Nuclear is Our Future

Q: How many life-cycle analysts does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three to mine the materials, fifty to assemble the light bulb, four to drive it over, one to bring it inside, two to make a ladder, one to change the light bulb, one to throw out the old one, three to collect the garbage, five to deposit the garbage in the city dump, and two to maintain security at the dump. (Option for an anti-light-bulb activist to say that it takes 72 people to change a light bulb, and an additional option for another to say it takes 74.)

This is a NIOF issues paper on life-cycle analysis, originally posted in parts here, here, and here.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), for all its flaws in implementation, had a concept known as connected action. A connected action is an activity that is a necessary consequence of a licensed action--for example, the production of carbon dioxide is a connected action when the issue is the licensing of a coal-fired power plant (whether it is released is another story; the only requirement is that the production of carbon dioxide be acknowledged and a place to put it identified). However, this does not apply to situations where a viable alternative is present--for example, emission of carbon dioxide is not a connected action when the issue is use of electricity, because the electricity could come from a hydroelectric dam, nuclear power plant, windmill, solar panel, wave machine, etc., that does not produce carbon dioxide. Now, no one is saying that building a coal-fired power plant to supply electricity for a project should be exempt from that project's environmental considerations. But where some people have decided to get creative is the idea that emissions are the fault of the end user of energy.

This idea is known as life-cycle analysis, and it throws the whole concept of connected action out the window. The end user is now responsible for every activity involved in the production of everything they use, even (especially) when they took no action to cause the activity, make it worse, or make it better, and when the activity is not a necessary consequence of their use of a product. Using this method, the emissions from construction equipment are blamed not on the construction equipment, but on whatever they're building. So the Washington Monument now "emits carbon dioxide."
I kid you not. This happens all the time.
Imagine if the same standard were applied to consumer protection laws: it's your fault the car we sold you is a lemon, because there wouldn't have been a demand for lemons if you hadn't bought it from us. Thus, you're guilty of fraud. That is the first ethical problem with life-cycle analysis: it abrogates the responsibility of polluters to control their emissions, instead allowing them to blame shortcomings in their processes on customers' demand for their product. How can an organization that calls itself a consumer advocacy group, like Public Citizen, subscribe to such nonsense?
The second ethical problem is that life-cycle analysis blames end-users for things that they didn't do. For example, nuclear power plants--and every other kind of power generating facility--require the services of construction equipment. It's important to be very clear on the fact that "the services of construction equipment" do not include "emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," as they could run on electricity (or even some other non-hydrocarbon fuel) and still produce the desired function. Yet the standard line becomes "nuclear power plants emit x grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, which is y times better than coal," and windmill salesmen turn this into "nuclear power plants cause global warming." Both are wrong, because no process in nuclear power plants involves the emission of carbon dioxide--they're simply tracing the sources of energy involved in constructing the plants back to the point where someone emitted something, then blaming it on the plant. Unbelievably, the industry has caved to this, and is calling nuclear power "low-carbon" instead of the proper "zero-emission." Ugh.
There are two standard objections to the above. One is a Catch-22: that in order for electricity to not have an environmental impact, it must come from a zero-emission power source, and if I say that life-cycle analysis is bogus because electricity could come from a hydro dam or nuclear power plant just as well as it could come from a coal burner, I am actually conducting a life-cycle analysis to make that conclusion. That's not what I'm saying; all I'm saying is that electricity is not in and of itself dirty. It is in fact the cleanest possible form of energy, and there's nothing environmentally wrong with using it; thus, users shouldn't be punished for not causing a problem (actually, to turn that life-cycle analysis around, users of electricity provide a benefit to policymakers: if a homeowner converts from gas to electric heat, the option of a zero-emission power plant to produce the electricity is there, whereas gas is inherently polluting; while electricity doesn't solve any environmental problems, it creates options to fix them). If there's something wrong with producing it, clean up the production. If there's something wrong with the device that uses it, regulate that device--but not the energy used to operate it. Regulate what's causing the problem, not everyone who is simply associated with it.
The second objection is that the purpose of life-cycle analysis is not to analyze emissions, but to analyze energy use. This is another red herring; if the purpose is to analyze energy, why is the unit of comparison grams, pounds, or tons of carbon dioxide, not joules or kilowatt-hours or British Thermal Units (alternatively, why is there a conversion factor sometimes supplied between the two, as though there were some equivalence)? Furthermore, the policy implications of life-cycle analysis are more rooted in its effects on decision-making than the personal intentions of the life-cycle analysts. And thirdly, the analysis of energy flows in a system is an engineering exercise (and a fine one), but its policy value (approximately zilch) should not be misrepresented to a largely uneducated public. This method (comparing emissions) does not work to compare two dissimilar polluting systems, either, since the pollution from one can be a connected action with respect to the outcome, whereas another might not be (and assuming that it always will be provides a strong disincentive to developments that might "unhook" actions from pollution--meaning alternative technologies--since the impetus for reducing emissions at the source is removed). Neither does electricity enable the public to "continue the party" without a thought to where their primary energy comes from; it puts the ball in the utility's court to reduce emissions. My alternative is plain old polluter-pays: if you can buy a service that has someone produce electricity for you, let the service provider figure out how to do it in an environmentally-friendly manner. You must be willing to pay any added costs, but the actual management of emissions is not your job any more--you're not emitting anything, and what you're doing does not require emissions. You have, in effect, unhooked the emissions from your actions; and that's not irresponsible: the service provider can take an action to reduce emissions, and you usually can't. In short, "input energy required per unit of output energy" is an utterly useless policy metric, since it doesn't tell you anything about actual emissions.
The basis of both objections is the idea that there's something wrong with energy use. There isn't--in fact, energy use is essential, because it powers technology, and technology is the cause of the great and uniquely human journey from the trees of Africa to modern civilization. Demand reduction, I repeat, is not the answer: people have historically increased the space-efficiency and thus carrying capacity of their habitat. This has been accomplished through technology, which, again, uses energy. It's possible to have both reductions in human habitat size and energy use--in other words, a pure efficiency culture--but that would require the deaths of several billion people and a return to the Dark Ages squalor that we as a species fought so hard to escape. That answer is unacceptable to the dignity of humankind; thus, the requirement is more technology as fast as possible, and more energy to run it. The energy that is used just has to be clean; we can never get to zero environmental impact with anything, but we can always improve the situation. (You may have noticed a careful gap in the above train of logic: improving the energy-efficiency of technology. On a practical level, this works very well--but since demand is going down and supply is constant, a surplus is created and the price goes down, which might sound good, except it lowers the price of electricity past the point where alternative energy works economically, and the demand reduction lowers or eliminates the requirement for new plants--the operational effect being to entrench the status quo. You can choose efficiency or alternatives but not both, since demand for energy is required for the construction of new, alternative energy facilities (take the efficiency advocates' oft-used shining example of the late 1970s--the only thing the well-documented conservation and efficiency measures of that time accomplished was the cancellation of a bunch of nuclear power plants, which is a major reason why we're burning as much coal today as we do). There's a reason why "efficiency gurus," most notably a former anti-nuclear activist named Amory Lovins, have made a very good living consulting for oil companies. Don't get me wrong--efficiency is important, but it's not as important as ensuring that alternative energy facilities get built, which means fleet turnover. Supply and demand--and their energy market corollary, conservation (the condition of negative rate of change in demand)--are natural market forces, and once reasonable rules have been set to prevent construction of dirty power plants, they'll take care of themselves. There's no reason to mess with them once effective operating rules are set, especially given the always-limited understanding of how a complex socioeconomic system like a market works.) There are many different ways to improve the situation, and life-cycle analysis works against almost all of them.
1. Replace dirty power generation facilities with clean ones. This is the most effective way to stop pollution--go to the source and replace it with a clean equivalent that does the same thing. A life-cycle analysis, though, takes every initial use of energy, from gasoline burned by the construction equipment to electricity used for initial testing, and counts it against the new clean facilities as though it were their fault that there weren't clean facilities like it in the market before to supply electricity for startup. In other words it punishes market entrants, the implication being that alternative energy is a dead end because there will always be pollution inherent in activities that utilize energy--even when the activities don't pollute or actively prevent pollution.
2. Concentrate pollution either in places where there are alternatives to it or in places where there aren't alternatives to it. Either way can work, depending on the approach you want to take; an example of the former is electrification of cars. The combustion of petroleum is an inherently-polluting process, but electricity is a clean energy transfer medium. Now, policymakers have the option of switching all of the power plants over to clean energy sources, which would eliminate emissions from cars and power. The switch from petroleum to gasoline undeniably slashed emissions from cars to zero--but also did not cause an increase in power plant emissions, just an increase in demand for power. That increased demand could have come from clean energy; while nothing has zero environmental impact, the use of electricity does not imply any particular one of those impacts as it is not in and of itself a cause of environmental problems of any sort. The key is the potential for reductions--switching from an inherently-polluting primary energy source to an energy transfer medium whose efficacy is independent of what primary energy source is used to generate it does not in and of itself do anything, but allows more flexibility in what environmental impacts society wishes to accept. The latter can work just as well, but is done in reverse. In this case, nuclear power plants could be used to displace coal from power generation, which could then be converted to synthetic fuel for use in cars. Then, as battery technology improves, a gradual transition to electric cars begins. The net effect is the same (emissions reductions), but a life-cycle analysis doesn't care about the flexibility that either one of these approaches gives, or the fact that emissions from one sector or the other go down, but rather assigns a "carbon value" to each unit of energy and simply assumes that reductions in pollution in one sector achieved by obtaining energy--not hydrocarbon liquid fuel, but energy--from another sector, or by pushing a versatile commodity like oil or natural gas (or with some chemistry, coal) out of a sector that has other options (as the power generating industry does) will have the effect of increasing emissions by the same amount. In fact, life-cycle analysis does not concern itself with the installation of cleaner equipment; if you can blame your emissions on the ultimate use of the energy you produce, it makes no difference whether the equipment is actually emitting anything.
3. Reduce the number of polluters so that they're easier to regulate. This has no effect to a life-cycle analyst; even though it opens the door to clean energy, it makes no difference to an overview of the whole system whether a sector has dramatically reduced it emissions. That is seen as unimportant, because all energy is assumed to have a carbon dioxide price tag. Also "unimportant" is the reality that it is more difficult to cut emissions when everyone has a diesel generator and a few million people have to be convinced to switch over to a clean energy source than if a single utility can be convinced to build a clean facility to generate electricity for those people to use. A life-cycle analysis does not consider the difference between distributed generation and centralized generation except in that centralized generation gives them an opportunity to knock clean generators an extra couple of grams of CO2 due to line losses.
4. Any clever framework for reducing emissions that nobody has thought of before. This is derailed by the underlying assumption that human activity--and by implication, the presence of humans on the planet--is always a source of negative environmental impacts, and that there is no technological way to improve this situation (when in fact technology has been the only way this has ever happened). Demand reduction is the only answer that is acceptable to zealous conservatives whose idea of progress is that old-time religion and related concepts, and life-cycle analysis only plays into their hands.

There are a number of logical problems with life-cycle analysis, as well:
1. It counts emissions twice or more (fuzzy accounting). This is fundamentally dishonest and is not an accurate assessment of the state of the environment.
2. Its lack of consideration of who is actually emitting and emphasis on end-users' demand for deficient products (the implication being that the deficiency is the fault of the demand) amounts to demand-side economics. Supply-side economics (Reaganomics) is rightly-discredited extremist-right-wing-fringe voodoo. Demand-side economics, when applied to the entire economy, is basically communism. Both examples show why it is imprudent to ignore large parts of the economy in a supposed analysis (and both are usually done for political reasons, unmasking their lack of basis in logic). As usual, it is best to know how the system concerned actually works, instead of assuming a worst case and taking actions based on this assumption--as there may be unintended consequences that degrade safety. The most glaring example is a lack of investment in supply-side emissions reductions (read: pollution controls and clean energy facilities; remember, the supply side in this case actually creates all the pollution) if the demand side is the focus of all important policy initiatives--why do anything about the supply side if it doesn't matter to the economy?
3. It upends the traditional concepts of credit and debt. For example, any zero-emission power generating facility must draw electricity from the grid for initial testing. Life-cycle analysis assigns a "carbon value" to each kilowatt-hour of electricity, and holds that against the clean facility for the rest of its operational life, even when the "energy debt" has been repaid thousands of times over. The wackiest implication is that the first clean energy facility is blamed for there not being any clean energy facilities before it was built, and any subsequent ones get blamed for the old facilities' previous market share (return of the "punishing market entrants" fallacy).
4. In a globalized economy, everything is connected. Now, I'm not arguing for globalization in the traditional sense; the contemporary implementation is extremely flawed to say the least, and the only way we're going to see real globalization--and the worldwide cornucopia it will someday bring--is if Canada could trade with Ethiopia the same way that Utah can trade with Texas, meaning a worldwide federal government (which is not going to happen any time soon but I believe someday will). But I digress. The point is that a life-cycle analysis can't go on forever, not for any logical reason, but simply due to the human limits of the analysts; the life-cycle analysts have to compromise their principles somewhere in order to simplify the study of such an interconnected system. Unless, that is, they have an axe to grind with regard to a certain technology. This is properly classified as an abuse of life-cycle analysis, but the slippery-slope fallacy inherent in life-cycle analysis (anything that involves an energy input is fair game, and in a large, complicated, globalized economy that is literally almost anything) essentially requires this abuse, or else the piling on of grams of CO2 will never end. Those who study complex systems must always simplify, but an analysis is flawed when this simplification requires breaks in its logical chain (which in this case is that everything feeds into everything else). Again, life-cycle analysis is being presented to the public as something other than an engineering tool for utility planners and a curiosity for people who milk Ph.D programs into perpetual projects (and who desperately need to get a life)--when it is clearly not.
5. It interferes with the environmental assessment process by introducing unnecessary considerations. Granted, this is a consequence of any faulty analysis, and if life-cycle analysis made sense, it wouldn't apply, so it really doesn't apply to a discussion of the merits of life-cycle analysis. But just like the Precautionary Principle, it avoids the question of "is the technology under consideration better than what we have now, even if we know only that it's better and not precisely why (e.g., that the problems that it will produce are less severe than those which it will solve)," and replaces it with a demand that we know everything about the technology before it is used. That is impossible; thus, a necessary consequence of the Precautionary Principle and the aspect of life-cycle analysis that carefully critiques every facet of everything is the idea that the only activity that isn't "dangerous and unnecessary" is swinging in trees simply because we did it before anything else. Not that swinging in trees is safe compared to civilization--it is most certainly not--but it isn't something new. They made fun of Donald Rumsfeld for saying it, but it's true: in management, there are things that you know you know (known knowns), things that you know you don't know (known unknowns), and things that you don't even know you don't know (unknown unknowns). Risk avoidance in a sane system consists of gaining a complete understanding of known knowns and marshalling that knowledge towards minimizing known unknowns. You can't do anything about unknown unknowns except treat them as you would known unknowns when you uncover them, but the Precautionary Principle and kin ask that unknown unknowns be predicted and no action taken--even if the known knowns and known unknowns are screaming "do something!" In practice, it means dig in, get in your mental fortress, and grandfather in existing practices without a thought as to their effects while cutting off anything else. I do not understand how an organization that claims to be liberal, such as an environmental group, can make such an obviously boneheadedly reactionary recommendation.
6. It implies a halt to research and development of technological improvements that will actually make people's lives better, as opposed to reducing demand on infrastructure to maintain the existing standard of living. Why pursue technological solutions to energy problems when you can just cut back? Alternatively, you can have a huge research and development program geared at making technology more energy-efficient--which boils down to squandering engineering talent on figuring out how not to develop, similar to the waste of talent experienced when talented engineers spend years out of their lives designing weapons (and that's ignoring all the practical problems with efficiency as a proxy for energy sources as detailed above--ever see a hungry person eat less as a proxy for requiring food?). It doesn't matter how little effort is required; that little effort is resources robbed from development. Can it be less effort than is required to develop new clean energy production? Perhaps (I haven't personally checked the numbers)--but you end up shooting yourself in the foot in the long-term. To quote Sybil Fawlty, "the reason it's cheap-ish is it's no bloody good!"

Why do environmental and consumer groups agree to this nonsense? More to the point, why does the nuclear industry agree to such nonsense? Do they feel that misleading, equivocating statements about their product make the case for clean energy clearer? The motivations of "public interest groups" (whoever died and left them as the arbiters of what's in the public interest) are considered off-limits by society, but I think it's pretty safe to say this method--and the mentality that results--is the result of the confluence of two concepts:
1. Energy enables technology, which damages the environment. Efforts to cut back energy use reduce our ability to use technology and thus reduce environmental impact.
2. Global warming is not about global warming, but rather about the impact of humans on the environment in general (this can be confirmed by discussions with mainstream environmentalists or polling data of these groups if you wish). It doesn't matter whether the catastrophe is global warming, global cooling, or "global norming" (temperatures staying steady when they should be changing); an impending catastrophe gives environmentalists an excuse to push through reforms that they want, which will make everyone's life better. Thus, global warming is a good issue for them to ride; even if they get the details wrong, it gives the public a better general picture of the situation than they otherwise had. It's a net gain in public knowledge; thus, they're not being dishonest.
I can't say I agree with those two statements, and that's probably what separates me from the environmentalist mainstream. I do not believe that it is desirable or acceptable to manipulate data and cherry-pick analytical methods based on what serves a given organization's purposes. I think we can get along with the environment; our survival doesn't have to be at odds with the survival of our home--and we can have all the energy we want in the process. In fact, we really need to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow distinct from the system in which we operate. We're part of the environment, and we should make policy decisions in line with that fact if we intend to leave a better world for the grandkids instead of a mess.