Making nuclear power double-D sexy!

In what seems like eons ago, when I had started teaching in California, we were discussing nuclear energy in the economic geography class.  One student, whose name I have forgotten all these years later, with a track record of wisecracks, raised his hand.  I should have known better than to recognize his hand, but I did anyway.  He had a question, which went something like this:

"That is a nuclear power plant, right, by I-5 on the way to San Diego?"  I said yes, not knowing what was coming up after that.

"Why did they build it to look like two boobs?"

The class laughed.

Soure

By no means an original joke that was.  It is such a cliche. One of those typical junior-high humor that giggles on seeing sex in everything.

I was reminded of that when I checked in with The Hindu, as I do every afternoon, and the story on Kundakulam carried this photo:

source

The news item is of critical importance to this nuclear project and to India:

The Supreme Court on Monday said there is no basis to the fear that the radioactive effects of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant, when commissioned, will be far reaching.

The court noted this about petitions challenging the commissioning of Kudankulam nuclear power plant:

Few of them raised the apprehension that it might repeat accidents like the one that had happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Union Carbide and Fukushima and so on. Apprehension, however, legitimate it may be, cannot override the justification of the project. Nobody on this earth can predict what would happen in future and to a larger extent we have to leave it to the destiny. But once the justification test is satisfied, the apprehension test is bound to fail.

Yep.  Often people, like the petitioners who are dead set against the nuclear power plant, confuse risk with uncertainty.  All we can do is estimate the probabilities as best as we can.

Frank Knight was an idiosyncratic economist who formalized a distinction between risk and uncertainty in his 1921 book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. As Knight saw it, an ever-changing world brings new opportunities for businesses to make profits, but also means we have imperfect knowledge of future events. Therefore, according to Knight, risk applies to situations where we do not know the outcome of a given situation, but can accurately measure the odds. Uncertainty, on the other hand, applies to situations where we cannot know all the information we need in order to set accurate odds in the first place.

“There is a fundamental distinction between the reward for taking a known risk and that for assuming a risk whose value itself is not known,” Knight wrote. A known risk is “easily converted into an effective certainty,” while “true uncertainty,” as Knight called it, is “not susceptible to measurement.”

We can always invoke uncertainty in order to oppose any project.  In fact, that is very much one of the arguments that some committed environmentalists use when they base their opposition on the "precautionary principle."

The Supreme Court also had observations on energy and economic development, and the critical importance of Kudankulam:

Quoting a report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Bench said: “The report highlights that to sustain rapid global economic growth, it is necessary to double the supply of energy and tripling supply of electricity by 2050. Further, it is stated billions of poor people need energy and other life-saving and job-creating technologies.”

India, as I have often noted here, is a power-starved country.  Tamil Nadu, where this nuclear power plant is located, has acute electricity shortages--so much so that there are regularly scheduled rotating outages, which is more than 12 to 14 hours every day in the rural areas.  India has a huge challenge in terms of electricity generation.  In such a context, to oppose the Kudankulam project simply because it has the word "nuclear" in it is awfully stupid and irresponsible.

I wonder if the opponents in India are aware that one of the original founders of the no-nuke-movement--the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore--has long since ditched his opposition and has apologized for equating nuclear power plants with nuclear bombs.  Or that even the climate change guru, James Hansen, calculates that nuclear power plants have saved lives that would have been lost because of pollution from coal-fired plants that would have otherwise been built.  Do the opponents really prefer that India build more coal power plants instead?  Or, do they want to condemn the hundreds of millions of India's poor to their poor and neglected state?

As a former minister for India's environment bluntly stated:

“I know the environmentalists will not be very happy with my decision, but it is foolish romance to think that India can attain high growth rate and sustain the energy needs of a 1.2 billion population with the help of solar, wind, biogas and such other forms of energy. It is paradoxical that environmentalists are against nuclear energy”

Yes, "foolish romance" indeed!