Rick Monteverde wrote:
I doubt we could do it without building a rash of new nukes. The hazards are pretty obvious, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be a bad idea now given the alternatives.
I agree some number of nukes might be a good idea, especially to reduce coal consumption. But given 30 years to do the job, we could even build something like a giant array of solar thermal liquid fuel plants (or the bio-fuel plants discussed here).
30 years is a long time. The U.S. built a gigantic railway system between 1840 and 1870, and a highway system between 1952 and 1982. I am pretty confident that if we had made serious efforts to end the use of gasoline starting in 1976, it would be gone by now, and with plug-in hybrid technology it should be much easier to drastically reduce or eliminate gasoline.
I think for liquid fuel production, a solar-thermal array in the southwest would be better than massive wind farms in the Dakotas.
With plug-in hybrids, the demand for liquid fuel would be far lower than it is now, so the liquid fuel could come from distant solar-thermal plants while the electricity comes from new nukes built closer to population centers. My guess is that would be the best combination of present-day technologies. Something like HTSC power transmission might change that. An improved battery would shift the equation toward the plug-in side of the plug-in hybrid equation.
The difficulty of this problem has been exaggerated. Last year, global windpower increased by 11.5 GW (nameplate), or the equivalent of roughly 4 average U.S. nukes. The U.S. could easily afford to install as much wind power as the rest of the world combined. It would not be a gigantic effort, given the size of our economy and population. It would cost far less than the Iraq war. 30 years * 4 nukes = 120 nukes (very roughly 1/3 of our present power generating capacity.) That pretty much solves the vehicle fuel problem, assuming you find a good way to recharge and refuel plug-in hybrids. (They do not mind intermittent electricity.) In real life, you would want to make this a mixture of wind, solar and fission. Anyway, ~4 per year would fix the problem. Maybe around year #10, as plug-in hybrid car sales take off, you might need to expand by ~8 nuke equivalents instead of 4, but by that time the construction capabilities could easily be ramped up.
- Jed
