safe ways of disposing of nuclear waste, even at Yucca Mountain. For all the empty "unity" rhetoric that inevitably is present during an election cycl...

After reading an article about Gwyneth Cravens and her public about face on nuclear energy, Glenn Reynolds had this to say: Just think how much better-off the planet would be if people had been smart enough to ignore the no-nukes crowd 30 years ago. Indeed, just imagine.

In the midst of promoting her new book, The Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy , Gwyneth Cravens sat down for an interview with Wired News ... WN: You have an interesting statistic comparing the waste levels produced by individuals over a lifetime. Cravens: A family in four in France, where they reprocess nuclear fuel, would produce only enough waste to fit in a coffee cup over a whole lifetime. A lifetime of getting all your electricity from coal-fired plants would make a single person's share of solid waste (in the United States) 68 tons, which would require six 12-ton railroad cars to haul away. Your share of CO2 would be 77 tons. Wow. Very neat. For our entire archive of entries on Cravens, click here .

Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy , recently took a tour of the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant : By the end of the tour it became obvious to me that the slightest incident at a nuclear plant, even if it occurs far from any reactor and poses no risk to the public, is usually given three-alarm treatment by the media, whereas the large-scale, relentless, ongoing risks from fossil fuel combustion are ignored. Our biggest reliable sources of our basic electricity supply are fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants. There is nothing speculative about the fact that as coal combustion provides half of our electricity it causes the premature deaths of more than 24,000 Americans a year in addition to hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and heart disease. Is this acceptable? Nuclear power, while providing one-fifth of our electricity and three-quarters of our emissions-free electricity, has never caused a single death to a member of the American p...

Ruth Sponsler has a review of Gwyneth Cravens' new book, The Power to Save the World . Be sure to give it a look. I'm sure many of you will recall that we first pointed out Cravens and her book in a post back in September , before also finding news of a presentation before Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation .

Last week we told you about Gwyneth Cravens , a former anti-nuclear protester who has done a 180 degree about face on building new nuclear plants. Last Friday night, Cravens participated in a discussion on nuclear energy sponsored by Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation about her new book, The Power to Save the World : Comparing the environmental footprint of nuclear versus coal was the most persuasive mind-changer for Cravens. Coal involves vast quanities of mine spoil, vast quantities of fuel, vast quantities of pollution (including mercury and uranium), and vast quantities of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere. Nuclear, by contrast, uses the most concentrated form of energy in the world, the plants are small, and the waste amounts to one Coke can per person’s lifetime of energy use. For more, stop by O'Reilly Radar .

Over at Atomic Insights , Rod Adams reviews The Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy . What's interesting about the book is that its author, Gwyneth Cravens, is a former anti-nuke who was part of the opposition to the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island. But after spending decades talking to people working in the nuclear industry, she's changed her mind: [A]s a native of Albuquerque, NM, she had the opportunity to develop a social acquaintance with Rip Anderson, one of the leading researchers and practitioners of probabilistic risk assessment of nuclear facilities. Her occasional discussions with Dr. Anderson began to disturb her previously firm belief that nuclear power represented an unreasonably risky endeavor that should not be allowed to flourish. Eventually, she decided that she needed to learn more - I love people like that! Through her connection with Dr. Anderson, she set up visits to mines, a uranium mill, waste storage facilities in Idaho...