. . . a nuclear solution to global warming would succeed only in bankrupting the world. Now, what can we do instead?
There are basically two components to this: The first is called "energy efficiency" and it simply means more wise use of energy. . . . as much oil leaks out of American windows each year in the form of heat loss as the entire Alaskan oil pipeline produces. . . . So here we spend 300 million dollars to produce 36 million barrels of oil, here we spend only eight million dollars [to coat window glass with transparent film that reflects heat making effective thermal insulators] to save the equivalent quantity of oil and all of the associated pollution.
The second part is to shift to renewable energy resources. . . . the DOE's own data show that the United States could actually supply all of its energy with renewable sources. . . . . . . in the world of energy experts and utility experts you often find people saying: "Oh, I know about renewable energy, we tried it, we did it back in the seventies and early eighties, it didn't work, it was horrendously expensive, it was basically a failure, and we know what we are talking about."
Well, the truth is, that people who speak like that do not know what they are talking about today, because things have changed radically since then. . . . between 1980 . . . and 1992, the cost of electricity from solar thermal plants dropped from 55 cents per kilowatt hour to about eight cents per kilowatt hour. . . . the same story with respect to wind technology: Between 1980 and 1992, the cost dropping from nearly 40 cents per kilowatt hour to about seven cents per kilowatt hour today. . . . the same story with photovoltaics: Between 1980 and 1992, the cost dropping from nearly 90 cents per kilowatt hour to about a little over 20 cents per kilowatt hour.
Now, this raises a question: If it is all so great, why isn't it happening? . . . Here we see the energy spending in the U.S. government and we see that over half of it goes to nuclear energy -- half the research money --, and a relatively small share goes to renewable energy. Very similar sorts of numbers pertain actually for the entire OECD countries -- about 59 percent of the government energy budget is devoted to nuclear power and about less than ten percent to renewable energy.
Now, for all that money that we have spent on nuclear power, what do we get for it? In the United States, quite little. Nuclear power only provides about seven percent of our total energy, and furthermore, to the eternal embarrassment of the nuclear industry, renewable energy now produces more energy than nuclear power in the United States.
. . . what we label as a crisis in our environment is equally as much a crisis within ourselves, a crisis of human consciousness and values. And there are several dimensions to this that actually serve as hidden driving forces for the ecological crisis, and I'll just mention a couple of them. One is the psychological pollution of continual bombardment of corporate advertising and the consumer culture, another is the dominance by an hegemony of the masculine gender and related problems of class and racial oppression. A third is the epistemological tyranny of western science and market economics. And finally, the spiritual bankruptcy of secular technological modernism.
Now, if we ignore these aspects of our current dilemma, then the solar technologies that I have outlined above could actually, I think, serve to hasten ecological collapse, because energy would be removed as a constraint on a forward stampede. However, if we embrace these deeper dimensions accounting for their physical, social, cultural and spiritual implications, then solar energy and renewable sources can provide abundant energy for all human societies on earth and free us once and forever from the ravages of fossil fuels and nuclear power.

Beyond Nukes
The Promise of Renewable Energy

Dr. Bill Keepin, New Mexico, USA. Physicist,
consultant for energy and environment.

What I would like to do today is two things really: The first will be to deepen our insight a bit about the absurdity of the nuclear dream, and the second will be to point to another way. There have been dramatic developments in the last ten years or so that are not widely known, that give rise to a whole new vision of energy for the world. So I would like to summarize some of those developments. And let me just give a couple of caveats. I will be using lots of examples from the United States, only because I have been working on the U.S. case, which is obviously an important one as we all know from Rio de Janeiro. But I don't mean to be overly U.S.-centric, it's just simply that this is the data I am familiar with. The other thing I would like to say is that I will be showing a number of charts and graphs and this is because this is the venue that I usually use. But, please, don't be put off by them. I'll explain what they mean if you are not used to dealing in this medium and they do carry a very important message.

So, as Ernst von Weizsacker said earlier, the nuclear industry loves the greenhouse effect and the problem of global warming, because they use this as a pretext for advancing nuclear energy. And I think the idea that nuclear power would be a solution to our environmental problems is quite an ironic oxymoron -- but for the moment, I would like to invite you to think through with me the most optimistic future that could possibly be imagined for nuclear power, because I think if we actually take these arguments at face value and think them through, their absurdity becomes even more apparent.

So let's imagine for the moment that the world was going to try to solve the problem of global warming due to the combustion of fossil fuels with a massive nuclear power program. Okay, so what we'll specifically consider is, that since coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and produces the most carbon dioxide per unit energy, we will assume that we'll displace all coal use worldwide by the year 2025. So this will be obviously a very aggressive goal. And in addition -- since we wish to consider for the moment the best of all possible worlds for nuclear power -- we will also assume that nuclear power plants could be built very cheaply. So, here we are assuming 1,000 dollars per kilowatt installed, which is about one third the cost of nuclear power in the United States today, and consistent with that inexpensive capital cost would also be very cheap electricity from nuclear power. And finally, in keeping with common practice among nuclear proponents, we will explicitly avoid any consideration of all of the problems of nuclear power, that includes nuclear-waste treatment and storage, decommissioning costs, the safety of nuclear plants, the environmental or health consequences of nuclear power and the possible impact on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And I think you will agree with me that by excluding all those problems and assuming these optimistic economic conditions and the fact that we could replace all coal with nuclear power, we are indeed assuming the best of all possible worlds.

Now, what are the implications of this?

[Diagram] This schematic diagram shows the world's nuclear power installations today. Each dot that you see there represents ten large nuclear plants of 1,000 megawatts a piece. In a business-as-usual-scenario for energy growth, the nuclear dream is that if we just build enough nuclear plants, we can have business as usual and energy consumption as usual and everything will be fine. So, in the case of replacing the coal, we would go from this situation here in 1990 to this situation by the year 2025. The world would have to build 5,000 new nuclear reactors between now and the year 2025. Each dot here again represents ten large nuclear reactors, and half of those would have to be in the Third World. It should be apparent already that this is infeasible, but let me just run through a couple more implications. The case that I am just describing is this medium scenario over here on the right. This would require that we build a brand new large nuclear plant every two and a half days for 37 years straight. The total cost would be over 500 billion dollars per year, half of which would have to come from the Third World. In fact, just to build the required plants would actually double the entire Third World debt burden. This would entail an 18-fold increase in nuclear power capacity. Now, clearly, this is infeasible, but the most ironic observation to be made here is: Suppose we did it and bankrupted the world and actually pulled this off, what would be the impact on global carbon dioxide emissions in a business-as-usual-scenario? It turns out, over here as you can see, that carbon dioxide emissions would not decline, they would remain at or above today's level throughout future time. The reason for this is that we have only dealt with the coal, and the anticipated expansion in oil and natural gas consumption would be sufficient to keep carbon dioxide levels at or above today's levels for all future time.

So, I think it is clear that a nuclear solution to global warming would succeed only in bankrupting the world. Now, what can we do instead?

There are basically two components to this: The first is called "energy efficiency" and it simply means more wise use of energy. Let me give you an example: In the United States, as much oil leaks out of American windows each year in the form of heat loss as the entire Alaskan oil pipeline produces. Now, what can we do about it? If we follow the Bush administration, we will take this approach of building more off-shore oil platforms. [Picture] This particular one costs 300 million dollars to build, and over its lifetime it will supply 36 million barrels of oil before it runs dry. Alternatively, we could do this: This is a factory, a window factory, and what they do in this factory is, they coat window glass with a transparent film that reflects heat. So, what this does is, it makes windows into effective insulators, thermal insulators. This factory over the same period of time can coat enough window glass to save 36 million barrels of oil, and it only costs eight million dollars to build. So here we spend 300 million dollars to produce 36 million barrels of oil, here we spend only eight million dollars to save the equivalent quantity of oil and all of the associated pollution. Similar examples abound throughout the energy economy, and in the United States, for example, we could cut energy consumption in half with no reduction in life style or services, and, of course, pollution would be correspondingly reduced as well. So, that's the first part of the solution.

The second part is to shift to renewable energy resources, and that's what I want to focus on primarily here. [Picture] This here shows for the United States the total renewable energy potential by source -- wind and solar and various other sources. The total quantity here -- this is actually according to the U.S. Department of Energy -- is 85 quads up here by the year 2010. Now, current energy consumption in the United States is about 85 quads. So the U.S. Department of Energy's own data show that the United States could be potentially completely self-sufficient on renewable energy.

Question from the audience:

"What is a quad? "

A quad is a funny unit of energy used in the United States, and that refers to a quadrillion BThU's [British Thermal Units]. The main point here is that the DOE's [Dept. of Energy's] own data show that the United States could actually supply all of its energy with renewable sources. Now, I am sure you are all familiar with roof-top photovoltaic systems, and I will be talking about photovoltaics in a minute. But I would like to point to some technologies for large scale solar energy use. [Picture] This here is a solar thermal plant in the desert of California, and this is a large scale 150 megawatt electricity generation plant that produces steam, and then the steam is used to run a turbine as in a normal power plant. You'll notice there is no smoke or any kind of emissions coming up from this plant, and let me give you a close-up. [Picture] Here you can see more clearly what it consists of: These are actually large parabolic mirrors that reflect the sun's rays onto the focal axis and thereby generate steam which is then used to run a turbine. Now, these plants in California -- there are about six of them -- they generate currently 90 percent of the world's solar electricity. They could also be used to make hydrogen which will be probably an important component of a sustainable energy future. Hydrogen can be used much as a fuel-like natural gas, except that when it's burned, it produces primarily steam and produces no carbon dioxide, no sulfur dioxide, and very little nitrogen dioxide, or nitrous oxides if it's burned properly.

In addition, there is new research in Australia that's being done currently to try to produce solar electricity at night. And the way this is done is simply by storing the sun's heat from the daytime in rock beds, so the rocks are heated, and then at night time, the heat is drawn off from the rocks to produce steam to generate electricity. This has generated a great deal of interest in Australia and, in fact, just recently the Australian government ran detailed energy scenarios to the year 2020 to determine what strategies might meet their environmental goals. They ran a nuclear scenario, they ran a solar scenario, and they found that a solar scenario using this kind of technology would actually be cheaper than doing it with nuclear power. And this is having quite an impact in Australia, and my colleague down there told me just last week that as a result of this, the Australian government has made this type of technology -- solar thermal technology -- its number one research priority for renewable energy.

[Applause]

Yes, we should all clap loudly at this.

[Picture] Here is another example on a smaller scale. This is actually also in Sydney, Australia. This is a hospital, and you notice these pretty blue things on the top. Those are actually solar thermal collectors. And here is a close-up of those. Again, these are parabolic throughs that reflect the sun's rays onto the focal axis and produce steam, and it is very impressive to go up and visit this hospital, because you walk on the roof and there is no noise, there is no smoke, there is no valves, there is no moving parts. Nothing is happening, and, in fact, the physicist told me that when most energy experts come, they are quite unimpressed because there is no bells or whistles to kind of gauges to gawk at. But then, as they finish the tour and go back downstairs over here, he throws open the valve to the open air and there is a deafening blast of steam at 170C coming out of this array. This is actually used to generate hot water and space heat and also electricity. It's a co-generation system for this hospital in Australia.

These kinds of collectors have great promise also for even smaller household and also village applications and rural and Third World applications. [Picture] These collectors here are each about two meters by one meter, and if you take just two of those and put them on the roof of a building and then run the line down to a pressurized water storage tank, this forms a kind of solar cooking system. Basically, the way it works is: During the daytime, the solar collectors produce steam, the steam then comes down and is stored in the form of hot water at about 180C and about seven atmospheres of pressure. So this then becomes an energy storage system and then the next morning at 5 a.m., when it's pitch black outside, you can cook as a normal electric range would do, from yesterday's sunshine.

So you can see there are lots of exciting developments in the possibilities of solar and renewable technologies, and these are actually summarized -- the tremendous progress that's been made is summarized in the next three graphs. [Diagram] I want to show you what has happened to the actual economic cost of renewable energy technologies. This is very, very important, because in the world of energy experts and utility experts you often find people saying: "Oh, I know about renewable energy, we tried it, we did it back in the seventies and early eighties, it didn't work, it was horrendously expensive, it was basically a failure, and we know what we are talking about."

Well, the truth is, that people who speak like that do not know what they are talking about today, because things have changed radically since then.

[Diagram] Here, for example, you'll notice between 1980 -- at the beginning of the graph -- and 1992, the cost of electricity from solar thermal plants dropped from 55 cents per kilowatt hour to about eight cents per kilowatt hour. So this is radical improvement in the cost. And this is a reflection of the improvement in the technology and the learning that has gone on, ironically enough, during the Reagan years when the budget for renewable energy in the United States was cut by 90 percent.

We find the same story with respect to wind technology: Between 1980 and 1992, the cost dropping from nearly 40 cents per kilowatt hour to about seven cents per kilowatt hour today.

We find the same story with photovoltaics: Between 1980 and 1992, the cost dropping from nearly 90 cents per kilowatt hour to about a little over 20 cents per kilowatt hour.

Now, this raises a question: If it is all so great, why isn't it happening?

[Diagram] This tells us part of the story. Here we see the energy spending in the U.S. government and we see that over half of it goes to nuclear energy -- half the research money --, and a relatively small share goes to renewable energy. Very similar sorts of numbers pertain actually for the entire OECD countries -- about 59 percent of the government energy budget is devoted to nuclear power and about less than ten percent to renewable energy.

Now, for all that money that we have spent on nuclear power, what do we get for it? In the United States, quite little. Nuclear power only provides about seven percent of our total energy, and furthermore, to the eternal embarrassment of the nuclear industry, renewable energy now produces more energy than nuclear power in the United States. And notice that it does so on this very small amount of money that has been invested by the government in renewable energy. This is a very powerful testimony to the intrinsic viability of renewable energy technologies, and also testimony to the inherent intractability of nuclear technologies. During the period of the eighties, when the cost of renewable technologies have dropped dramatically, the cost of nuclear technologies has steadily climbed, and the only "progress" that we have seen is the development of so-called passively safe reactors. These passively safe reactors are designed to preclude the possibility of a core melt-down. However, they do nothing to address the problem of nuclear waste. They do nothing to address the problem of the health effects of radiation exposure. They do nothing to reduce the security risks of shipping 30 tons of plutonium from Europe to Japan. So, clearly, that's no solution. [Diagram] And indeed we can see here that the annual rate of adding nuclear power has diminished dramatically since the mid-eighties. So, this shows the rate of completions of nuclear power plants and it's falling off very rapidly.

So, what are the prospects for solar energy for the future? Here are a few examples:

Basically by the year 2000, we should have very likely -- this actually comes from a study done at Princeton University -- we are likely to have solar electricity for five to eight cents per kilowatt hour, which is about what coalfire power costs today. In addition, we will have hydrogen probably for less than the cost of gasoline in Europe, and a very interesting comparison here with the amorphous silicon cell, the great allure of nuclear power, is that a single gram of uranium, when cycled through a fast-breeder reactor, produces a tremendous amount of energy, but we see here that gram for gram, silicon in an amorphous silicon cell produces about a comparable amount of energy. And silicon is 5,000 times more abundant in the earth's crust and non-toxic.

The same study at Princeton University showed that all of the fossil fuels in the entire United States could in principle be displaced with an area of desert land shown here in these small circles [Diagram], which would be about 14 percent of the nation's deserts. And the idea here is that we would use the United States' natural gas pipeline system to pipe the hydrogen generated in the Southwest in the sunny regions to the rest of the country. Now, the status quotations of energy maintain that this is a very radical and infeasible strategy. But they think nothing of hauling oil halfway around the world, spilling it all over the place and killing 200,000 Iraqis to keep it up!

Briefly turning to the global prospects for solar future: This can be done in a variety of ways, but just to look at the land requirement: It turns out that to replace all of the world fossil fuels would require only 1.7 percent of the world's deserts. Now, that's a lot of land, but it's not half the earth. In fact, it's equivalent to about 3.5 percent of the agricultural land area. And also, it would only require about one sixth of the water naturally falling on that area. [Diagram] The international group Greenpeace -- they are just now completing a study of the potential of renewable energy futures. It is very interesting, and they use some of the most sophisticated and well-substantiated methods. What they find, is that nuclear power can vanish entirely by the year 2010, and by the year 2030, fossil fuels are reduced to a relatively small percentage, and by the year 2100, fossil fuels have vanished entirely, nuclear power has been extinct for 90 years, and the entire world runs an energy economy about six times larger than today's on solar, wind, hydro-power, geo-thermal and bio mass.

I was asked to review that study, and my principle feedback in addition to praising it was, that it wasn't happening fast enough, that it could actually happen more quickly, partly because they hadn't considered a number of possibilities, and I'll just give you one example. [Picture] This is a coal-fired power-plant in the Southwest, sitting under very beautiful blue shiny skies, of which we have a lot. It turns out that it should be possible to actually convert fossil fuel power plants that happen to be located in sunny regions to solar energy, you see, because they work the same way. Here, what you do, is you burn coal to produce the steam to generate electricity. Instead, we could use large solar collectors like this to actually produce the steam and run it through the turbine and thereby shutdown the coal mines and turn off the smoke stacks. So this idea of solar repowering is just now being explored and we are actually looking at a case study of the Navajo Nation, where the situation is very desperate and the people are very divided. Coal-mining has taken a severe environmental toll in Navajo and Hopi lands, and there is at least a possibility of converting these plants to solar energy.

So, my major point is that renewable technologies have developed dramatically in the past ten years. There is still much implementation work to be done, and some renewable technologies do have environmental problems that may limit their application. But overall, renewable technologies offer tremendous promise for a sustainable energy future.

In closing, I would just like to make a couple of reflections on the context of renewable energy development. The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh has said: "What we most need to do is to hear within ourselves the sounds of the earth crying." And I think when we do this, it becomes clear that what we label as a crisis in our environment is equally as much a crisis within ourselves, a crisis of human consciousness and values. And there are several dimensions to this that actually serve as hidden driving forces for the ecological crisis, and I'll just mention a couple of them. One is the psychological pollution of continual bombardment of corporate advertising and the consumer culture, another is the dominance by an hegemony of the masculine gender and related problems of class and racial oppression. A third is the epistemological tyranny of western science and market economics. And finally, the spiritual bankruptcy of secular technological modernism.

Now, if we ignore these aspects of our current dilemma, then the solar technologies that I have outlined above could actually, I think, serve to hasten ecological collapse, because energy would be removed as a constraint on a forward stampede. However, if we embrace these deeper dimensions accounting for their physical, social, cultural and spiritual implications, then solar energy and renewable sources can provide abundant energy for all human societies on earth and free us once and forever from the ravages of fossil fuels and nuclear power.

Thank you.