A Little Drill and Fission: Breaking down Obama, McCain energy talk at the debate, Part 1

Inspired by the Washington Post's tag-clouds of the presidential campaign debates -- which highlight how often certain words and phrases show up in each candidate's answers --  I've investigated the frequency of certain energy-related words in last night's debate:

• "Nuclear" - 18 mentions
• "Drilling" - 5 mentions
• "Gas" - 4 mentions: 1 natural gas (McCain), 3 gasoline (Obama)
• "Coal" - 3 mentions
• "Solar" - 2 mentions
• "Wind" - 2 mentions
• "Hydrogen," "geothermal" - 1 mention
• "Biomass," "ethanol,"  "hydropower" - no mentions

Even when we subtract the 7 uses of "nuclear" that referred specifically to nuclear weapons, and the one mention by moderator Tom Brokaw in a question about energy policy, "nuclear" in the sense of "nuclear power" still trumps these other common energy policy words with 10 name checks: 8 by Senator John McCain, 2 by Senator Barack Obama.

The science writer side of me is compelled to mention that a single evening's supply of politi-speak creates a very lean data set from which to draw conclusions.    But the environmental-journalist side feels that if it's good enough for The Washington Post, it's good enough me.  In that spirit, and given how often energy policy came up during the debate, let's take a look at what the candidates said:

Q/audience:  How can we trust either of you with our money when both parties got -- got us into this global economic crisis?  [[i.e., trust you to fix the economy?]]

Obama: [Answer did not mention energy.]

McCain: ...You're going to be examining our proposals tonight and in the future, and energy independence is a way to do that, is one of them. And drilling offshore and nuclear power are two vital elements of that. And I've been supporting those and I know how to fix this economy, and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, and stop sending $700 billion a year overseas.

[[What's the potential for offshore oil drilling and nuclear power for cutting into the nation's imports of foreign oil, in the short time frame that McCain implies every time he mentions them as solutions to high energy prices and national security?  Let's note first that we get electricity from nuclear power plants, while 70% of our oil imports go to transportation. Building more nuclear power plants presumably would not reduce transportation's demand for oil (well, unless plug-in hybrid vehicles were to come on incredibly strong, but that seems at best uncertain). So whatever the virtues of nuclear energy -- it is a greenhouse-gas free source of power, for instance -- it seems misleading for McCain to mention it in the context of "energy independence."]]

[[As for offshore drilling, I recently reported for Scientific American that it won't bring in any oil for at least five years, and more likely ten -- and even when it does, it's unlikely to lower our oil imports or gasoline prices significantly. Furthermore, McCain knows this.]]

[[Canada is the largest electricity supplier to the U.S., and our single largest source of foreign oil as well. (The U.S. also exports electricity to Canada and Mexico. Does Senator McCain mean to imply that our friendly NAFTA partners are hindering the U.S. economy, or that they're national security risks?]]

Q/Brokaw: There are new economic realities out there that everyone in this hall and across this country understands that there are going to have to be some choices made. Health policies, energy policies, and entitlement reform, what are going to be your priorities in what order? Which of those will be your highest priority your first year in office and which will follow in sequence?

McCain: ... We can work on nuclear power plants. Build a whole bunch [[How many is "a whole bunch?"]] of them, create millions of new jobs.    We have to have all of the above, alternative fuels, wind, tide, solar, natural gas, clean coal technology. All of these things we can do as Americans and we can take on this mission and we can overcome it.

[[According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Industry-Occupation Employment Matrix, 11,538 people were employed in 2006 as nuclear engineers, nuclear power reactor operators, and nuclear technicians.  According to the Department of Energy's Energy information Administration, there were 104 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. at the end of 2007.  Since no new nuclear power plants have come online in the U.S. since 1996, and none have closed since the late 1970s, that works out to around 111 skilled workers per plant, on average.  Allowing for a host of support staff -- security, accounting, administrative support, etc. -- we could generously estimate around 1,000 employees per plant, or 104,000 jobs total at present. ]]

[[A recent study by Oxford Economics, a global economic forecasting consultancy, concluded that if the nation built 52 new nuclear reactors in the U.S. -- in other words, increased our nuclear power infrastructure by 50% --  it would create around 47,000 permanent, full time plant jobs by 2030.  There would be roughly another 7,000 jobs created in "enrichment plants" and "recycling plants." -- for a total of 54,000 permanent nuclear facility jobs.  Add in jobs created indirectly as a result of the new plants, and Oxford Economics estimates around 96,000 permanent jobs total, from 2027 onwards.

At the peak of construction, each plant would create 2,350 construction jobs, with another 2,750 (1.17 per construction worker) created in the wider economy, according to Oxford Economics -- upwards of around 143,000 jobs total.  Add in jobs for building "recycling and enrichment" facilities, and Oxford hikes the number to 268,000.  Again, this would be at the peak of the construction cycle; most years would employ fewer people, and, none of these jobs would be permanent. That's a lot of jobs -- but well short of millions Senator McCain extolled at the debate.

Using this analysis, for an expansion of nuclear power to create over 1.5 million jobs at any one point, we would have to build upwards of 300 new plants simultaneously.]]

My friends, some of this $700 billion ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations

[[I have yet to find a primary source for this $700 billion number -- maybe McCain and others using it got it from T. Boone Pickens.]]

To be continued...

Transcript source: The New York Times

Methodology: I cut and pasted the transcript into BBEdit, a powerful professional text editor for the Mac platform, and then did "find all" searches on the various words.