Plans for the Future

[two energy solutions]

This is in response to an article in the Seattle Times about the Puget Sound area having been chosen for the introduction of a network of electric car recharging stations. Ford has devised a hybrid car that will drive 40 miles on battery before resorting to its gas engine. Used carefully it might never use gasoline.

The author points out neatly why the Puget Sound area was chosen. After some local pride about how hip everybody in the Seattle area is, he mentions the real reasons, availability of hydroelectric power and mild climate (to minimize use of both power-draining air conditioning and battery-killing sub-zero temperatures). Of these the power issue is the more important one.

There are two important effects of electric cars - one is that they raise the efficiency of power generation by centralizing it from millions of small engines to one large power station. And the other is that they reduce emissions by doing so.

But ordinarily, though they change the locus and efficiency of power generation, in the great majority of cases, power is still generated by the combustion of fossil fuels. In the case of coal-fired plants burning high-sulfur coal (as is still done in China and such places), the net pollution may rival or even exceed that of the automobile gas engines replaced.

The problem is thus not only how much energy do cars use, but where do they get it.

For this reason I have long been an advocate of nuclear power plants. Though endlessly decried for their production of nuclear wastes as though that were an insoluble problem, they power the electric grids of France, Japan, and many other countries. The populations of which have somehow not become extinct.

Of late however, I am beginning to rethink the problem. Widespread use of nuclear reactors contemplates widespread use of Uranium-235, a rare substance and expensive to separate from Uranium-238, a reasonably common one. (This is what the whole fight about Iranian centrifuges is about) One solution is that, once one has reactors available, as we have had since the 1950's, one can use them to irradiate Uranium-238 with neutrons, transmuting it to Plutonium-239. These are the so-called breeder reactors which generate more nuclear fuel than they use. Breeder reactors provide a pathway to the future with effectively unlimited energy resources.

The problem is that it brings lots of plutonium into the world, which scarcely exists in nature. Pu-239 is the deadliest substance imaginable. It is far easier to make into a nuclear weapon and requires smaller quantities for a nuclear weapon than U-238 (it is said to be "more fissile").

A few pounds of plutonium were delivered to the people of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killing 39,000 of them. We are used to thinking of it as a bomb, B-29's, the Manhattan Project, the wrath of the United States over Pearl Harbor. But in the end it was a few pounds of plutonium.

That is aside from the fact that it replaces calcium in the body and causes bone cancer upon ingestion of mere micrograms, making it one of the most toxic substances known. It is worth noting that the same amount of plutonium would likely have killed even more people in Nagasaki, albeit more slowly, had it been introduced into their water supply. It is fitting that it is named for the god of the underworld, the god of death.

An energy future based on reactors and Pu-239 would require that nowhere, in no country, for centuries to come, would any plutonium ever be diverted. Not even by governments wanting to achieve military nuclear power status quickly and cheaply.

Ours is a world with many contending sovereign governments, some of them dictatorships, some of them irrational. Others, including capitalist democracies, are merely venal and conscienceless. They are all too rational and too calculating, but only of short-term benefits. It is a world containing a billion or so Muslims whose religion teaches jihad. The prospect of this, our world, full of breeder reactors, is worse than the prospect of a world burning fossil fuels.

So I have changed my mind. My new theory is reduced production of CO2 by green everything, and reforestation for increased CO2 uptake. That will leave us dependent on fossil fuels for a long time but sustainably so until they run out (a sustainable oxymoron).

The problem with ethanol from crops like corn and switchgrass is that it produces more CO2 than it saves. But that objection puts on corn ethanol the burden of solving two separate problems simultaneously. If one asks that it simply replace fossil fuels and finds a separate solution to CO2 emissions, it will work handily. Again reforestation is the leading way to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.

I do not know enough about it to speak knowledgeably, but I am told that restoring the oceans to pre-industrial conditions would greatly enhance their ability to process CO2 to oxygen as well.

I have long intended to write either a long essay or a short book about reforestation baselines but I am forever stalled by my own inertia.