Many on the political left believe we can replace fossil fuels with 100 percent renewable energy. This belief has been bolstered by Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson, whose Solutions Project provides a roadmap for moving to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.
Celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo campaign for Jacobson’s Solutions Project, and social activist Naomi Klein imagines reinventing Democracy based on Jacobson’s work. Jacobson has also been influential in California’s commitment to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, and Gov. Jerry Brown is likely to promote this commitment at his upcoming global climate summit.
There is, however, significant disagreement among energy experts as to the viability of Jacobson’s 100 percent renewable roadmap. Many scientific organizations — such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the International Energy Agency –have concluded that our best chance at averting climate change is to use a diverse set of energy technologies that include renewable energy, nuclear energy and carbon capture storage.
Consider also the recent rebuttal of Jacobson’s plan in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, authored by 21 energy researchers, including prominent climate change and energy experts Ken Caldeira of Stanford, Daniel Kammen of UC Berkeley and Varun Sivaram of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Yet California is planning to transition to 100 percent renewable energy despite these considerable disagreements. This is a risky strategy that could destabilize California’s electric grid over the coming decades and cost Californians billions of dollars while failing to contribute significantly to averting climate change.
One hundred percent renewable energy plans are based on computer models and simulations. In the real world, however, the only low-carbon energy technology that has successfully replaced fossil fuels used for powering a national electric grid is nuclear energy.
This occurred in Sweden and France, with both nations replacing fossil fuels in less than 20 years. Today, France’s electric grid is 97 percent free of carbon emissions thanks to a combination of nuclear and renewable energy. Meanwhile, Germany — which, like California, is pursuing 100 percent renewable energy —gets only 19 percent of its electricity from wind and solar despite spending hundreds of billions of euros on these energy sources over the past 16 years.
Unfortunately, many Californians have accepted the narrative that nuclear power is too dangerous, despite the fact that not a single human being has died in the U.S. as the result of a radiation release from either civilian reactor accidents or the waste from these reactors over the past 50 years, with more than 100 civilian reactors running most of that time.
And 30 years after Chernobyl, the actual death toll from that accident is less than 100 (despite early predictions of high casualties), and not a single person has died or is expected to die as a result of the radiation release from Fukushima.
Meanwhile, 3.7 million people die prematurely every year worldwide due to air pollution from burning fossil fuels; climate change threatens floods and droughts that endanger the lives of millions; and ocean acidification threatens to cause a massive die off of the ocean food chain. With so much at stake, it seems unconscionable not to include nuclear energy in California’s portfolio of low-carbon energy. Only then would California be a true leader in averting climate change.
Stephen Williams, Santa Cruz, is a member of Environmental Progress, which advocates policies recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, He wrote this for The Mercury News.