Book Review: Robert Zubrin's 'The Case for Nukes'
Eric Grover
In The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future nuclear and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin makes a compelling case for nuclear power.
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In The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future nuclear and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin makes a compelling case for nuclear power. It’s the cleanest, safest source of the massive energy essential to mankind’s flourishing in the rest of the 21st century and beyond. He’s a reasoned optimist and thinks nuclear power is cause to be bullish about man’s future.

The essence of nuclear power is splitting or combining atoms to release energy. You split heavy atoms or combine light atoms. So far only splitting heavy atoms (nuclear fission,) is commercially viable, though fusion offers the potential to provide an order of magnitude more energy.

Energy is a key component of virtually everything we produce and consume. Cheap, reliable, safe energy is critical for human prosperity. Zubrin warns that the near-religious orthodoxy that “renewables” can somehow power our future is dangerous “nonsense.” Fossil fuels and nuclear are the only viable sources of the energy needed to power global economic growth for the foreseeable future.

While mankind will be highly reliant on fossil fuels for most of the century, ultimately nuclear promises practically limitless, safe, clean energy.

Nuclear doesn’t emit air pollutants or carbon dioxide. Thus, it should appeal to environmentalists who in good faith worry about CO2, but don’t want to cripple the economy and consign billions of people worldwide to poverty.

Many people hold as an article of faith that CO2-emitting fossil-fuel use drives global warming and that warming is an existential threat to humanity.

While no global-warming apocalypticist, Zubrin shares their worry that changes in the Earth’s climate and chemistry are “most probably, to a significant degree, human caused” and that “it would appear” global warming is coincident with a 50% rise in atmospheric CO2 of the last 150 years. However, he warns that “the existential threat facing humanity” isn’t climate change but the “ideologies of despair.”

Eminent physicists’ research suggests CO2 isn’t a problem.

Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer observes that with greater concentration CO2’s greenhouse effect diminishes. Doubling CO2 concentrations from current levels “would cause tiny changes of the heat radiation to space, and, therefore, tiny changes of Earth’s surface temperature.” This saturation effect explains why temperatures were not catastrophically high over the hundreds of millions of years when CO2 levels were 10-20 times higher than they are today...” Astrophysicist Willie Soon too makes an empirically-grounded case that rising CO2 isn’t the main factor affecting climate change, rather the Sun is.

If as Happer and Soon contend anthropogenic CO2 doesn’t drive global warming, nuclear power is still worth vigorously supporting. But, if anthropogenic CO2 is a dire threat, then, nuclear is the only way to produce the abundant, cheap, reliable, and clean energy vital for robust economic growth.

Tragically, the US nuclear industry has been stymied and its costs inflated by political and regulatory hostility. Author of Fossil Fuels Are Vital to Human Flourishing Alex Epstein warns nuclear power’s “skyrocketing costs” are “the product of crippling, irrational regulations imposed by badly-motivated environmental activists.”

America’s first commercial nuclear power plant was completed in three years and by December 23, 1957 was operating at full capacity. Hostile and capricious regulators and legal obstruction have lengthened the typical time to build nukes to sixteen years, causing mushrooming costs and leaving a once vibrant industry comatose.

The fact that so few nukes are being built increases costs and stifles innovation.

Nuclear energy offers significant advantages over other energy sources.

It’s denser than fossil-fuel-, solar-, and wind-generated energy, and less land-intensive. One uranium fuel pellet the size of your fingertip has as much energy as 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 149 gallons of oil, or 1 ton of coal. Wind and solar are 360 and 75 times more land-intensive, respectively, than nuclear. Moreover, being intermittent, wind and solar require dispatchable fossil-fuel backup.

While there’s a fog of scaremongering over the industry, nuclear is safe, extraordinarily safe. Outside the Soviet Union, nobody has died because of radiation poisoning from a nuclear power plant. Notwithstanding its pristine safety record against other energy sources, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has strangled the industry by evermore restrictive regulation. Zubrin laments it faces “no accountability for…massive acts of vandalism against the industry.” The U.S. nuclear industry has been regulated into sclerosis.

Organized opponents of nuclear power Zubrin contends are anti-human, need pollution for agitational purposes, and get paid to oppose nuclear. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and scientists Ronan Connally, Michael Connolly, and Willie Soon’s ‘Analysis of Greenpeace’s business model’ corroborates Zubrin’s cynicism about the institutional environmental movement pursuing its economic self-interest.

Rather than solving the waste problem anti-nuclear activists want to make it worse. They’re blocking safe storage at central sites deep underground at Yucca Mountain or in containers at the bottom of the ocean rather. It’s not the nuclear industry, but rather the anti-nuclear activists who are responsible for the accumulation of nuclear waste at plants across America.

The author’s discussion of the gamut of nuclear-power technologies and how they work is fascinating, but may be a heavy slog for some.

Generation IV fast-breeder reactors produce fissile material and use uranium 238 and thorium 232, which are 130 and 500 times, respectively, more common than uranium 235, which powers most nuclear-power plants today. Additionally, there are vast quantities of uranium in seawater and uranium and thorium in granite, which could provide fuel for billions of years.

Fast-breeder reactors burn up more of the fuel than conventional reactors, reducing nuclear waste a hundredfold.

While support for fast-breeder technologies has dried up in the U.S., China and Russia have commercial fast-breeder reactors. Zubrin urges fast-breeder development be renewed.

The author evangelizes the transformative potential and inevitability of fusion power. The challenges are to sustain a plasma of heavy hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium at greater than 100 million degrees Celsius and, to net, produce energy. They’re worth conquering. Earth’s fusion resources are millions of times greater than its fission resources and billions of times greater than known fossil-fuel resources.

December 5, 2022 at Lawrence Livermore Labs fusion “ignition” was achieved, meaning the experiment generated more energy than used by the lasers sustaining it. More than 40 commercial fusion firms have been launched since 1998.

Commercially-viable fusion power providing cheap inexhaustible energy would be a boon for humanity and the ultimate nightmare for the Limits-to-Growth Malthusians. While not imminent, it’s inevitable.

The stakes are huge. People aren’t paying enough attention.

To better inform their thinking, policymakers, the commentariat, and, most importantly, voters, concerned about our future, should read The Case for Nukes. A nuclear-power Renaissance, with the widespread adoption of nuclear power and development of the next generation of more powerful nuclear technologies, is critical for human flourishing.