Thoughts on Lester Brown’s “Plan-B”
Last night I was flying back to Alabama from TEDxYYC in Calgary, and somewhere over the middle of the continent I found myself with a few hours and a recorded program I had been meaning to watch. I pulled it up on my laptop: “Plan-B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization,” a PBS documentary built around the work of Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute.
Brown is one of the genuine elders of the environmental movement. He founded the Worldwatch Institute in 1974 — the first research organization dedicated entirely to global environmental analysis — and has spent nearly four decades warning about the collision course between industrial civilization and the planet’s carrying capacity. His Plan B series, now in its fourth edition, has been read by policymakers, activists, and concerned citizens around the world. Ted Turner reportedly bought copies by the dozens to send to friends. Brown is not a crank or an alarmist. He is a serious person who has spent a serious career thinking about these problems.
The documentary follows Brown across Asia, where he makes the case — carefully and with real data — that climate change is already disrupting food production systems in ways that will intensify dramatically over the coming decades. Glaciers that feed the great river systems of Asia are retreating. Aquifers that supply irrigation water to some of the world’s most productive farmland are being drawn down faster than they recharge. The Yellow River no longer reliably reaches the sea. These are not speculative projections; they are documented trends with documented consequences. Watching this portion of the program, I found myself nodding along. Brown is right about the problem. Completely, urgently right.
Then the program asked the question I had been waiting for: what do we do about it?
Nuclear energy was dispensed with in a single sentence. “Too expensive.” That was the entirety of the discussion — the beginning and the end of it. No examination of why nuclear has been expensive, no consideration of whether new reactor designs might change that calculus, no acknowledgment that the technologies that drove nuclear costs upward in the 1970s and 1980s were specific design choices rather than inherent properties of nuclear physics. Too expensive. The subject was closed.
The music changed. Heavy and ominous gave way to light and hopeful. The screen filled with computer-generated images of offshore wind turbines — endless rows of them, all rotating in perfect synchrony, backlit by a golden setting sun. My artist friend in college used to say that golden light was the key to making anything look beautiful. She was right. Those turbines were gorgeous in their golden light.
Then came solar panels, stretching to the horizon. Then the graceful extruded parabola of concentrating solar troughs. Geothermal made an appearance, with billowing white steam clouds emerging from a plant nearly shrouded in vapor. The music told us what we were supposed to feel: that this was good, virtuous, life-affirming technology, and that it was Going To Save Us.
Matt Damon narrated with the kind of passionate conviction that makes you want to believe. And Lester Brown clearly does believe — completely, sincerely, with decades of environmental commitment behind him. I don’t doubt that for a moment.
But I couldn’t share the optimism. Because the numbers don’t add up.
Solar and wind are real technologies that are getting less expensive every year. I am genuinely glad they exist and I expect them to play a significant role in our energy future. But they are diffuse and intermittent in ways that create fundamental challenges at civilization scale. The sun doesn’t shine at night. The wind doesn’t blow on calm days. Storage technology capable of bridging those gaps at grid scale doesn’t exist yet in the forms or at the costs that would be needed. The computer-generated images of high-speed rail gliding through a landscape of perfectly rotating turbines are not a plan. They are an aspiration rendered in pixels.
And geothermal, for all its charm, is worth a deeper though. What is geothermal, really? It is heat from the interior of the Earth, accessed through a heat exchanger made of rock, powered by the radioactive decay of thorium and uranium in the planet’s mantle. Geothermal is essentially thorium energy — operating through the world’s least efficient heat exchanger, at geological timescales, in the specific locations where the Earth’s crust happens to be thin enough to make it accessible. I mean this seriously and not as a cheap rhetorical point: the same physics that makes geothermal work at Reykjavik and Reno can be made to work anywhere on Earth, on human timescales, in a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor.
The documentary ended. I closed my laptop somewhere over the dark prairies.
Lester Brown has spent his career trying to save civilization. So have I, in a much more modest way, by advocating for a technology that I believe could actually do it. The LFTR is not too expensive. It has the potential to be dramatically less expensive than the solid-fueled, water-cooled reactors that gave nuclear its cost reputation, because it eliminates the most expensive elements of conventional nuclear: the elaborate fuel fabrication, the high-pressure vessel engineering, the enormous containment structures built to manage the consequences of a loss-of-coolant accident that a liquid-fluoride reactor cannot physically have. It has the potential to produce a tiny fraction of the long-lived waste. It is passively safe. It can be built in factories rather than constructed on-site. And it runs on a fuel — thorium — that is effectively inexhaustible at any civilization-relevant timescale.
I spent the rest of the flight wondering whether I should write to Lester Brown.
On one hand, he is a committed and influential man who has given his life to a cause I respect. The problems he describes are real. The urgency he feels is justified. If he could be persuaded that the LFTR deserves a place in the solution set — even a sentence or two in the next edition of Plan B — it might reach audiences that the thorium community hasn’t yet reached.
On the other hand, he has clearly made his peace with the nuclear question. The single-sentence dismissal in the documentary didn’t feel like a gap in his research; it felt like a settled conviction. Challenging settled convictions is uncomfortable for everyone involved, and there is a real risk of coming across as the nuclear enthusiast who can’t accept that smart people have decided nuclear is a dead end.
And yet. If I had watched a program in which a serious environmentalist dismissed solar power in a single sentence — “too intermittent,” say, without any engagement with storage technology or grid integration — and then went on to advocate for nuclear as the only viable path, I would feel an obligation to reach out and say: there is more to this story than you have considered.
That obligation runs both directions. Lester Brown is an honest man trying to solve a real problem. He deserves to know that the nuclear story is more complicated than “too expensive” — and that a technology exists, with a real history and real physics behind it, that addresses nearly every concern his movement has ever raised about nuclear power.
I’m going to write to him. I’ll let you know what happens.
If any of you have thoughts on how to make that case most effectively — what to lead with, what to acknowledge, what to ask for — I would genuinely welcome them in the comments.
Absolutely.
Yes. Yes you should.
M.
It is ironic Lester Brown's journey was through Asia since they will now almost certainly lead the rest of the world in almost all nuclear development, particularly thorium molten salt reactors …
From the Wiki page, this Plan-B video and the associated tour seems to be a continuation/extension of Lester Brown's books. There's no mention of nuclear on there either. Perhaps his books contain more.
However, he certainly seems to be a heavy hitter in the environmental space. If he could understand that for all intents and purposes the only viable *principal* long term option is nuclear (if for no other reason than the immensity of the energies involved) and that new designs, particularly LFTR/thorium molten salt reactors are not only highly Disruptive Technologies across several areas, but also proven and will likely soon be deployed for utilities, then Lester would need to take some kind of real view on it.
Designs like LFTR should also have significant cost advantages once their designs are finalized due to key design elements. As Lester clearly realises, cost can have a dramatic effect on deployment. When it would have been unthinkable to have a conventional large/very large reactor under heavy pressure in huge containments in poor countries, now it suddenly becomes an option on the table with small power plant designs. Where a relatively small number of large reactors would be plopped miles from nowhere in developed countries, now passively safe, clean, and hydrogen generating (High Temperature Electrolysis) small reactors would be dotted in smart power grids around cities effecting the change from a fossil fuel economy to a hydrogen fuel cell economy.
Also, there are reasonable arguments that can be made as to why current nuclear development seems to have changed little in 60 years:
1. ease of access to fossil fuels (which will rapidly change – it has already begun with shale oil and gas)
2. nuclear militarization lead (unnecessary after Cold War stockpiles)
3. nuclear plant economy based on fuel sales/contracts
4. US lack of energy independence policy working hand-in-hand with the previous issues and other foreign policies as a way to impose their version of trade, capital financing and political system on the rest of the world.
The clear counterpoint is China and other parts of Asia. Most people do not understand the Chinese think culturally very differently from Westerners. The points 1 to 4 above are not viable options for China, they need a LOT more energy than anyone else and they STRONGLY identify Chinese interests with full independence which naturally leads to the development of energy technologies that guarantee energy security. When Westerners do manage to sell their technology in China, if it is too useful, it will just be directly replicated. This happens at any level, including entire power plant designs! Therefore, being dependent on Western nuclear fuels and plant designs is not in their long term plan … With this huge gap in Western technological development (which is really more engineering than scientific), thorium molten salt reactors are a perfect fit, even from an Intellectual Property perspective.
Thus, this WILL happen, come what may. The quicker high profile players of all kinds understand this and the significance, the more likelihood the public can be informed, contribute and hopefully look to determine their own future.
So, please contact him. Also, you never know who such a high profile person knows …
Lester Brown writes on Treehugger a lot (where I hang out). On countless occasions I have commented on his articles. Whenever he brings up geothermal energy I point out that it is "indirect thorium" energy (a Kirk Sorensen quote). Some of my comments have included LFTR.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/08/tapping-t…
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/08/making-th…
Yes! Contact him and provide a link to your presentation on thorium power you did at google. And if Matt Damon is lending his celebrity to promote alternative energy, try to contact him too. I have been posting the link to your google presentation in the discussion area of any article on any site that discusses energy issues. I really appreciate what you are doing and wish you success!
Yes.
I don't think the problems with wind and solar are quite as irresolvable as you do, though.
Power magazine recently had a summary article about the state of the art of energy storage options. One of the options is using excess electricity to fix CO2 + water into methane or synthetic gasoline. They claim that electricity at $16MWh can produce carbon neutral gas for $80/barrel.
The same tech combined with LFTR reactors would be a good bridging technology until ideal batteries are invented.
http://www.powermag.com/issues/features/Energy-St…
Do it, because Lester Brown and everyone else who currently opposes nuclear energy needs to understand how the fundamentally different physics in LFTR effectively answer all the concerns and problems associated with 'nuclear energy' but which have actually come from the use of solid-fueled, water cooled, pressurized-cored reactors.
Do it, out of respect for Lester Brown's concern for the environment and the future of all those he loves.
Do it because you know that trusting renewable energies alone is a very sure way for that future they long for NOT to happen and it wouldn't be right to leave him wandering down a dead end, and taking many others with him, without saying anything.
Yes, absolutely. We need a mix of energy sources. Just like investing, it's better to diversify.
Give it a try, and I agree that your talk at Google is a great pointer. I'd also point out that LFTR originally was squeezed out due perceived defense/military needs in the past, and currently is an underdog to traditional nuclear manufacturers. Another great point is the ability and ease of medical isotope creation.
No, don't waste your time contacting Lester Brown about LFTR technology. He will not be interested no matter how good it is because nuclear power is EVIL!!!
The Chinese and other Asians do not pay attention to our tree huggers. If they meet with them, they listen to these people more to evaluate the future of the West rather than to take the actual advice of these people. In other words, the tree-huggers are there to humor the Asians.
The reality is that nuclear processes, either some form of fusion if possible, Gen IV concepts such as LFTR and the like if not, is the future of energy production. There is no other choice. The Asians, even the Japanese, understand this despite the problems of the Fukushima reactors. Much of the West does not.
What is clear to me that the only effect that people like Lester Brown will have is to drive all energy-intensive industries to China and other Asian countries. They will only ensure that the 21st century and beyond will belong to Asia.
@vboring – Are you the same vboring commenter from Treehugger ?
Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. I recently started a thread to this microbial electrochemistry stuff: making hydrocarbons from electricity. http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic….
Forget about Lester Brown. Email Monbiot. Email him now.
I went to a retirement party for a nuclear engineer friend who works at HFIR at ORNL on Friday. He gave a synopsis of his career with some rather humorous slides. One slide was of a summer stint at ORNL (he was an undergrad physics major at the time). He worked that summer on solar power and started out very enthusiastic about solar power, but at the end of the summer he had formulated three main conclusions:
(1) The sun is only out half the day
(2) It is dark the other half of the day.
(3) It rains a lot in tennessee during daytime hours, especially in the summer.
After making this observations, he switched to nuclear engineering for the remainder of his academic studies. He remarked that 32 years later, people are still pursuing solar at ORNL and have not grapsed these three fundamental facts that he made as an undergraduate 🙂
Jonathan, it appears that Monbiot already knows about thorium.
trueblue, having visited ORNL and seen the token solar panel placed in perhaps the prominent public place possible, I can only conclude that the lab is more interested in PR than actually making solar work.
Yes, do it.
Answer is simply no if you don't so nothing to lose.
If you could somehow reach Matt Damon that would go farther. I hope he's as intelligent and as open as his movies make him appear. Besides he's tackled a few documentaries lately and has proven to be quite the activist. He supports http://water.org so ideas on creating pure water running a thorium reactor in a poor dry country somewhere might get his attention.
Definitely! Please talk to Lester Brown. You can ask why he doesn't like LFTR technology (if he already knows what it is). As cbass, we need a mix of energy sources.
@Abelard Lindsey – I just want to point out that it's not good practice to generalize Chinese and the Asains as one group. They may look the same to you but all Asian countries speak different languages as all European countries speak different languages. It's not like Arabic countries where everybody speaks Arabic. In additon, China is a communist country so the way they think is certainly different from some other Asian countries that are capitalists. I just want to say that a generalization hinders our critical thinking ability.
Go for it, Kirk. We must dispel ignorance whereever it lurks. BTW: I end all my emails with this:
"Thorium's the answer – so what's the question?", to stir a little bit of curiosity at least. It would be good if everyone who is aware of the potential of Thorium and LFTR did likewise. I haven't patented it, so they're more than welcome :-).
Another interesting thing that Lester B et al should be aware of, is that many of the current and most promising renewable technologies as well as their electronics rely on "rare earth elements". As you can probably appreciate, there is a very large and growing demand for these elements since so many advanced technologies at least assume their availability. For example, an electric car carries a few kilograms of rare-earth elements, and a 3-megawatt wind turbine uses about 1.5 tonnes. Total world demand for the elements leapt from 30,000 tonnes in the 1980s to 120,000 tonnes in 2010 (which was met in part by depletion of national stockpiles), and is predicted to hit 200,000 tonnes by 2015.
While these are not technically rare, the elements are diffuse and difficult enough to process that only a few places on the planet currently have the capability to produce them (after having also been priced out by Chinese exports). It turns out that 95% of that world capacity is from China/Mongolia, despite having only 37% of the known reserves.
China, in the last few years, has been aggressively limiting exports of these very useful elements using reasons such as "conservation". Though it is more likely they recognised the enormous value of their reserves for their own primarily manufacturing-oriented exports now and in the future. This has contributed to causing, for example, the price of neodymium oxide to jump from USD 17 a kilogram to USD 85 a kilogram in 2010 alone! So, far this year, based on released 2011 quota rule changes, its looking like China will export at most 23,000 tons in 2011…
An almost waste product of rare earth mineral mining is thorium (though it does require some processing to be isolated). Not much is needed to power the entire planet via thorium thermal spectrum nuclear fission reactors. The US alone is estimated to have 13 million metric tons of rare earth elements and yet currently has zero capacity to produce them. Thus, the US, in this and many other areas of energy and industry, are highly or totally dependent on imports and external states.
Good article here: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110406/full/47202…
Lester Brown has what Stewart Brand calls "legacy resistance" against nuclear energy. I believe that he is located in the Washington DC area, so you could suggest a meeting around the time of the TEA conference in May.
"Whether the carbon-free future that we both want should be primarily powered by renewables or nuclear energy, I believe that there are a few things about the molten salt reactor concept that you should know. There is growing public interest in this technology, and can address many of our biggest challenges, such as carbon emissions, energy poverty and water scarcity."
… something like that.
It's ironic that we let actors and muscle builders run our lives. Everything will be ok, just so long as government makes all the decisions.
Not only are the rosy scenarios computer generated, so are nearly all the gloomy scenarios. This is on purpose. There will be winners and losers when the government decides who gets the contracts. Mostly it's companies that help to kill people with weapons, but starving people so someone gets rich making wind turbines is just as likely.
Would it be worth sending an email to an actor? No worse than sending one to the actor at the white house I suppose.
You should also watch, at least out of the corner of your eye, the threads on Huffington Post concerning the Fukushima crisis.
Predictably, the threads are dominated by extreme environmentalists who believe all nuclear is unconditionally very evil, and who refuse to believe that renewables will fail to save the planet.
But despite that dominance, there is a notable number who are at least asking the right questions about thorium. I try to answer as best I can, but I can't answer them all.
Total Newb question here: How is Thorium's Plan A coming along? What design and research steps are being done now to move LFTR's to a reality?
I see a lot of speculation and misinformation in the preceding comments. Anyone reading them should not take their word but instead do their own thorough independent investigation.
I like the idea of nuclear power, but the Fukishima disaster has put one more nail in the coffin as far as new power plants being built in America. The Chinese are supposed to build hundreds of them in the next few decades. That's great if it will take the same number of fossil fuel power plants out of commission.
Kirk,
Thanks for your excellent video presentation. I was most impressed with your enthusiasm and grasp of the subject of LFTR. If there is anyway I can assist you in my capacity as a well-respected international science writer I'd be happy to work with you.
Regards,
John