My Clean Break column this week picks up on the noticeable absence — or quietness — of the nuclear power lobby at the climate talks in Durban these past two weeks, and the declining fortunes of the industry. This is good or bad, depending on your perspective. If you’re a George Monbiot, you’re worried about the impact on our already impossible struggle against climate change. If you’re Greenpeace, you’re saying good riddance. Some believe in a post-Fukushima world that low natural gas prices and the high cost of conventional fission reactors are creating a rare opportunity for the emergence of better, safer and lower-cost nuclear technology designs. That may be so, if you’re an optimistic, but those will still take time to develop… ah yes, time. We could use more of that.

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Tyler Hamilton

For years the nuclear power lobby has muscled its way into international climate negotiations and asserted itself as a critical part of any serious effort to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Not so much during climate talks in Durban, South Africa, these past two weeks. There were some media mentions and the occasional sound bite from industry officials, but the nuclear lobby — still suffering from a Fukushima hangover — stayed relatively quiet this time around.

Even Patrick Moore, Greenpeace [alleged?] co-founder turned nuclear booster, seems to have moved on. His gig these days is defending the oilsands, part of a recent advertising campaign from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The Fukushima disaster in Japan certainly served a blow to the nuclear power industry. The low price of natural gas and the global economic downturn — and reduced demand for electricity — hasn’t helped matters.

The economics of building new nuclear plants also remain in question. A report just released by the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association points out that even before the Fukushima accident, the decades-long trend of reactor projects being delayed and coming in dramatically over budget was still a reality, as recent experiences in Finland and France clearly show.

The Worldwatch Institute reported last week that generating capacity of the world’s nuclear power fleet dropped 2.4 per cent in 2011, causing nuclear’s share of the world energy mix to fall slightly.

The first 10 months of this year saw the closing of 13 reactors, contributing to a reduction in the total number in operation around the world to 433 from 441. Growth is happening in developing countries such as China, India and Pakistan, but these are far outweighed by reactor shutdowns in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.

So much for the much-heralded nuclear renaissance. “These numbers can hardly encourage the (nuclear) industry,” said Worldwatch president Robert Engelman.

As much as the anti-nuclear lobby must be cheering, these numbers also beg the question: if not nuclear, then what?

Some environmentalists, while not particularly fans of nuclear power, do worry about the pullback and how it will impact what are already pitiful efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

If, for example, a decline in nuclear capacity means more countries — particularly China — burning more coal and natural gas instead of embracing more renewable energy, then we’re merely trading one risk for another (out-of-control climate change) with a more certain, broad-reaching outcome.

As U.K. Guardian columnist and environmentalist George Monbiot has said, “The choice between renewables and nuclear is a false one. We appear to need both” – as painful a reality as that might be.

If we accept this, then the question shouldn’t be about how to get rid of nuclear power, but about how to make it better and safer.

“For nuclear to gain significant share, it must change,” writes U.K. journalist Mark Halper in a recent report on emerging nuclear innovations, penned for Canadian cleantech consultancy Kachan & Co.

Fukushima gave the world cause for pause, according to the report, but it also created an opportunity to move the nuclear industry in a new direction. “There has never been a better time for mavericks to come forward with safer, better and less costly ways to split atoms or, in the case of the elusive but reachable notion of fusion, to meld them together.”

In Halper’s view, part of the problem is that the nuclear technology we have today was a poor choice from the start, given that it produces weapons-grade plutonium as its waste, is vulnerable to meltdowns, and can potentially release dangerous amounts of radioactive material if something goes horribly wrong.

There were many alternatives to choose from half a century ago, but the fission reactor design most in use today was the result of Cold War decision-making.

“As undesirable as plutonium waste is today, it was in demand during the atomic weapons build up of the Cold War, helping the water-cooled uranium reactor win the day in the 1960s,” Halper writes. “It was a VHS victory over several superior Betamax alternatives.”

Some Betamax alternatives, however, are trying to make a comeback. The Kachan report outlines a number of technology alternatives currently in play, some of them based on designs or ideas that have been around for several decades.

Included in this list are reactors that use thorium as fuel instead of uranium, or which are cooled using gas. Molten salt, pebble bed and fast-neutron reactors are also being seriously considered. And yes, even fusion technology, including a mechanical reactor from Vancouver-based General Fusion, is grabbing attention.

Some designs deal with the toxic waste and nuclear proliferation issues. Others improve significantly on safety, such as eliminating the potential for meltdown. This is all exciting news for those outside the old boys nuclear club.

Unfortunately, they don’t offer a quick fix. Our nuclear regulators, underfunded as they are, haven’t the resources and time to understand, let alone establish rules for, new nuclear reactor designs. It will take many years, perhaps decades, for competing technologies to take hold.

But time is something severely lacking when it comes to avoiding the worst effects of climate change. This, even with “old” nuclear technology in decline and better alternatives on the rise, is the conundrum we face.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

In my book Mad Like Tesla I have a chapter on a company called General Fusion, which is making what is in essence a mechanical fusion reactor — a thermonuclear diesel engine, if you will — using $50 million or so in government grants and venture capital, some of which has come from Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. General Fusion says it can do with tens of millions and within a few years what large, bureaucratic international consortia, such as ITER, aim to do with many billions over at least a couple of decades.

But enough about GF. You can read the book for that.

I mention this because as part of the chapter I go into a bit of history around nuclear fusion, and specifically some of the past scandals related to cold-fusion claims — e.g. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann’s public claim in 1989 that they had achieved a cold fusion reaction in their university lab. If you can’t remember the day of that event, just go on YouTube to view the original news conference. The media was abuzz, and the world thought we finally had the solution to the world’s growing energy crisis. Yay! Except, wait, nobody else could replicate it and after a few months government scientists put out a comprehensive report that said Pons and Fleischmann’s claim lacked “convincing evidence.”

The two scientists, tails under their legs, walked out of the limelight and the quest for “cold fusion” was, as far as the mainstream media were concerned, a dead end.

Except is wasn’t a dead end. Since then there have been many serious and not-so-serious scientists quietly labouring away on cold fusion. One of the most prominent is Peter Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The group, generally, is shunned by the mainstream scientific community, and yes, spurned by a media still stinging more than two decades after Pons and Fleischmann.

But it will be interesting to see how long they will stay out of this story, considering the progress Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi are apparently making.

Back in January 2011 the two men demonstrated their own cold fusion apparatus, which they claim fuses nuclei of nickel and hydrogen to produce copper and huge amounts of excess energy. The device is being called the E-Cat, which stands for “energy catalyzer.” According to the site E-Cat World, which was created to follow the work of Rossi and Focardi, “The E-Cat is a device in which hydrogen gas, powdered nickel metal, and an undisclosed catalyst are combined to produce a large amount of heat through a little understood low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) process inside a specially designed chamber… In this process, when an external heat source is applied (electric or fossil) it is claimed that the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, a proton, penetrates a nickel nucleus and in doing so a nickel atom becomes a copper atom, and releases a large amount of thermal energy” — much more than the energy that goes into the process. That heat, of course, is used just like any heat source to drive a steam generator that produces electricity.

Furthermore, no radioactive waste is created from the process and no CO2 is released, it is claimed.

Honestly, I don’t know what Rossi and Focardi have, but they have attracted much attention in the blogosphere — no surprise there — and have conducted a number of demonstrations in front of scientists, such as two Swedish physicists who — while still skeptical — have admitted that the reaction is real and not based on chemical reactions.

I write all of this now because, as he promised earlier this year, Rossi has plans to demonstrate a 1-megawatt version of his technology later in October, and possibly as early as Oct. 6 will test a single E-Cat unit in Uppsala, Sweden. Apparently a number of scientists from around the world — and some select journalists — have been invited to attend. The demonstration of the 1 -megawatt plant will be interesting, as this is being positioned as a pre-commercial demonstration. Something to watch for, certainly, and the outcome of this larger 1-megawatt demonstration could either reinforce the skepticism toward the cold fusion concept or, after 20 years, finally attract the attention of the mainstream media.

Stay tuned. In the meantime, it’s worth watching this 60 Minutes show from spring 2009 — one of the rare detailed looks by a mainstream media outlet at the state of cold-fusion research. It cited research from the U.S. Pentagon, specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which found after a thorough analysis of the research that “there no doubt that anomolous excess heat is produced from these experiments.”

Also in the show, Robert Duncan, vice-chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in energy measurement, said he was a cold-fusion skeptic until he took a closer look at the data. He’s now convinced that we should be taking seriously some of the research in the field. “To say we don’t fundamentally understand the process, and that’s why we’re not going to study it, it’s like saying we’re too sick to go to the doctor,” he says, encouraging the mainstream scientific community to do their homework before making knee-jerk dismissals. “Read the published results, talk to the scientists, and never let anybody else do your thinking for you.”

I’ll report back later in October with an update on the Rossi and Focardi demonstration.

Just one more note: the term cold fusion is thrown around loosely now to encompass any kind of non-chemical reaction in a relatively ambient-temperature environment that can’t be easily explained. Defined narrowly, what Rossi and Focardi are attempting to do may not even be cold fusion — or even just fusion. But it’s something that may be producing much more energy than goes in. The same can be said for BlackLight Power, which claims it has a catalyst-driven process that turns hydrogen atoms into what the company calls hydrinos. The process of turning hydrogen to hydrinos releases an enormous amount of energy, according to the company — another venture to watch.

Calling each of these innovations a form of “cold fusion” is the equivalent of calling the research crackpot science, and this does a disservice to those individuals who are devoting their life and labours to exploring these energy unknowns. Perhaps one day we can move beyond the cold fusion label and the memories of Pons and Fleischmann and give this broad area of research a more committed, objective look. We need more of this kind of exploration and experimentation, not less. We should cautiously praise it; not ridicule and ignore.

General Fusion, of course, is far from a cold fusion play — though anything considered unconventional fusion is often wrongly tossed into the cold fusion bucket. What General Fusion is attempting is a lower-cost mechanical approach to fusion that takes the best of magnetic fusion (ITER) and intertial confinement fusion (U.S. National Ignition Facility) — i.e. a hybrid approach known as magnetized target fusion.

Keep your eyes on General Fusion as well, and on the fusion field in general. Often written off as that forever-emerging but never-emerging technology, there are significant advancements coming down the pipeline — sooner than many people think.

It’s shameless self promotion, I know, but this is how you create awareness of books, and the point of writing Mad Like Tesla was to create awareness of the innovation going on around clean energy and the immense barriers inventors and entrepreneurs face. I also wanted to celebrate those much-needed risk takers in society, without whom we will never have the kind of breakthroughs necessary to tackle our energy demons. It’s part of the reason I write and have maintained this Clean Break blog for the past six years, without financial gain. It’s a labour of love, as time consuming as it often can be.

Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and Their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy was launched this month and has been well-received. The reviews so far have been positive, and awareness of the book is slowly building. But not fast enough. I want to take this moment to ask my readers, many of whom have already purchased the book (thank you!), to help spread the word. Share this link or the Mad Like Tesla website (www.madliketesla.com) on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Refer to it when commenting on the various blogs you might follow. And for my media friends out there — whether in the mainstream press or the blogosphere — please consider a review, or alternatively, I’m happy to chat about the many odd and inspiring stories in this book. Please see press release here.

Thank you all for your ongoing interest and support. BTW: Many have asked, so I’m happy to report that the e-book version of Mad Like Tesla is now available at Amazon.com.

The Power Workers’ Union, representing the well-compensated workers at Hydro One and Ontario Power Generation, have run yet another full-page advertisement in the Toronto Star in an attempt to scare the public with talk of “big multi-nationals”  and foreign “Trojan Horses” threatening in “stealth” to chip away at Hydro One’s iron grip on Ontario’s electricity system. Can we say paranoid?

You see, Hydro One and its union are complaining they can’t keep up with the demands of homeowners and farmers who want to connect their solar rooftop systems to the grid. Industry, in response, is wondering what gives? If Hydro One can’t do it — and many justifiably accuse the utility of intentionally dragging its feet — then let’s let other players come into the market that can do it. Of course, Hydro One doesn’t want that because it threatens its hegemony over the Ontario grid. Hydro One has had two years or more to prepare for the increased connection requests that were expected to come through the feed-in tariff program, yet it is acting now as a deer in the headlights that couldn’t possibly accommodate the influx without sacrificing grid reliability. It leads one to believe whether top officials and union leaders at this utility — which earns generous incomes through Ontario ratepayers (they seem to forget about this) — are intentionally delaying action in hopes that a Progressive Conservative government will be elected, after which they can continue with the status quo: nuclear and fossil fuel generation.

What gets me is the misinformation they’re prepared to spread through these full-page advertisements. Here’s one: “So far, the tens of billions Ontario has spent on intermittent wind and solar energy is not delivering the promised benefits to the environment or the economy.” Wha? Would be nice to see something backing up that claim. I mean, Ontario ratepayers only pay for the renewable energy they receive, and two, any capital costs have come from the private sector, not ratepayers, and these investments have created thousands of jobs — non-unionized jobs, which is what is ruffling the PWO’s feathers.

PWO is pro-nuclear, pro-centralized generation, and pro-big transmission at a time when the global electricity market is moving to become more decentralized and less carbon-intensive. It is a throwback to an earlier era, and it’s struggling to protect what it has and it won’t let the truth get in the way.

That’s the real threat to the future of Ontario’s electricity system, not green energy.

Canadian sites are taking pre-orders for a few more days still, but for my U.S. readers Amazon.com has started shipping my new book Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and Their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy. The book tells the stories of some clean energy entrepreneurs/inventors taking huge risks and thinking outside the box to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. Each one is at a different level of development but all face similar barriers along their journey. The stories set the stage for discussion about a specific type of clean energy, technology or field of discovery (e.g. fusion, solar, waste-heat recovery, biofuels, energy storage, biomimicry, etc.) supported by some historical context and current-day examples.

Why Mad Like Tesla? That’s explained in the introduction, but in a nutshell Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla invented many important technologies in his lifetime. yet he faced constant struggle against naysayers and skeptics who couldn’t, at first, grasp the significance of what he was sharing with the world. Many dismissed Tesla as a mad scientist, and yet his inventions shaped the world largely for the better. So, in my view, if someone today is mad like Tesla, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s quite a good thing, actually — we need more of these people, for the changes necessary in our world will not come from the kind of cautious, incremental steps being taken today.

I have a website for the book in the works, but it won’t be ready until end of August.

Thanks for your support!