Stewart Brand’s environmental heresies

I imagine Mr. Brand’s view of nuclear power has brought him a lot of unpleasantness from the environmental folks. But any dogma is worth re-examining in light of new circumstances.

One of the difficulties in this area is the near-total lack of familiarity with nuclear energy among both the public and the chattering classes. I’ve been in the atomic power field over 20 years and I can tell you its neither Star Trek nor The Simpsons, nor anything like the silly TV movies that periodically surface. (Nor is it perfect, I hasten to add.)

If readers would care for a more accurate picture of the US nuclear industry, I’ve written an insider’s look in the form of the thriller novel “Rad Decision”. Mr. Brand thought enough of the concept to say “I’d like to see Rad Decision widely read.” It is available free online at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com – - with no adverts, no sponsors and no $$ for me (not even from the paperback at Amazon.) We’ll make better choices about our energy future if we first understand our energy present.

Please note that some of the issues I talked about at the State Department (and will talk about at Long Now in October) are controversial, and therefore I am NOT speaking as an officer of Long Now but as a individual writer. One of Long Now’s guidelines is “Take no sides.” The foundation has no official or unofficial position on the issues I talk about in this speech.

[...] The October 9 edition looks especially fun, as it will be a longer and maybe better supported version of City Planet: Foreign Policy Edition. [...]

a little disappointing. al gore, 2nd-gen power player, used to be a nuke proponent and now wants to rewire everything for wind and sun. i hope in the longer talk and the book there’s serious comparison of speed and cost — duking out “green nukes” and “repowering america” — or at least putting them in context — as solutions for different parts of the world, with different infrastructure.

To say that subsistence agriculture is an environmental catastrophe and exporting cash crops to cities is good for the environment, is 180 degrees out. It’s always easy to blame the poor for environmental problems. Rural subsistence living maintains soil fertility because there is little or no export of nutrients. These things go in cycles. During periods of urbanisation, soil nutrients get exported to cities. When civilisations collapse people drift back to rural areas. The long term result is soil depletion, but it is the periods of urbanisation that are to blame, not the subsistence farmers.

Also zero till farming existed long before GM crops, and can be one successfully without them. Masanobu Fukuoka developed an entirely organic method of growing cereals zero till.

Regarding golden rice, see http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/goldenricehoax.html

I can’t help but wonder if Brand is pushing nuclear power and GM foods because they are ‘sweet’ problems – technical challenges that should be attempted just because solutions are possible and even foreseeable. Extracting more efficiency from solar and wind are also technical challenges, perhaps just not so sweet because the solutions appear more difficult and with more obstacles. But that doesn’t make them less right.
The danger in chasing the nuclear and GM food problem is that the obsession to solve them could blind us to their fractional but immense risk – nuclear war and declining biodiversity. These risks require strategies to avoid them stronger than the strategies which create them. Unfortunately, Brand’s proposition to counter the proliferation of nuclear weapons grade fuel, a central entity to buy back and dispose of it, is unintuitive and in the opposition philosophical direction to which society is moving.