Sanctions on Russia will prompt discussions of renewable energy

by Tom Maertens

As one of the sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden has banned Russian energy imports. A Wall Street Journal poll showed that 80% of Americans support this even if it means higher domestic energy prices.

This has to hurt Russia, which obtains more than half of its foreign exchange from energy exports, but it will hurt importers, too.

Prior to the pandemic, the United States was the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas, surpassing both Saudi Arabia and Russia. Oil production dropped sharply during the pandemic, but has subsequently rebounded to more than 11.9 million barrels per day. That won’t compensate for the loss of Russia’s 5 million barrels per day; prices are going up.

This in turn will prompt more discussion of renewable energy sources, along with nuclear.

According to a recent analysis from the Environment America Research and Policy Center, power from renewables is now cheaper in most places than new fossil fuels. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that solar and wind are the cheapest source for 91 percent of the world’s electricity. As a result, solar energy grew 23-fold and wind energy nearly tripled from 2011 to 2020.

There is another major reason to switch to renewables: a Harvard study found that fossil fuel air pollution is responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide.

Climate change is another reason. Scientists from several federal agencies jointly reported this year that, as a result of warmer temperatures, sea levels on U.S. coastlines are forecast to rise on average by about a foot by 2050 due to meltwater from ice sheets and glaciers

Thirty experts made a separate assessment for the state of Florida: “In the short term, sea level rise is projected to be 10 to 17 inches by 2040 and 21 to 54 inches by 2070 (above the 2000 mean sea level in Key West, Florida).” South Florida is already planning to build seawalls and raise highways, at a projected cost of billions.

The Yale School of the Environment noted that “Renewable energy skeptics argue that because of their variability, wind and solar cannot be the foundation of a dependable electricity grid. But the expansion of renewables and new methods of energy management and storage can lead to a grid that is reliable and clean.”

Nuclear is more problematic. According to the Yale School of Environment, every French nuclear plant was, on average, shut down for 96.2 days in 2019 due to “planned” or “forced unavailability.” That rose to 115.5 days in 2020, when French nuclear plants generated less than 65 percent of the electricity they theoretically could have produced.

Then there is the danger, however small, of a nuclear accident, such as Fukushima Daiichi, Three-Mile Island and the worst of them, Chernobyl, where the Reactor 4 site will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

Nuclear advocates frequently ignore the problem of nuclear waste. “High-level wastes are hazardous because they produce fatal radiation doses during short periods of direct exposure. For example, 10 years after removal from a reactor, the surface dose rate for a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 10,000 rem/hour — far greater than the fatal whole-body dose for humans of about 500 rem received all at once.” (NRC)

Spent reactor fuel is currently stored on-site for lack of permanent storage, but that has been labeled “politically unsustainable” because spent fuel can be reprocessed to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons and because those sites are nearly full and vulnerable to theft.

The Department of Energy spent tens of billions to prepare Yucca Mountain in Nevada for deep storage of high-level waste, but public opposition stopped the project.

“If isotopes from these high-level wastes get into groundwater or rivers, they may enter food chains.”(NRC) Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, a long time to worry about leaking storage casks and earthquakes. (There is another DOE site near Carlsbad, N.M., for lower-level trans-uranic waste — rags, tools, clothing — generated by the government’s nuclear weapons program.)

“The problem is intractable,” says Paul Dorfman, founder of the Nuclear Consulting Group, made up of about 120 international academics and independent experts in the fields of radiation waste, nuclear policy and environmental risk.

“The bitter reality is that there is no scientifically proven way of disposing of the existential problem of high- and intermediate-level waste,” he said.

If things go wrong underground in the next millennia, he warned, future generations risk profound widespread pollution.

Many people doubt that a satisfactory final repository will ever be found.

As a Foreign Service officer, Tom Maertens worked on Soviet/Russia issues, including from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the U.S. Consulate General in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), the U.S. Senate and the White House. He also completed nuclear courses at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, and worked on nuclear policy.