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Bob's Blog

Introduction

In my non-professional travel and everyday life I often view things through the prism of a site selector. In this blog I share some observations and thoughts that might be of mild interest to the larger community of site selectors, economic developers, and corporate managers. I am not a frequent blogger (more often doing client work), and when I do so I may add a post with a link in LinkedIn. I use my twitter account, @BFSSSS, more as a rant about poor customer service or what seem to me to be non sequiturs. Actually, I have found twitter to sometimes yield quicker responses than via customer service kiosk queues or phone calls when those media are backed up or unavailable, for example after a flight cancellation, while overseas, or after one of several hurricane evacuations from my summer home on the Outer Banks.

A wasted opportunity: How environmentalists contributed to global warming

In 1975 I was a nuclear engineer working to privatize uranium enrichment for nuclear power. At the time U.S. nuclear power capacity was forecast to increase 10 fold to 1000 gigawatts by the year 2000. Capacity outside of the U.S. was predicted to reach 2000 gigawatts by that year. On that course it is reasonable to assume worldwide nuclear capacity could have doubled to 6000 gigawatts by 2021. That capacity would have been sufficient to replace all fossil fuel electric capacity that exists today and the carbon emissions they have and continue to produce. With increased research accompanying this growth on safety and advanced reactor types such as the High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor (HTGCR) and Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) the cost of electricity, while never too little to even meter as was once expected from nuclear energy, may have contributed to the economics of electric vehicles and hydrogen production through electrolysis. U.S. based reactor manufacturers General Electric and Westinghouse and fuel cycle vendors would have benefited from this growth.

So what happened? Environmental activists used every tactic in their book to delay the permitting and licensing of nuclear reactors. A favored strategy was to identify an endangered species impacted by a proposed reactor and invoke the Environmental Protection Act. For example, possible endangerment of the snail darter, a small 3 inch fish species, was used to halt billions of dollars of renewable energy development in the Tennessee River valley. The time to permit and license a nuclear reactor before it could begin to produce power grew to well over 10 years due to interventions by environmentalists.

Nuclear reactors are very capital intensive and these delays in beginning operation ultimately rendered nuclear power uneconomical as opposed to fossil fuel generated electricity. Admittedly, the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor was a bump in the road to nuclear power deployment, but ultimately it was the cost of delays and regulatory constraints that curtailed nuclear power.  Nuclear power capacity has been essentially flat or declining since 1976.

Today we find ourselves in the situation that government subsidies are being given to renewable energy technologies including, belatedly, to the few nuclear reactors still in operation. Perhaps if more support had been given to nuclear power earlier, many more species would not have disappeared due to global warming over the last 50 years than the few, if any, that may have been saved by the misguided intervention of environmentalists in the 1970’s.

Bob Frederickson