A Time for Choosing
“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” – William Shakespeare
When we have occasion to remind friends and family that the anti-nuclear movement was created by a group of radical environmentalists who were fundamentally anti-human – as in, they were actively and specifically working to have fewer humans living on the planet – we are usually met with blank stares of disbelief, followed by a prompt change of subject. Especially during the holidays.
As we laid out in Malthusian Malarkey, the prospect of cheap, abundant energy for the masses was considered no solution at all to the elites who founded many of the well-known environmental groups still in operation today, individuals that understood all too well that nuclear power from fission was capable of providing an energy bounty with minimal damage to the environment. Thus began a decades-long propaganda campaign directed at the technology that continues to this day.
While these same organizations have worked hard to distance themselves (at least superficially) from their ugly history, physics mandates that full implementation of their policies would result in the death of countless humans in the name of preserving nature, to which we routinely say to the closet Malthusians who support such thinking: “You first.”
Serendipity provided a timely reminder of this last week when Emmet Penney, author and pro-nuclear advocate whom we quoted in Malthusian Malarkey (you can find his excellent work on the Grid Brief blog here), chanced upon some revealing correspondence while researching the origins of the modern environmental movement. Tucked into a pre-publication copy Penney acquired of Allan Talbot’s book Power Along the Hudson: The Storm King Case and the Birth of Environmentalism was a signed letter from David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth. On Saturday, Penney tweeted his exciting discovery, and, having confirmed the authenticity of Penney’s story directly with him, we reproduce a key passage of that letter here (emphasis added throughout):
“Only a short twenty years ago the phrase ‘population explosion’ hadn’t yet been coined, and only a few demographers foresaw the deluge of people now engulfing the earth. Few of them anticipated the devastating effects of too many people. Now we’re beginning to reap the whirlwind of that Hugh Moore warned about in the early Fifties.”
On this issue, Brower did not lead by example and went on to live a long, resource-consuming life before passing away from natural causes at age 88. To be clear, we would be the last to begrudge him or anyone else of such a lengthy lifespan, we rather point out that all humans deserve a shot at a similarly long run on this wonderful blue planet, not just the select few self-pardoned from the label of “too many.”
It is with this sober background that we reluctantly address yet another imminent hype cycle on nuclear fusion, a supposedly new-and-improved embodiment of nuclear power. Earlier this week, scientists at the storied Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) made global headlines by claiming to have achieved the long-sought-after goal of deriving more energy from a fusion experiment than went into it. The scoop was broken by the Financial Times:
“US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment….
The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.”
As exciting as this scientific breakthrough appears – and rest assured, we are as fascinated by advances in basic science as anybody – the reaction to this development by the general public will undoubtedly be more enthusiastic than that of the grizzled veterans of the nuclear power industry. What does this advance realistically mean for humanity and why are so many nuclear power advocates underwhelmed by these headlines? Let’s dig in.