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February 22 2019 Book review: A Bright Future by J. Goldstein and S. Qvist, (c) 2019 Came across this book at our public library and, despite the overly optimist title, figured I'd give it a chance and checked it out. A Bright Future [0] is basically a nuclear industry sales pitch thinly disguised as a serious plan to address climate change. Qvist actually is a nuclear engineer; Goldstein works in "international relations", which sounds a lot like public relations. After a brief recitation of the usual depressing existential risks unaddressed climate change poses it concludes that nothing less than 30% per decade starting in 2020 will have any hope of staying under 2 degrees Celsius. So far so good -- of course that means some fairly serious restructuring of our economies, transportation systems, agriculture, etc. A tall order, but this book doesn't address any of that; its sole focus is on decarbonizing electrical generation. Currently only about 20% of our fossil fuel is used for electrical generation, though that will likely increase if substantially more solar and wind are added to the grid, and mostly natural gas as it's the only option that can be quickly brought online as needed when the wind falls off or clouds roll in. The authors make the usual case for being skeptical of claims that 100% renewables powering some version of our current civilization is a realistic possibility. I totally agree -- it's not. Solar and Wind power will likely continue to make modest gains in overall contribution but are simply too defuse and intermittent to become significant, at least for our current civilization and population numbers. On to the pitch. The authors try to be clever as they discuss Sweden's adoption of "karnkraft", the Swedish word for nuclear power, presumably to avoid the usual knee-jerk reactions when the "n" word comes up. That's somewhat understandable but then they launch into their spiel, describing nuclear as clean, carbon-free, and safe. While I agree that nuclear has gotten some unfair criticism, I don't think it can claim to be benign. While a finished plant is reasonably clean and carbon free in operation, the uranium has to be mined, processed and transported, all fossil fuel based. The waste, if not reprocessed (currently quite expensive; only France does this) has very long storage requirements. Without reprocessing there is estimated to only be a few decades worth of uranium available; uranium is a non-renewable resource. As to safety, I agree that compared to the numbers of people that die from fossil fuel caused air and water pollution, nuclear seems quite safe. But when things do go sideways like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it sure doesn't seem so safe. The people affected are permanently displaced from their homes, possibly at higher risk of cancers down the road. The cleanup is incredibly expensive. All this is glossed over in the book. My last problem with A Bright Future is that it actually is encouraging more of the techno-utopian future mindset that's at least somewhat responsible for the mess humanity currently finds itself in. The authors actually state that they want a future like Star Trek, with all the high-tech accessories, never mind that replicator technology isn't an option, we'll have to make those gadgets the old-fashion resource-intensive ways. They slam concerns about over-population being a driver for climate change, singling out Paul Ehrlich's 'The Population Bomb' [1] predictions of famine that never materialized as proof that population isn't a problem. What they fail to note is Ehrlich's book predated the bulk of the gains from "the green revolution" [2] which used massive amounts of fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and intensive mono-culture growing methods to bump up crop yields. Had this not been done the world very likely would have experienced famines. Modern agriculture is unquestionably contributing to climate change as well as loss of species, water pollution, loss of trees that sequester CO2. Our larger population numbers are totally dependent on modern agriculture, hence it is a driver of climate change. Maybe if the authors actually studied the issue holistically they might have written a better book. In summary, while A Bright Future does accurately lay out the risks of Climate Change and the limited potential of Solar and Wind power, at its core it is little more than nuclear power propaganda and I would not at all be surprised if this book turns out to be a project of the World Nuclear Association [3]. - - [0] http://www.brightfuturebook.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution [3] http://www.world-nuclear.org