I get an early start on my Summer Reading List for 2023, with the most important book you will ever read!
Favorite quote from this book:
Malthusians always end up pointing to energy. There is only so much to go around, they say, so human aspirations must be crushed. Lest we run out of energy, they claim, people in advanced countries must accept lower living standards and the poor nations must stay poor forever.
The Case for Nukes, How we can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future, Robert Zubrin (Polaris Books, 2023)
Before I get into why The Case for Nukes is the most important book you will ever read, I must take a moment to praise its author and establish his credibility for such a bold assertion. Bob Zubrin is a remarkable engineer with a PhD in nuclear engineering and many years of experience at Lockheed Martin. He is the founder of The Mars Society and of Pioneer Astronautics. Iâve known Zubrin for several years and I assure you that he is âwicked smart.â Bob and I squared off in a public debate on the value of NASAâs Lunar Gateway at USC a few years ago and when I was asked to debate Mars settlement at the Oxford Union last year, he kindly agreed to prep me. With the possible exception of Elon Musk, I know of no living person who has worked harder for humanity or the planet Earth. The Case for Nukes, is one in a series of âThe Case forâ books by Zubrin, which also include The Case for Mars and The Case for Space. While each of Zubrinâs many books are must reads, The Case for Mars has been very influential in the space community. In fact, Zubrinâs vision of an efficient âMars Directâ plan for getting astronauts to the Red Planet and explanations of the use of in-situ resources to further reduce costs, inspired Musk, who provides the introduction to that bookâs latest edition.
If you read The Case for Nukes with an open mind, you will be convinced that nuclear power is the only hope for saving our planet from emissions while also maintaining or improving global living standards. Nukes can save us from the global warming peril that the media obsesses over and other, more critical threats, like ocean acidification and hydrocarbon pollution. He will also convince you that a future with nearly unlimited, emissions-free nuclear energy promises a brighter, healthier, and more peaceful future for humankind. In doing, so Zubrin leads us on a multidisciplinary tour de force in physics, engineering, economics, history, and policy.
On the technical side youâll learn how to build your own nuclear reactor, though Zubrin does caution that doing that at home may attract some unwanted regulatory attention. Iâd best warn you Zubrin is a snarky writer, after my own heart (see my book Death by China). With his tongue firmly in his cheek, he suggests that â⊠you should not try to save money by omitting a containment building,â because the NRC sends out inspectors who, âare not the sharpest people you will ever meet, but having a containment building is on their checklist.â He also offers a whole section on how a terrorist, or your ex-spouse, might attempt catastrophically to destroy your reactor; spoiler alert: blowing up a nuke plant is neither an easy nor effective form of terrorism. He even discusses how to (âasking for a friendâ) utilize standard industry equipment to produce bomb grade nuclear material; spoiler alert: not practical.
Zubrin shows us, step-by-step, why nuclear energy is affordable and safe â in fact, 70 years of experience show us that nuclear is demonstrably the safest form of energy ever developed. Outside of Chernobyl, nobody has ever been killed by radiation from a nuclear plant. Zubrin notes, that as with many Communist state boondoggles, the design and operation of Chernobyl was so bad that itâs approximately fifty fatalities were actually, âvictims of the Soviet Union.â He rams home the point, backed by data, that public reaction to this and the non-fatal events at Three Mile Island and Fukushima drove the continued use of much worse fuels, which kill millions every year. The alternative, of course, is just abandoning our whole experiment with civilization.
Got questions about nuclear disposal or proliferation? Zubrin has the answers, read. Want to understand the difference between every type of nuclear reactor, including 4th gen entrepreneurial startups? Read. What about nukes in space? Read. Is harnessing the even more potent power of fusion possible? Read.
Zubrin is also situationally aware. He understands the important social and political context in which scientific data is gathered, analyzed, and presented to the public. He also knows â from years of frustrating battles with NASA Mars planners â that when governments are involved, big engineering choices are surprisingly suboptimal. Governments routinely make peculiar policy decisions, because some special interests can always smell an opportunity to direct massive public investment into their own coffers. In authoritarian countries, this is easily accomplished with bribes. In democracies, advocacy and lobbying organizations are masterful at manipulating the public conscious. These professional fear mongers create crises, in order to gain the political support they require to ensure that your taxes will fund their salaries. Bob pulls no punches here. He names names and show us specifically how the founders of the ideological environmental movement took money from big oil in exchange for going hysterically anti-nuclear back in the 1970s. They found that model worked well for supporting their non-profit businesses and they have not been able to give it up. Zubrin scaldingly comments:
Practical environmentalists support nuclear energy because it is a safe way to produce unlimited amounts of energy with minimal pollution or harm to nature. Ideological environmentalists oppose it for precisely that reason. In fact â despite coal combustion fumes blacking the air and oil spills despoiling coastlines â they fight it with far greater vehemence than they do fossil fuels. This is because air and water pollution are not threats to them. Far from it, they are fundraisers. They hate nuclear power because it solves problems they need to have.
Here lies the key to our environmental problem: those we have trusted to protect our planet have literally been killing it. Nominally âenvironmentalâ ideologues sabotaged our only reliable emissions free energy source. They utilized public activism to drive public fear and intentionally create an onerous regulatory burden for the nuclear industry. They drove up plant construction cost in the U.S. (not elsewhere) by 10x, while often reducing safety by adding complexity and delay to to a previously smooth process. Then, seeing another opportunity, CO2 emissions accelerated by their own work against nukes, they leveraged the looming climate problem into a new âcrisis,â demanding hysterical responses and unworkable solutions, solar and wind, favored by their financial backers. Zubrin notes, some of these folks are so filled with self-hatred that their real objective is to remove other human beings from the Earth or at least make their lives as short, dark, and miserable as possible.
Zubrin offers us a better way forward. As he suggests in the final chapter, âOnly in a world of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.â If you, like me, hope for that world of peace and plenty, buy ten copies of The Case for Nukes and give away nine. Iâll be giving away a lot of them.