No Nukes? Go Nukes!

Two in a row on this topic-- this entry inspired by excerpts from Spencer Reiss' review of Gwyneth Craven's Power to Save the World in the Wall Street Journal...

"Power to Save the World" is a picaresque, flat-out love song to the bad boy of the great American energy debate -- as good a book as we're likely to get on a subject mired in political incorrectness, general unfathomability and essentially limitless gut fears. It's also the latest plot point for one of the few unassailably positive byproducts of global-warming mania: the quiet emergence of pro-nuke greens, led by such impeccable apostates as Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand and James Lovelock, the British chemist best known for his Earth-is-a-living-organism "Gaia hypothesis."...

The book's subtitle -- "The Truth About Nuclear Energy" -- could come straight off some forlorn industry-group handout. That's not meant as criticism.

In fact, it's hard not to read Ms. Cravens's book as a 400-page indictment of the nuclear power industry's tragic-comic inability to tell its own story. Going all the way back to Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) -- disasters that look a lot less disastrous in retrospect, as Ms. Cravens discovers -- the industry has swapped missionary zeal for a hair shirt and a defensive crouch....

...half the fuel in America's nuclear reactors -- in other words, the source of 10% of the country's electricity, far higher in (shock, horror) super-nuclear Vermont -- comes from dismantled Soviet bombs. A Coke can will handily contain all the uranium needed for a legendarily high-powered U.S. lifetime of electricity. (The coal equivalent is 68 tons.) Here's a fun fact: Walking through Grand Central Terminal's granite corridors hits you with more radiation than a similar stroll through a nuclear power plant. Special for paranoids: Depending on where you live, a third or more of your daily dose of radiation comes from your own body's isotopes. Cheers!...

Of course, nuclear power's funnest fact is: zero carbon....

Toward the close of "Power to Save the World," Mr. Anderson lets Ms. Cravens in on a wry engineering (and science-fiction) term for magical fixes: unobtanium. In today's energy discourse, unobtanium includes hydrogen, biomass, cellulosic ethanol, negawatts, Jimmy Carter's cardigans and any other dream technology that someone can come up with to avoid focusing on the epic problem of keeping an ever-brighter planet's lights burning.

Another cute bit of knowing jargon pops up in Richard Rhodes's introduction to "Power to Save the World." It neatly encapsulates 98% of public discourse about nuclear power: "secondhand ignorance." Ms. Craven's firsthand portrait of the devil we know won't fix that by itself, but it is -- appropriately -- illuminating.