Policy Pete:
http://208.49.25.221/policypete/policypete.htm
[Policy Pete, "not affiliated with other energy or environmental organizations", is
a one-man production by an oil patch insider, noteworthy for hard realism. Pete
knows oil is running out, and that without finding an alternatived, capitalism is
probably doomed. He favours nuclear power, for reasons set out below. He may be
right in the case of highly industrialised capitalist states, but is certainly wrong
for the world as a whole, since the peripheries - where 5 billion people live - lack
the infrastructure for complex nuclear systems to operate safely or at all.
Therefore his prescription will NOT save world capitalism. But without nuclear, the
West now faces an energy debacle. California is a symptom but is also such a special
case that you better not generalise to much from the California meltdown. As for
alternatives like wind, waves, photovoltaics etc: they are simply non-starters.
here's why. Mark]
On Nukes*
Pete has heard again from Ruedi Rechsteiner, a member of the Swiss Parliament's
energy committee, who argues, to Pete's chagrin, in favor of greater use of wind
power. Here is a portion of Pete's response:
I think that many Europeans, including you, are missing the larger picture. The US
has a dangerously large appetite for energy, especially oil and gas, and has been
totally unable or unwilling to scale back. The rest of the world, including your
famous gnomes of Zurich, have allowed it to finance this addiction, even though
doing so has caused it to run what would otherwise have been ruinous trade deficits.
To be fair, much of American prosperity is due to our ability to import cheap oil,
so we should be grateful, but can this basis for our prosperity be sustained?
If you answer this question in the negative -- as I think you must -- then what
should US strategy be? I believe that the only real long term strategy must be to
move toward gradual electrification of the transportation sector and less gradual
electrification of other sectors. The issue then becomes which fuel to use for
generating future electricity.
Although it would take me a long time to demonstrate it to you, the US has no
plausible alternatives to use either wind or solar. Nor does Europe, for that
matter. I know you find this sort of statement annoying because in theory both of
these resources could be many times larger than they actually are. Granted. Let's
even say they could rise 10 fold. Even if they did, they would still be trivial in
the US energy picture!!! (In the most recent year for which statistics are
available, the US generated 3,677.7 billion Kwh of electricity, of which 3.6 were
from wind and 0.3 from solar). The point is that there is no way solar and wind
could ever produce, say, even two/thirds of current electricity generating capacity.
I'm all in favor of people trying to make both solar and wind as prevalent as
possible. I personally wish they would succeed. But there's no realistic prospect
for any sustained solar or wind development of the required size at any time in the
foreseeable future. These energy sources are dangerously illusory, since they
captivate the imagination of so many and yet can't deliver the goods.
The US, until this year, has instead been betting its future on natural gas. The US
has a lot of gas (much more than current prices would indicate) but it doesn't have
nearly enough to heat 75 million homes and run most of the electricity generation
and industrial sectors over the next 30 years. It does have enough coal to do this.
But, if you accept the general premises of the global warming argument -- and I
do -- then the US cannot rely on coal and still do something about reducing
greenhouse emissions (even though with great expense it could do something about
coal's SO2, NOX, and other pollutants).
The one technology that will actually work, while greatly ameliorating global
warming, is to use nuclear power. It already produces 23 percent of our electricity
from utilities, and, as the French have shown, this factor could safely triple.
True, nuclear comes with very heavy baggage. I often wonder if reasonable people
would have allowed Fermi to proceed with the first reactor beneath the University of
Chicago stadium had they known even half of what was to follow. Both the forces
unleashed and the incredibly dangerous byproducts produced will be around long after
we're all long gone. But my generation is presented with a fait accompli produced by
a previous generation. The transuranic zoo is nasty stuff, but there is every reason
to suppose that we can handle it, if for no other reason than we must. We have no
choice. Fermi, Oppenhiemer, and co. saw to that. There is no serious technical
problem with long term storage of nuclear waste, and we have to do it anyway, so why
not scale it up to handle the larger amount that increased electrification will
produce?
Once the US proceeds with an extended electrification strategy, it becomes possible
to avoid the question of reducing general energy demand since it no longer needs be
reduced, permitting us many more timing options for the extent to which we channel
demand away from fossil fuels. The move away from fossil fuels needn't be, and won't
be, at a rapid pace, but will be at the sort of pace that future US national
security requirements will dictate. ...
Ruedi promises that he will give these arguments some thought and respond in kind.
In the meanwhile, he has been good enough to provide several links that you might
want to consider: qv1 qv2
*Before writing to Pete on this topic, please read Stanford professor J. McCarthy's
excellent faq on nuclear power. q.v.
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Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
