One of California’s two nuclear power plants remains offline amid roiling speculation about its future. At a geothermal energy conference in Sacramento this week, the head of California’s Independent Energy Producers association put the odds of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) “ever” coming back online at 50/50.

Geothermal Education Office

A "flash steam" geothermal plant in East Mesa. Geothermal plants tap the heat energy underground to produce steam for electricity.

The odds matter because nuclear plants provide so-called “baseload” power, which is to say that they produce electricity 24/7 — when they’re on. Geothermal power — tapping energy from underground sources of heat — also has the virtue of being baseload. While geothermal plants can lose potency during the hottest part of the day, they don’t stop producing completely. Solar and wind are considered “intermittent” sources as they’re at the mercy of the sun shining and wind blowing.

At this week’s meeting of the Geothermal Energy Association, there was visible consternation over geothermal being the odd man out in California’s race for renewables, even though the Golden State is endowed with the most geothermal capacity in the nation.

“There’s no question that the geothermal industry is stalled in California,” lamented Karl Gawell, GEA’s executive director. The question of the day was how to turn that around. Several speakers suggested that geothermal developers seize on the current uncertainties around California’s nuclear future as an opening to tout the advantages of geothermal’s always-on potential. Obstacles include a potential dearth of transmission lines to carry power from typically remote geothermal sites and technicalities in state policies that tend to favor wind and solar development. By contrast, geothermal development is surging ahead in Nevada.

Money is another potential stumbling block. Geothermal requires drilling deep wells at upwards of $5 million per. Californians currently get about five percent of their electricity from geothermal sites. But that’s changing rapidly and the state is on track to get the lion’s share of renewable energy from the sun and the breeze. The reliance on intermittent sources for all that power has more than a few insiders worried.

“When we look at the 2016-17 time frame and see thousands more megawatts of [intermittent sources] coming online…our eyes get really big,” said Karen Edson, a vice president at California’s Indpendent System Operator (CAISO), the switchyard for electricity throughout the state. “We’re very worried about that.”

Mixing more intermittent sources into the state’s energy mix makes “load balancing” a trickier proposition for grid managers. As energy guru V. John White of the Center for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Technologies put it, “The more [renewables] we put on the system, the more it matters how it all fits together.”

Geothermal has its detractors. UC Berkeley Physicist Richard Muller, author of Energy for Future Presidents, insists that it will never be cheap enough to compete.

“Compare geothermal to solar,” Muller told me in a recent interview. “The energy coming from below is three thousand times smaller than the energy coming from solar. I mean, it’s as competitive as solar if you can make it three thousand times cheaper.”

Still, there’s a lot of potential juice down there. Government reports estimate that with the right technology, drillers could recover power equivalent to more than half the nation’s current installed base.

“The biggest risk right up front is finding the resource,” says Doug Hollett, at the federal Department of Energy. Hollet says his Geothermal Technology Program is aggressively seeking “game-changing” advances that will lower the financial risks by speeding up the drilling process or underground imaging techniques to identify where the “hot rocks” are.

But geothermal won’t provide an immediate answer for San Diego. Edson describes San Onofre as, “a bit of an odd beast,” serving an area that’s relatively isolated in terms of electrical power. “It’s not something that increased imports can solve.” The plant’s operators are currently filling the power gap by ramping up the half-century-old gas-fired plant at Huntington Beach. But getting adequate renewable energy in to replace the lost low-carbon electrons from the nuclear plant, officials admit, will be a challenge.

Okay, so Yucca Mountain hasn’t worked out so well. In fact, the current betting is that the planned Nevada repository for nuclear waste will never open its doors. No matter. New Mexico beckons.

Craig Miller

A transport container for nuclear waste, outside the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

Few Americans seem to realize that the world’s only functioning geologic repository for nuclear waste of any kind is already open for business in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. In fact, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is well beyond the “pilot” phase. It’s been taking in truckloads of the stuff since 1999, without mishap, it’s success no doubt a factor in its anonymity.

An average of 30 truckloads a week from all corners of the US, roll into what is essentially a glorified salt mine, licensed by the federal government to accept low-level “transuranic” waste from defense-related facilities only.

The waste is “isolated” 2,000 feet below ground in the saline remains of the vast Permian Sea that covered the region more than 200 million years ago.

On a recent tour of the underground tunnels or “drifts” where the waste is entombed,  my guide, Bobby St. John, picked up a marble-sized salt crystal and pointed to a tiny bubble trapped inside. “That right there,” he said, “is a 230-million-year-old drop of water.”

It’s about the only water in evidence, part of what makes this a promising place to put away radioactive cast-offs for good. The other is the virtual absence of seismic potential, something that has dogged proponents of Yucca Mountain.

You can tag along on my tour by listening to the radio report that accompanies this post, airing on The California Report as the final installment of our three-part series on the nuclear waste dilemma. You can also watch a video segment on WIPP produced by the PBS program Need to Know.

Tune in to the companion radio series: Part 1: California’s nuclear waste profile. Part 2 (Tue): What we can learn from Sweden. Part 3 (Wed): The town that said: “Yes, in our back yard.”

Ingrid Becker

The Forsmark nuclear power plant is one of three in Sweden where about half the nation's electricity comes from 10 reactors built on the coast.

Sweden gets a lot of press as the country that’s figured out not only how and where to dispose of its nuclear waste but – significantly — how to win community support.

Today, in the second installment of our radio series, we’ll hear the Swedes explain what it took to change public attitudes.  You can also take a visual tour here of some of the places I visited and people I met while tracking Sweden’s progress.

While the U.S. – and pretty much everywhere else in the world – is in a political meltdown over the topic, The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company or SKB, is making strides toward a deep geologic disposal site at Forsmark in Eastern Sweden. In this video, a company representative explains how the company plans to encapsulate the fuel in copper canisters before burying it.

And you can peek inside the central interim storage facility with this video that shows where the waste is currently stored in what looks like large swimming pools.

Ingrid Becker

Inger Nordholm at the site on the Baltic Sea where the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company hopes to open a geologic repository in 2025 -- if regulators grant them a license.

Forsmark is part of the 22,000-person community of Osthammar which has been deeply involved in the repository issue for at least 15 years. You can read more about its work on the community website.

While there are still plenty of critics and some unresolved questions about whether the company’s proposed disposal method can withstand the test of time, local residents so far are willing to trust that the waste can be managed safely.  And they’ve come to accept that the stable bedrock in their region could be one of the safest places to bury all of Sweden’s nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years.

Osthammar of course stands to benefit from the jobs and investment that would come along with a repository, but everyone I talked with in Sweden told me this willingness to step forward is much more than financial.

“We have a Swedish expression, when you hunt the fox, you have to deal with the bite, says Brita Freudenthal, a spokeswoman for SKB. “We have the nuclear power, we use the electricity and we created the spent fuel and this is our responsibility. Most Swedes are very much aware of that.”

Jacob Spangenberg, the Mayor of Osthammar, told me he doesn’t  believe burying the waste in his community will create a stigma or hurt tourism in this  picturesque area on the Baltic. Rather, he says, it will generate global interest “In how to solve this very difficult issue, that people in Japan, and California and Germany must solve in one way or another.”

Among the people I ran across in Scandinavia was Janet Kotra, a senior staffer with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She  was there for a meeting of international nuclear communities and told me  the United States can learn a few things from Sweden, which admitted a long time ago that solving the nuclear waste dilemma is not just a technical issue.

With plans for a repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain on hold — perhaps permanently —  Kotra says the US government is already thinking differently when it comes to community engagement. Regulators and  government agencies need a commitment, she says “that the  process for making regulatory decisions is available and accessible to a broader public so there can be that social acceptability.” If not, Kotra adds, “We’ll find ourselves right  back where we are today and we’ll find ourselves once again looking for another alternative.”

Tune in to the companion radio series: Part 1: California’s nuclear waste profile. Part 2 (Tue): What we can learn from Sweden. Part 3 (Wed): The town that said: “Yes, in our back yard.”

See Monday’s blog post to see where California’s nuclear waste is located and to explore an interactive timeline of the history nuclear waster disposal.

"Dry casks" waiting to be loaded with spent fuel at Diablo Canyon. (Photo: Craig Miller)

It could be worse. This could be Illinois, the undisputed spent fuel champ, with more than 8,000 tons piled up at plants. As it is, California ranks eighth in the nation.

“This country has an obligation to those states and those communities to take those materials and put them into deep geologic disposal, where they can be safely isolated for a very long period of time,” says Per Peterson, who chairs the nuclear engineering department at UC Berkeley.

Trouble is, the country seems farther now from meeting that obligation than it was in 1998, the original legislative deadline for opening a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel.

Peterson is also member of a White House commission on nuclear waste solutions, due to report its findings next Friday. Between now and then, Climate Watch and KQED’s The California Report will collaborate on a three-part series on the issue of high-level nuclear waste.

“We’ve made progress but it’s taken an enormous amount of time,” Peterson told The California Report’s Senior Producer Ingrid Becker, in a recent interview.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future is not expected to offer specific site recommendations for long-term storage. More likely, it will suggest an interim strategy of sort-of-long-term storage for the 65,000 tons of accumulated waste sitting more or less literally in the back yards and “attics” of US plants.

Peterson thinks a good place to start is with the spent fuel still sitting in dry storage at two decommissioned plants in California:

- Humboldt Bay, the state’s first commercial nuclear plant, which went online in 1963 (160 tons), and

- Rancho Seco, east of Stockton, which Sacramento voters shut down by referendum in 1989 (202 tons)

Peterson suggests consolidating the “relatively modest amounts” of fuel from those locations somewhere that can serve as a pilot project for “informing decisions as to what do with the spent fuel of larger quantities at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre” (California’s two operating plants). Peterson says that “getting to the development” of a permanent tomb for spent fuel “conceivably could happen in 20 to 30 years.” From some estimates we’ve seen, that’s at the optimistic end of the timeline.

Speaking of timelines, you can explore the history of commercial nuclear power in California, with our interactive timeline, assembled by Chris Penalosa.

Experts agree that most vulnerable to both terrorist attack and natural disaster are the uranium fuel rods suspended in pools of water at reactor sites. Utilities operating Diablo Canyon and San Onofre have both begun moving older, less radioactive rods to more durable “dry casks.” The bad news is that two-thirds of California’s spent fuel remains in “wet pools.”

The good news is that Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told a Senate hearing that he believes the temporary storage methods used in this country are adequate for the next 100 years or so. Let’s hope he’s right because at this rate, it might take that long to find a permanent home.

Where the Waste Resides

This interactive map shows the current locations and amounts of spent nuclear fuel at commercial reactor sites in California.
View California Nuclear Power Plants in a larger map

Tune in to the companion radio series: Part 1: California’s nuclear waste profile. Part 2 (Tue): What we can learn from Sweden. Part 3 (Wed): The town that said: “Yes, in our back yard.”

A fresh poll from the Field Research Corporation shows statewide support for nuclear power plummeting.

PG&E's Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, near Avila Beach. (Photo: Craig Miller)

The survey, taken earlier this month, shows that support for expanding nuclear power in California has dropped to 38%, from 48% last year, when only 44% opposed the idea. In the newest poll, 58% surveyed said they did not agree that more nuclear power plants should be built in the state.

Field analysts say the numbers are a clear reflection of the shift in sentiment worldwide, since the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, a tense series of events that have remained front page news since March 11. Since then, Germany, Switzerland and Italy have all decided to scrap their nuclear energy programs.

In spite of it all, confidence in California’s existing nuclear plants remains high. Only two plants remain in service, PG&E’s Diablo Canyon facility on the Central Coast, and the San Onofre plant, operated jointly by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. And according to the Field Poll, Californians expressed confidence in the safety of those installations by almost two-to-one (56%-32%). Just 39% of respondents said that the state should phase out nuclear power over ten years.

A report accompanying the poll results says that attitudes toward nuclear power have closely tracked high-profile incidents over the years, with support dropping after accidents at Three Mile Island (PA) in 1979 and Chernobyl (Ukraine) in 1986. Support peaked in 1976 at 69% and has not crested 50% since the Three Mile Island incident. Statewide, opposition is most concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to Field.

The poll has a margin of error of +/- 4.6 percentage points.

UPCOMING Coverage: In July, Climate Watch and our content partners will provide a series of reports on seismic safety and the problem of accumulating nuclear waste at California’s nuclear power plants. The latter will include a three-part radio series, to air on KQED’s The California Report, in advance of a national commission report, due out on July 29.

Backers of a new Fresno “clean energy park” aim to use nuclear power to clean up salty irrigation water in California’s Central Valley.

The twin cooling towers of the decommissioned Rancho Seco nuclear power plant. Could the Central Valley see another nuke constructed near Fresno? (Photo: Craig Miller)

They see the state’s 35-year-old moratorium on expansion of nuclear power as a mere speed bump in the road. They wouldn’t be the first. There have been several attempts to challenge the ban over the years – in the courts, in the legislature, and even a couple false starts through the initiative process.

But the idea of simply drawing up plans for a plant and gearing up to build it – without getting permission from the state – that’s a new approach, which I explain in my Wednesday radio feature for The California Report.

Fresno Nuclear CEO John Hutson told me he thinks it would be much more profitable to sell precious clean water to farmers than to generate electricity for the grid.

“Why should we sell electricity when we could clean enough water to irrigate 40 thousand acres of Thompson seedless grapes?”, Hutson asked. He also plans to make water bottles out of the captured salts and fill them with fresh, desalinated water. I wonder how many of those he’d have to sell to finance two 1600-megawatt reactors?

KQED’s Quest first talked to Hutson several years ago about his plan to build a nuclear plant next to a Fresno wastewater treatment plant. At that point, he was talking about selling electricity and possibly introducing a ballot initiative to overturn the moratorium, enacted in 1976.

But now he’s simply plowing forward, teaming up with French energy giant Areva to draw up plans for a clean energy park that would include solar, desalinization, and nuclear. They’ve even produced an animated tour of the proposed park:

Meanwhile, some of the state’s anti-nuclear activists are pushing in the other direction. They hope to collect signatures for a proposed ballot initiative which would expand the current moratorium to the point of shutting down power generation at the state’s two existing nuclear plants.

The initiative’s author, Ben Davis, told me he’s not quite ready to knock on doors yet. He sent a letter to the state Attorney General’s office voicing concern about the state’s summary of the proposed initiative. He doesn’t like the clause that predicts a full nuclear stoppage could cost Californians billions of dollars a year due to electricity interruptions and rate increases.

“It misleads the public,” Davis said. “It’s written as if they handed the proposal to the nuclear industry and asked them to write whatever they wanted.” And he wants the summary to include a more specific estimate of what a nuclear disaster like Fukushima could cost the state.

Follow the yellow brick road? The Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory in Sweden. (Photo: Ingrid Becker)

This summer, Climate Watch will launch a three-part radio series on the nuclear waste dilemma. As part of the reporting for that series, The California Report’s senior producer, Ingrid Becker, traveled to Sweden to examine a program touted as a potential model for the world. This dispatch is the second part of her series preview.

The road to Äspö from Gothenburg, where I arrived from San Francisco, winds through a storybook landscape of small farms, lush forests and brick-red houses. Road signs warning of moose crossings pop up at regular intervals along the highways and back roads.

Traditional wooden houses like this one dot the landscape in Småland, the historical province where the Swedes have built a demonstration laboratory for storing spent nuclear fuel. (Photo: Ingrid Becker)

And so it was a bit jarring to later find myself in a granite cavern, standing face-to-face with giant copper tubes, enormous machinery and a specially designed fuel transport vehicle quaintly named after one of the Viking gods.

The trip, 340 meters (1,115 feet) below ground to the demonstration tunnel takes a full minute in a noisy and slightly bumpy elevator. Before we enter the tunnel, I must strap on a transponder, a safety precaution in case of emergency. At this point I’m asking myself if I should be alarmed, but the attentive public relations officer assures me that since the facility opened in 1995, about 10,000 visitors a year have made this trek.

Down in the tunnel, it’s anything but scary.  While the lab is not quite an industrial Disneyland, there is an element of showmanship here. The company prides itself on openness and bright graphics detail the plans for storing the waste. Visitors are encouraged to touch the models and sample the salty groundwater flowing through the bedrock. During my visit we are joined by a clutch of students from a local university and researchers from the Swedish defense agency.

Tour guide Åsa Nielson encourages visitors to Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory to touch the bentonite clay that will help seal copper canisters with nuclear waste when they are stored underground. (Photo: Ingrid Becker)

The waste won’t actually be stored in these tunnels.  This is what SKB calls a “dress rehearsal.”  SKB has selected a site further east at Forsmark in the community of Östhammar for the permanent repository. It will take several years for the government to review the 7,000-page application for the repository. Under best-case scenarios, construction could start in 2015. The first canisters wouldn’t actually be buried until 2025.

As with anything requiring this level of scrutiny, there are sure to be a lot more questions about whether the plan is really safe.   Before touring the lab, I met with the environmental organization dedicated to watching over the nuclear waste planning process.

Johan Swahn of the environmental watchdog group MKG, lifts a box containing some of the 7,000 pages in SKB’s application for a permanent spent fuel repository. (Photo: Ingrid Becker)

MKG director Johan Swahn says six years ago when he began his watchdog role, the repository plan seemed more assured. Today, he has his doubts.

The Swedish nuclear waste company is adamant that its method will be safe, but Swahn says more concerns are being raised about whether the copper canisters could in fact corrode and leak. “Copper is not all immune in those environments,” he says. “The whole idea in Sweden that the industry itself is solely responsible for taking care of the waste (means that) there’s no other funding for research outside industry — and that has led to a situation where we may have fooled ourselves properly.”

As Ingrid Becker continues her research in Sweden, Climate Watch senior editor Craig Miller is touring the only functioning geologic repository for nuclear waste in the US. The two will combine their reporting for the upcoming series.

Cooling towers from the defunct Rancho Seco nuclear power plant rise above vineyards near Lodi. Photo: Craig Miller

According to a report in the Fresno Bee, the notion of building a nuclear power plant near Fresno is still alive, if on life supports. California still has an effective ban on new nuclear plants. That hasn’t stopped some from pushing the plan, as Amy Standen reported for Quest last spring.

And apparently some French investors haven’t given up, either.

Maybe they were inspired by the juxtaposition of vineyards and cooling towers at the site of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s (SMUD) decommissioned Rancho Seco nuclear plant, near Lodi.

Last summer I reported on the prospects for expanded nuclear power as part of California’s low-carbon energy push. Then in November, the advocacy group Environment America issued a report down-playing the potential role of nuclear. The report, bluntly entitled “Generating Failure,” made the claim that: “Even if the nuclear industry somehow managed to build 100 new nuclear reactors by 2030, nuclear power could reduce total U.S. emissions of global warming pollution over the next 20 years by only 12 percent.”

Proponents of nuclear point to its mportance as a steady source of “base load” power, generated 24/7, as opposed to the intermittent or cyclical nature of many renewable sources.

Stanford civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson and UC Davis researcher Mark Delucchi crunched the numbers and have concluded that if the world used existing technology to convert entirely to electricity (and hydrogen powered by these renewables) by 2030, the world’s power demand would be reduced by 30%, from the expected 16.9 terawatts to 11.5 terawatts.  They base this expected reduction on the premise that fossil fuel and biomass combustion are inefficient, losing up to 80% of the produced energy to heat. With energy produced by electricity, only 20% is lost as heat.

Even without this reduction in world energy needs, the two researchers assert that there is more than enough renewable energy available to meet the world’s needs (their data pegs the potential worldwide energy from wind at 1,700 TW and solar at 6,500 TW).  When difficult-to-reach areas and protected lands are excluded from their calculations, the scientists find at least 40 TW available from wind and 580 from solar.   Currently, they find, we generate only .02 TW of wind and .008 of solar.

The ambitious plan calls for 3.8 million large wind turbines, which, when spaced appropriately would occupy 1% of the Earth’s land, and 89,000 300-megawatt photovoltaic and concentrated solar power plants, which would occupy .33% of the Earth’s land surface.  The plan also requires 490,000 tidal turbines; 5,350 geothermal plants; 720,000 wave converters; and 1.7 billion rooftop photovoltaic systems.  Less than 2% of these energy producing installations current exist.  The plan also requires 900 hydroelectric plants, of which 70% are currently operational.

“I know it’s possible,” said Jacobson. It’s just a question of whether people want to do it.”

Of course, overhauling the entire world energy economy in 20 years is a Herculean task to say the least, and the researchers are upfront about the obstacles their plan faces.   They concede that not only would there need to be significant political support in the form of feed-in-tariff (FIT) programs, taxes on fossil fuels, and significant investment in long-distance transmission systems, but materials availability could also be a barrier in the long term.

“It’s all a question of politcal will,” said Jacobson. “It’s not a technical problem. If we shifted subsidies to things that are clean, that’s being smart. Why invest in something that puts out more carbon and air pollution rather than something that doesn’t?”

The idea of shutting off all of the world’s coal and nuclear plants and building hundreds of miles of wind farms and solar arrays  is controversial to say the least.  Aside from (not exactly minor) political, social, and economic obstacles, there is the issue of baseload power–what’s available around the clock, rain or shine, to keep the lights on–which we currently draw primarily from nuclear and fossil fuel plants.   Proponents of nuclear power like Stewart Brand argue that until there’s a massive storage system for wind and solar energy, renewables will remain supplemental sources of energy.

Jacobson and Delucchi do address this issue in their article. “Intermittency problems can be mitigated,” they write, “by a smart balance of sources, such as generating a base supply from steady geothermal or tidal power, relying on wind at night when it is often plentiful, using solar by day and turning to a reliable source such as hydroelectric that can be turned on and off quickly to smooth out supply or meet peak demand.”

Climate Watch sat down with ecologist and futurist Stewart Brand to talk about the rethinking of “traditional green pieties” that he says environmentalists will have to confront, in order to address climate change. In his new book, Whole Earth Discipline, he argues for a major change in the way “greens” have traditionally thought about stewarding the planet — one that calls for managing the earth’s natural infrastructure “with as light a touch as possible and with as much intervention as necessary.”

What do you think the world is facing in terms of climate change?

“I pretty much buy James Lovelock‘s approach that we’re warming toward an equilibrium of maybe five degrees warmer than now, which doesn’t sound like much, but the last time we were that was 55 million years ago and crocodiles were swimming around in the polar oceans. [Lovelock] thinks the carrying capacity for humans in a world that’s five degrees warmer would be about a billion to a billion-and-a-half people. And it could happen fairly quickly because there are various positive feedbacks that are self-reinforcing, amplification of change going on. A four-or-five-billion person die-back is horrible to contemplate. Nothing like it has ever happened in human history, and it does get your attention.

“I am persuaded by a number of data points he looks at and climatologists he listens to and the system dynamics of climate, which is tremendously non-linear. It has lots of these positive feedbacks in it and various thresholds. Sometimes we know where the threshold is, and sometimes we find out after we’ve passed it. Abrupt climate change, it turns out, is pretty common in the historical record and that’s what we could be looking at this century, maybe even in the first half of this century.”

You write in your book: “Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system: climate change.” Can you talk more about this?

“I wonder if there will be people turning up soon saying, “Let the climate do what it wants. Gaia’s just having her usual carryings-on and we must not stand in her way.” [Ed. Note: There are people already saying this] I think when it cuts this close to home, environmentalists do realize that when humans are an endangered species we’ve got to rise to the occasion and be green to protect this species and its habitat as well.

“There’s a shift that goes on because the standard, deep, ideological, emotional stance of environmentalists is that nature is always right and humans are always wrong, and this is a case when actually, nature is up to something we really, really don’t like and we have to do, as humans, something that’s right to head that off. That’s a switch. And it’s my point of leverage in the book which is to say, okay, bear that switch in mind, now think through all the things you’ve had opinions about for 20 or 30 years and revisit them.

“The climate crunch gives us permission, indeed encouragement, to rethink nuclear power, to rethink genetically-engineered food crops, to rethink how we feel about cities, and to start thinking in a serious way and an encouraging way about geo-engineering, which is direct intervention in the climate.”

The idea of “playing God” with nature can raise a lot of emotion and controversy…

“The thing is, we’ve been having god-like power in nature for a very long time, probably at least 10,000 years, maybe 55,000 years when we started doing massive burning to change the landscape in a way that we liked. In ecology, the current term is “niche construction” or “ecological engineering.” We don’t have a choice not to do it because it’s what we are doing. One of the terms for our era geologically is the ‘Anthropocene;’ the human-dominated era of geology. And so we’re already terraforming the Earth, and we’re doing it badly. So, is the choice to stop terraforming the Earth? No. Actually that’s no longer an option. The only choice is to stop doing it badly and start doing it well.”

It’s a large laboratory that we’re talking about in terms of learning from our mistakes, because we’ll be conducting our experiments (geo-engineering, bio-engineering, etc) in the world.

“We’re running an experiment in the world anyway by raising the greenhouse gas percentage in the atmosphere, and we’re starting to get results from that experiment, and we don’t like them, so we’re already doing interventionist science outside the lab in the laboratory of the world. If we don’t like what’s happening so far, we have no choice but to do better experimentation and better science and start getting the results that are better.”

How do you respond to Amory Lovins’ recent article on Grist, criticizing your position on nuclear power?

“I think it’s great that Amory Lovins, who is an old friend, has put up a rebuttal to my chapter on nuclear in the book. I think that’s absolutely fair and right since my whole chapter is basically a rebuttal of his anti-nuclear arguments.* I respect him enormously for most of the things I think he’s right about. I think he’s wrong about nuclear. He thinks I’m right about most things, and that I’m wrong about nuclear, so that’s the debate.”

*Last week we posted highlights from a conversation with Amory Lovins, aired originally on KQED’s Forum program. Brand’s name was not evoked in those excerpts but Lovins was critical of the idea of a nuclear power revival, dismissing it as financially unsupportable.