In his latest Scripps-Howard column, the acclaimed and vilified science writer Michael Fumento asks and answers the following question:
Why would an energy-craving nation (the U.S.) that also demands a pristine environment put the kibosh on a limitless form of power (nuclear energy) that produces no air pollution and no emissions environmentalists claim cause global warming?
Fumento's answer, and the correct one, is that the people of the United States have a superstitious fear of nuclear energy that is based on two incidents, neither of which was even a tiny fraction as damaging as the American media have potrayed them as being: Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. These two incidents, both so widely publicized that they are known worldwide simply by their place names, have put a great fear of nuclear energy into the American mind, and Fumento's article explains exactly how little damage these two accidents did to the environment and how much damage they did to the use of nuclear power in the United States, the world's largest energy user.
Ironically, these two accidents did far more damage to the environment by turning the United States away from nuclear power and toward an increased use of fossil fuels in the supply of electrical energy.
Talk about unintended consequences!
ReplyDeleteI agree. Turning away from nuclear power crippled our ability to create even more efficient and perhaps "cleaner" methods of disposing of nuclear waste. Imagine the foreign policy implications: We have smaller, more efficient, easy-to-construct nuclear plants that don't produce material that can be refined to weapons-grade. Here North Korea, have a few in exchange for scrapping your program!
ReplyDeleteSomething similar happened in Santa Cruz county. A plant that creates concrete aggregate wanted to use old tires as fuel. Essentially, the tires are burned at such a high temperature that the resultant air pollution marks as among the cleaner sources of fuel. But, since they were burning tires, and this has a negative imagery, the Santa Cruz populace rose up in arms in protest. So now they still have a giant tire pile and the plant pollutes more than it would have. But at least they're not burning tires! Morons.
I've been thinking about this all week because of the "Peak Oil" brouhaha elsewhere on the blog. I don't understand the view that oil is irreplaceable in our energy economy. It seems to me that with some relatively minor readjustments, we could reconfigure our existing infrastructure to work with technologies we already have or could reasonably develop without big leaps: nuclear, coal, biofuels, and increased domestic production of oil and gas. I am working on the numbers right now, but as of now it doesn't seem that farfetched.
ReplyDeleteOh, and the tires? Leave a giant pile of tires sitting around long enough, and something will catch fire. And it will burn, and burn, and burn, and burn, at relatively low temperatures, out in the open, spewing out the most obnoxious cloud of particulate hydrocarbon. For years. Like this. And it will serve Santa Cruz right, for being such nitwits.
Part of the problem with replacing oil is that all of the alternatives require oil at some point during their processing. This may not hold for nuclear power (it's been some time since my one class on nuclear physics, and that was about making bombs), but you can't drive your car on it unless it's an electric vehicle.
ReplyDeleteIt's also a consumer need thing: You can't propel a tanker truck or even a consumer vehicle as far as it maybe needs to go if it's purely electric. Now, a brilliant interim measure would be to force a conversion to hybrid technology and THEN talk about alternative power sources, like hydrogen. But don't expect Big Auto or Big Oil to roll over and take that one lightly.
Of course, we can also thank Pete Domenici of New Mexico for screwing alternative fuels. He's cut funding to the National Ignition Facility (a long-term project that would benefit both nuclear arsenal testing AND clean energy) in order to get some short-term funds for Sandia and Los Alamos.
James, I wasn't proposing switching the transportation fleet to electric; that's why I mentioned biofuels. On the diesel end, at least, the switchover is a minor matter. Virtually all serious agriculture machinery is diesel already, and diesel engines can burn 100% biodiesel with no modifications. Right now, the efficiency ratio of biodiesel is 3.2 -- for every BTU you put in, you get 3.2 back. And that's using soybeans as the feedstock, which is done not because soybeans are the best thing to use, but to pay off the soybean farmers who are sick of the cornboys getting all the ethanol subsidies. Likewise, current gasoline engines can run on up to 85% ethanol, although you do have to do some tinkering. It's also possible to run existing IC engines on methane gas. (Back in the '70s, one of those eccentric British geezers modified his '53 Hillman to run on rotting chickensh*t.) In the case of biodiesel, you don't need petroleum at any stage of the process. Well, maybe manufacturing the agricultural machinery, I haven't looked at the industrial sector very carefully yet.
ReplyDeleteI'm not suggesting that this is something that should be pushed; I don't believe in "Peak Oil" but if it were true, the price of oil would go high enough for all these strategies to be economically attractive. I'm just saying that in prinicple we could move to fuels we already know how to produce, without much disruption to existing generation and transmission infrastructure.
"Now, a brilliant interim measure would be to force a conversion to hybrid technology and THEN talk about alternative power sources, like hydrogen."
ReplyDelete"Force"? James, I'm presented no option but to doubt your previously self-professed libertarian/anti-authoritarian credentials.
Force business. Business is evil and oppressive. Like Republicans.
ReplyDeleteSolar goes straight from incident light to power output.
ReplyDeleteAren't there transmission and storage losses whenever you're dealing with electricity (depending on whether its going onto the grid or into batteries)? Also, it's hardly kosher to debit the biofuel side with planting and harvesting costs without accounting on the solar side for the manufacture of the photovoltaic cells.
I admit when I was ruminating about the fuel substitution I was thinking small scale -- a rural co-op sort of situation. Not just in the context of the US, I've been thinking about third-world agriculture lately, and how much more vulnerable these ag sectors are to oil shocks than we are. I know the Brazilians are doing a ton of research on ethanol and biodiesel.
Do you know anything about proposals to refine biofuel from (a) saline-tolerant algae and (b) waste cellulose? I do realize (thought I made clear, but perhaps I was too vague) that biodiesel from soybeans is a political stunt, not an energy strategy.