Losing Propositions

Last week the Matthew B. Ridgway Center co-sponsored a conference on “Meeting the Threats of Global Warming and Nuclear Weapons” at the University of Pittsburgh with the Stanley Foundation and the Physicians for Social Responsibility. We tried to connect the dots for the uninitiated.

Global warming and nuclear proliferation are the only two existential threats to human kind. Both are manmade. Both can be prevented. But the solutions to one tend to exacerbate the other.

The renaissance in nuclear power, for example, promises to provide a virtually unlimited source of clean energy that does not contribute to global warming. But it also creates a vast amount of fissile material (PU237), the principal explosive in thermonuclear weapons.

The Science Advisor to President Clinton once told me that a leading option for disposing of this radioactive waste was to put it in canisters and deposit it in the deepest part of the ocean where there had been no movement for thousands of years. That seemed like nonsense to me because in time the canisters would deteriorate, poisoning the ocean environment. He went on to explain there simply was no good solution to the excess plutonium problem, not burying it at Yucca Mountain, not launching it into outer space.
And yet the demand for energy has never been greater and will go right off the charts as China and India increase the standard of living of their vast populations. In this context, burning fossil is simply unsustainable. So too is the creation of hundreds of tons of plutonium, given the fragility of the Nuclear Nonproliferation regime and our inability to secure fissile materials or even know how much of it exists for that matter.

If you don’t like the idea of terrorists with nuclear weapons or of losing Florida and coastal California as the oceans rise, then it’s time for dynamic new approaches, and industry and government better get moving. No more oil wars; no more nuclear power plants. They’re both losing propositions.

[Figure: US Department of Energy]