Why the kerogen in oil shale will never fill up your tank

Posted on September 5, 2026 by

Source: Oil Shale vs. Shale Oil: What’s the difference? USGS

Preface. The basic reason oil shale was never developed was because it was not cooked enough.  Turning it into oil requires so much “cooking energy” that the energy return is negative, as the U.S. government found out after spending almost $7 billion ($42 billion 2026) in the 1970s trying to develop kerogen shale in Colorado and Wyoming. Accelerating geology came with too many energy and environmental costs to make it a commercial project (Nikiforuk 2013).

It is so hopeless you will notice most of my references are not recent. Though it can be done, Estonia produces a little, China too, where experiments continue to try to convert it to oil since there is so much of it.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Shell is pulling out of Colorado after 31 years of trying to get the shale out

29 Sep 2013. Kurt Cobb. Geology beats technology: Shell shuts down shale pilot project:

“The belief that technology can always overcome natural limits just took a big hit this week when Royal Dutch Shell PLC decided to shut down its pilot oil shale project in western Colorado after 31 years of experimentation. A clue [as to why they shut the project down] comes from coverage in The Denver Post: “Full-scale production would probably have required building a dedicated power plant.” In simple terms, it takes energy to get energy. Shell’s process requires copious amounts of electricity to heat the rock in place through boreholes in order to release the waxy hydrocarbons embedded in it. In this pilot project, the subterranean rock was heated for three years before liquids were captured and brought to the surface for further processing.

 

Shale oil will never be an energy resource

Oil shale is any sedimentary rock that contains solid bituminous materials that are released as petroleum-like liquids when the rock is heated.

1) Restoring the land after mining the shale will be very energy expensive. When oil shale is retorted, the inorganic portion of the shale expands considerably. The spent shale remaining after retorting has no commercial value, but it must be disposed of in an environmentally acceptable manner. Ideally, the spent shale is placed back in the mine, refilling the mined-out cavity and helping to prepare the area for land reclamation. Because of the popcorn effect, the volume of spent shale is greater than the volume of the mine from which it was taken. Thus even if the mine were completely refilled, there would still exist some amount of spent shale for which alternative disposal methods must be sought

2) Shale oil needs to be mined, pulverized, and heated to get the oil out. It’s done with machines that burn oil to dig, drill, blast, crush, load, haul, dump, heat, hydrogenate, refine, and transport the ore and final product.

3) The hydrogenation step requires a tremendous amount of water to provide hydrogen to refine the shale. Separating the hydrogen from the water uses a large amount of energy. An estimated one to four barrels of water are required for each barrel of oil. Where this water would come from is a mystery, the Colorado river is already insufficient for downstream users.

4) Randy Udall and Steve Andrews: “Compared to the coal that launched the Industrial Revolution or the oil that sustains Western Civilization, oil shale is a pathetic pretender…When it comes to energy, quality is everything. Quality can be measured in various ways—cost, convenience, and cleanliness all matter-—but energy density trumps them all…Pound for pound, oil shale contains one-tenth the energy of crude oil, one-sixth that of coal, and one-fourth that of recycled phone books…Dung cakes have four times more energy than oil shale…Searching for appropriate low-calorie analogies, we turn to food…Oil shale is said to be “rich” when it contains 30 gallons of petroleum per ton. An equal weight of granola contains three times more energy. The “vast,” “immense,” and “unrivaled” deposits of shale buried in Utah and Colorado have the energy density of a baked potato. If someone told you there were a trillion tons of tater tots buried 1,000 feet-deep, would you rush to dig them up? Oil shale has one-third the energy density of Cap’n Crunch, but no one is drilling in the cereal aisle”.

5) Steve Mut, CEO of Shell’s Unconventional Resources unit, spoke at the Denver ASPO 2005 conference about Shell’s project to use shale oil. He pointed out that people have been trying to do this for over 100 years, so there was no guarantee they’d succeed. Shell has been working on a small-scale project for over two decades. If they decide to scale it up to a level of producing significant amounts of shale oil, it would require eight to ten gigawatts of power a day, as much as a large city uses.

6) The Energy Returned on Energy Invested is at best 2 to 1 according to a study by Cleveland Cutler.  Charles A. S. Hall estimates you need an EROEI of 12 to 1 to keep Civilization-As-We-Know-It running, right now we’re at about 20 to 1 and when the oil age started, we started out at 100 to 1.

 

Shale In the News

30 September 2013. Steve Andrews. Shell’s Shale Oil Shutdown  1-800-dry-hole. ASPO.

Early last week, Shell Oil announced it was shutting down its oil shale research project in western Colorado. Combine their departure with Chevron’s exit back in February 2012 and you can count another nail in oil shale’s coffin.

Yet since this unconventional resource ranks among the largest in the world, estimated by some at 1+ trillion barrels of potential liquid energy, this might well not be the final chapter in efforts to develop it. But it probably should be.

Shale oil may be the fool’s gold of the energy world. As long-time friend, energy writer and commentator Randy Udall wrote back in 2005, “If crude oil is king, oil shale is a pauper. It’s the dregs. The mystery is not that we lack an oil shale industry; it’s that we’ve spent billions trying to develop one.” His most pointed question: are such development efforts acts of inspiration or desperation?

A badly-kept secret is that there is no oil in oil shale. The rock is actually called marlstone and the hydrocarbon it contains is a waxy substance that never went through the “oil window”—the heat and pressure applied over millions of years to turn the solid into liquid energy. Instead, developers such as Shell cooked the kerogen into petroleum by injecting heat energy. A lot of heat energy. Gigabunches of heat energy. In fact, so much was needed—one very large new power plant per 100,000 barrels/day of liquid produced—that the process, despite extensive R&D, never made economic sense.

Shell was guarded with the details of their energy balance analysis, also known as Energy Return on Energy Invested. But it seemed likely that for every unit of energy input to produce liquid from kerogen, the output was just two units, maybe 2.5 units best case. (For comparison, conventional oil in the USA is likely to result in roughly 10 units of energy output for every one unit input.) Further, while Shell claimed they owned enough water rights to supply the substantial amounts required during production, residents of arid western Colorado expected large impacts on their water supply.

The high energy and water requirements undoubtedly contributed to Shell’s exit, though the company tended to speak in terms of “evolving priorities” and “other opportunities. In Shell’s comments to journalists, they didn’t exactly say, “it’s over. Kaput. Finito.” After all, that would be fessing up to the fact that their “tens of millions of dollars” invested in oil shale R&D as of mid-2005 came up way short—a high-stakes gamble with some learning spinoffs, but mostly money down a rathole.

If misery loves company, Shell has plenty of it. During the 1915-1920 era, oil shale promoters endured the first of many investment boom and bust cycles. Half a century later, the most infamous of these crashes hit western Colorado hard; it was the flaming out of our $8 billion federal investment in oil shale started during the late 1970s. When Exxon Mobil Corp. pulled the plug on its $5 billion project on May 2, 1982 (called “Bloody Sunday”), it cut 2,200 jobs and sent west-central Colorado into a decade-long depression. Today, Shell’s decision only impacts perhaps a few dozen Coloradans. But it deals a body blow to the latest round of oil shale hype.

As recently as 2005, one California Congressman—who must have been either blind, dumb or devious—intoned that if we would just get with the oil shale program, as a US Dept. of Energy report claimed, the USA could be producing 10 million barrels a day of the stuff in a couple of decades. Given that our oil production of the $3/barrel variety actually peaked at close to 10 million b/d some 40+ years ago, the notion that we could ever produce that much from very expensive shale oil was delusional.

Randy ranked in the top tier of oil shale skeptics. Our tour together of Shell’s Mahogany Creek research site in August 2005 kick-started his concerns. Over the next eight years, he penned a number of brutally frank op-eds, wrote “The Illusive Bonanza: Pulling the Sword from the Stone,” and started speaking out about the challenges and downsides of oil shale. He rarely pulled his punches.

During our visit to Shell’s R&D site, company personnel showed us the small area, a footprint about the size of a two-car garage, from which they had produced 2000 barrels of high-quality petroleum liquids. That was the culmination of 25 years of R&D efforts. They opined that after another five years of R&D, by 2010 they should be able to make a go/no-go decision about commercialization. But in 2010, Shell admitted they needed more time. Now we have their answer: we’re outta here.

Before Randy died this past June, it may be that his last publication was his article questioning a recent twist in the oil shale story: the entrance by Estonia’s government-owned oil company Enefit into the US oil shale saga. Estonia apparently agreed to subsidize Enefit’s efforts to export its oil shale technology to the US and elsewhere. An Estonian mining engineer wondered why Estonian taxpayers were subsidizing half a billion kroons for such development. Randy went on as follows:

“But what is a ‘kroon,’ you might ask. Kroons were once the local currency in Estonia. Then, when the country adopted the Euro, the old banknotes were compressed into bricks and burned for heating fuel. Smarter to burn those, in my view, than to burn oil shale.” Yet the sheer size of this illusive prize and the high price of petroleum products make it likely that some level of R&D will continue, with or without oil majors like Shell and Chevron. So, as Yogi Berra might put it, it ain’t over til it’s over…though it probably should be.

Steve Andrews is a retired energy consultant and analyst.

 

Dec 3, 2003. Brian Robins.   Shale-oil dream ends in company collapse  theage.com.au

The collapse yesterday of Southern Pacific Petroleum marked the end of one of the most enduring and ambitious dreams of the local resources industry: shale oil.

In 1968, US business magazine Forbes heralded shale oil, essentially a process to extract oil from shale rock, as “a veritable treasure of black gold . . . so plentiful it can supply this country’s needs for at least 200 years.” The US never had a shale oil project.

When it collapsed, Southern Pacific was at work on the Stuart project near Gladstone, one of a clutch of shale oil prospects it held west of the Queensland regional centre.

While there have been other resource dreams that came to nought – such as Australian Magnesium Corp – shale oil differed. It died a lingering death that began not long after the concept emerged at the start of the 1980s, when US oil giant Exxon said it would outlay a then unheard of $400 million to buy half the Rundle oil shale prospect from Southern Pacific and its Central Pacific Minerals stablemate. Southern Pacific and Central Pacific, for much of their life known as the Rundle twins, merged in 2002.

Doubts about the technical feasibility of extracting shale oil and environmental problems arose soon after Rundle hit the news, and were never resolved. It was a complex and inefficient process. In fact, shale oil is not actually oil at all, but kerogen, with the shale heated and the resulting vapour becoming liquid oil when cooled.

The numbers just never added up: shale oil was supposed to be economic with the price of oil at more than $US13 a barrel, while Southern Pacific had reserves in excess of 26 billion barrels of oil, not far off Libya’s 29.5 billion barrels. The technical issues never were resolved and sceptical investors kept well clear of the shares.

The trigger for the interest in shale oil was the surge in oil prices in the 1970s as OPEC squeezed supplies, triggering a hunt for alternative fuels.

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Nov 30, 2003. Steve Raabe. Geology sealed Colorado’s fate in oil crash. Denver Post.

In the game of synthetic petroleum, Mother Nature has dealt a full house to Alberta, Canada, and a pair of deuces to Colorado.

Colorado’s synfuels bluff was called in 1982 when a budding oil-shale boom suddenly went bust, sending the Western Slope economy into a depression that took years to mend.

Meanwhile, northern Alberta now is pumping a steady flow of synthetic crude to the United States from a huge oil-sands deposit worth as much as $9 trillion.

“The forecast for oil sands is significant. They’re in business,” said Craig Van Kirk, head of the petroleum engineering department at Colorado School of Mines.

“On the other hand, oil shale is not in business,” he said. “Never has been, perhaps never will be.”

The difference is water. Because they contain a trace of water, doughy oil sands are easier to turn into crude than is rocky shale, which had its moisture squeezed out during eons of pressure and heat.

In a geologic quirk of fate, Canada’s oil sands evolved from ancient seabeds that retained some of their moisture.

The gooey black substance that makes up oil sands consists of individual particles of sand and clay, each surrounded by a thin film of water, then coated with a layer of heavy petroleum.

The processing of oil sands is a relatively simple technique using steam or hot water to melt oil away from sand, a separation made easy by the underlying film of water.

No such benefit exists in oil shale, where lake bottoms lost moisture through pressure and heat, creating a shalelike rock called marl.

Oil-bearing hydrocarbons in shale, known as kerogen, are bonded tightly within the rock. That requires the difficult, expensive process of cooking oil out of the shale.

Coloradans learned of oil shale’s economic and technical problems on May 2, 1982, a day still remembered as “Black Sunday,” when Exxon suddenly pulled the plug on its multibillion-dollar Colony oil shale project near Parachute.

The overnight closure left more than 2,000 workers unemployed and created a wave of bankruptcies, foreclosures and business failures on the Western Slope.

Government subsidies and soaring prices in the late 1970s and early 1980s raised hopes that oil shale could address the United States’ dependence on imported oil.

Oil-shale resources in western Colorado’s Piceance Basin contain as much as 300 billion barrels of recoverable oil, equaling about one-half of all crude oil reserves in the Mideast.

But Exxon, Union Oil of California (Unocal), Shell Oil and a handful of smaller players never have produced a profitable barrel of synthetic crude from shale.

Energy experts say oil prices, after reaching all-time highs of nearly $40 a barrel in 1981, have fallen to levels that don’t justify the huge investments necessary to build commercial oil-shale operations.

And even if prices soared again, technical and environmental impediments make shale an iffy prospect.

“It’s not so much price as it is a technological barrier,” said ExxonMobil spokesman Chris Dobbs.

The process of cooking oil out of shale requires large amounts of natural gas or electricity. Disposal of spent shale is difficult, and virtually every stage of recovery and processing consumes lots of water.

The hurdles haven’t stopped Shell from returning to Rio Blanco County with an experimental technique that may one day prove economically feasible.

Instead of the conventional technique of mining shale and baking it in industrial-sized ovens to recover oil, Shell is drilling holes into shale formations and suspending electric heaters in the well bores.

Oil melted from the electric heat is then pumped to the surface.

The “in-situ” underground process creates less surface disturbance and eliminates the problem of spent shale disposal.

“It’s promising because we think it’s environmentally more viable than in the past,” said Shell spokeswoman Jill Davis.

“But this is still in a research phase,” she said. “It’s important not to tout this because of what has happened in the past with the booms and busts.”

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Jul 12, 2004. Paul B. Weisz.Basic Choices and Constraints on Long-term Energy Supplies. Physics Today.

Oil shale, or bitumen, is sedimentary rock containing dilute amounts of “heavy oil” or near-solid carbonaceous residues. The US has negligible amounts of that resource. Worldwide estimates of the total energy contents are large but highly speculative.

To harvest the dilute solid carbonaceous contents requires drastic measures: Either underground combustion, heating, steam, or air to drive the carbonaceous solids toward the surface, or the mining of huge volumes of solids using heat, solvents, and steam to extract the resource. The extracts must be further processed to yield usable hydrocarbon fuels, a process that requires further energy sacrifices. Compared to petroleum, these heavy oils present additional refining and environmental problems because of the abundance of nitrogen, oxygen, and metal compounds found in them. Also, the amount of CO2 released during processing and use greatly exceeds that released by the current use of petroleum fuels.

Weisz is an emeritus professor of chemical and bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and a retired senior scientist and manager at the Central Research Laboratory of the Mobil Corp. He is also currently an adjunct professor of chemical engineering at the Pennsylvania State University.

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67658 Hayduke  Dec 21, 2004 In the late 70s and early 80s I had a contract with the
Department of Energy (DOE) to document their oil shale and tar sands projects in
Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota. I trooped about all over the country, most often in the Rifle, Colorado area, shooting video and stills, interviewing content experts and preparing detailed technical reports and video documentaries for the folks back in Washington, DC.

I learned a few interesting things:
1) Oil shale doesn’t contain oil; it contains kerogen. Kerogen requires considerable
processing once it’s released from the shale before it can be used as a fuel. Yes, it
will burn if you keep an intense flame on it long enough.
2) When oil shale is retorted to release the contained kerogen, it expands 2 to 3 times
it’s in-situ volume.
3) So-called “in-situ” retorting requires considerable hard rock mining in order to
prepare the rubbleized oil shale for retorting. Somewhere around 10% 0f the kerogen can
be pumped out in in-situ processing.

After several years of effort, it was pretty well determined, by the scientists in the
field, that developing oil shale is an energy sink

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18 Dec 2005.  Randy Udall and Steve Andrews. Oil shale may be fool’s gold. Denver Post.

Buried underground in western Colorado are a trillion tons of oil shale. For a century, men have tried and tried again to unlock this energy source. But the rocks have proved stubborn, promising much, delivering little.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy published a new report on oil shale. It claimed that the nation could wring “200,000 barrels a day from oil shale by 2011, 2 million barrels a day by 2020, and ultimately 10 million barrels a day” from fields in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. These predictions – both the production targets and their timing – are preposterous, as some industry experts admit.

But hyping oil shale is nothing new. As geologist Walter Youngquist once wrote, “Bankers won’t invest a dime in ‘organic marlstone,’ the shale’s proper name, but ‘oil shale’ is another matter.”

California Rep. Richard Pombo and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch are spearheading efforts to jumpstart the industry. “I find it disturbing that Utah imports oil from Canadian tar sands, even though our oil shale resource remains undeveloped,” says Hatch.

In truth, oil shale presents a paradox. If these rocks are, as some claim, the richest fossil fuel resource on Earth, why has it been so difficult to unlock them?

The primary explanation is that oil shale is a lousy fuel. Compared to the coal that launched the Industrial Revolution or the oil that sustains the world today, oil shale is the dregs. Coal seams a few feet thick are worth mining because coal contains lots of energy. If coal is good, oil is even better. And oil shale? Per pound, it contains one-tenth the energy of crude oil, one-sixth that of coal.

Searching for appropriate analogies, we enter the realm of Weight Watchers. Oil shale is said to be “rich” when a ton yields 30 gallons of oil. An equal weight of granola contains three times more energy. America’s “vast,” “immense” deposits of shale have the energy density of a baked potato. Oil shale has one-third the energy density of Cap’n Crunch, but no one is counting on the Quaker Oats Company to become a major energy producer soon.

Historically, oil shale has been mined, crushed and roasted in large kilns, or “retorts.” The slag, swollen in volume and contaminated with arsenic, must then be disposed. The process is so costly, laborious and polluting that global output has never exceeded 25,000 barrels a day, compared to 84 million barrels of conventional oil production.

In the last 150 years, humans have used 1 trillion barrels of conventional oil. The second trillion will be consumed in the next 30 years. Given projected demand for fuel, Royal/ Dutch Shell has been experimenting with a new way to produce shale oil, a way that is, at first glance, more promising.

Humor columnist Dave Barry once demonstrated that if you put a “strawberry Pop-Tart in a toaster for five minutes and 50 seconds, it will turn into a snack-pastry blowtorch, shooting flames up to 30 inches high.” Putting a chunk of oil shale into your toaster would not offer similar excitement, but in a strange way, Shell’s fascinating experiments near Rangely resemble something Barry might attempt if he had the money to build the world’s largest underground toaster oven.

The plan is audacious. Shell proposes to heat a 1,000-foot-thick section of shale to 700 degrees, then keep it that hot for three years. Beam me up, Scotty, but first share some details. Imagine a 100-acre production plot. Inside that area, the company would drill as many as 1,000 wells. Next, long electric heaters would be inserted in preparation for a multi-year bake. It’s a high-stakes gamble, but if it works, a 6-mile-by- 6-mile area could, over the coming century, produce 20 billion barrels, roughly equal to remaining reserves in the lower 48 states.

Although Shell’s method avoids the need to mine shale, it requires a mind-boggling amount of electricity. To produce 100,000 barrels per day, the company would need to construct the largest power plant in Colorado history. Costing about $3 billion, it would consume 5 million tons of coal each year, producing 10 million tons of greenhouse gases. (The company’s annual electric bill would be about $500 million.) To double production, you’d need two power plants. One million barrels a day would require 10 new power plants, five new coal mines. And 10 million barrels a day, as proposed by some, would necessitate 100 power plants.

How soon will we know whether Shell’s technology is economic? The company plans to do more experiments, before making a final decision by 2010. If it pulls the trigger, it would be at least three or four years before the first oil would flow, perhaps at a rate of 10,000 barrels a day. That’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of current U.S. consumption. But if it turns out that Shell needs more energy to produce a barrel of oil than a barrel contains, bets are off. That’s the equivalent of burning the furniture to keep the house warm. $$$ Energy is the original currency; electricity its most valuable form. Using coal-fired electricity to wring oil out of rocks is like feeding steak to the dog and eating his Alpo.

In a ham-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. With half the world’s oil shale resources located here, our region is committed. Another recent report by the RAND Corp. warned that if oil shale developers “overstress the environmental carrying capacity of the area, we may never see more than a few hundred thousand barrels per day of production.” Amen.

Large-scale development of the kind proposed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Pombo would be a disaster. The DOE casually dedicates all of western Colorado’s surplus water to oil shale, proposes enormous open-pit mines 2,000 feet deep, and advocates retorting up to 6 billion tons of shale each year. That’s twice the tonnage of all coal mined in the U.S. and China. This is not a vision, it is a nightmare.

Americans love panaceas. We want thinner thighs in 30 days, a pill to cure baldness, an ultrasonic carburetor that will double our mileage. A magic wand would be nice, because the nation faces serious energy challenges. Since domestic oil production peaked 30 years ago, the need for energy efficiency, conservation and renewable energy has been obvious. Instead, like an addict on a binge, we continue to pursue a policy of “strength through exhaustion.” Drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before improving our woeful vehicle efficiency is one example of this brain-dead approach.

What contribution can oil shale make to energy security? Producing 100,000 barrels per day of shale oil does not violate the laws of physics. But the nation currently consumes that much oil every seven minutes. Improving the efficiency of our automobiles by 2 miles per gallon would save 10 times as much fuel, saving consumers $100 billion at the pump. The National Academy of Sciences has stated that cars, trucks and SUVs that get 30, 40 or 50 miles per gallon are doable. An aggressive national commitment to fuel efficiency is not optional, it’s inevitable. In time, a more efficient fleet could save 20 times as much petroleum as oil shale is likely to ever provide.

All hype aside, oil shale is the poorest of the fossil fuels, containing far less energy than crude oil, much less even than hog manure, peat moss or Cap’n Crunch. A meager amount of energy, tightly bound up in an enormous volume of rock, oil shale seems destined to remain an elusive bonanza, the petroleum equivalent of fool’s gold.

Randy Udall directs the Community Office for Resource Efficiency, a nonprofit energy office in Carbondale. Steve Andrews is a Denver-based energy expert.

Best article by far:  Oct 3, 2005. Randy Udall. The Illusive Bonanza: Oil Shale in Colorado “Pulling the Sword from the Stone”.

Other references

Nikiforuk, A. 22 May 2013. Difficult Truths about ‘Difficult Oil’. As we work down the hydrocarbon pyramid, energy gets messier and much more costly. TheTyee.ca

Cleveland, Cutler, J., et al. June 2010. An Assessment of the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of Oil Shale. Boston University.

2005.  James T Bartis, et. al. Oil Shale Development in the United States Prospects and Policy Issues. Prepared for the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy by RAND.

Oct 2008. Walter Youngquist. SHALE OIL–THE ELUSIVE ENERGY.
Hubbert Center Newsletter # 98/4 M. King Hubbert center for Petroleum Supply Studies.

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‘The oil we eat’. Following the food chain back to iraq

Posted on August 25, 2026 by

Source: The Oil We Eat – How Our Food System Depends On Oil and How Fragile It Makes Our Food Security

Preface. Even though this article was published in 2004, it is still true today, only worse. This article will never be out of date because it is so powerfully written:

It requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

When we say the soil is rich that’s not not a metaphor. Soil is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain–wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hyper-charged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency” of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

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Vanishing open spaces: population growth and sprawl in America

Posted on August 18, 2026 by

 

Preface.  Before the fossil fuel age began, up to 90% were farmers. The end of the brief blip of oil production will send us back to that time (if we aren’t so far into overshoot we go back to being hunter-gatherers). Yet we’re losing a lot of prime farmland to development.  We need all the land we can get in the future. As it is, in the Great Depression people were hungry at a time when there were 100 million people and 25% of them were farmers, while now just 1% of people are farmers and there are 348 million today.  

Kolankiewicz writes in “Vanishing Open Spaces Population Growth and Sprawl in America” below, that cities were built where the best farmland and water existed. As cities and towns grow, they sprawled outwards over this prime farmland. This is where 85% of developmental sprawl happens. The United Nations calls this soil sealing – the permanent covering of soil with impermeable materials such as asphalt or structures.  This leads to a total soil loss of food and fiber production, for water to infiltrate and be held and purified, and often increases flooding, the ability of the soil to hold water, loss of purification capacities, loss of carbon sequestration, increased urban heat from the loss of vegetation, and less biodiversity (FAO 2015).

Between 1945 and 1975, enough farms disappeared beneath concrete to pave Nebraska (Montgomery 2007), about 49.5 million acres (77,350 square miles).

Between 1982 and 2010 the U.S. lost 41.4 million acres, 14% of its crop land.  That’s equal to 65,000 square miles, an area as large as Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, New York, and Pennsylvania

Over a third of all land that has ever been developed occurred in the last 25 years.  If we keep paving over cropland at this rate, it will all be gone in 200 years.  

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Admiral Rickover 1957: Energy Resources & Our Future

Posted on August 11, 2026 by

Preface. I’ve shortened and reworded this prescient speech.  You can see all of it at “Energy resources and our future” – remarks by Admiral Hyman Rickover delivered in 1957″ archived at http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph240/klein1/docs/rickover.pdf and resilience.org has a speech by Congressman Roscoe Bartlett from 2007 about this as well here.

“We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% of the world’s energy.

The most significant distinction between optimistic and pessimistic fuel reserve statistics is that the optimists generally speak of the immediate future – the next 25 years or so – while the pessimists think in terms of a century. A century or even two is a short span in the history of a great people. It seems sensible to me to take a long view, even if this involves facing unpleasant facts.

The popularizers of scientific news would have us believe that there is no cause for anxiety, that reserves will last thousands of years, and that before they run out science will have produced miracles. Our past history and security have given us the sentimental belief that the things we fear will never really happen – that everything turns out right in the end. But, prudent men will reject these tranquilizers and prefer to face the facts so that they can plan intelligently for the needs of their posterity.

The disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants is a problem which must be solved before there can be any widespread use of nuclear power.

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Posted in An Overview, By People, Dependence on Oil, Energy Slaves, Limits To Growth, Military, Nuclear Waste, Other Experts, Overpopulation, Overshoot, Peak Oil | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

The Green New Deal is not a solution for the real problem: Overshoot

Posted on August 4, 2026 by

Preface.  Seibert & Rees’ paper is important and well-written, without unintelligible scientific jargon.  It explains overshoot in just 13 pages, and covers the most important issues we face and real solutions. It explains why the Green New Deal is a fantasy and the reasons “renewables” can’t possibly help solve overshoot.  I started to highlight sections I liked but gave up, it’s all good, all worth highlighting.

While the consequences of overshoot are dire, it may seem like a blessing if you watch this powerful video showing overpopulation all over the world, roads, dumps, uncollected garbage, buildings, cities, traffic, unsold cars, sewage, dangerously polluted air, and more in Lagos, China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and dozens of other places     1 Hour of Urban Hell on Earth    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpe_004ioNE

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A transition from fossil fuels to renewables could take a century – if it ever happens

Posted on July 28, 2026 by

In 2024 and the previous 60 years, primary energy consumption was 80% or more fossil fuels. An energy transition is not happening, fossil fuel growth exceeds renewable growth, reliability requires fossil fuel electricity generating plants to remain, they are not being shut down

Preface. Vaclav Smil explains why energy transitions take 50 to 100 years in the article below.  Hirsch wrote a report  for the Department of Energy in 2005, and also explained why you’d want to prepare at least 10 to 20 years for the peaking of world oil supplies, though at an ASPO conference years later, said 30 years or more (my summary of the Hirsch DOE report is here). As Smil writes below: “It is delusional to think that the United States can install in 10 years wind and solar generating capacity equivalent to that of thermal power plants that took nearly 60 years to construct.”

With conventional oil production peaking in 2005 and unconventional slightly raising the plateau since 2015, the time when oil starts to decline is looming, experts suggest anywhere from 2027 to 2035, but even if 2040 or some other date, the only thing that matters is that fossil fuels are finite, and we are running out of time.

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Electrifying freight trains in the U.S. is a bad idea

Posted on July 21, 2026 by

Diesel-electric locomotives use electricity to drive forward motion despite the name ‘diesel’.  A large diesel engine turns a shaft that drives an AC generator which makes electricity.  This electrical energy powers large electric motors at the wheels called ‘traction motors’ that have better traction and adhesion Source: https://edisontechcenter.org/Dieseltrains.html

In the U.S., freight rail tracks are privately owned. Companies put much of their profit back into maintaining the existing 95,000 mile infrastructure of tracks. Which can’t go just anywhere — tracks are laid on land with less than a 1% grade whenever possible.  And who would pay for electrification? Not private companies.

Diesel-electric locomotives are ALREADY electric, and more energy efficient than electric freight trains. Diesel-electric freight is very efficient and moves 4 times more tons per mile than trucks because they hardly ever accelerate, stop, start, or travel over 40 mph. I have a chapter on this in “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation” more extensive than this post if you would like to know more.

High-speed passenger rail is all the rage, but when it comes to electrification of America’s freight trains there’s almost total silence. Yet Europe and Russia have electrified freight trains, so why not here?

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Why Nuclear Power can’t replace fossil fuels

Posted on July 14, 2026 by

Preface. Economic reasons are the main hurdle to new nuclear plants now, with capital costs so high it’s almost impossible to get a loan, especially when natural gas is so much cheaper and less risky. But there are other reasons nuclear power is in trouble as well. Far more plants are in danger of closing than are being built because they’re so expensive (37 were predicted to shut down in 2013, 21 have been or will be soon). The $14 billion Vogtle reactors ended up cost $35 billion — of taxpayer money.  If there is another Fukushima or spent fuel pool release, the public will also be on the line for potentially trillions of dollars (Stone, R. May 24, 2016. Spent fuel fire on U.S. soil could dwarf impact of Fukushima. & Near miss at Fukushima is a warning for U.S., panel says. Science)

I have several chapters on nuclear reactors in my next book (and nuclear waste, war, and winter) that will be more up-to-date than this post, hopefully out in 2026 or 2027.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Nuclear power plants take too long to build

The Vogtle reactors were AP 1000 MODULAR reactors, which small nuclear reactor proponents say will differentiate make them more successful.  No they won’t, and so far they cost billions too, beyond what lenders will lend. k

It often takes 10 years to build one due to the many years it takes to get licensed, fabricate components, and finally another 4 to 7 years to actually build it. Or more: the Vogtle units 3 and 4 have been under construction since 2013 and aren’t expected to be ready until 2023.

That’s too long for investors to wait, they want far more immediate returns. Techno-optimists can argue that some new-fangled kind of reactor could be built more quickly.  But the public is afraid of reactors because there is nowhere to store their million-years of toxic wastes, so it’s bound to go slowly as protestors demand stringent inspections every step of the way. So even a small, simple reactor would have many hurdles to overcome.

Financial markets are wary of investments in new nuclear plants until it can be demonstrated they can be constructed on budget and on schedule. Nuclear plants have not been built in the United States for decades, but there are unpleasant memories, because construction of some of the currently operating plants was associated with substantial cost overruns and delays. There is also a significant gap between when construction is initiated and when return on investment is realized.

Nuclear power costs too much

U.S. nuclear power plants are old and in decline. By 2030, U.S. nuclear power generation might be the source of just 10% of electricity, half of production now, because 38 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are past their 40-year life span, and another 33 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are over 30 years old. Although some will have their licenses extended, 37 reactors that produce half of nuclear power are at risk of closing because of economics, breakdowns, unreliability, long outages, safety, and expensive post-Fukushima retrofits (Cooper 2013. Nuclear power is too expensive, 37 costly reactors predicted to shut down and A third of Nuclear Reactors are going to die of old age in the next 10-20 years.

New reactors are not being built because it takes years to get permits and $8.5–$20 billion in capital must be raised for a new 3400 MW nuclear power plant (O’Grady, E. 2008. Luminant seeks new reactor. London: Reuters.). This is almost impossible since a safer 3400 MW gas plant can be built for $2.5 billion in half the time. What utility wants to spend billions of dollars and wait a decade before a penny of revenue and a watt of electricity is generated?

In the USA there are 104 nuclear plants (largely constructed in the 1970s and 1980s) contributing 19% of our electricity.  Even if all operating plants over 40 years receive renewals to operate for 60 years, starting in 2028 it’s unlikely they can be extended another 20 years, so by 2050 nearly all nuclear plants will be out of business.

Joe Romm “The Nukes of Hazard: One Year After Fukushima, Nuclear Power Remains Too Costly To Be A Major Climate Solution” explains in detail why nuclear power is too expensive, such as:

  • New nuclear reactors are expensive. Recent cost estimates for individual new plants have exceeded $5 billion (for example, see Scroggs, 2008; Moody’s Investor’s Service, 2008).
  • New reactors are intrinsically expensive because they must be able to withstand virtually any risk that we can imagine, including human error and major disasters
  • We’d need to add an average of 17 plants each year, while building an average of 9 plants a year to replace those that will be retired, for a total of one nuclear plant every two weeks for four decades — plus 10 Yucca Mountains to store the waste
  • Before 2007, price estimates of $4000/kw for new U.S. nukes were common, but by October 2007 Moody’s Investors Service report, “New Nuclear Generation in the United States,” concluded, “Moody’s believes the all-in cost of a nuclear generating facility could come in at between $5,000 – $6,000/kw.”
  • That same month, Florida Power and Light, “a leader in nuclear power generation,” presented its detailed cost estimate for new nukes to the Florida Public Service Commission. It concluded that two units totaling 2,200 megawatts would cost from $5,500 to $8,100 per kilowatt – $12 billion to $18 billion total!
  • In 2008, Progress Energy informed state regulators that the twin 1,100-megawatt plants it intended to build in Florida would cost $14 billion, which “triples estimates the utility offered little more than a year ago.” That would be more than $6,400 a kilowatt.  (And that didn’t even count the 200-mile $3 billion transmission system utility needs, which would bring the price up to a staggering $7,700 a kilowatt).

Extract from Is Nuclear Power Our Energy Future, Or in a Death Spiral? March 6th, 2016, By Dave Levitan, Ensia:

In general, the more experience accumulated with a given technology, the less it costs to build. This has been dramatically illustrated with the falling costs of wind and solar power. Nuclear, however has bucked the trend, instead demonstrating a sort of “negative learning curve” over time.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the actual costs of 75 of the first nuclear reactors built in the U.S. ran over initial estimates by more than 200 percent. More recently, costs have continued to balloon. Again according to UCS, the price tag for a new nuclear power plant jumped from between US$2 billion and US$4 billion in 2002 all the way US$9 billion in 2008. Put another way, the price shot from below US$2,000 per kilowatt in the early 2000s up to as high as US$8,000 per kilowatt by 2008.

Steve Clemmer, the director of energy research and analysis at UCS, doesn’t see this trend changing. “I’m not seeing much evidence that we’ll see the types of cost reductions [proponents are] talking about. I’m very skeptical about it — great if it happens, but I’m not seeing it,” he says.

Some projects in the U.S. seem to face delays and overruns at every turn. In September 2015, a South Carolina effort to build two new reactors at an existing plant was delayed for three years. In Georgia, a January 2015 filing by plant owner Southern Co. said that its additional two reactors would jump by US$700 million in cost and take an extra 18 months to build. These problems have a number of root causes, from licensing delays to simple construction errors, and no simple solution to the issue is likely to be found.

In Europe the situation is similar, with a couple of particularly egregious examples casting a pall over the industry. Construction began for a new reactor at the Finnish Olkiluoto 3 plant in 2005 but won’t finish until 2018, nine years late and more than US$5 billion over budget. A reactor in France, where nuclear is the primary source of power, is six years behind schedule and more than twice as expensive as projected.

“The history of 60 years or more of reactor building offers no evidence that costs will come down,” Ramana says. “As nuclear technology has matured costs have increased, and all the present indications are that this trend will continue.”

Nuclear plants require huge grid systems, since they’re far from energy consumers. The Financial Times estimates that would require ten thousand billion dollars be invested world-wide in electric power systems over the next 30 years.

In summary, investors aren’t going to invest in new reactors because:

  • of the billions in liability after a meltdown or accident
  • there may only be enough uranium left to power existing plants
  • the cost per plant ties up capital too long (it can take 10 billion dollars over 10 years to build a nuclear power plant)
  • the costs of decommissioning are very high
  • properly dealing with waste is expensive
  • There is no place to put waste — in 2009 Secretary of Energy Chu shut down Yucca mountain and there is no replacement in sight.

Nor will the USA government pay for the nuclear reactors given that public opinion is against that — 72% said no (in E&E news), they weren’t willing for the government to pay for nuclear power reactors through billions of dollars in new federal loan guarantees for new reactors.

Cembalest, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, wrote “In some ways, nuclears goose was cooked by 1992, when the cost of building a 1 GW plant rose by a factor of 5 (in real terms) from 1972” (Cembalest).

Nuclear power depends on fossil fuels to exist (Ahmed 2017)

“One extensive study finds that the construction, mining, milling, transporting, refining, enrichment, waste reprocessing/disposal, fabrication, operation and decommissioning processes of nuclear power are heavily dependent on fossil fuels (Pearce 2008). This raises serious questions about the viability of nuclear power in about two decades time, when hydrocarbon resources are likely to be well past their production peaks.

Further, the study concludes that nuclear power is simply not efficient enough to replace fossil fuels, an endeavor which would require nuclear production to increase by 10.5% every year from 2010 to 2050-an “unsustainable prospect”. This large growth rate requires a “cannibalistic effect”, whereby nuclear energy itself must be used to supply the energy to construct future nuclear power plants. The upshot is that the books cannot be balanced as the tremendous amounts of energy necessary for mining and processing uranium ore, building and operating the power plant, and so on, cannot be offset by output in a high growth scenario. In particular, growth limits are set by the grade of uranium ore available-and high-grade uranium is predicted to become rapidly depleted in coming decades, leaving largely low-grade ore falling below 0.02% (Pearce 2008)”.

Peak Uranium

Energy experts warn that an acute shortage of uranium is going to hit the nuclear energy industry. Dr Yogi Goswami, co-director of the Clean Energy Research Centre at the University of Florida warns that proven reserves of uranium will last less than 30 years. By 2050, all proven and undiscovered reserves of uranium will be over.  Current nuclear plants consume around 67,000 tonnes of high-grade uranium per year. With present world uranium reserves of 5.5 million tons, we have enough to last last 42 years.  If more nuclear plants are built, then we have less than 30 years left (Coumans).

Uranium production peaked in the 1980s but supplies continued to meet demand because weapons decommissioned after the Cold War were converted commercial fuel. Those sources are now drying up, and a new demand-driven peak may be on the horizon.

The only way we could extend our supplies of uranium is to build breeder reactors.  But we don’t have any idea how to do that and we’ve been trying since the 1950s.

China switched on its 19th nuclear power reactor as it rushes to increase nuclear generation. The country plans to switch on 8.64 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity in 2014 as compared to 3.24 gigawatts of new capacity in 2013. The availability of uranium for China’s nuclear industry is becoming an issue. Beijing may have to import some 80 percent of its uranium by 2020, as compared to the current 60 percent.

There may not even be enough uranium to power existing plants. For example, Nuclear fission startup TerraPower, founded and chaired by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has raised $750 million to develop advanced nuclear reactors to serve as alternatives to the light-water reactors. The future Natrium reactor is hoped to be running by 2028 for just $4 billion dollars. It will use a different fuel than standard nuclear reactors — high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which is enriched with more uranium than the fuel used in traditional nuclear plants. But the only source of HALEU is in Russia, and with the war in Ukraine threatening to go on for quite a while, this source is untenable. And even if money from Biden’s Inflation and climate acts is used to create a HALEU source, that’s many years away. Worse yet, the project will lose $2 billion in funding if it isn’t ready by 2028 (Wesoff 2022).

Source: Colorado Geological survey

Related articles:

Nuclear power is Way too Dangerous

In 2016, top journal Science, based on the National Academy of Sciences of lessons learned from Fukushima, reported that a nuclear spent fuel fire at Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania could force 18 million people to evacuate.  This is because there’s still nowhere to put nuclear waste, so it’s stored in pools of water on-site that are not under the containment dome, but open to the air, and a prime target for terrorists at over 100 locations.  If electric power were ever down more than 10 days due to a natural disaster, electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon / solar flare, or any other reason, these nuclear pools would catch on fire and spew out radiation for many square miles and force millions of people to evacuate.  Also see: Shocking state of world’s riskiest nuclear waste sites

The dangers of nuclear waste is the main reason California and many other states won’t allow new nuclear power plants to open. To find out more about the dangers of nuclear waste and why we have nowhere to store it, read by book review of “Too Hot to touch: The Problem of high-level nuclear waste“.

Greenpeace has a critique of nuclear power called The Global Crisis of Nuclear Waste (2018) and Nuclear Reactor Hazards (2005) which makes the following points:

  1. As nuclear power plants age, components become embrittled, corroded, and eroded. This can happen at a microscopic level which is only detected when a pipe bursts. As a plant ages, the odds of severe incidents increase. Although some components can be replaced, failures in the reactor pressure vessel would lead to a catastrophic release of radioactive material. The risk of a nuclear accident grows significantly each year after 20 years. The average age of power plants now, world-wide, is 21 years.
  2. In a power blackout, if the emergency backup generators don’t kick in, there is the risk of a meltdown. This happened recently in Sweden at the Fosmark power station in 2006. A former director said “It was pure luck that there was not a meltdown. Since the electricity supply from the network didn’t work as it should have, it could have been a catastrophe.” Another few hours and a meltdown could have occurred. It should not surprise anyone that power blackouts will become increasingly common and long-lasting as energy declines.
  3. 3rd generation nuclear plants are pigs wearing lipstick – they’re just gussied up 2nd generation — no safer than existing plants.
  4. Many failures are due to human error, and that will always be the case, no matter how well future plants are designed.
  5. Nuclear power plants are attractive targets for terrorists now and future resource wars. There are dozens of ways to attack nuclear and reprocessing plants. They are targets not only for the huge number of deaths they would cause, but as a source of plutonium to make nuclear bombs. It only takes a few kilograms to make a weapon, and just a few micrograms to cause cancer.

If Greenpeace is right about risks increasing after 20 years, then there’s bound to be a meltdown incident within ten years, which would make it almost impossible to raise capital. (And indeed there was, Fukushima had a meltdown in 2011).

It’s already hard to raise capital, because the owners want to be completely exempt from the costs of nuclear meltdowns and other accidents. That’s why no new plants have been built in the United States for decades.

The Energy Returned on Energy Invested may be too low for investors as well. When you consider the energy required to build a nuclear power plant, which needs tremendous amount of cement, steel pipes, and other infrastructure, it could take a long time for the returned energy to pay back the energy invested. The construction of 1970’s U.S. nuclear power plants required 40 metric tons of steel and 190 cubic meters of concrete per average megawatt of electricity generating capacity (Peterson 2003).

The amount of greenhouse gases emitted during construction is another reason many environmentalists have turned away from nuclear power.

The costs of treating nuclear waste have skyrocketed. An immensely expensive treatment plant to cleanup the Hanford nuclear plant went from costing 4.3 billion in 2000 to 12.2 billion dollars today. If the final treatment plant is ever built, it will be twelve stories high and four football fields long (Dininny 2006).

A crisis will harden public opinion against building new Nuclear Power Plants

I wrote this section before the Fukushima disaster, and there will be more disasters as aging nuclear power plants, extended beyond their lifetime and being pushed to produce electricity full-tilt, succumb to many hazards detailed in the Green Peace International report “Nuclear Reactor Hazards“.  It’s only a matter of time before one of our aging reactors melts down.  When that happens, the public will fight the development of more nuclear power plants.  Other factors besides aging that could cause a disaster are natural disasters, failure of the electric grid, increased and more severe flooding, drought, and severe and unstable weather from climate change, lack of staffing as older workers retire with few educated engineers available to replace them.

Even Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, thought Nuclear Power Plants were dangerous and should be put underground for safety in case of a failure and to make clean-up easier.

Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima plant in Japan were Mark 1 reactors. Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric quit after they became convinced that the Mark 1 nuclear reactor design they were reviewing was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident (Mosk).

Nuclear power plants are extremely attractive targets for terrorists and in a war.  Uranium is not only stored in the core, but the “waste” area near the plant, providing plenty of material for “dirty” or explosive atom bombs.

For details, read the original document or my summary of the Greenpeace report.

EROEI and decommissioning

See: Decommissioning a nuclear reactor

The energy to build, decommission, dispose of wastes, etc., may be more than the plant will ever generate  a negative Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI).  A review by Charles Hall et al. of net energy studies of nuclear power found the data to be “idiosyncratic, prejudiced, and poorly documented,” and concluded the most reliable EROEI information was too old to be useful (results ranged from 5 to 8:1). Newer data was unjustifiably optimistic (15:1 or more) or pessimistic (low, even less than 1:1).  One of the main reasons EROEI is low is due to the enormous amount of energy used to construct nuclear power plants, which also create a great deal of GHG emissions.

Scale

“To produce enough nuclear power to equal the power we currently get from fossil fuels, you would have to build 10,000 of the largest possible nuclear power plants. That’s a huge, probably nonviable initiative, and at that burn rate, our known reserves of uranium would last only for 10 or 20 years.” (Goodstein). Are there enough sites for 10,000 plants near water for cooling yet not so low that rising sea levels destroy them or drought remove cooling water supplies?

Staffing

Nuclear power has been unpopular for such a long time, that there aren’t enough nuclear engineers, plant operators and designers, or manufacturing companies to scale up quickly (Torres 2006).  The number of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) nuclear certificates held around the world fell from 600 in 1980 to 200 in 2007. There is also an insufficient supply of people with the requisite education or training at a time when vendors, contractors, architects, engineers, operators, and regulators will be seeking to build up their staffs. In addition, 35% of the staff at U.S nuclear utilities are eligible for retirement in the next 5–10 years.

There could be shortages in certain parts and components (especially large forgings), as well as in trained craft and technical personnel, if nuclear power expands significantly worldwide.

There are fewer suppliers of nuclear parts and components now than in the past.

Nuclear Proliferation & terrorism targets

Can we really prevent crazed dictators for 30,000 years from using plutonium and other wastes to wage war?  Even if a nuclear bomb is beyond the capabilities of society in the future, the waste could be used to make a dirty bomb. Meanwhile, reactors make good targets for terrorists who do have the money to hire scientists help them make a nuclear bomb from stolen uranium or plutonium.

Water 

Nuclear plants must be built near water for cooling, and use a tremendous amount of water. Scientists are certain that global warming will raise sea levels — about half of existing power plants would be flooded.  Climate change will cause longer and more severe droughts, with the potential for not enough water to cool the plant down, and more severe storms will bring more hurricanes and tornadoes.

NIMBYism

Never underestimate NIMBYism, which is already preventing nuclear power plants from being built. The political opposition to building thousands of nuclear plants will be impossible to overcome.

No good way to store the energy

One of the most critical needs for power is a way to store it. Utility scale storage batteries  have not been invented despite decades of research, and only enough materials exist on earth to build NaS batteries at a cost of over $44 trillion that would take up 945 square miles of real estate (Friedemann 2015)

A great deal of the electric power generated would need to be used to replace the billions of combustion engine machines and vehicles rather than providing heat, cooling, cooking power and light to homes and offices. It takes decades to move from one source of power to another. It’s hard to see how this could be accomplished without great hardship and social chaos, which would slow the conversion process down. Desperation is likely to lead to stealing of key components of the new infrastructure to sell for scrap metal, as is already happening in Baltimore where 30-foot tall street lights are being stolen (Gately 2005).

Related posts:  Energy Storage

Ramping up and down quickly to balance solar & wind damages nuclear power plants

Nuclear plants can’t ramp up or down quickly like natural gas — they are very incompatible with intermittent wind and solar power.

The German nuclear plant Brokderf was damaged because its operators increased and decreased its output to respond to energy grid fluctuations. The incident supports the theory that nuclear and renewable energy generation are incompatible. Brokdorf’s period of inactivity has cost plant owner EON more than €100 million, according to reports by Bloomberg.

State Minister for Energy Robert Habeck warned that the power plant’s output should not be increased or decreased at short notice to adapt to the supply of renewable energies on the electricity grid because “atomic energy is not a bridging technology”.

A 2011 study by Greenpeace also concluded that renewables and nuclear are not compatible and that fuel rod damage is a possible consequence.

Kiel’s nuclear supervisory authority explained that the corrosion of Brokdorf’s fuel rods was a result of the reactor’s capacity being increased from 1,440 MW to 1,480 MW in 2006.  The investigation also concluded that the decision to run the plant as a load-following power station, where output was tailored to grid fluctuations, contributed to the damage (Dehmer 2017).

Breeder reactors. You’d need 24,000 Breeder Reactors, each one a potential nuclear bomb (Mesarovic)

  • We’ve known since 1969 that we needed to build breeder reactors to stretch the lifetime of radioactive material to tens of thousands of years, and to reduce the radioactive wastes generated, but we still don’t know how to do this. (NAS)
  • If we ever do succeed, these reactors are much closer to being bombs than conventional reactors – the effects of an accident would be catastrophic economically and in the number of lives lost if it failed near a city (Wolfson).
  • The by-product of the breeder reaction is plutonium. Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. How can we guarantee that no terrorist or dictator will ever use this material to build a nuclear or dirty bomb during this time period?

Assume, as the technology optimists want us to, that in 100 years all primary energy will be nuclear. Following historical patterns, and assuming a not unlikely quadrupling of population, we will need, to satisfy world energy requirements, 3,000 “nuclear parks” each consisting of, say, 8 fast-breeder reactors. These 8 reactors, working at 40% efficiency, will produce 40 million kilowatts of electricity collectively. Therefore, each of the 3,000 nuclear parks will be converting primary nuclear power equivalent to 100 million kilowatts thermal. The largest nuclear reactors presently in operation convert about 1 million kilowatts (electric), but we will give progress the benefit of doubt and assume that our 24,000 worldwide reactors are capable of converting 5 million kilowatts each. In order to produce the world’s energy in 100 years, then, we will merely have to build, in each and every year between now and then, 4 reactors per week! And that figure does not take into account the lifespan of nuclear reactors. If our future nuclear reactors last an average of thirty years, we shall eventually have to build 2 reactors per day to replace those that have worn out.  By 2025, sole reliance on nuclear power would require more than 50 major nuclear installations, on the average, in every state in the union.

For the sake of this discussion, let us disregard whether this rate of construction is technically and organizationally feasible in view of the fact that, at present, the lead time for the construction of much smaller and simpler plants is seven to ten years. Let us also disregard the cost of about $2000 billion per year — or 60 percent of the total world output of $3400 billion — just to replace the worn-out reactors and the availability of the investment capital. We may as well also assume that we could find safe storage facilities for the discarded reactors and their irradiated accessory equipment, and also for the nuclear waste. Let us assume that technology has taken care of all these big problems, leaving us only a few trifles to deal with.

In order to operate 24,000 breeder reactors, we would need to process and transport, every year, 15 million kilograms (16,500 tons) of plutonium-239, the core material of the Hiroshima atom bomb. Only 10 pounds are needed to construct a bomb.  If inhaled, just ten micrograms (.00000035 ounce) of plutonium-239 is likely to cause fatal lung cancer. A ball of plutonium the size of a grapefruit contains enough poison to kill nearly all the people living today. Moreover, plutonium-239 has a radioactive life of more than 24,000 years. Obviously, with so much plutonium on hand, there will be a tremendous problem of safeguarding the nuclear parks — not one or two, but 3000 of them. And what about their location, national sovereignty, and jurisdiction? Can one country allow inadequate protection in a neighboring country, when the slightest mishap could poison adjacent lands and populations for thousands and thousands of years? And who is to decide what constitutes adequate protection, especially in the case of social turmoil, civil war, war between nations, or even only when a national leader comes down with a case of bad nerves. The lives of millions could easily be beholden to a single reckless and daring individual.

References

Ahmed, Nafeez. 2017. Failing States, Collapsing Systems BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence. Springer.

Amy J (2021) Georgia nuclear plant cost tops $27B as more delays unveiled. Associated Press.

Cembalest, M.21 Nov 2011. Eye on the Market. The quixotic search for energy solutions.  J P Morgan

Coumans, C.  4 Sep 2010. Uranium reserves to be over by 2050. Deccan Chronicle.

Dehmer, D. July 19, 2017. German nuclear damage shows atomic and renewable power are unhappy bedfellows. Der Tagesspiegel

Dininny, S. 7 Sep 2006. Cost for Hanford waste treatment plant grows to $12.2 billion. The Olympian / Associated Press.

Friedemann, A. 2015. When Trucks stop running: Energy and the Future of Transportation. Springer.

Gately, G. 25 Nov 2005. Light poles vanishing — believed sold for scrap by thieves 130 street fixtures in Baltimore have been cut down. New York Times.

Goodstein, D. April 29, 2005. Transcript of The End of the Age of Oil talk

(Greenpeace) H. Hirsch, et al. 2005. Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/nuclearreactorhazards.pdf

Heinberg, Richard. September 2009. Searching for a Miracle. “Net Energy” Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society. Post Carbon Institute.

Hirsch, R. L., et al. February 2005. Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, mitigation, & risk management. Department of Energy.

Hoyos, C. 19 OCT 2003 Power sector 'to need $10,000 bn in next 30 years'. Financial Times.

Mesarovic, Mihajlo, et al. 1974. Mankind at the Turning Point.  The Second Club of Rome Report.  E.P. Dutton, 1974 pp. 132-135

Mosk, M. 15 Mar 2011. Fukushima: Mark 1 Nuclear Reactor Design Caused GE Scientist To Quit In Protest. ABC World News.

(NAS) “It is clear, therefore, that by the transition to a complete breeder-reactor program before the initial supply of uranium 235 is exhausted, very much larger supplies of energy can be made available than now exist. Failure to make this transition would constitute one of the major disasters in human history." National Academy of Sciences. 1969. Resources & Man. W.H.Freeman, San Francisco. 259.

Peterson, P. 2003. Will the United States Need a Second Geologic Repository? The Bridge 33 (3), 26-32.

Pearce, J. M. 2008. Thermodynamic Limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology. International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology 2(1): 113.

Torres, M. “Uranium Depletion and Nuclear Power: Are We at Peak Uranium?” http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379#more

Wesoff E (2022) Bill Gates’ nuclear startup wins $750M, loses sole fuel source. Canary Media

Wolfson, R. 1993. Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Technology. MIT Press

To see what plants are open, closing, or being built (excel):

United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission 2014-2015 Information Digest. Nuclear materials, radioactive waste, nuclear reactors, nuclear security.

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Energy, Water, & Climate Change are interdependent

Posted on July 7, 2026 by

Preface. This is a very long post with summaries of two GAO reports on interdependencies of energy, water, and climate change from 2014 and 2012, which are still true today. While cheap and plentiful oil remains, these problems can be fixed.  As energy declines, the interdependencies are likely to snowball and accelerate collapse.

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Why fusion power is Forever Away

Posted on June 30, 2026 by

Preface. When my husband Jeffery Kahn was a science writer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, astrophysicists told him fusion was 30 years away and always would be.

ITER was supposed to be ready in 2016, but the completion date for full fusion to produce net energy is now 2039. At the very end, below the references, I list the progress of ITER but got tired of how many delays there were and have stopped doing so.

After the overview below, there are over half a dozen more articles about fusion. There are many issues with fusion not included in this post, see the others in category Energy/Fusion here.

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