Makhijani’s arguments in favour of renewable energy are exactly those used by all advocates of renewables, including those in Canada and especially Ontario. Not a single one of them can coherently or credibly answer the question of how to cover intermittency. They all know it will be some sort of fossil that covers nighttime or when the wind isn’t blowing.

Hear it in his own words. Toward the end, Rod asks a natural and perfectly reasonable question about solar energy: how will solar energy provide electricity from six p.m. to six a.m.?

Fig. 1: All the water on earth, represented in a single sphere (courtesy of Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Howard Perlman, USGS)

It is interesting to see how that ball of water compares with a sphere that represents the Earth’s atmosphere. Lucky for me, there is a graphic for that too (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Earth’s water represented in a sphere, at left; Earth’s air, at right (courtesy of ADAM NIEMAN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

In Fig. 2, the atmosphere sphere is the one on the right. It is bigger, which when you think about it is not surprising. The atmosphere is many kilometers thick all around the earth, while the deepest ocean trench is eleven or twelve km, but only in a relatively tiny area.

Now, what would be really interesting is to superimpose a sphere onto both graphics, which represents the amount of carbon dioxide that mankind has put into the atmosphere since, say, the First Industrial Revolution. Obviously the CO₂ sphere would be much smaller than either air or water. But would it be noticeable as a graphic scaled to air and water?

So far today (2040 on Tuesday, May 15, 2012), Ontario fossil-fired power plants have made the CO₂ sphere 33,057 tons bigger. It’s been a below-average day in a pretty low-carbon jurisdiction.

I shudder to think of the CO₂ that, say, Germany has dumped into the air today. Though it is trumpeted to the heavens because of a few wind turbines and solar panels, half of Germany’s power comes from coal. A recent Reuters report said that Germany plans to add 46 new fossil-fired generators to its system, to cover the nuclear generators that are being phased out. Nuclear emits zero carbon; the most efficient of Germany’s 46 new fossil plants will emit half a kilogram for every kilowatt-hour it generates.

And let’s not forget where most of that carbon dioxide will end up. As I pointed out in “Oceans of Acid,” it will end up in the world’s oceans, represented by that relatively small sphere in the top graphic. Put CO₂ into water, and the water turns acidic.

Thanks, Germany.

So, to draw Cliffs to Ontario, the Ontario government is bargaining with Cliffs over the price of electricity. Is the government trying to persuade Cliffs to pay 13.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for unreliable wind power? Of course not. Cliffs wants cheap power or it won’t start an operation in northern Ontario.

Cliffs’ desire for cheap power is no different from that of anyone else. Who would willingly pay exorbitant rates for an unreliable commodity, when there is a perfectly good reliable alternative that costs half as much?

Unfortunately, no residential ratepayer in Ontario gets this kind of deal. In order to please a small group of rich environmentalists who want to get richer selling wind power to the province, Ontario forces residential rate payers to pay through the nose for expensive, unreliable wind power. If wind did not fetch 13.5 cents per kWh, no wind turbines would go up. Their owners could not stay in business.

So residential ratepayers, who include seniors on fixed incomes who live in urban high rises and who are totally dependent on electricity, have to pay the exorbitant rates demanded by the owners of wind turbines.

If only poor seniors on fixed incomes could get the chance to bargain with the government over their electricity rates. Then we would see the “wind is green” argument finally get the exposure it deserves.

The government, in its negotiations with Cliffs Natural Resources, is certainly not trotting out that argument. Cliffs doesn’t know how lucky it is.

That is because all its nuclear reactors are shut down. Before March 11 2011, these machines made 30 percent of Japan’s electricity. So Japan is making do with less than three-quarters of its power supply. This is possible because of what is euphemistically referred to as “demand destruction”—i.e., the disappearance of demand for electricity. Usually that means big power users going out of business. In Japan’s case, demand destruction was literal: the tens of thousands of people who were killed by the tsunami are no longer using electricity. Hence the country can get along, barely, with much less power supply.

But it is painful. A couple of days ago, Reuters reported that Japan is now bracing for major power shortages as summer approaches and demand for air conditioning rises.

So the question is, how resolute will the fear of nuclear power be in the minds of the Japanese who oppose nuclear restarts? After all, they are opting to go without the only source of energy that did not kill anyone on March 11 or at any time since.

My own prediction: Japan will most definitely restart most if not all of its nuclear reactors. Sooner or later people will realize they simply cannot sacrifice their way of life to silly misguided fear.

In the Simpson’s episode Bart’s Comet, Principal Skinner, after months of painstaking observation, discovers a new comet. (Through typical bad luck, Skinner’s discovery is mistakenly attributed to Bart.) It then becomes apparent that the comet is on a collision course with Earth, and that the town of Springfield will be the very point of impact. When the comet dissolves harmlessly in Springfield’s smog, Moe says “now let’s go burn down the observatory so this never happens again.”

That is essentially the same logic underpinning the Japan nuclear blackout. Sooner or later the Japanese will come to their senses. They are too smart to live with such dumb decisions.

And if the previous performance of other machines with the CANDU brand is anything to go by, Bruce Unit 2 can run at its rated capacity—which, to repeat, is 750 MW—more than 80 percent over its thirty-year lifetime. Wind generators, which are woefully inefficient by comparison, rarely run at their rated capacity for even a day. That’s why wind needs a parallel fleet of fossil-fired generators running in tandem.

The return of Bruce Unit 2 is huge good news for everybody in Ontario. And because it will put zero grams of carbon into our air over its lifetime, it’s huge good news for the planet as well.

Next question: what is the most efficient form of electricity? Answer: the kind that uses the least resources. That could be distilled into a simple metric: resources consumed per kilowatt-hour generated.

Resources include land and fuel. Land is measured in square miles, square kilometers, acres, and hectares—it depends on whether you use imperial (British or US) or metric units.

And fuel: most electricity is generated using coal, natural gas, oil, uranium/plutonium, and running water. Some people would add wind to the list, but that’s mostly because wind gets a lot of headlines. Don’t confuse headlines with reality. Wind is a bit player, even on grids where governments are bending over backwards to bring more of it in. Solar also gets a lot of headlines, but it is simply so minuscule that we can ignore it in this analysis.

So in terms of resources consumed to make electricity, what is the most efficient form of electricity?

Meanwhile, the U.K. prime minister continues to talk up the imaginary benefits of “renewable” energy and reassure everyone that he at least remains committed to it. Apparently, his finance minister Osborne disagrees with him. Will the double dip recession shock Britain into dropping its subsidies for useless wind turbines?

And will Britain’s double dip shock America into doing the same? While the U.S. government has bent over backwards to sponsor solar energy, only to see company after company go bankrupt, it has stonewalled major infrastructure projects that will create real, high paying jobs. Two of these projects are in the large-scale energy realm. These are the Calvert Cliffs nuclear project, and the Keystone XL pipeline. Both would have created tens of thousands of jobs.

So: American unemployment is stuck at eight percent. Shouldn’t the Calvert Cliffs and Keystone jobs start as soon as possible?

Canada, which the U.K. paper The Independent praised as motoring along admirably, should take steps to make sure it keeps motoring along. Start the Darlington new nuclear project, and bring ten thousand jobs to the Golden Horseshoe. It will be the biggest clean energy project in Canada.

A significant underlying development of the Second Industrial Revolution was standardization of parts and components, especially things like nuts, bolts, and screws. Things like these, and the tools—screwdrivers, wrenches, etc.—that went with them, enabled the do-it-yourself types to physically interact with the new technological world, thereby maintaining the link to Mother Earth that many feared had been lost when people began migrating en masse from rural to urban areas in the latter part of the 19th century.

The convergence of open-source software (e.g., Linux and G-code) with hardware (e.g., Arduino) that enabled CNC technology to explode in recent years is, in my limited view at least, roughly analogous to the standardization of parts and tools a hundred years ago, though it is of course proceeding along decidedly different business-model lines. It allows far greater breadth and depth of interaction with the world than ever before.

I cannot predict exactly what this development will produce. But one of the participants at the maker’s lab, my friend Darcy Whyte (who is more than a participant; he’s one of the driving forces) said “this is a revolution.” I think he’s right.

The maker’s lab was in Ottawa, where I live. The maker phenomenon is of course world-wide; step back and look at the possibilities for innovation and your imagination will soar.

Imagination is soaring at Singularity University, and at U.S. public television. But in a contrived way, not organically like at the maker’s lab the other night. Put innovative people together with the media and sometimes you get amazing things. Unfortunately, some innovators’ need for capital and some media’s need for ratings often collaborate to produce little more than hyperbole. A recent PBS report on the goings on at Singularity University says

Food, water and energy, [are] supposedly scarce, but with the tinkerings of technology… [are] potentially abundant.

It’s not really the tinkerings of technology that will make scarce things abundant. Food scarcity could be eradicated by irradiating freshly harvested produce with gamma rays from isotopes made in nuclear reactors. A recent report from Bangladesh Agricultural University estimates that 18 to 44 percent of fruits and vegetables are lost after harvest to pathogens and pests. Humans should be eating this produce. Pathogens and pests could be destroyed by gamma rays, without harming the food. There should be a major push on to get irradiators, loaded with the gamma-emitting isotopes cobalt-60 or cesium-137, into the food supply chain of every developing country.

This is not “tinkering with technology.” The technology is already invented. Gamma irradiators have existed for decades. Canada led the world in developing them. The World Food Organization urges fast uptake of irradiation to solve the harvest spoilage problem and feed more people. The problem is political, not technological.

Same with water and energy. Again, technology could end all shortages. But it’s not a case of inventing it; it was invented decades ago and has been in use for decades. Readers of this blog know I mean nuclear energy. Only uranium and plutonium nuclei contain enough energy to power mankind for the foreseeable future. Water desalination by nuclear heat is totally viable; it just needs uptake.

Unfortunately, the PBS piece did not cut to that chase. Instead it focused on pie-in-the-sky notions and stuck loyally to the “tinkering with technology” line. This gives the impression that if you design a better computer chip, food will grow faster. Water will become easier to manage.

Water is not easy to manage. I mentioned in an earlier post that I personally wrestle with the reality of the specific heat of water every time I visit my Muskoka hibernacle in the winter. I get to the cottage, then spend the next five or six hours heating the place and “looking after the water.” The latter involves sawing a hole in the lake ice, fetching water in pails, lugging the pails into the cottage, transferring the water to a pot, putting the pot on an electric stove, then waiting until the water is hot. The water-fetching and -heating process by itself takes about two hours from fetching to boiling. Good thing somebody else is producing the electricity.

Sometimes it pays not to fetch or heat water. One of those times is right after a sauna, when you want cold water. Here’s one of those times:

That’s my brother Dave taking a dip, after a sauna; the water temperature is somewhere between 0° C and 2° C. If you want the water more comfortable than that, then you’re looking at a lot of work.

So I shook my head at at 05:15 in the PBS video below, when the correspondent introduced the Slingshot, a portable water purification device which according to the report can each day purify 250 gallons of polluted water by boiling it first.

Watch Tech’s Next Feats? Maybe On-Demand Kidneys, Cheap Solar on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

This gives the impression that the energy to boil the water is of secondary importance in the purification system. It’s not. Africa has a potable water problem because it lacks cheap, widely available electricity. If cheap electricity were as widely available as it is here in, say the southern part of Canada, the poor African women in the video would not have to physically fetch dirty water then try to figure out how to make it safe to drink.

I say the “southern part of Canada” because, amazing as it may sound, there are people who live in Canada’s north who have water problems similar to those of the African women in the video. But their problems are compounded by the temperature. Water freezes at zero degrees celsius, and that introduces a whole new set of problems to anyone dealing with the infrastructure that moves and heats water. The bulk of my Muskoka problem has to do with water’s differing physical phases below and above zero (i.e., the fact that it’s liquid above and solid below).

At one point in the video, the inventor of the Slingshot water purifier says “if we can build these machines to scale, at a cost that is highly realistic, we will be able to put these things all over the world… .” I salute his desire to bring clean water to people who need it. But unless he makes energy cheap, the water purifier will see only limited uptake.

How could the “Maker Revolution” described above approach this problem? Let’s take the issue of water infrastructure on Canadian First Nation reserves in the North. What technological improvements to water infrastructure could be addressed by Makers? In “Inuvik running out of gas,” I suggested using isotope water heaters, based on the heat that the isotope strontium-90 gives off as it disintegrates, to keep potable water and sewage systems from freezing. Once installed, these heaters would work for decades. How could a maker make one?

That public service announcement is from Energy Northwest, a public power utility in Washington state.

I was in Gatineau Park last Sunday. The day started sunny but by the time I was in the Park had become overcast. It was a thrill to see these painted turtles soaking up the residual solar heat. The one on the right is getting ready to escape; it doesn’t like the way I am moving in to get the photo.

Gatineau Park, for those who don’t know, is in Quebec, which is, in terms of geographical size, Canada’s largest province. Quebec is also Canada’s biggest electricity producing province; it typically generates roughly 180 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year. Quebec exports a lot of that electricity to the U.S. northeast.

Quebec generates most of its power with water. That’s physically possible only because the provincial authorities who built the hydroelectric system controlled an enormous swath of territory containing several major watersheds—i.e., areas with lots of water at the high points.

Quebec electricity is cheap. It costs consumers only around 7 or 8 cents per kilowatt-hour (in Ontario, where I live, electricity costs around 12 cents).

People think that hydroelectric power is cheap because once a hydroelectric generator is built, it’s essentially free to run—water is free, right? That’s true, if you don’t factor in messy and inconvenient issues like aboriginal land rights.

Quebec’s hydroelectric system, like Ontario’s, was developed in the early to mid part of the 20th Century. Back then, when the electric utility (in both Quebec and Ontario the electric utilities quickly developed into provincially owned corporations) wanted to divert water and/or make a dam, it went ahead and did it. If you were aboriginal and this was your ancestral territory, tough. You had two choices: move, or swim.

That is why hydroelectricity is so cheap today in Quebec.

If for whatever reason Quebec had waited until today to develop its hydropower resources, Quebeckers—and electricity consumers in other jurisdictions who are today customers of Hydro Quebec—would not be paying anything close to 8 cents per kWh. Quebec electricity would be far more expensive.

That is because governments across Canada are today required by law to consult with aboriginal groups when it comes to the use of ancestral aboriginal territory. This is the Crown Duty to Consult, put into Canadian law in 2004.

A cynic would say, how convenient for Canada to wait until 2004 to introduce the Crown Duty to Consult—after all the hydropower resources have been developed, after all the land has been permanently altered, after all the sacred ground has been submerged. He could be forgiven his cynicism.

Returning to Earth Day. When it comes to large-scale electricity, how should mankind proceed to supply it? The immediate answer is, in the way that has the least impact on the Earth.

That is certainly not hydro. Flow-managed waterways alter landscapes, and lives. Painted turtles like those in the photo above don’t tend to thrive in flow-managed waterways with dramatic and (for the animals) unpredictable rise and fall in water levels. Nor do humans. The National Film Board documentary Up the Yangtze is a heartbreaking account of one Chinese family’s experience with hydroelectricity. The story is a familiar one to millions of other Chinese in the case of the Three Gorges Dam, and to who-knows-how-many North American aboriginals in the case of hydro on this continent.

Wind and solar are not earth-friendly either, in spite of their warm and fuzzy PR. Both require massive backup from natural gas. Gas is a carbon-heavy fossil fuel, which in turn requires a gigantic network of pipelines to transport it.

The numbers are simply inescapable. The answer is nuclear.

Stewart Brand, one of the publishers of the amazing Whole Earth Catalog (I still love reading the early editions) and a founder of the Earth Movement, which inspired Earth Day, looked at the numbers and came to that conclusion. In an interview with InHabitat, Stewart says:

It’s sad that we have to keep saying “potential” with regards to solar. It’s been around for 40 years and should have proved itself by now. In terms of providing grid electricity at the scale of coal, it’s not anywhere close to that yet. Wind is starting to gain significant speed, but environmentalists are learning that just to get a gigawatt of electricity from wind, it takes about 250 square miles of landscape.

Two hundred and fifty miles of landscape, for a thousand megawatts of wind power. How many 1,000 megawatt nuclear plants would fit into 250 square miles (648 square kilometers)?

Well, Ontario has roughly 11,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity. These 11,000 MW are in three plants, Bruce, Darlington, and Pickering. The total area of territory occupied by the three Ontario nuclear plants is 2,340 hectares. That’s 23.4 square kilometers.

So: 1,000 MW of wind needs 648 square km.

11,000 of nuclear needs 23.4 square km.

Nuclear has eleven times the capacity, and requires less than three-fiftieths—or five percent— of the territory.

One of my favourite rivers is the Dumoine in Quebec. The Dumoine flows into the Ottawa River upstream of Rolphton Ontario, not far from the famous Chalk River Lab. It is also upstream of the Des Joachims (pronounced “de swisha”) dam, an OPG hydro facility with a capacity of 493 MW. Where the Dumoine enters the Ottawa, the Ottawa is around 3 kilometers across; it’s part of the upstream reservoir for the Des Joachims generators.

When Ontario Hydro built Des Joachims back in the 1950s, it displaced the Trans-Canada highway, a railroad, numerous farms, and God only knows how many Indians. All three nuclear plants could fit into the 3-km area at the mouth of the Dumoine.

If you really care about the earth, you have to support nuclear power.

The second stage, Rapid Global Energization, really began in the mid-1920s but accelerated and achieved astonishing manifestation across the world during and after the Second World War. It essentially transformed the way humans move. The amazing power of liquid petroleum fuels to move vehicles across continents and oceans, and through the air, made the world smaller. By the mid-1950s virtually all of the features that define today’s world were in place: vehicle sales propelled automakers to the forefront of economic players, and Saudi Arabia was the world’s biggest oil producer.

And there was a third, literally earth-shaking, feature of Rapid Global Energization. While it also involved transportation, this other feature mostly dovetailed with Rapid Urban Electrification. This was the advent of nuclear energy.

What a change in the world, from 1850 to 1950. Nothing has ever happened like that in our history. Here in 2012, it is very difficult for us humans to grasp how recently we emerged from medieval darkness and backbreaking toil. We are actually in the very early stage of a historic transformation. The technological features that shape our lives and that we take for granted—things like 24/7 electricity, cars, subways, airplanes, smart phones, and the Internet—are very, very new in our collective history.

Rapid Global Energization, as a historical phase, is still developing. Its two main features remain ubiquitous cheap oil and nuclear energy. Oil brings convenient, cheap energy to the masses, and nuclear energy, while it plays a somewhat lesser role in electricity than oil plays in transportation, will ensure the masses have cheap, clean energy for the foreseeable future. Oil today dominates nearly every aspect of transportation, and its co-located cousin, natural gas, is making major commercial inroads to electric power generation.

And nuclear? Commercial application of nuclear energy, after the requisite research and development in the early post-Second World War years, made truly astonishing gains in the area of power generation during the 1970s. Ontario Hydro, the giant utility that made my province an industrial powerhouse, went, in the space of a single decade, from being a hydro-and-coal company, to one in which nuclear energy made most of its electricity. It was a similar story with many utilities in other countries.

But of all the energy forms that we humans know, nuclear is by far the newest. The phenomenon of fission in uranium was unknown—and literally unimagined—as recently as January 1939. It was discovered and developed in a very short time by physicists and then engineers.

I should make clear that physicists and nuclear engineers are truly impressive people who have achieved truly amazing things. Imagine: they discovered nuclear fission in 1939 and within fifteen years nuclear powered submarines were plying the oceans of the world and nuclear reactors were making commercial electricity. But nuclear physicists and engineers are not like the rest of us. They throw around with easy familiarity arcane terms that to the rest of us might as well be in another language. Most of us have no idea what they are talking about.

And because we humans had achieved our knowledge of uranium fission by way of a massive military effort to create the atomic bomb, which is literally millions of times more powerful than the most powerful bombs we had made up to then, people since the (very recent) beginning of the nuclear age have been frightened of nuclear energy. And they have been, and still are, particularly frightened of the artificial radioactive isotopes that are the products, through various physical mechanisms, of fission.

For these reasons, and because nuclear energy so quickly became a major, if not the dominant, energy source in power grids the world over, the politics of energy development inexorably led to extremely close regulation of the nuclear industry. The media sensation surrounding the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 underlined the general lack of understanding of nuclear processes and materials. Suddenly, though TMI was consequence-free in terms of human and environmental health, the public—and especially utility regulators and the politicians who write the laws governing regulators—became worried. This led to lengthier decisionmaking through the various stages of reactor construction, which drove up the costs of building plants.

The high capital cost of building nuclear plants continues to be the basic factor that drives decisions on how to add or replace generating capacity in most western grids.

Today, natural gas in North America is extremely cheap. We humans are familiar with the risks of using natural gas. It is a combustible fuel, and fire, while still fearful and enormously destructive and deadly when out of control, is familiar to us. We have lived with the risks of fire since time immemorial.

But we have lived with the risks of nuclear radioactivity for only the most recent 60 years. In the elemental ages’ chart, that is but a few seconds of human history. So, though those 60 short years of experience have demonstrated that it is comparatively easy to engineer those risks down to well below those posed by other fuels including natural gas, nuclear energy is still relatively unknown. It still hasn’t resonated in our primal fight-or-flight brain. We still fear what we don’t understand. And because we can’t really fight it, we flee from it.

I believe that that is about to change. The Fukushima plant in Japan, which melted down 434 days ago, has yet to produce its first casualty. The media sensation provoked such primal fear of the “generally unknown” that the national governments of some countries made panic decisions to abandon nuclear energy. Other governments, like the Netherlands, looked past the hysteria and decided that a long-term nuclear strategy is simple good sense; the Netherlands cabinet in January of this year approved the replacement of that country’s high flux research reactor with a newer model. The reasoning behind that decision was simple. The current research reactor is near the end of its useful life. The Netherlands needs medical isotopes, sees the marvelous opportunities to export isotopes to other countries, and knows nuclear energy is the way of the future.

Other countries with nuclear projects in progress, like Finland, stayed the course. And still others, like the U.S., saw major new reactor construction projects win approval.

The benefits of this technology so far outstrip those of competing technologies that there is simply no comparison. Nevertheless, the fear factor still makes today’s cheap natural gas look like the low-hanging fruit on the electricity vine. It’s not. Nuclear has the power to save the world.

Gwyneth Cravens wrote a book called Power to Save the World. Check it out; it’s in bookstores everywhere, and you can also order it from her website. Gwyneth is a self-confessed former anti-nuke who feared the technology and opposed nuclear plants. Through honest conversations with the people who are experts in the technology, and a hard-headed re-evaluation of her own fondly held beliefs, she arrived at a new appreciation of nuclear energy. Her book is worth reading.