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C00002 00002 %earth[s90,jmc] Earth Week energy comments
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%earth[s90,jmc] Earth Week energy comments
I'm glad to have the opportunity to state my
opinions about energy during Earth Week even though
they dissent from the opinions of the organizers of
Earth Week. Here are some principles.
1. Energy is just another commodity. Our objective
is to make it available to anyone who wants it at the lowest
prices consistent with the cost of obtaining it.
2. In the long run, as much of it as anyone could want
will be available at costs not much larger than we are now
paying---maybe even less. We spend less than 10 percent of the
GNP on energy.
3. As has long been known the world has to move off
petroleum based energy in the fairly near future, almost
certainly in the next 50 years, maybe in the next 20.
4. The main future source of available energy is ordinary
nuclear fission energy, extended by breeder reactors when this
is required. This source will last for many millions of years.
5. Solar energy can also be made to work but is very
much more expensive.
6. The cost advantage of nuclear over solar is so
large that countries going nuclear will have large economic
advantages of those that don't as soon as oil becomes
very scarce. Nuclear energy is safe enough, i.e. the
overall loss of life from all causes from nuclear energy
has been and remains lower than from any other---even
solar when the cost in lives of wasting money is considered.
7. There is no special problem in using nuclear
energy for electricity and for heating, although the
availability of natural gas for heating may last for quite
a long time.
8. If the carbon dioxide (CO2) problem turns out to
be serious, there is no alternative to nuclear and solar,
in the relatively short term, because natural gas also
produces CO2.
9. The largest technical problems come from the
need to use electricity (nuclear or solar) as the primary
energy source for transportation. There are two major
possibilities.
a. Electric cars. The present electric cars and
those promised for the near future are just toys---gestures
at the problem. The requirement is for a battery that
can give the performance and range of a gasoline powered
car. There is no fundamental reason of electrochemistry
why this can't be done, but it isn't easy, and the research
has been inadequately pursued. The sodium-sulfur battery
will work and the aluminum-air battery is potentially
as good as gasoline.
b. Hydrogen powered cars. It is easy to make a
demonstration using compressed hydrogen, but this is
also just a gesture. If hydrogen is to give the performance
we require, it must be used in liquid form, and the
difficulties on handling large tanks (3 times the volume of
present gas tanks) of this extremely cold substance must
be faced and solved. The risks associated with the solution,
e.g. release of hydrogen after collisions, must be made
as small as possible and then accepted.
Again the research has been inadequate.
10. Giving up cars is not an option. Any government of a
modern country that tries it will face mass emigration if it's a
dictatorship and electoral overturn if it's democratic.
11. Both batteries and hydrogen are secondary
energy sources and require a primary source to charge the
batteries or obtain the hydrogen from water.
12. The time scale on which these developments are
required is uncertain. I believe the U.S. will temporize
until forced to act by an oil shortage. The nuclear
plants can be built in two years whenever necessity
forces suspending the opportunities for legalistic
delays. The Westinghouse official who gave this
information declined to speculate what could be done
if the job was attacked with the determination America
achieved during World War II. However, the Hanford
works was built and put into operation in eighteen
months on the basis of zero experience.
13. Other countries have less possibilities for
temporization than the U.S. France generates 70 percent
of its electricity from nuclear energy, and Japan has
just passed the U.S. level of 20 percent in spite of a
much later start. The U.S. debates on nuclear energy
are generally conducted ignoring the French success.
However, the U.S. is not in the habit of ignoring Japanese
successes, so I suppose the U.S. will act before Japan
reaches the 70 percent level.
14. Neither France nor Japan has seriously tackled
the problem of the non-gasoline car yet. They won't be
cheap, and the development will be expensive, and the
automobile companies worldwide are in intense price
competition. For this reason, the development will
take place at a time when the gasoline shortage as
become acute and will be rather exciting.
15. All the above facts were known in the early 1960s.
The attempts of the 1970s and 1980s to find alternative
energy technologies have achieved about the results that
were predicted in the 1960s in spite of enormous efforts
in research and economic pump priming.
THE POLITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF ENERGY
The political problems of energy are complex,
because they interact with many other conflicts in
the various societies on this planet. Here are some
considerations.
1. Anti-technology and anti-capitalist ideas
animate strong minorities in democratic countries.
They haven't ever yet reached the level of political
success that would lead to the destruction of a society,
but they have done considerable harm---anti-capitalism
more than anti-technology.
Here are some quotes from extremists.
``Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important
as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind
me that people are part of nature, but it isn't true. Somewhere
along the line - at a about a billion years ago, maybe half that -
we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague
on ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the
developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil fuel
consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of
landscape.
Until such time as {\it homo sapiens} should decide to
rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus
to come along.''
-David M. Graber, National Park Service biologist in the
Los Angeles Times.
- reprinted in Access to Energy, 1990 April
\noindent Would this man lie for his cause? You bet.
``If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for
us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy
because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking
for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't
give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could
do mischief to the earth or to each other.''
- Amory Lovins in {\it The Mother Earth} - Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p. 22
`` Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent
of giving an idiot child a machine gun.'' Paul Ehrlich, ``An Ecologist's
Perspective on Nuclear Power'', May/June 1978 issue of
Federation of American Scientists Public Issue Report
``We can and should seize upon the energy crisis as a good excuse and
great opportunity for making some very fundamental changes that we
should be making anyhow for other reasons.'' - Russell Train,
{\it Science} 184 p. 1050, 7 June 1974