By Randy Brich
Since Nuclear Street focuses on nuclear energy, it’s fitting that my last monthly book review takes a comprehensive look at the U.S. energy pie and the piece that nuclear power provides.
Robert Bryce’s second book, “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future” details the current U.S. energy mix, shatters the myths of renewable technologies and provides an excellent overview of future energy resources. Bryce, a journalist, identifies himself as a climate agnostic, meaning that he doesn’t know if manmade carbon dioxide is or isn’t causing global warming as he examines the basics of current and future energy usage and production in America.
Bryce’s work opens with an exquisite description of the Cardinal Coal Mine in West Virginia and uses its daily output, equivalent to 66,000 barrels of oil, as a starting point.
“… that begins to allow us to separate energy rhetoric from energy reality. And it is important to make clear just how different rhetoric and reality can be when it comes to energy production and use, because Americans are woefully uniformed about the subject, despite the intense interest that energy and the environment have been getting over the past few years.”
He goes on to say:
“We use hydrocarbons – coal, oil and natural gas – not because we like them, but because they produce lots of heat, from small spaces, at prices we can afford and in quantities that we demand. And, that’s the absolute critical point. The energy business is ruthlessly policed by The Four Imperatives: power density, energy density, cost and scale.”
Therein lies the crux of the problem. While the greens want the rest of us to adore solar and wind, it’s just too darn dilute, diffuse and distant from population centers (not to mention expensive and unreliable) to amount to much more than the candy of our daily energy diet. The meat and potatoes must come from somewhere else, and in the words of Robert Bryce, “If you are anti-carbon dioxide and anti-nuclear, you are pro-blackout.”
To paraphrase author James Mahaffey, if you have an opinion about the energy policy the U.S. should pursue and you haven’t read Power Hungry, your opinion might be the right one but for the wrong reasons. In Bryce’s world the right opinion recognizes the total ridiculousness of the “green” energy argument from a pure physics perspective. The right opinion, Bryce asserts, embraces the sheer power of natural gas and nuclear from a very strong physics perspective.
But before Bryce details the “real fuels of the future,” namely natural gas and nuclear, he exhaustively eliminates the renewables through careful analysis and application of The Four Imperatives. Additionally, Bryce asks the questions the rest of us have been asking about the unreliability of renewables: If you need backup to cover the entire renewable capacity, and that backup runs most efficiently near 100% capacity, then why do we need renewables? Good question.
Thorough enough to serve as an introductory text in a college level Energy 101 course, Power Hungry satisfies the reader’s energy appetite by providing an industrial quantity of facts, figures and data in a compelling and entertaining read that should be mandatory reading for all energy aficionados.
Although Bryce makes his case for the “real fuels of the future” simply and superbly using basic physics and applying The Four Imperatives, at least one error snuck past the editor’s eye. Specifically, on page 10 where Bryce discusses the greater power density of nuclear over chemical (in itself significantly greater than mechanical such as wind), he misses the real number by an order of magnitude (1 million, not 10 million times greater), and it appears to be more than a simple typo in the context in which it’s offered.
Other criticisms could be that Bryce took an antiquated look at renewables, especially solar, and overlooked the distributed energy model involving the synergism of smart buildings and rooftop solar panels currently in vogue on businesses on the east coast and elsewhere. Regardless, Power Hungry goes a long way toward answering the questions that continually plague the U.S. energy picture. It would be excellent reading for anyone attempting to form an opinion about what type of energy policy the U.S. should be pursuing now and in the future.