Global Warming — Ecology or Politics?

The Nuclear Genie

Global warming is presumed to be caused by the "greenhouse" gases, among which the most prevalent is carbon dioxide (C0₂). CO₂ is produced in great quantities by the burning of fossil fuels—gasoline, diesel and kerosene in automotive equipment; (cars, buses, airplanes, trains etc.) and oil and coal in power plants. The answer; reduce the use of fossil fuel and hope the CO₂ and other greenhouse gases will go away. CO₂ is heavier than air and would be expected to sink to lower levels of the atmosphere. On the surface this should be no problem but the CO₂ that is supposed to be the root of the problem is in the high atmosphere reflecting heat from the Earth back to Earth instead of allowing it to escape to space.

The Earth Has been Warm Before

This would not be the first time the Earth has gotten warmer. Each of the last three or four glacial periods was interspersed with heating periods. Coal is found in Antarctica. We all know that coal is formed by the compression of large amounts of plant material. In the Carboniferous Era huge beds of coal were formed by the compression of luxuriant growth of plant materials—some of the beds being 400 feet thick. The difference now is that humans are the supposed cause of the increase of the greenhouse gases. When I was a graduate student studying plant physiology I was taught that CO₂ was a minor constituent of the atmosphere found at a constant 0.03%. At the time researchers were doing experiments with CO₂ enriched environments—up to 3%—and greatly increased growth resulted. It was at CO₂ concentrations of 5% and above that CO₂ had deleterious effects. The great buffer for atmospheric CO₂ was supposed to be the oceans. The system worked like this: the CO₂ from the carbonate rocks of the oceans were in equilibrium with the CO₂ of the water of the ocean, and the CO₂ of ocean water was in equilibrium with the CO₂ of the atmosphere. Green plants fixed CO₂ in photosynthesis, which took the CO₂ out of the atmosphere, but that CO₂ was replaced by CO₂ from the ocean water which in turn was replaced by the CO₂ from the carbonate rocks of the ocean. It is this system which is alleged to have been disrupted by the burning of fossil fuel—oil, gas. and coal. The CO₂ of the atmosphere, acting like the glass in a greenhouse is trapping the heat between it and the surface of the Earth, hence the greenhouse effect and global warming. The Earth is putting on a blanket of greenhouse gases.

The Nuclear Specter

Since there is a great concern about the effect of the greenhouse gases on the heating of the Earth and since there are numerous recommendations to solve the problem, the chief of which is to reduce the burning of fossil fuel, the specter of nuclear power is again raised as a possible answer to global warming. The proponents of nuclear power are once again touting it as the panacea for our energy requirements, with the added benefit that nuclear power plants do not produce greenhouse gases so that "clean" power can be generated. The proponents of nuclear are claiming that new powerplant designs are safer, easier and cheaper to build than the "old style" power plants. No more Windscales, where thousands of curies of Iodine¹³¹ were released on the English countryside. No more Three Mile Islands and no more Chernobyls.

E=MC²

I remember as a high school student dreaming about the wonders of atomic energy. Einstein's E = MC² was just penetrating the plebian ranks. One of my teachers lent me a book on relativity, not really expecting me to understand it, which I did not. He told me not to feel bad about it because only 7 people in the world really understood it. (In Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, 1988, Bantam Books, New York, NY, he recounts an incident of a journalist remarking to Sir Arthur Eddinton that he understood only three people in the World understood Einstein's theory of relativity. Eddington paused and said, I am trying to think of who the third might be.) E = MC² was to unleash the energy of the universe. It was to be the source of unlimited energy. To a boy from Pittsburgh, who lived with coal, whose house was heated with coal, who saw numerous coal trains with a hundred coal cars go through his town, who played on a coal tipple, and whose air was filled with the outpouring of miles of beehive coke ovens, the thought of an ocean liner making the Atlantic crossing on a lump of coal was the ultimate science fiction. And I was to see this in my life time.

A Single Lump of Coal

The ocean liner has yet to cross the Atlantic ocean on a single lump of coal, but nuclear submarines have traveled beneath the Arctic ice and have exceeded the wildest dreams of Jules Vern's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Nuclear power became a reality. A tower holding the first atomic bomb, vaporized in the Nevada desert. Hiroshima and Nagasaki disappeared under mushroom clouds. The Island of Bikini is still unhabitable because of the testing of hydrogen bombs there and the word still describes the briefest of women's swimsuits. IdT member J. Robert Stottlemyer and I wrote a position paper for Secretary Cecil Andrus assessing the risks for the Bikinians who wanted to return to their home island. We concluded that the risks were too great and recommended against their return. This is a great tragedy in the South Pacific because land is in such short supply and it's all taken. When the U.S. took Bikini for a test site, little thought was given as to what this would mean to the Bikinians. Bikini was their island; all the other islands were taken by other families and clans. There is no spare land in the islands. When the Bikinians were displaced it was as if they were shoved off the Earth.

Runit — the Ultimate Wasteland

A similar consequence was suffered by the inhabitants of Runit a small island in the Eniwetok Atoll. Runit was the site of a hydrogen bomb test. The island and the near shore were cratered. A huge crater—hundreds of yards in diameter—was formed. The bomb test engineers decided to use the Runit crater as a dump for the radioactive debris from all the tests—one nice atomic junk yard. A concrete floor was poured in the crater. Radioactive waste products of the atomic explosions were placed on the concrete floor. More concrete was poured into the crater, more waste, more concrete until a dome rising like a giant landed flying saucer hovers over the crater on Runit. Runit is not inhabitable. To visit Runit requires full scale protective clothing and the visit has to be closely timed to not exceed the life-time dose of radiation exposure. This was the only land the inhabitants of Runit had. They live as guests on other islands. The land tenure system is so tight that an unlimited amount of money could not buy land. There is no land and again displacing the citizens of Runit is akin to pushing them off the globe. They have been permanently disinherited. What are the chances they could go back when their island cools off? The Bikinians will go back. Its not certain when but it has an understandable time horizon. Runit is another story. The debris on Runit is heavily contaminated with plutonium²³⁸. The island is so radioactive that it is not possible for a human to survive there — the lethal dose of radiation would be attained quickly and humans would die of radiation sickness. Madam Curie and numerous early workers on radium and the other radioactive elements died of cancer induced by radioactivity.

Ten Half-Lives and What Do You Get?

The loss of radioactivity by a radioactive element is called decay. The decay is measured in half-lives. Each radioactive element has a different rate of decay but the decay for all of them is measured the same way. The length of time it takes a quantity of radioactive element to lose half of its activity is called a half-life and it so happens that this time will be the same for each succeeding halving of the decay. Supposing a given amount of phosphorus³² is determined to have 100 microcuries of activity. In 14 days that activity will decay to 50 microcuries. In another 14 days it will decay to 25 microcuries and in another 14 days it will decline to 12.5 microcuries. For each successive decline by 1/2 the time is a constant 14 days. A casual rule of thumb is that after 10 half lives the radioactivity will be negligible. I don't believe this rule but let's see how it will work out for Runit. The radioisotope of interest is plutonium²³⁸ which has a half life of 25,000 years. To reach the negligible stage it would have to decay through 10 half lives or 250,000 years. Is this a reasonable event horizon? With what confidence can we predict events at a distance of 250,000 years? Can we make rational, sensible decisions with some de gree of plausibility with a time horizon of 250,000 years.

The Future is a Black Hole

We live in a black hole so far as the future is concerned. For the past we can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whose light is just reaching us now. The first radio station in the United States was WHO in Madison, WI; the first commercial station was KDKA in Pittsburgh, PA. Consequently, we live at the center of a sphere of radio signals produced by us that has a radius of about 95 light years. Intelligent beings at an appropriate place in space could tune in on our past history, but our future would be as murkey to them as it is to us.

Who would have predicted one year ago the events that are now taking place in Eastern Europe? How about six months? Three months? Six weeks? It is safe to say the former inhabitants of Runit will never return, not in their lifetime nor in the foreseeable future of the human species. This prediction can be made on the basis of the half-life of plutonium²³⁸, not our prescience. It's difficult to predict the weather more than fifteen minutes in advance, although the weather man may be correct for twenty-four hours. Forty-eight hours is a long range forecast. The future is just not available to us and we send people to jail who try to arrange it to suit—throwing the boxing match, throwing a ballgame, or a horse race, or insider trading. The attempt to plan or even to make a plan to plan for 250,000 years is insanity.

Nuclear Weapons = Stability

I am not opposed to nuclear weapons because I believe they have introduced the only stability the world has known. I do not believe they will be used, and the threat they pose is a curb to the ambitions of over-eager nations. If they are ever used they will produce a new set of starting conditions and there is simply no way to predict what the outcome will be, except to say they will have no relationship to what we know and experience today. The mere hint of chaos theory is devastatingly appropriate. Because of the great amount of radioactivity released under such conditions we could not be certain that human genetics would be stable or predictable. For us it would be as though the universe were newly created anew.

The Last Terrible Act

This excursion through the South Seas points to the folly of considering any uses but research or medicine (and a few industrial ones), for the radioactive elements. The radioactive elements do not belong in our lives and to continue the immoral, political advancement of the peaceful uses of atomic energy will be the last terrible act we commit in the desecration of the Biosphere. To align atomic power generation with a concept of a clean healthy environment is a contradiction of terms, and advance it as a corrective measure for global warming is nonsense. I would rather have global warming.

It's Cost a Bundle

Nuclear energy to date has cost the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. It is the most extravagantly subsidized program in the Federal government. Without the subsidies the program would be a bust. If private investors had to bear the costs of research, development, planing, design and construction there would be no takers. It would be easier to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to the Borough President of Brooklyn. There are no economic advantages and there is success only at the cost of additional subsidies. And the whole story is not told. The atomic test engineers were lucky — they were dealing with completely helpless and impotent Runit islanders, who had no means to resist even if they understood what was happening to their land which they did not. The waste dump is out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a now uninhabitable island, in what was a territory, over which the Congress exercised complete and absolute authority. The weapons engineers are trying to find a place for the wastes from the Rocky Flats Weapons Facility. Nobody wants them. Governors including Cecil Andrus, now Governor of Idaho, are up in arms. No waste repository has been certified as suitable for the disposal of wastes in spite of the fact that billions are being spent. The principal wastes from the nuclear reactors—spent fuel rods for the most part—are much like the wastes from the weapons laboratories—plutonium²³⁸. It has a humongous half life—25,000 years—and it would be dangerous even if it were not radioactive.

Not of this World

The plutonium used in weapons and in nuclear reactors is man made. It was made in 1940 in transmutation experiments by G.T Seaborg, E.M. McMilan, J.W. Kennedy, and A.C. Wahl. It was the second transuranic element made, neptunium²³⁸ being the first. They bombarded neptunium with neutrons and produced plutonium. Plutonium is the most important of the elements heavier than uranium because of its use in weapons and in nuclear reactors. When it was made nobody thought plutonium occurred in nature. Some researchers subsequently found it to occur in the ratio of 1 to 1x10¹⁴ in uranium—a mighty scarce element. If it were not radioactive chances are it never would have been discovered in nature.

If you are a Star Trek fan the concept of alien matter will not come as a surprise to you. If you think of the radioactive elements, they are with rare exception rare in nature and only one element (to my knowledge) essential for living organisms has a relatively abundant radioisotope—potassium⁴⁰. It is a gamma emitter. All the really bad radioisotopes are rare in nature or are man made. Returning to Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, we find a powerful concept to help understand the universe. He called it the "anthropic factor." It comes in a weak form and a strong form. The strong form says the universe was created for our benefit. The weak form says any theory of the creation of the universe must account for the fact that we are here. Where are we? We are in a world of atoms, the only part of which we can touch, feel or smell are the outer shell of electrons. And we can see light—visible and invisible—photons. Our world is operated on an electronic basis. With either anthropic factor we must face the fact that humans and all life are electronic creatures with interacting photons. In fact all matter as we biological organisms perceive it is electronic/photonic. We see photons in the visible spectrum leaving electrons in orbit around nuclei. We feel the warmth of exited electrons in the outer or bits of atoms. The plants see photons and do their photosynthesis bit.

An Electronic World

We sense the weight of heavy and light elements but we can not touch the neutrons and protons that make atoms heavy because they are surrounded by electrons which are the only things we can touch. We live in an electronic world and the radioisotopes are alien substances in that world. No element by nature of its radioactivity is necessary for our life — our life can do nicely without them. To introduce a deadly poisonous, man-made radioactive isotope of plutonium, which is an alpha emitter, the most dangerous form of radioactivity for living systems into our sun bathed, harmlessly photonic-electronic world is truly to let the bad genie out of the bottle. There is no good that plutonium²³⁸ can do in proportion to the harm it can do in even the most benign situations. I accept nuclear weapons as the price of stability in the world. It is a stiff price but it is a realistic risk. The use of plutonium and other radioactive nuclides for other than research and medicine is to contaminate our electronic world with elements that strip electrons away from atoms causing innumerable deleterious changes.

The Prairies Came from the West

The subject of global warming deserves more treatment than I gave it here. The last great epoch of climate change was the Pleistocene. It was followed by the xerothermic period and the tropical trees did not migrate from the south, instead the prairies migrated from the west.

We, as a nation would be insane to entertain the return of nuclear power to provide energy. There is no way nuclear energy can be used to provide power "at no threat to the environment." Conservation and the use of solar in its various forms will provide great stores of clean benign energy to us and to our posterity. The sun is good for at least another five billion years. It sure beats the hell out of living with Plutonium²³⁸ for 250,000 years. Let's put the genie back in the bottle.

. .. Ted Sudia . . .

© Copyright 1989
Institute for domestic Tranquility