We want to speculate qualitatively by playing with the idea of technological progress: so let us put ourselves on the side of the absolute materialist boor who measures things by quantity, and well we can state the following law:
Given a technological level of a certain discipline, it will take an amount of energy greater than or equal to that technological level to advance to the next technological level.
That is, consider nuclear fission: in order to advance one level of technology, and thus be able to achieve nuclear fusion, an amount of energy equal to or greater than that which was required to reach the previous level of technology (i.e. nuclear fission in this example) is required.
A corollary is: the next technology level may not necessarily yield better results than the previous one.
If, for example, we were to consider photovoltaic panels as the next level after the nuclear fission reactor (chronologically they came later in fact), photovoltaic panels provide, for the same investment of resources, less energy per unit of energy invested in building them than a nuclear reactor.
In fact, there is a quantity, called E-ROI, or Energy Return On Investment, which shows how many units of energy are invested compared to how many units of energy are obtained during the operation of the plant (this is obviously net of the knowledge required to develop a certain technology). Just to get some numbers from wikipedia nuclear is at EROI 106 while rooftop photovoltaic panels are at 4 or 7. Obviously, a website will tell you what number you find… but it is just to give an order of magnitude. Hydroelectric is at 50 for example, in fact it uses 19th century technology (reinforced concrete and ignorant water turbines) and produces quite a bit of energy (but it radically changes certain environments, in Europe mostly mountainous).
All this is to make the point that if for some reason we completely lost (in Europe for example) the knowledge to build nuclear reactors, the risk would be that we might never be able to realise nuclear fusion. For nuclear fusion requires an enormous amount of energy to carry out experiments, run laboratories, research institutes and physically activate the reaction itself. It is certainly not with photovoltaic panels or windmills that one would be able to have the energy density to carry out such a titanic feat, just look at EROI.
Let’s look at it from the other perspective instead, let’s pretend we are going back technologically 200 years, so with the steam engine and coal, because for example it was decided to de-industrialise Europe. If you wanted to re-establish an economy based on oil or gas, it would be much more complicated than in the past. In some places (colonial Libya for example) you would drill a 20m hole in the ground and oil would come out by itself. What does that mean? That the energy needed for extraction was practically zero, i.e. compatible with the low efficiency of steam engines or the technology of the time (200 years ago). Today, that ease does not exist because those sources have been consumed. The threshold of access to that fossil energy is much higher (because you no longer drill a hole in the ground and oil comes out).
Here: the energy threshold!, back to the Law explained above.
In essence, regressing to forms of energy that have a low EROI may mean not being able to develop key technologies with much higher EROI (nuclear fusion).
Some of the reasoning here is taken to the extreme more for explanatory reasons, but what Brussels policy is doing is de-industrialising Europe through legal obligations to facilitate the green economy. Unfortunately, however, for the latter, except for hydropower, which is an excellent investment, the EROIs are considerably lower than for nuclear power plants.
In a country (Europe) that can be called, progressive, energy is everything. In a digital world, servers have to run 24/7 (once upon a time when letters were sent, there were no facilities always on except for the courier who moved either by burning oil or on horseback, so the energy per gram of letter was negligible, today there are MW of power needed to run all this stuff). Not to mention the mobile phone WiFi network that requires Gflops of bandwidth and repeater antennas to handle all the traffic coming in and out of devices.
So the system’s survival energy threshold is raised even higher when the requirements to keep the system going are even higher than before (an article in Forbes states that this threshold is an EROI of 7, citing in turn a paper by Weißbach , see here, so our solar panels stay well out. Let us also remember that anything that is done so that the EROI is lower, i.e. mixing different energy sources, will affect the country’s economy).
If Europe ends up below that energy threshold it may never rise again, not least because those sources, as we have said, easy to find, are much scarcer than they used to be (the exception might be for peat and coal still abundant in Germany for example). To let engineering companies, foundries and steel mills become uncompetitive is to kill any European economic strategy for the benefit of someone else who does not play to win but plays for himself. Importing the next electric cars from China will only weaken the European automotive industry because competitiveness is reduced, why? Because to do anything you need energy. Wrong investments in energy policy can destroy a country within a few decades. So it was for Italy when it said no to nuclear power twice, under psychological blackmail. A strategic decision for the good of a country was left at the mercy of the emotional feelings of a population unable to make that kind of decision because they were unaware of the strategic consequences.
What would it cost Italy alone today to rebuild the knowledge gained in the 1950s by Italian physicists and engineers who worked on nuclear power? An infinity, certainly not repayable in energy terms with photovoltaic panels, not even produced in Italy (go find rare earths in Italy…). Italy demonstrates the law of technological progress by falling behind that energy threshold we were talking about. This is what will happen in a decade or two in Europe if the direction taken remains the same.
Ah, one more thing, if you did not understand this article, don’t worry. You will certainly have voted in the referendum on nuclear power (in Italy). Think you will have voted for something with much, much more complex effects than this article, so ask yourself if there is any point in exercising a vote when you cannot and do not even understand articles of a certain simplicity. What value does democracy have when the result is criminally extorted?
Forbes article in full link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-tool-to-predict-the-best-energy-mix/