series, Smil's work was routinely cited in many papers on the literature, including some in journals like
Nature. He was cited by at least one Nobel Laureate on this topic.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/8/194846/997">Troll Rating Fritz Haber, Jimmy Kunstler, and The Oracle at Snowmass, Part 3.
He has also, besides his work on nitrogen, written important seminal stuff on phosphorous.
He is one of the most important thinkers of his age.
However Smil is
misleading on several points, particularly when he speaks on a topic on which he is less expert than on biological mass flows, nuclear energy.
Note that several commercial nuclear breeder reactors did operate, the Kazakh/Soviet one for several decades, but the problem was that the world was awash in Uranium, and that the element, thought to be scarce in the 1950's when the breeder program was first under investigation, turns out to be as common as tin. It is the ready availability of uranium (and now thorium) that has prevented the application of slightly more expensive technology that could vastly increase supplies.
Nor it is a correct statement to say that nuclear energy is non-renewable. The argument is easily made that it is more sustainable than any other energy supply, including the often hyped solar electricity schemes. This is immediately discernable by merely noting that almost all of the internal heat of the earth - with the exception of potassium-40 derived heat - comes from the highly inefficent alpha decay of the uranium and thorium series, which recover only a fraction of the available energy. The cycling of these elements through the crust has been a continuous feature of earth's history since life evolved, and will be so for as long as life exists.
Nuclear power is the
only new energy invention to have been scaled to a tens of exajoule scale since the economic and environmental phase out of renewable energy that commenced at the end of the 18th century.
Thus it is disingenuous to claim that nuclear energy is a failure, especially when compared to grotesque failures like solar PV electric energy, which has been hyped since its discovery in 1954 as "the future" and has still, yet, to produce even 0.1 exajoules of earth's energy demand.
The fact that nuclear energy is not doing
more for humanity is not economic - since the Shippingport nuclear reactor was built for less than $100 million in 1957 and operated economically for decades.
Rather, the reason is ignorance itself. Somewhere along the line, egged on by stupid people and apologists for the dangerous fossil fuel industries, nuclear was <em>arbitrarily</em> required to meet standards that no other form of energy, including solar, wind, and geothermal <em>could</em> meet under any circumstances. This has amounted to the spending of billion dollar quantities of money to save one
theoretical life while tens of millions are actually killed and while hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, face imminent risks from the dangerous fossil fuel industry.
It is now too late - ignorance kills - to enable nuclear energy to do what it could have done, but it happened not because of technical limitations as this excerpt seems to imply, but rather because of the failure of a
rational imagination and the running wild of an
irrational imagination.
It didn't have to be this way. Reason might have won.
But again, although I do not agree on everything he says, Smil is one of the most important thinkers now living and working, by far. He's not some media twirp cited endlessly by stupid people - including one notable retard here - in an endless series of "appeal to authority" logical fallacies of the type that "Al Gore says..." and "Joe Romm says..." and "Humptey Dumpty says..." statements.
It doesn't matter what Al Gore says about anything anymore. The issue moved long past him years ago, and in any case, Gore's presence in the debate derives entirely from "Appeal to Authority" arguments in their own right. Gore is neither a scientist nor an engineer.
So what Gore says about energy production - and in fact what most environmental scientists say about energy production - is meaningless. An oncologist who diagnoses cancer may not know anything at all about how to cure it. There are many disiplines, indeed, where making a correct diagnosis implies nothing about understanding its solution.
Nuclear power need not prove that it can produce an endless era of our ridiculous lifestyle to be vastly superior to all other options. It merely needs to be vastly superior to all other options, which it is and has
experimentally shown to be. Even if it were true that nuclear could only be roughly scaled to 100 exajoules - a mere factor of 3 from current levels - there is no other form of climate change gas free energy that could come remotely close.