Rad Future - Book Review

I just finished Rad Future, a pro-nuclear power book by Isabelle Boemeke following a recommendation by Meredith Angwin, the Electric Grandma.

I liked it. I loved her drawings! I loved her food analogies for energy sources. It was a quick read that is to the point with a passionate plea for people and for nuclear (fission) power.

I believe with her in a rad future - radical and radiant, powered by nuclear. She is critical about people’s need for electricity and pleads nuclear is the best long-term choice. I am glad her activism kept California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant open, which is a great service to CA rate payers.

Nuclear power is the densest power source. Energy density rules and saves space for other things we love. Nuclear leaves minimal waste that is easy to store. Nuclear has an extremely low carbon footprint and can truly claim to be “green” in that sense of its meaning for those who care about that aspect of its power. In societies unbounded by bureaucratic paperweights, nuclear is affordable. Contrary to what many people think, nuclear is safe and its death toll per unit energy produced, is second to none. What’s not to like?

Hollywood hates it for all the wrong reasons and has successfully helped to shut it down in our country. The movie The China Syndrome with Jane Fonda had perfect timing right after the Three Mile Island accident. I remember watching Silkwood in a high school class and the shrieks of terror from classmates. Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) did not really care about big-picture energy safety or affordability. And the Simpsons, as much as I love them, have ingrained the brutally incompetent image of Homer as par for the course for nuclear power.

Some of our cultural leaders have been doing the world irreparable harm. And even the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)) was full of disinformation. This has been bad for human energy access and prosperity.

Isabelle also assesses that fossil fuel companies have conspired against nuclear in the past - to push ineffective solar (!?) She does not present proof of this and today I would say that the oil & gas industry is generally supportive of more nuclear power. She makes it sound like a conspiracy theory. I would counter that fossil fuels have been able to stand on its own legs, and if there is competition on a truly leveled playing field without subsidies or regulatory preference, fossil fuels win because they are transportable, affordable, cheap and fossil sunshine works all the time.

If you think the oil & gas industry or fracking have been vilified by clumsy videos or anti-human environmental organizations backed by Russia-sourced money, think again. The vilification of nuclear by environmental organizations supposedly wanting green power and the regulatory follow-up that built a government bureaucracy in many developed countries aiming at delay has effectively stopped any nuclear advancement in its track. This machine was also built by naive politicians. Angela Merkel stopped German nuclear after Fukushima, even though the tsunami danger in Bavaria is zero. Nuclear power in the US has been killed by a thousand paper cuts, making nuclear uninvestable and uneconomic. In China nuclear costs about $3/W (US Dollars per Watt) to build. In France and the United States, paper cuts have pushed building costs to $10-15/W.

While she is extremely critical of nuclear power as the overwhelmingly best choice, she is uncritical about climate change science, not at all questioning the one-directional evil doings of fossil fuels. You won’t hear her celebrate women escaping the awful consequences of wood-burning fires that can quickly be erased with coal-fueled electricity or propane stoves. In that sense, the perfect of nuclear is the enemy of the good from propane. While she asserts that people make the “tired talking points” against nuclear, she does the same with climate change. Some examples of her technical assessment: “getting to 3 degrees would really suck”, “countless lives lost to fossil fuel due to air pollution” - what she forgets is that more lives are lost due to poor cooking stoves, and that electricity from coal is a first mover’s choice that is - for the poorest in the world - a step in the right direction away from backbreaking energy poverty.

“At the end of the day, all that matters is that it is from carbon free sources”. Anyone who says “all that matters…” is looking at things in a one-sided manner and does not want to evaluate trade-offs that most adults consider in their choices.

Her book starts and ends with fires - “the Amazon is burning” in 2019 and “California is burning” in 2020. Her quick assessment is that the world has come to an end. Instead, her big-picture assessments should be that humanity is safer than ever through energy access and that wildfires are at an all-time low, with possible exceptions in places where bureaucrats have let forest management get out of control and where pyromaniacs run wild (see Bjorn Lomborg’s full dataset from the US Forest Service): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/us-fires-nowhere-near-record-bjorn-lomborg/

Isabelle has been courageous in picking a fight in favor of nuclear power, and maybe a critical look at climate change science and the historical importance of fossil fuels are a bridge too far in the world of supermodels?

Another topic of my criticism is that she only talks about electricity - not about all our use of primary energy. While there may be efforts to electrify various things, a future that electrifies everything is expensive and unrealistic. There is a need for power sources that can do more than cater to electricity. An acknowledgement of that shortcoming of nuclear, and an assessment for the task at hand to address the other 4/5th of our energy consumption would have been appropriate. Even in nuclear advanced France, nuclear fission power is only 37% of primary energy consumption, with oil and gas the #2 and #3 sources.

I do believe nuclear (fission first, fusion at some point) will save the world as the fuels for the next century and beyond. But as our current lack of energy transition toward other sources shows, a true transition needs a reliable destination and time. We first need to add more reliable sources like natural gas that can scale much more quickly to the needs of the energy poor of the world. Also, it is best and at the lowest cost for consumers when governments step back and let the marketplace decide what is best instead of mandating a winner. When governments step aside, I believe with Isabelle that nuclear power will be a winner and a life-changer to make billions of people energy rich and prosperous.