Guest post by Martin Cohen
When philosopher and long-standing climate sceptic Martin Cohen, and distinguished energy economist Andrew McKillop published a book on nuclear economics [2], they expected it to arouse the hackles of the nuclear establishment.
But they had not anticipated that it would come in from the sort of ‘denial of service’ attacks that only the climate change lobby knows how to dish out. Papers and magazines we had contributed to regularly refused to review it. Radio stations that were previously desperate for comment on nuclear issues backed off. Indeed, in soliciting forewords for the book many academics heisted to participate for fear of incurring the displeasure of certain influential people. (Eventually probably the world’s top nuclear sceptic, Stephen Thomas, author of numerous reports for independent energy institutes and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, whose views the authors had frequently found relevant and insightful in researching the book wrote the foreword.) So when that apparently very proper organ of scientific debate, the New Scientist did agree to review it, the authors expected a scholarly if probing analysis.
What they got instead was a strident personal attack. Calling the book ‘mendacious’ (which means frequently relying on deliberate falsehoods), and under the page tag ‘Climate Denialism’ (the controversial term that links climate sceptics to holocaust denialists), one of the UK’s oldest and most respected Climate Change agitators, Fred Pearce denounced the book as an hysterical drivel.
The ‘review’ is not so much a review as a series of personal attacks.
“The Doomsday Machine, a sometimes mendacious and frequently anti-scientific book, has one claim to novelty. It combines hysterical opposition to all things nuclear with an equally deranged climate-change denialism. One wonders both why the publishers published, and who they imagine will enjoy it.”
The ‘review’ continues (and bear in mind this is a book about nuclear economics)
“The authors argue that concern about climate change is largely a public relations exercise by nuclear power lobbyists to revive their fortunes. And that it is sustained by corrupted scientists at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in league with “new nuclear romantics” and “environmentalists [who believe] humanity deserves to be punished for its poor stewardship of the Earth… From this original vantage point, they apparently see no need to challenge the argument that low-carbon nuclear energy can help combat climate change. So instead, a chapter purporting to slay “the myth that nuclear power is green” spends its time rehearsing ludicrous attacks on named environmentalists and climate scientists, such as Gaia inventor James Lovelock, for having the temerity to support nuclear power.”
Fair comment – or something worse? The New Scientist thought the former although it admitted that the might have been certain factual errors in the review.
But one of the key accusations of those Climategate emails, after all, was that academic professors working with environmental campaigners and journalists like Fred Pearce, were deliberately distorting public perceptions of the true state of climate science in order to prevent sceptical doubts being aired. For example, were the vast glaciers of the Himalayas really melting so fast that they would disappear by 2035, as Pearce breathlessly reported some years ago? Climategate was about whether the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy, in which scientists and others attempted to suppress critics
According to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press, the scientists are keenly aware of how their work would be viewed and used, and, just like politicians, went to great pains to shape their message. In the process, sometimes, “they sounded more like schoolyard taunts than scientific tenets”.
Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, put it this way: “The scientists were so convinced by their own science and so driven by a cause “that unless you’re with them, you’re against them,”
Of course, if you ask a leading proponent of Climate Change, doubtless bearing a few grudges against climate sceptics for publicising things like Himalayagate, PLUS someone who is a chum of Jim Lovelock, to review a book ridiculing both – what can you expect? A nasty venomous review, for sure. But not, perhaps crude, factual inaccuracies and equally crude ‘conflicts of interest’. In protesting the unflattering portrait of Jim Lovelock’s nuclear stance, for example, Fred Pearce and the New Scientist failed to note that Lovelock wrote a glowing foreword to Pearce’s latest book, ‘Earth, Then and Now’, which Lovelock sums up as, simply, ‘wonderful”.
It is straightforwardly wrong to say, as even a skim of the book reveals, that it asserts the nuclear lobby invented the global warming theory. On the contrary, the book explains that it was an old and discredited scientific theory ‘warmed up (as it were) by special interest groups, primarily governments wishing to get rid of their coal industries. Martin Cohen drew for this section on an influential cover story he wrote in 2009 for the Times Higher (London) saying that the theory of Manmade Global Warming was not science but propaganda.
However, the authors do say that the theory that burning carbon was dangerous was eagerly seized upon by the nuclear industry. Indeed they quote several of the industry’s representatives making that point. As to the suggestion that Cohen and McKillop are too hysterical to “challenge the argument that low-carbon nuclear energy can help combat climate change”, their book specifically argues, for example, that nuclear power supplies less than 3% of world energy and thus that it cannot possibly replace fossil fuels.
Pearce throws in a few broad rejections of the economic arguments against nuclear, apparently determined to give no ground on any points = a tactic characteristic of the scientists in the Climategate emails. He thus says that no one claims that nuclear electricity is ‘cheap’ any more – but of course they do. There is no other way to sell it, given its dangers and unpopularity otherwise. As to no one saying radiation is safe, the papers were full of that after Fukushima exploded recently. Again, the book gives many quotes and examples of all this – including those of Jim Lovelock.
It’s only a short review, but there are straightforward factual errors – the New Scientist itself acknowledged that in a supplementary note to the review.
Commenting on the affair, Cohen said “My point is that Andrew and I have researched the book carefully, and if it is presented in a lively, and in places darkly humorous way, that does not mean that it is not a very serious look at these issues. And these issues deserved a real review, not to be sidelined by a lazy bit of ad hominem.”
So what happened to Fred Pearce, champion of openness who defended the integrity of the climate scientists after their internal email correspondence, apparently potting to suppress dissident views and promote their own came to light? The man who wrote in a ‘special investigation’ for the Guardian newspaper [3]. In his own words:
“Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics… [And[when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.”
Climate sceptics argued that the emails showed that the theory of manmade global warming due to carbon dioxide was bolstered by a scientific conspiracy, in which scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics.
The United States National Academy of Sciences condemned what they called “political assaults on scientists and climate scientists in particular”.
The AP said that the “[e]-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled sceptics and discussed hiding data.” As John Tierney put it in a piece for the New York Times: “these researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.”
Climategate eventually became something of a scandal, leading to several public enquiries. But no lessons seem to have been learned.
ENDS
Notes
[1] http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/03/doomsday-drivel-promoting-nuclear-paranoia.html
Doomsday drivel: promoting nuclear paranoia 11:20 29 March 2012
[2] The Doomsday Machine: The high price of energy, the world’s most dangerous fuel
by Martin Cohen and Andrew McKillop published byy Palgrave March (US) /April (UK) 2012
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers Tuesday 9 February 2010 14.05 GMT
[ends]
Contact details
contact Martin Cohen on docmartincohen at yahoo.co.uk for more details about the controversy contact Laura Conn L.Conn at palgrave.co.uk for more on the book and to request review copies
Stas Peterson says:
April 2, 2012 at 3:25 pm
… a Fusion plant IS much safer, can’t run away, and contains no large repository of highly radioactive materials, that must be carefully contained.
Ahem. No radioactive materials, just a miniature sun that must be carefully contained. How confident are you that we can keep the sun in a box?
From Berényi Péter on April 2, 2012 at 11:06 am:
Basically done long ago, with the CANDU reactors designed in Canada.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/
You can start reading about burning “spent” fuel and even getting rid of old bomb-grade plutonium here. They can also do other “tricks” like refueling while running (sec A.6), and some load following (sec A.17) thus they’re not “100% or nothing”.
Just about everything you want has already been done, and here in the US we’re sitting on enough “spent fuel” for many decades of electricity from CANDU’s. If you want to go nuke, this is the way to do it. If you don’t, then you likely haven’t read up on CANDU’s. If you have read and are still against nukes, well then, obviously you’re too irrational and illogical to reason with anyway. 😉
What is being illustrated here is the deep division within the ranks of the global warmers with respect to nuclear power. It has been apparent for many years that many of the most strident activists would rather have old coal plants functioning rather than have new nuclear power plants, despite their belief that AGW is an existential crisif for the planet.
That said, there is also a clear though not nearly as visible a cleavage within the industry. A large proportion of the actual scientists and engineers within the industry are deeply skeptical of the theory of AGW. However, Max Hugoson is right that many of the pro-nuclear advocacy agencies like NEI have shamelessly signed on to the cause because of its lobbying benefits, not because they understand and accept the science. The World Nuclear Association was the first and worst of these. But what can you expect from an organization first headed by a failed UK diplomat?
Berenyi Peter: nuclear power is now, even with just first generation technology at least two orders of magnitude safer that coal mining, about an order of magnitude safer than hydraulic energy, and about 50 times safer than natural gas, in terms of lives lost per unit of energy generated. These numbers derive out of the Paul Scherrer Institut database. Nuclear is by far the safest way to produce energy on a large scale. As I’ve noted before, it’s about two orders of magnitude safer than wind generation.
Kwinterkorn: No one involved at Fukushima received “lethal doses of radiation.” A lethal dose is approximately 5000 mSv, defined as that level of radiation which produces a 50 per cent chance of mortality. The lowest level of radiation to ever show a prompt dose response is 2000 mSv. The emergency level for plant workers was set at 200 mSv, of which a couple exceeded that level slightly. Please in future do not exaggerate.
Claude Harvey: we’ve been hearing this insurance canard from you professional antinukes for decades. No insurance company can insure against an undefined risk however marginal the possibility of its occurrence. By your standards, every airline industry in the world would have to shut down immediately as all benefit from a state liability cap.
Follow the money: Not correct. Nuclear plants had no difficulty internalizing the cost of decommissioning. They had no trouble internalizing the cost of final used fuel disposal either. What has made life impossible for them is that governments refuse to approve acceptable methods of doing either. Germany and the United States serve as prime examples of both.
Duster: You are nearly right, but there’s one critical detail missing. LNT (linear no-threshhold) was designed by its authors in the 1950s as a prediction of risk not a prediction of outcomes. This was translated by the regulatory agencies into a prediction of risk, with hugely adverse cost implications. What we now have is a regulatory regime which requires ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable). What this nasty little doctrine says in essence is that if you can put a protective mechanism in place, no matter how expensive it is and how little it will add to overall safety, you must do so. Reasonable has been translated into technically feasible.
Speaking as a member of the nuclear industry, I can not confirm the idea of the industry pushing the CAGW agenda. Everybody I know is a skeptic. Not a denialist. When we push our industry we do it on the facts, not by wheezing on the hysteria around climate. In Canada, the nukes all hate David Suzuki.
Re Confused Photon 10.47:
‘Are there still people who read New Scientist?’
Yes I do!
I hadn’t had a subscription to it or read it for 45 years, though it was the journal that set off a burning interest and opened up the whole world of scientific innovation to me at the age of 11, set me on the path to chemistry, physics, pure maths, applied maths and geology A-levels and then on to a scientific profession. And when my son bought me a new subscription for my birthday a year ago, I thought: “Oh no! I am much too old for this, and I don’t want my Science served up by amateurs and poisoned by politics. How can I tell him?”
But it was always political, and who cares? Donald Gould’s boring left-wing editorials in the 1970s never stopped me feasting on the science that I was interested in then, and nothing stops me now. I switch off to politics. The stupidity bores me.
And to my utter delight I find that New Scientist is still the most delicious smorgasboard of everything that is going on in the now-exponentially grown and diversfied world of science (the amazing universe of study and research that all those 100,000s of degrees and PhDs in the intervening years have spawned).
As a starting point, it keeps me up to date with everything that is going on that I would otherwise not have heard of. Not the final world. A starting point!
(Apparently there may be a multiverseout there. I had always ignored that bit of news: too hard, too new, not for us oldies reared on the comforting simplicity of big-bang theory. But no: I read the New Scientist special on it, and it is a credible, compelling possibility which I am now up to speed on and digging away elsewhere for more facts).
And the New Scientist’s articles, reviews and briefings are also one of the best sources I currently have of the best and the worst scientific books out there, which, once I know that they exist, I habitually track down, recklessly urchase on-line, and grab from my mailbox a week or so later to explore.
eg. Most excellently and recently, the beautifully written: ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman. It is a complete delight!
or, most disappointingly, the hideously jargonistic and opaquely-written: ‘Incomplete Nature’ by Terrence W Deacon ( I can hardly start this book, let alone finish it, and cannnot work out whether the man is a genius, a fraud or a lunatic. Never use a long word where a short one will do Mr Deacon! And never use undefiined jargon! Always consider your reader.. Oh dear.)
So, don’t be put off New Scientist, anybody. It is still exactly what it always was when we were young, but the science is even better these days. Don’t be old and closed-of-mind. Ignore the boring bits and feast on the delights, just like you always did.
(Now for a while there, my 20s and early 30s, I subscribed to ‘The Economist’. And that really was a largely boring read, and every time it spoke of something with which I was directly involved, It tread like high-brow journalistic posturing that was factually incorrect. A gymnasium for the mind, indeed!)
In declaring some 30 years of deep involvement in the front end of the nuclear industry, might I please be permitted to say that the multiplicity of diversions and obfuscations in the article and comments above are not needed. They range from the price of insurance, to British political policy to the storage of waste at Yucca, the Gaia fairy tale, the irrelevance of CO2, to the aims of Friends of the Earth and on and on into even more irrelevance.
Simplify.
Nuclear power can be costed in its own right, stripped of leech-like free riders and their zany ideologies.
Simply take the cost of building and operating a modular modern unit in Peoples Republic of China; then increase or decrease the Chinese costing depending on the REAL circumstances peculiar to your country.
Simplify, then build as economic demand dictates.
Everybody I know in the nuclear business is a skeptic, too.
@alex Heyworth
If that sun touches the box, it quenches and must be restarted. That is all.
mike_g, yeah, I know that’s the theory. My scepticism is derived from my brother in law (physics PhD) who worked on tokomacs in the 80s. He is not so sanguine as you.
I’m sure Dr. Cohen had something interesting and important to say but I’ll be darned if I have the time and energy to sort it out and find it. Why so careless, Dr. Cohen? A wasted effort.
Michael Bentley says (April 2, 2012 at 5:53 pm): “We are a nation believing in magic. I think Larry Nivin said it ‘Any sufficiently advanced civilization’s technology will appear as magic to us.'”
Arthur C. Clarke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
Its funny how everyone talks about intrinsically safe technology and the nuclear industry – of course modern reactors are much safer than at Fukushima. To my mind there was nothing particulalrly unsafe about the technology used at Fukushima, except that in their risk assessment they determined that they did not need to put their back up powre supply in as secure a location as their reactors. So the sequence goes –
Eathquake – reactors succesfully move to shut-down mode- grid energy fails – back up diesel generators kick in correctly to supply cooling water – Tsunami hits and wipes out generators, leaving reactors buildings intact – reactor rods overheat due to lack of cooling water – reach critical temperature where water is dissociated into oxygen and hydrogen – hydrogen explodes rupturing reactor vessels and buildings – rods continue to overheat and only solution is to flood with seawater from choppers and then pumped seawater dosed with boron. All because they didn’t do the risk assessment properly.
Technology alone is not the solution here, its the nuclear industry taking a real look at the risks and then implementing easily available solutions.
Until the nuclear industry stops talking about technology and starts taking the risks seriously I for one don’t trust them. Though I do believe that nuclear energy can be operated safely.
I am mystified by this post. What does it mean?
It is a reminder that the clarity and relevance of almost all WUWT posts is no accident. There is a huge morass of poorly written crap which is mainly about pursuing personal vendettas out there. Thankfully, it rarely gets through the editorial fine seine net at WUWT. But it seems there has been a hole punched in it with this one.
“and a few may have gotten lethat doses of radiation while trying to shut down the injured, old-style, nuclear plants.”
According to NASA, whoes astronaughts have to spend time in space exposed to cosmic rays, they consider 5000 rads to be safe. The most anyone recieved at the Japan plant was tops 2500 rads, half that.
Number of people who have been killed, or even injured in this “horrible nuclear disaster”, still ZERO.
Are people on this site, I dunno, sort of rational? Do they know what science, the scientific method, you know, looking at the EVIDENCE (like the total lack of death or injury from radiation) means? Considering that an old style nuke plant was subjected to a very major earthquake PLUS a very major tsunami and still not one person killed or even injured and at only one plant out of many tells you what, based on EVIDENCE, about nuclear power?
If you consider yourself rational about climate, someone who looks to the evidence, not emotions run wild, don’t you think it is time to do the same about nuclear power?
And then there is the options, use a source of power that has been shown in Japan to be completely safe even under the most extreme conditions, or freeze to death in the dark. Your choice.
So the author of yet another anti-nuclear book is complaining that NS gave it a bad review? Sounds more like NS is coming to it’s senses. Or is this a total misunderstanding of the post?
Fred Pearce is an honest environmentalist, and thus should be honoured as one of the few. He was the one who pointed out Glaciergate, to the embarassment of the IPCC and WWF.
Why this post here? WUWT?
Good grief, the Nuclear industry was prime supporter in building the AGW scam, funding CRU to mess with temperature records and so on, is still funding the scam and writing reports on nuclear disasters as if unbiased which are the ones published by MSM and which you’re reading, and you’re still repeating their memes as if you know what you’re talking about. You probably don’t know who you are because you’ve never bothered to check what MSM isn’t printing.
No one died from Chernobyl? How the heck would you know?
The big cover up was first of all because it was under the Soviet system, and now because agencies like the UN support the nuclear industry and weapons production. If you don’t make an effort to investigate the other side for yourselves, then you have nothing constructive to say about this. All the risks need to understood.
If there isn’t a problem, why are they still trying to contain Chernobyl?
Do you even know what effects to expect to see?
Have a banana.
http://tekknorg.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/iaea-uncesco-icrp-playing-down-radiation-in-fukushima-and-chernobyl-is-scientifically-valid/
http://enenews.com/nuclear-expert-fukushima-daiichi-like-horror-movie-creature-keeps-coming-grave-going-away-video
“…such as Gaia inventor James Lovelock..” Is that an actual quote? My understanding is that finding something that exists is discovery, making something that did not exist is invention. Columbus discovered America, Swift invented Lilliput.
Clearly the article is highlighting the dubious review published by the New Scientist, it is irrelevant that parts of the article are slightly disjointed the central premise of this piece seems to be valid. In its collective rush to trash the book the anti-nuclear activists have again shown how intolerant they are of dissenting opinions, equally the disgraceful behavior of New Scientist in commissioning a known activist in this case Pearce to provide a review (if you could classify his polemic as such) shows that impartiality which should be the byword of such a prestigious journal is sacrificed, sacrificed in a unseemly rush to silence any dissenting voices which challenge the status quo.
Reading some commentators posts on this article, the fact that they would rather discuss their concerns that the article might be slightly disjointed, is in my opinion a smokescreen to hide their personal reservations about the author / and or nuclear energy.
I have been in meetings in which lobbyists for nuclear power interests have clearly laid out the need for a “price for carbon” to justify nuclear power and the collection of “work in progress” funds from customers.
It was like watching a yoga class in suits.
Legatus says:
April 2, 2012 at 11:44 pm
If you consider yourself rational about climate, someone who looks to the evidence, not emotions run wild, don’t you think it is time to do the same about nuclear power?
———————————————
I’m sure you are missing words like ‘concensus’, ‘denier’ and rhetoric like that to claim that the debate is over. So far all you have added is not debate but demands that the other side doesn’t have an argument because your non-arguments say so.
Historically nuclear waste and tailings from uranium mines don’t kill people either but thats because of the now expensive methods used to control it. People don’t die from Japanese reactor because noone wasn’t allowed within a fair distance for some time but this doesn’t mean as a result people will not die due to exposure in the future, not because the reactor was safe (and it wasn’t). Is the exclusion zone still in place? Is the background count near the site elevated to unsafe for continual exposure rather than short-term safe? Otherwise why still have an exclusion zone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster
“In March 2011, Japanese officials announced that “radioactive iodine-131 exceeding safety limits for infants had been detected at 18 water-purification plants in Tokyo and five other prefectures”.”
“As of February 2012, the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is still leaking radiation and areas surrounding it could remain uninhabitable for decades due to high radiation.”
If that is safe I’d hate to see unsafe….
Would have been nice to see this space / opportunity to concisely re-make the arguments (Willis E’s elevator speech like), instead of spending time on total lamentation about people we all know are rascals.
Looks like the ‘Culture Lab’ blog where Fred Pearce publishes has a sceptic autodetect bot. ere’s what I got when I left the following comment:
Comment Submission Error
Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: Text entered was wrong. Try again.
Hi Fred, Rog Tallbloke here.
It’s not many years since many of the people who now denounce “deranged climate denialism” frequently announced their “hysterical opposition to all things nuclear”.
It’s enough to make you think that the observation that climate PR spin has had much to do with the revival in the nuclear option’s fortunes might be an astute one. Since Margaret Thatcher carried on browbeating heads of state with her chemistry degree at UNFCC conferences long after she had (allegedly) been informed that co2 wasn’t an issue by her boffins, you have to wonder if having mounds of the Tory Party membership’s money locked up in the nuclear bunker might not have had something to do with her suddenly acquired environmentalist fervour. Well, that and bashing the strongest trade union of course.
Either way, it’s pretty obvious to those with open eyes that there is much more politicking than sound science behind climate carbon catastrophism. Let’s hope Andrea Rossi isn’t spinning us all a yarn eh?
Nice to see WUWT readers are pro-nuclear.
Seems we don’t like this article ‘Fred Pearce and the New Scientist attack anti-nuclear book‘
at least because the title insinuates nuclear power is bad \ evil.
I’d attack any anti nuclear power lobby or media if I thought my effort counted.
Nuclear power is great.
(Sigh) No, Tallbloke, climate change was irrelevant to the revival of nuclear power. That was brought on solely and completey by several factors about 10 years ago, specifically the near tripling of the price of coal and the rise of natural gas to $8/million BTUs. In the electricity business it’s always about the cost per kWh, nothing else.
The second factor that brought a revival of nuclear power was the US reactor fleet hitting it’s 25 years in service mark starting in the late 1990s. That forced operators and regulators to start taking a serious look at how long plants could operate successfully. Once a nuclear plant is fully amortized, it’s literally one of the lowest cost sources of electricity imaginable.
The third contributing factor was the developing construction boom in Asia. In short, the more nuclear power plants are built, the lower cost they are on an overnight basis because of a much larger supplier base.
All of these economic factors separately swamp whatever economic benefit CO2 emission restrictions would bring.
cgh:
Sorry to make you sigh. In the UK your statement:
“In the electricity business it’s always about the cost per kWh, nothing else.” is incorrect and an irrelevance, because it’s all about regulatory powers, and public opposition through fear and NIMBYism. It’s a crowded little backyard here you see.
“it’s literally one of the lowest cost sources of electricity imaginable.”
The French seem to have lower domestic prices than we do, certainly. Not all that much lower though.
“the lower cost they are on an overnight basis because of a much larger supplier base.”
Heh. “overnight” isn’t a word often found in the same sentence as a discussion of nuclear plant construction, commissioning, certification and startup.
“All of these economic factors separately swamp whatever economic benefit CO2 emission restrictions would bring.”
Unless you can get away with taxing it heavily enough to finance your shiny new nuclear fleet.