Both of these sentences appeared in major US newspapers, one during the Reagan administration and one just last year:

“Now, consider solar. Photovoltaic systems get the most attention. But for now, at least, they are very expensive, costing an estimated 39 cents a kilowatt-hour .”

“Costs for photovoltaic power currently range from $6 to $9 a watt, which translates to 15 to 20 cents per kilowatt hour.”

It’s reassuring, right? Solar power is still kind of expensive, but at least we can look back a quarter decade and see how much progress we’ve made, even if that progress has been slow compared to, say, the 10,000 fold improvement in desktop computing power. Except–as you might have guessed!–the Reagan-era quote is the one that has solar power costing 15 cents a kilowatt hour. The 39 cent figure is from 2008.

So what’s going on? Well, we were browsing through some old newspaper stories about solar energy and were struck by the fact that what was being said about prices and projected improvements a quarter century ago sounded–literally–exactly like what you might read in today’s  paper. Even down to the price per kilowatt hour. If anything, the average price of solar energy (as cited in the press) seems to gone up a bit in the last two decades.

We’ve collected quite a few examples from each period–the first batch from 1985 to 1990, the second batch from the past year or so. There is a lot contextualizing and caveating that could be done, of course. But we find the simple juxtaposition of the quotations to be much more interesting, and will save our commentary for another day.

Welcome back to our solar future:

Then:

1985: Solar [is] two to three times more expensive than conventional energy sources, [which average] 5 cents per kilowatt hour on Southern California Edison’s system. -LA Times

1987: Costs for photovoltaic power currently range from $6 to $9 per watt, which translates to 15 to 20 cents per kilowatt hour. - St Petersburg Times

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These days there is a constant drip of news about other countries planning their energy future around nuclear power. Today, for instance, there’s an announcement from India’s prime minister that his country wants to build 470 gigawatts of generating capacity over the next few decades. That’s 100 times more than the country currently has. 

Of course, in the US there is just deafening silence. GOP senator Lamar Alexander has been pushing for a major new commitment to nuclear, but calls like his haven’t been getting much traction. Maybe because lots of Americans think that nuclear power is scary, evil and kind of laughable, as branded by Mr. Burns and The Simpsons. That view is a wee bit dated at this point, but because so many of us take our worldview from sitcoms it’s proving rather durable. Which might be why Obama is so loathe to mention new nuclear plants. Or even T. Boone Pickens, who (rightly) pushes for better integrating natural gas into our economy, totally brushes aside nuclear.

All of us know the RFK Jr argument that nuclear power is scary and dangerous. And that view greatly informs our regulatory process, which is absurdly lengthy and expensive. And, perhaps, in some perfect world, that would be the appropriate view. But the reality is that nuclear power is very very safe. Today’s plants are virtually foolproof. And even in the improbable case of a mishap, the risks pale in comparison to the risks of global warming. Power generation pumps more greenhouses gases into the atmosphere than any other human activity, of course.

Let’s compare: We all saw Chernobyl. Now, an event like that wouldn’t happen in modern nuclear plant, but for the sake of simplicity let’s use it as our model of what a serious accident looks like. A town is functionally destroyed. There are lots of cancer cases that there wouldn’t have otherwise been (in the case of Chernobyl, estimates range from almost nil to 300,000).

But let’s compare that to the potential effects of a 6-degree centigrade rise in global temperatures — something that we could potentially be looking at this century if climatic warming effects start feeding on themselves:

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That somewhat fringey stuff you’ve been hearing about for years now under under the rubric “peak oil” is looking more and more like it might be true. The latest bit of disconcerting news comes from the excellent UK paper The Independent.

Today they ran an interview with “the world’s top energy economist”–that is, Dr Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency–who makes clear that we shouldn’t even be thinking about recovery from the recession without shock-proofing our economies against higher oil prices in the near future.

The IEA–a rather staid and conservative organization set up by Western governments to track global energy supplies after the oil shocks of the 1970s–recently did a first-of-its kind survey of the world’s largest oil fields. The results are grim: “The first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago.”

But nobody in power is acknowledging this rather important situation: “Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilization depends is running out far faster than previously predicted.”

He predicts a global peak within 10 years. Which at first blush doesn’t sound that bad. But the good doctor seems to think supply shortfalls–read: very high prices and perhaps spot shortages–will begin much sooner. 2011, even.

The are many lenses through which one can look at this story, but The Independent is correct in highlighting the fact that the high oil prices Dr. Birol predicts would kill any prospects for economic recovery. As he puts it, “The earlier we start [to prepare for more expensive and scarce oil], the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously.”

In other words: THE ECONOMY WON’T EVER RECOVER IF IT’S STRUCTURALLY DEPENDENT ON CHEAP OIL.

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There is an interesting resonance in a couple of predictions about energy prices that have hit the press recently. A widely-noted new book announces that gasoline will get so expensive–$20 a gallon–that it will completely upend how the world economy operates and how each of us lives. Meanwhile, a respected energy expert is saying that we face a “devastating” overhang of oil supplies and, in the event of a mild winter, could see oil fall to $20/barrel prices. If past experience is any guide, that would push gas down to around a $1/gallon in many places.

It’s a remarkable situation. And strange as it may sound, the predictions could both be right: oil could plunge in the next few months and then skyrocket in the next few years. But one is liable to get whiplash trying to plot a course that accounts for both outcomes.

There’s a lot hanging in the balance, obviously. We’re having these epochal policy discussions on environmental and economic issues. Yet through it all there’s the disconcerting sense that our future course will overwhelmingly be determined by energy prices.

Climate? Oil above $200 would be like cap-and-trade on steroids. It would bring about sudden and violent reforms in how our communities operate and how we get around. Our carbon footprints would shrink dramatically. Conversely if crude were to remain under $50 for the next decade or so, it’s tough to imagine making much progress weening ourselves from its energetic charms–not to mention the billion or two strivers in Asia who are already aching to crank the key on a Tata Nano.

Transportation and cities? If gasoline gets very expensive, transportation options will proliferate. Ride sharing and van pools will become cold necessity for tens of millions of Americans who now drive their own cars. Cities and suburbs will be forced to act fast to figure out ways to make life less energy intensive–the manner of the changes will be a good deal more improvisational than our current ways of doing things.

What’s disconcerting is that we’re prisoners to the price of oil. And the price of oil is a black box–in five years, will it be $20 0r $200? Who knows!

Where we could reclaim some agency would be to accept, as a society, that gas *might* be going to $10 or $20 a gallon. T. Boone Pickens and the many others who share this view could very easily be right–and anyone who claims or implies certainty to the contrary, is being paid to say that (e.g. Daniel Yergin) or is a moron (e.g. Jerome Corsi). Accepting this notion means that we are required by all principles of prudence and responsibility to treat it as a likelihood.  The downside of gambling on the point could be catastrophic — so let’s just go ahead and start building a multi-decade national plan that assumes double digit gas prices. Policy makers should just make that case: “We don’t know! But we have to assume…”

From there, a lot of other now-pressing issues would start to resolve themselves, we’d guess.

NOTE: We’re starting a regular book review here at The Infrastructurist. Next week, we’ll be reviewing Christopher Steiner’s $20 Per Gallon: How The Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. We’d like the reviews to be interactive — so if you’re inclined, give it a read, and weigh in next week.

In 16th century Japan, the national aristocracy, a coterie of priests and samurai warriors, decided that guns, which had been introduced a century earlier, were a threat to the established order and should not proliferate.

Instead the weapon of choice would be the samurai sword, a somewhat outmoded instrument that nevertheless had an archaic panache free of the leveling implications of gunpowder. As Noel Perrin chronicled in Giving up the Gun, the priests succeeded in erasing all record of guns from artwork and historical documents so that the Samurai ruled in splendid isolation – until Admiral Perry showed up in 1853 with a few gunboats and the medieval era was over.

Today parts of America seem to want to take a similar approach to nuclear power. The Obama Administration, has decided to exile nuclear power from the public square. It’s not that the technology will be weighed against the bizarre alternative of trying to run an industrial nation on windmills. Instead, we will simply pretend that nuclear doesn’t exist, either here or abroad.

Nowhere was this more on display than in March when Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy and a Nobel Prize Winner no less, announced the 20-year effort to open a repository at Yucca Mountain would be abandoned. What was revealing was not the Yucca decision – that was almost a foregone conclusion – but the simultaneous announcement that neither will we pursue nuclear reprocessing in the manner of the French and Japanese. The reason, Secretary Chu said, is because reprocessing “might lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

It is hard to express the fatuousness of this head-in-the-sand, know-nothing, make-the-world-disappear approach.

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There’s a wonderful article in the current issue of Insight, the energy journal published by Platts, called “The Unbearable Lightness of Wind.”

The author, Ross McCracken, tackles the question that nobody has posed yet – what are the economic consequences going to be of putting up all these wind turbines with government subsidies, mandates and “feed-in tariffs” that tell the utilities, “Buy it whatever it costs”?

“The conundrum,” McCracken writes, “lies in the fact that wind does not directly displace fossil fuel generating capacity, but will make this capacity less profitable to maintain.”

What’s likely to happen, McCracken argues, is that windmills – which generate electricity only 30 percent of the time – will replace some peaking power and some base-load power:

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Right now there probably isn’t a bigger advocate of nuclear power in the country than I am. I’ve just published a book, Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Long Energy Odyssey and now spend my time touring the country trying to convince people nuclear is the best thing that could happen for the environment and debating those who want to see it banned from the planet.

Yet after listening to both sides of the argument, I’m siding with them on a hot button issue in the nuclear debate. I think we should close down two controversial nuclear power plants in the country: Oyster Creek, which provides 12 percent of New Jersey’s electricity, and Indian Point, which provides 25 percent of the electricity consumed in New York and Westchester County. Both are currently seeking 20-year extensions of licenses first issued in the late 1960s and early 1970s and both are meeting strong opposition from environmental groups (though as of yesterday, Oyster Creek got an up vote from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission).

Why do I think these reactors should be closed? Veterans of the nuclear industry I talk to say they are very concerned that relying on aging reactors like Oyster Creek and Indian Point is eventually going to lead to an accident, which will kill nuclear power in this country forever. What they want instead is new construction incorporating all the technological and safety improvements that have been made since we stopped building reactors in the 1980s. We should have built replacements a long time ago.

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Thirty years ago this week, the Three Mile Island accident shook the nuclear industry to its core. A meltdown – the thing that all the experts insisted couldn’t happen – happened. Hollywood, which had just released “The China Syndrome” starring Jane Fonda, had done a better job of predicting the future than had the computer projections of fault-tree mathematicians.

What can we say today about Three Mile Island and its aftermath? I would say three things:

1)The accident, if nothing else, proved that the consequences of a nuclear accident were not as serious as imagined.
2)The culture surrounding nuclear power, rather than the technology, led to the events.
3)The industry has learned its lesson and improved operating and safety procedures almost beyond recognition. Such an accident is not likely to happen again.

The Consequences of an accident:
The general public has always thought of a nuclear reactor as a domesticated bomb that could explode in a mushroom cloud at any minute. Sophisticated critics knew a reactor can’t blow up, but they imagined a similar situation where an overheated core melted through the reactor vessel, through the containment structure and “all the way to China.” Supposedly it would hit groundwater at warp speed and cause a steam explosion that would (as the movie said) “render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.” (Give them credit for choosing the right state.)

None of this happened. The overheated core didn’t even melt through the chromium lining at the bottom of the reactor. Three Mile Island was a serious industrial accident that caused a billion dollars worth of damage and almost bankrupted the utility. What was unusual about it is that no one was hurt.

Chernobyl, on the other hand, which followed seven years later, was a Soviet specialty. Using a graphite moderator, the Soviets effectively packed the fuel rods in charcoal. When the core overheated, it ignited the carbon, which burned for days, sending a plume of radioactive smoke all over the world. Oh yes, they also neglected to cover it with a containment structure. All Russians reactors now have containments (although a few still use graphite moderators). Such an accident will never occur again in a country not run by infallible Marxist ideologues.

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The other day I saw this story come across the news wire:

WASHINGTON (AP) — California’s Mojave Desert may seem ideally suited for solar energy production, but concern over what several proposed projects might do to the aesthetics of the region and its tortoise population is setting up a potential clash between conservationists and companies seeking to develop renewable energy.

Nineteen companies have submitted applications to build solar or wind facilities on a parcel of 500,000 desert acres, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Friday such development would violate the spirit of what conservationists had intended when they donated much of the land to the public.

Feinstein said Friday she intends to push legislation that would turn the land into a national monument, which would allow for existing uses to continue while preventing future development.

It had to happen eventually — somebody finally took notice of the plans being made for gargantuan solar installations and started thinking about their environmental implications.

In January 2008, three solar scientists made a proposal in Scientific American that America produce all its electricity in the year 2050 by covering a mere 46,000 square miles of Arizona with a solar collectors. That’s one-third of Arizona, which is the fifth largest state.

Al Gore testified before Congress in February that we could do it on only 10,000 square miles – “a square one hundred miles on each side” – and accomplish this in the next ten years. He’s basing this on the claims of Cogentrix, a North Carolina company that just acquired the 20-year-old SEGS (Solar Energy Generating System) facilities in California.

Both these systems do not include energy storage, which could take up an equal amount of space. They also assume a wildly expensive reconstruction of the national transmission grid to 765 kilovolts so that all this electricity can be ferried around the country.

Yet nobody seems to ask the question, Where are we going to get 10,000 or 20,000 square miles of desert to do all this? The assumption – much like that of the early American pioneers – is that there are vast tracts of land somewhere out there in the West waiting to be put to our use. Has anybody ever heard the term “environmental impact?” Is it even conceivable that you can mark off this much land on the map and not come across some endangered species?

Here’s another consideration that you never hear about. One of the biggest problems with solar mirrors and photovoltaic panels is they get covered with dust and grim and lose much of their effectiveness. They have to be washed off frequently. Where, in the middle of the desert, do you find enough water to wash down 10,000 square miles of solar collectors at least once a month?

As all the facts come in, nuclear energy is starting to look awfully good. It’s principle advantage is its amazing energy density. The energy release from the uranium atom is 2 million times what you get from breaking a carbon-hydrogen bond in coal. And fossil fuels themselves have about 50 times the density of solar energy. That’s why the electricity generated from 75 square miles of solar collectors can be equaled by a mile-square coal or nuclear plant.

You can’t ignore physics indefinitely. All this is going to start playing a part in our energy discussions before long.

William Tucker has written about environmental and energy issues for twenty-five years. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Review, New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His most recent book Terrestrial Energy (Bartleby) is about nuclear power. He is a regular guest contributor to The Infrastructurist.

“White House Buries Yucca,” read the headlines after the Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told a Senate hearing that the Nevada repository is “no longer an option” for long-term storage of nuclear waste.

Instead, Chu said, the Obama Administration will be content to allow spent fuel rods sit in storage pools and dry casks for an indeterminate period. Meanwhile, the administration’s proposed 2010 budget calls for scrapping all spending on Yucca altogether “while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal.”

The decision was celebrated by Harry Reid, who bragged to readers on his website, “It was very easy working with the Obama Administration to bring about these cuts. This project is dead, and this announcement is another indicator that our efforts are paying off.” It was also gratified anti-nuclear activists, who have long seen Yucca Mountain as a choke point at which they can cut off all nuclear development. Greenpeace immediately called for the administration to cancel plans for new construction and begin plans to close existing reactors.

Supporters of nuclear, meanwhile, found themselves completely flummoxed. At the hearings, Senator John McCain, who supported nuclear during his presidential campaign, said the decision imperils the current nuclear revival.

But is this really true? The cancellation of Yucca may not be nearly as bad for the budding nuclear renaissance as it might first seem. In fact, it may provide the opportunity to prove once and for all that, in reality, there is no such thing as nuclear waste.

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The nuclear industry was born in America. But today while it’s booming in the rest of world, it seems to be dying here.

In the halcyon days of the ’60s and ’70s, the three largest builders of reactors were all U.S. companies. Today, there is only GE and it is starting to lag far behind foreign rivals. Since last November, Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear fleet owner, and Dominion, one of the most ambitious utilities in applying for new reactors, both announced they will drop plans to build GE reactors. Around the same time, Entergy, the nation’s second largest fleet owner, said it will “explore alternatives” to building with GE.

This means that GE, which was already running in third place behind Westinghouse, now a Japanese company, and Areva, the French giant, is down to one planned reactor.

How did we fall so far so fast? It’s actually been decades in the making.

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America is an energy-hungry nation, no doubt about it. In a very short period of time we will be making long-term decisions about how to feed that hunger. The money will be flowing soon and once we settle upon something it may be hard to take it back. So we need to think fast and clearly.

Renewables have a great popular appeal these days and certainly must have a place—even a large place –in any solution. But the people who think that we can run an nation like the United States on diffuse energy sources such as wind, solar and tidal flows are being, to put in kindly, a little unrealistic. We need a concentrated, reliable and proven source of energy as the backbone of our electric grid. For that we only have a few choices. Coal, is the current option and that won’t change anytime soon. Coal has long been reviled for its pollution, however, and that was before concerns arose about global warming. So just to make things interesting, let’s also suggest a competitor – a hypothetical energy source that, like coal, is plentiful and reliable enough to power a national electrical grid but also has some other interesting properties.

OK, then, the candidates:
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