Don't Fight The Power: Learning to Love Nukes
Tucker, William
"Don't Fight The Power" Oil's too political. Coal's too dirty. Solar, wind, hydro-they're all just green dreams. Hydrogen is lovely stuff, but it takes energy to make it. It's time Americans learn to stop worrying and...
...Unfortunately, hydrogen leaks from conventional pipelines, so an all-new infrastructure will be necessary) The leftover carbon will be combined with oxygen to form carbon dioxide-the notorious greenhouse gas...
...Unrecognized petroleum in igneous rocks might give us two to three times more oil than previously supposed...
...Although quarter-century-old reactors looked to most observers like white elephants, enterprising new "merchant energy" companies began snapping them up...
...Natural gas is bulkier to store than gasoline and limits a car's range to about 250 miles...
...Gases escaped to form the earth's atmosphere...
...In fact, the red light meant that the water was at its proper level...
...There is only one problem: The nation's base load is nuclear...
...The basic systems for nuclear training were developed by the military during the Cold War...
...Nuclear power is obviously mankind's best energy hope...
...With proper management, you can serve both masters," says David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists...
...At 81, he still does a full day's work in his cluttered office, parrying occasionally with his thoroughbred golden retriever and his wife's blind cat (to which he is allergic...
...Oil prices would be held low, but "taxed up" to world price levels in order to dampen demand...
...Why not just use the grid itse With each conversion, in even the most efficient systems, close to half the energy is lost as low-grade heat.The more conversions, the more energy wasted...
...It was not until Einstein formulated his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 that the true dimensions of this new energy came into focus...
...Why oppose an iron-clad, no-expense-spared, wildly overengineered plan to store nuclear wastes under a desolate Nevada mountain...
...Important switches and indicator lights were positioned so high that they had to be reached by ladders...
...Shale oil deposits are good for 5,000 years...
...Coal, the second most reliable source of electricity, operates at only 60 percent...
...In nuclear plants the levers that moved the control rods up and down were often sideby-side and identical...
...At $25 million a hole, however, it is difficult to persuade commercial drillers to undertake similar experiments...
...Postal Service employs a few experimental models for urban routes...
...We all want to be the guy on the foul line taking the shot at the end of the game...
...But] his wrong ideas are insignificant compared to his far more important right ideas...
...Some auxiliary operators are members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, but the senior operators are nonunion, free from work rules and slowdowns...
...Helium is chemically inert and doesn't combine with anything," he says...
...This is the "office...
...We start everybody at square one," says Gosekamp, who hunts and fishes on his off days...
...There's no way it could be concentrated by a fossilization process...
...In 1983, Gold supervised a test drilling in the Siljan Ring, a Swedish granite formation where a meteorite left a 22-mile-wide crater 360 million years ago...
...2) conservation and small industrial co-generation plants would get us through a "transition period," during which central generating stations would be phased out...
...As we shall see, Three Mile Island was really more about regulatory incompetence than flawed technology.Yet the damage was done: Since 1979, the nation has not convnissioned a single new nuclear power plant...
...are to refrain from using emissions reductions units generated from nuclear facilities to meet their commitments...
...It commissioned dozens of small industrial co-generation plants in the 200-MW range, which burn natural gas to produce steam and electricity and sell their spare power to the grid...
...But there is a payoff...
...No technology is free of risks.The danger of hauling spent nuclear fuel rods to Nevada for disposal is on a par with building a pipeline through suburban Westchester County to bring natural gas from Canada to light New York City...
...There is no hydrogen sitting around waiting to be mined or excavated...
...Those who haven't done active duty usually come from engineering schools or the nation's various maritime academies...
...Then politics got involved...
...The question is, where do you get the hydrogen...
...consumption...
...Passing those courses entitles you to take the licensing exam, administered by the NRC...
...The last shall be first and the first shall be last" is more than a Biblical injunction...
...It is the first state to achieve secondary treatment on all sewage plants and is nowworking on tertiary treatment...
...As Saddam Hussein's recent attempts at an oil boycott indicate, the world's oil supplies are eternally vulnerable to war and politics...
...It's a completely different system...
...About half his pupils are college graduates...
...We'll have a class come to us and say `Wouldn't it be better if you did it this way?'We've made equipment changes in the reactor based on things that happened right in this room...
...Osprey, loon and peregrine falcon have returned to their nesting grounds...
...An international consortium of public utilities and private power companies has now developed the "pebble-bed modular reactor," a design that packages nuclear fuel in graphite-coated spheres the size of tennis balls...
...It also trapped lots of radioactive heat, which kept gases bubbling toward the surface, forcing their way through cracks and creating their own fissures in the rock...
...The remainder will power those Hypercars...
...And can we get it efficiently to where we need it...
...Methane, Gold argues, is everywhere in the universe-in the gas clouds of Jupiter and Saturn, in meteorites and comets and in the vast clouds of interstellar space...
...Anti-nuclear groups publicize these incidents-they're public record-and many end up in the newspapers...
...Eight feet high and 50 feet from end to end, the control panel still has a Cape Canaveral look, with its forest of red and green lights and pressure-and-temperature gauges that are often quadruplicated...
...Because of the insular environment at the old Atomic Energy Commission, the nuclear industry missed these developments entirely...
...Earthquakes may also be triggered by gas pressure...
...One of the first principles of engineering psychology is called "compatibility of control movements...
...Although not generally political, nuclear operators often are called upon to defend the technology...
...in theory at least, they can be mass-produced cheaply...
...Maintaining performance is always a challenge in a job whereideally-nothing out of the ordinary ever happens.Week after week, month after month, nuclear plants hum along, carrying the nation's electrical base load...
...On Earth it is tied up in other molecules, mainly methane (CH4) and water (H20...
...Gold's deep-gas hypothesis changes the explanation of other geological phenomena as well...
...Oil is the residue of geological lakes...
...Eventually, they produce a class of people so fearful of change and so mired in the established order that history passes them by...
...They do 10 months' training before they ever touch a valve...
...Our mission is to promote the highest standards of safety and reliability," says Jim Caulk, director of communications at INPO...
...As Lovins explains at www.hypercar.com, "Plug-in Hypercars could provide five to 10 times as much generating capacity as all utilities ownenough in principle to displace essentially all central thermal power stations at a profit...
...Those most complacent and comfortable with the present-or worse, some imagined past-are likely to remain locked in it forever...
...A few reactors already in the pipeline were completed, but no new reactor was commissioned after 1980.The industry was reorganized from top to bottom...
...Sorry, Henry...
...Once again, there are experimental buses and delivery vans, but they face similar problems...
...The uranium is enriched to 8 percent, rather than the conventional 3 percent...
...Yet Gold has his explanations...
...The core is cooled by helium instead of water, eliminating pipe corrosion-the biggest single source of safety problems in conventional plants...
...Exelon, Entergy, and Dominion Resources ofVirginia have all announced plans to apply to the NRC for early site permits, the first step toward a full application for what would be the first new reactors commissioned in this country since 1979...
...Given these limitations, the best use may again be shortrange, stop-and-go urban vehicles...
...The problem of Middle Eastern dependence is more intractable...
...WT MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 with coal...
...They succeeded-tragically by making cars smaller, lighter and more hazardous to their occupants' health...
...The real impact of Gold's hypothesis may be more psychological than commercial...
...The Sierra Club and NRDC both oppose drilling in large portions of the West.The Millennium Pipeline, designed to bring Canadian gas to New York City, has been delayed for almost four years by environmental opposition...
...Environmentalists, of course, are already preparing their opposition...
...Conventional geologists argue these hydrocarbons are contaminants from upper layers, but Gold asserts the Silja experiment confirms his hypothesis...
...Because of the long training, licensed operators tend to be rooted in their communities, with little job-hopping or transferring...
...Hydrogen is not a "natural resource...
...As the planet began its life history, Gold maintains, a differentiation process occurred, with heavier elements settling to the bottom, while lighter elements migrated toward the surface...
...Hydrogen combusts with oxygen to form an "exhaust" of warm water...
...But producing it will require enormous amounts of some other source of energy...
...Total U.S...
...As a result, the reactor never has to refuel, a process that closes conventional plants for about two weeks-the only reason current reactors routinely shut down...
...But the real revolution would be in natural gas...
...This is hardly worth arguing...
...And what about France-the home of Greenpeace!-at 70 percent...
...Helen Caldicott in 1988.Yet if this is true, then why does Japan have the second-largest reliance on nuclear power in the world, 33 percent...
...Underwriters Laboratories is run by the insurance industry as a way of making electrical appliances safer and cutting down on accidents...
...Increasing imports have made the difference...
...And the truth is that although Gold may be right about the astronomical origins of natural gas, much of it may be uneconomical-for the present at least...
...environmentalists often decry the supposed folly of burning gas and oil to drill for more gas and oil...
...Digging for gas and oil produces net energy, which is what makes it profitable...
...You have to commit yourself to years and years of education...
...Leveling power system loads is a legitimate objective: Electric power must be consumed as it is generated...
...Even if we open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling-20 billion barrels of oil in reserve, less than three years' consumption at current rates-some technological change will eventually be necessary...
...The geology journals won't touch my articles," he says...
...By 1900, they had discovered two more substances, polonium and radium, which released a previously unknown form of energy...
...Less than a mile away, an abandoned 19th-century cotton mill has been turned into an incubator for handcrafts, software firms and organic food companies...
...We would rid ourselves of this idea that we're running out of resources," he says...
...You can't just shut the plant off and go home...
...These are not old wives' tales, Gold maintains, but accurate reports describing methane releases...
...Instead, a remarkable thing has happened...
...It is nuclear power...
...WT MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 using a catalytic process, then transported by pipeline around the country...
...At the same time, we in the United States now produce only about one-third of our oil needs and won't do any better in the foreseeable future...
...Soft-spoken and reserved, Gold has also made a habit of dropping hand grenades into other people's disciplines...
...See sidebar, p 58.] Gold argues that gas, oil and coal are not "fossil fuels" at all, but the remains of methane that were trapped in the earth's core when the planet was formed 4.5 billion years ago...
...Even our most experienced operators spend four days out of every six weeks in here," says Gosekamp...
...Nuclear power is the world's best technology for reducing air pollution and greenhouse gases (not to mention saving Wyoming shale beds and Arctic wildlife preserves...
...The entire geological era from 360 to 286 million years ago is named the "Carboniferous Age," after huge coal deposits in places like Pennsylvania...
...In 2000, electricity from nuclear plants averaged 1.83 cents per kilowatt-hour, as opposed to 2.07 cents for coal, 3.24 cents for oil and 3.52 cents for natural gas...
...Part of the methane's hydrogen content is stripped and more complex "organic" molecules are formed...
...Vermont recycles more than a third of its garbage and is aiming to achieve 50 percent by 2005...
...For an extra $20, residents can buy a special falcon license plate, with the money donated to acquiring even more lands...
...In his 1976 book by that title, Lovins stated that: 1) centralized electrical generation was inherently inefficient...
...Boosted by the Energy Crisis, He$ner convinced Carter and Congress to deregulate all gas beneath 15,000 feet...
...Efficiency Vermont, a nonprofit established by the state public service board, is the nation's first utility company dedicated solely to improving energy efficiency...
...He called this form of energy "Xrays...
...Whenever we become involved in the Middle East, we fight with one hand tied behind our back...
...Is there such a source available...
...As a glance at the historical price curves for everything from oil and coal to corn and soybeans will show, we are awash in natural resources...
...Since 1980, each U.S...
...Like firemen or elite Navy crews, nuclear operators have a camaraderie built on professional performance and pride in their unique public responsibilities...
...The Vermont chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association has 800 members and 230 certified organic farms...
...These figures can only get better as other fuels become more expensive," says Marv Fertel, senior vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute...
...Standard geological theory says that coal deposits are the remains of primeval swamps buried by shifts in the earth's crust...
...Not entirely...
...Both the number of safety system activations and scrams (automatic protective shutdowns) are about one-tenth of what they were in 1.985," says Victor Dricks, spokesman for the NRC...
...The industry now operates at an incredible 90 percent of capacity...
...Lovins has a simple answer...
...The result was a three-month "oil shortage"-basically a wartime event...
...Over the last 10 years, the state has doubled its land set aside for conservation, buying 77,000 acres and acquiring the development rights to another 120,000 from timber companies...
...In The Deep Hot Biosphere, he actually argues that life originated in the bowels of the earth, feeding on upwelling methane, and only emerged later to the surface, where it learned to live on sunlight and air...
...If nighttime energy could be stored and used during the dayas Lovins' Hypercars would do-loads could be leveled and much of the peaking power would indeed become superfluous...
...Experimental pebble beds have been built in Germany, and a full-sized reactor is under construction in South Africa...
...Tapping into the root energy of the stars, the power inside the atom can run an entire city on a handful of fuel...
...Extracting enough hydrogen by this method to power our transport sector would mean doubling or tripling current natural gas production...
...Electrics" competed with gas vehicles at the dawn of the auto era, but eventually fell by the wayside...
...The two "energy shocks" of the last 30 years-the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and the 2000 California electricity crisis illustrate this pattern...
...Fuel cells can be built small enough to run an auto...
...Buttons that had to be operated simultaneously were often on opposite sides of the room...
...Thus, the immense sun's lifetime can safely be measured in billions of years...
...So hydrogen could indeed replace much of our oil imports...
...Do we really have an energy crisis...
...Whereas nuclear plants once typically ran at 65 percent of capacity, the industry now averages 90 percent...
...Every time a janitor tripped over a mop, a report would be filed to the NRC...
...With nothing more than upgrades of existing plants, the industry has added 23,000 MWs-the equivalent of 23 standard reactors-to the nation's electrical grid...
...Fuel cells operate at the molecular level, turning free hydrogen into an electric current without combustion...
...He never mentioned what might have happened without Diablo Canyon's megawatts...
...He's a certified nuclear power plant operator...
...When private companies started buying reactors, people said, `They'll run them until they melt down, collect the decommission money and move on to something else: That hasn't happened...
...Operators had so much trouble keeping them straight that one reactor team famously ornamented them with different types of beer taps-until the AEC told them to desist...
...In a classic worst-of-both-worlds scenario, the nuclear industry was also forced to deal with state public service commissions, where amateur public officials often liked to participate in the design process...
...This is because, though expensive to build, they are the cheapest to operate...
...And increasing numbers of those are locked in "water wars" with farmers and fishermen, or in even deeper fights with dam-busting environmentalists...
...The drilling, underwritten by the Swedish Power Board, also produced a small but commercially viable quantity of natural gas...
...Gold concedes there are organically produced compounds in oil, but offers a broader explanation-that methane from the earth's core has been able to support life...
...We call the pebble-bed design the politically correct reactor," adds Andrew C. Kadak, professor of nuclear engineering at Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, whose class is working on a 110-megawatt modular reactor that can be assembled off the shelf...
...Nobody around here is a slacker...
...Each Hypercar is equipped with its own fuel cell a "plums in 20-plus-kilowatt power plant...
...After the war, President Eisenhower tried to defuse the bellicose implications of the bomb by proclaiming "Atoms for Peace," including the much-mocked "electricity too cheap to meter...
...do not readily produce, in the members of [the leisure] class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which alone can lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that have become habitual to them...
...on the morning of March 28, 1979, at Three Mile Island in south-central Pennsylvania.A warning light on the control panel indicated an unexpected pressure transient...
...reactor is required by federal law to purchase $200 million in insurance, in addition to contributing up to $90 million in case of an accident anywhere else in the industry...
...Pent-up domestic supplies gushed forth, world prices plummeted and the "oil shortage" magically disappeared...
...Nuclear fuel rods are only 3- to 5- percent fissionable material, while bombs are more than 95 percent...
...The import of these numbers was not publicly recognized until the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945...
...It is the uncomfortable and dissatisfied who take risks and thereby create the future...
...His 1987 book Pover,from the Earth, published by J.M...
...Both get 70 miles per gallon and recharge from an onboard generator, eliminating the need for pit stops...
...And when they calculated its mass, they found there was barely enough fuel to last another 10,000 years...
...After serving four years as a nuclear machinist's mate, he signed on withVermontYankee in 1988...
...Signing on for this job is like entering the medical profession," says Gosekamp, who oversees the simulated control room at Vermont Yankee's $10 million training center...
...So-called hybrid gas-electric vehicles may make a dent...
...The operators checked to see if the auxiliary feed-water valves were open.A control panel light indicated they were closed, but a cardboard repair tag hanging from another switch obstructed this signal.As a result, the operators wrongly activated the emergency core-cooling system...
...Honda's new Insight has a three-cylinder, 67-horsepower engine that gets a boost from an electric motor while accelerating or climbing hills...
...they can run two years at a time without shutting down for refueling...
...president named Jimmy-Gosekamp first encountered the technology in the U.S...
...In 1977, Jimmy Carter was casting around for "alternate fuels...
...The theory was soon confirmed, earning Gold a place right behind Goethe in the exclusive Chambers Biographical Dictionary...
...Instead, the state enforced a powerful conservation program and subsidized it to the hilt...
...A year later, Henri Becquerel, of France, accidentally found that a small amount of uranium left next to a photographic plate produced an i nage.Within two years, Marie and Pierre Curie were laboring day and night in a dirt-floor shed behind their Paris apartment, trying to isolate radioactive elements from a mine tailing known as pitchblende...
...But working on their own ends, environmentalists inserted two identical clauses:"Parties...
...As Veblen put it: The exigencies of the general economic situation...
...Some of this will change with the development of the fuel cell, a technology invented in 1839 by Sir Robert Grove, a Welsh judge...
...Navy...
...It provides electricity that-if not too cheap to meter-is cheap enough for millions more of the Earth's people to afford...
...Then or now, this was not literally true, but close enough...
...state...
...What is the engine that keeps this Ecotopia running...
...Donald's Grandma Duck drove the last one...
...Safety and economic efficiency can go hand in 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ' MAY/JUNE 2002 hand...
...every conceivable variety of organic foodsis one of the city's most successful supermarkets...
...So why do we live in perpetual fear of an energy crisis...
...This apprenticeship lasts another two to five years, at which point the candidate can begin official licensing courses.That's another 14 months on the job and in the simulator...
...the falcon has become the state's symbol for conservation...
...We still have higher construction costs, but we're basically immune to increases in fuel prices...
...They called it "radioactivity...
...With astronomer Fred Hoyle and mathematician Hermann Bondi, he formulated the steady-state theory of the universe, the rival of the Big Bang.Though it is widely dismissed now, Gold has yet to concede...
...The Middle East and environmentalism-those are the problems...
...The environment is a number-one priority for residents of this state," says James Bressor of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation...
...None of this is even questioned in the textbooks...
...What's the use of doing anything...
...Today, we import nearly 60 percent of our oil, and the figure climbs higher every year...
...All you need is a supply of hydrogen...
...J f there is a single footprint to this behavior, it is Articles 6 (Joint Implementation) and 12 (Clean Development Mechanism) of the Kyoto Treaty-that magna carta of global ecocrats...
...On the other hand, the deep-gas theory could also become one of those environmental will-o'-the-wisps like "a world run on renewable resources"- serving only as an eternal excuse for never doing anything in the present...
...Although the twin principles of the conservation of matter and of energy had long been established, Einstein postulated a third: Matter and energy were themselves interchangeable, as expressed in the famous equation E = met...
...As industrial psychologist Adam Reed pointed out in a brilliant 1980 Reason article entitled "Who Caused Three Mile Island...
...By all odds, the industry should have died years ago by death from a million regulatory cuts...
...Even more significant, the pebble bed eliminates the possibility of meltdowns...
...Operating costs are at an all-time low-half of what they were in 1990...
...We bestride the globe politically and militarily, but must continually impose peace in order to keep crucial resources flowing, for ourselves and for the rest of our allies in the world economy...
...If one nuclear reactor melts down, they'll lose their whole fleet...
...Gold first popularized his ideas in 1980 in ScientghAmerican, with follow-ups in The Atlantic Monthly and Time...
...Then there is the presence of fossils in coal...
...Mandated since 1979 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Vermont Yankee's training simulator is one of 65 at nuclear sites around the country...
...Along with this came forced conservation...
...We're looking for operators who can think for themselves...
...At one of my presentations, a geologist stood up and said, `Dr...
...Wary of putting its training in the hands of the bureaucracy, the nuclear industry persuaded Congress to settle for 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ' MAY/JUNE 2002 must instantaneously match demand...
...Taking these ideas seriously, Russians have drilled for oil and gas in igneous rock, where conventional theory says fossil fuels cannot be found...
...Of course, mining other fuels requires energy as well...
...Oklahoma entrepreneur Robert Heffner embraced Gold's theories in the 1970s, and began promoting drilling for gas below 15,000 feet-a mile deeper than anyone was looking...
...But daytime demand is usually double nighttime demand, and summer peaks are typically 50 percent higher than winter, especially in hot climates...
...It's much more logical to say the gas is undergoing transformation as it rises to the surface...
...They generally make around $100,000, and live well...
...As one 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002 advantage is that it is a convenient carrier of other energy, making it more transportable and easier to use...
...This folly ended only when Ronald Reagan removed oil price controls his first week in office...
...At bottom, environmentalists are not really concerned with global warming or air pollution, any more than they were with the snail darter or the gambling casinos of Nevada...
...So why is it that you only find an occasional fossil-and perfectly formed at that...
...Some of the hydrogen will be fed into fuel cells within the building, supplying it with heat, hot water and electricity...
...A lever designed to move something up should move up itself, while a lever moving something down should pull down...
...In 2001, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced that the Department of Energy would abandon its efforts to improve gas mileage on gasoline engines and concentrate completely on the hydrogen car instead...
...Brattleboro's Co-Op-featuring Contributing editor William Tucker wrote "Horror On the Hudson" in TAS, January/February 2002...
...at all times, supply Aboard the U.S.S...
...The payoff for the industry has come with lower insurance rates...
...The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent...
...And the reason for that is not complex: Nuclear power plants nin all the tine-often two years straight, without stopping...
...These two articles say all anyone needs to know about environmentalists...
...Or nukes...
...Adams concluded, with fine fin de siecle despair...
...We already have enough coal to last hundreds of years...
...Chrysler, BMW and Toyota have all introduced experimental models...
...as Veblen put it, of any aristocracy...
...They claim to have struck oil beneath "basement rock" near Kazan and in the White Tiger fields off the coast ofVietnam, Significantly, Russia recently passed Saudi Arabia as the world's leading oil producer...
...In 1959, N.A...
...The problem first hit home when the Arab oil producers declared a boycott on Europe and America during the 1973 ArabIsraeli War...
...We try to balance work and family," says Gosekamp...
...Before this stratification was complete, however-and this is the key-the earth's crust cooled and solidified...
...In terms of natural resources, the answer is a resounding "No...
...Nuclear power...
...There's constant updating and feedback," says Gosekamp...
...While environmental groups accept natural gas in theory they routinely oppose it in practice...
...Amory Lovins is back in the picture with several patents on his "Hypercar," a lightweight sports car run solely on hydrogen...
...In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon became concerned when imports shot up from 29 percent to 33 percent of U.S...
...Green Hotels for the Green Mountain State," a consortium of local hostelries, provides low-impact accommodation for ecotourists...
...Where Gold's theories have found an audience is with a few maverick drillers...
...Y W I L L I A M T U 0 K 9 R Vermont is the East Coast's answer to Ecotopia...
...In other words, we are long past the point of diminishing returns...
...By 1999, California had the lowest per capita consumption of electricity in the nation, the highest contribution of alternate energies (11 percent)and not enough power to run San Francisco's traffic lights.With the Zelig-like S. David Freeman at his side, Governor Gray Davis commandeered the entire electrical industry and quickly authorized a new generation of gas-burning central generating stations in a desperate attempt to Davis also blamed the whole fiasco on outof-state power companies...
...VermontYankee's actual control room is manned by 10-member crews, working 12-hour shifts...
...In the 1940s, Gold developed a theory that the human sense of pitch originates in the ear rather than the brain, as was commonly supposed...
...Natural gas-commonly found with coal and oilis methane vaporized from the more complex coal and oil hydrocarbons...
...They claim they want clean energy and a reduction of greenhouse gases and appropriate technology, but when you dig all the way down, what they really want is a world in which nothing ever changes again...
...But an energy source it is not...
...Many organic compounds in oil can only be the result of biological processes...
...We're a group that likes to step up," says Gosekamp...
...After World War II, industry made huge strides in industrial psychology, safety's "human factors...
...Oil, gas and coal are the costly fuels...
...Impressed with the Ford Foundation's 1974 study, "A Time to Choose," President Jimmy Carter hired its author, S. David Freeman-described by Harperl editor Lewis Lapham as a "wandering moralist"-to design a grandiose National Energy Strategy...
...Moreover, all the good hydro sites are already developed...
...Shale oil and other low-grade deposits will last even longer...
...Gold's most receptive audience has been in Russia, where skepticism about fossil-fuel theory dates back to the earliest days of petroleum...
...as a result, the fissionable material is almost completely consumed, minimizing disposal problems...
...Even more to the point, says Lovins, this will be "the last nail in the nuclear coffin...
...They have been powering manned and unmanned spacecraft for years.They are clean, quiet and operate at 60 percent efficiency...
...But he had little luck cracking the professional literature...
...The proposal is so straightforward that if you read it in a high school textbook you'd hardly have any reason to doubt it...
...But the biggest bombshell of his life has yet to fully detonate: a theory that the earth's oil, gas and coal deposits are not the remains of prehistoric biological material, but instead derive from upwellings of methane and other hydrocarbons originating in the geological core of the earth itself...
...He went on to head Seven Seas Petroleum, finding oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Colombia, but continues to tout what he calls "The Age of Energy Gases...
...Along with about half the nation's 4,000 licensed nuclear operators-and a former U.S...
...Coal supplies are plentiful enough to last for centuries...
...The Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council, wealthy green groups that had been influential in California's power planning, now quietly acknowledge that the "soft path" has led nowhere...
...Kudryavtsev advanced what is now known as "Kudryavtsev's Rule"-that petroleum deposits are often found simultaneously in several vertical strata...
...He's also part of an elite corps that produces 20 percent of America's electrical power...
...Second, America now has a retrogressive aristocracy marching under the banner of "environmentalism.''AsThorsteinVeblen predicted a century ago in The Theory of the Leisure Class, an industrial society will eventually generate a class of people who are so comfortable with the established order that they will oppose any further material progress, even though they themselves aright benefit from it...
...But the true absurdity of this proposal doesn't emerge until you realize Lovins hopes to use the energy produced by the Hypercars' fuel cells to replace the same grid froul which the energy was derived in the first place...
...In other words, the substances we burn for so much of our energy are not "fossil" fuels at all-and there may be vastly more of them than ever supposed...
...Each year it schools 10 new initiates, while keeping the plant's 50 licensed operators on their toes through constant retraining...
...Throughout the 1980s and '90s, California followed this prescription to the letter...
...Twice that portion goes to home and commercial heating...
...Just like the Soft Path, the hydrogen economy leads to a clean, green world, run on infinitely renewable resources...
...It solves the air pollution problem...
...It frees us from dependence on burning up the earth's furniture by digging what we presume to be fossil fuels...
...The core lost coolant and the reactor overheated.The result was a partial meltdown, a small release of radioactive steam into the atmosphere and the end of nuclear construction in America...
...MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63...
...This left lots of gases trapped within...
...But if natural gas is essentially infinite, then a lot of energy strategies become plausible...
...But we've heard it all before and the case is getting harder and harder to make...
...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002 The final significant event of the 1970s was the Three Mile Island accident, which fanned long-smoldering popular fears of anything atomic, and effectively ended the nation's commitment to nuclear power...
...An amazing 70 percent of the electricity generated in Vermont is nuclear-the highest proportion of any U.S...
...Conventional geology argues that oil seeps downward from the original "source deposit...
...The problems of environmentalism are domestic.They will be won or lost through political debate...
...Hydrogen, after all, is the most common element in the universe, carbon the fourth-why wouldn't they combine to form hydrocarbons...
...They claim that the graphite coatings are not impermeable, that the whole concept has never been proven, that pebble-bed reactors should not be built...
...Homes and businesses around the country would install "hydrogen appliances"-small electrolyzing devices that will use off-peak power from the "ubiquitous electrical grid" to split water, producing oxygen and hydrogen...
...First Lovins has designed a system that converts electricity to hydrogen to electricity.The circularity is immediately apparent in his proposal that the building's fuel cells, running on hydrogen derived from the grid, be used to provide the building's electricity...
...Vermont Yankee Mike Gosekamp is a volunteer fire captain, helps with Boy Scouts and roots for his daughter's soccer and basketball teams...
...But there are other observations that buttress the fossil-fuel theory...
...Natural gas was still under price controls dating from the 1930s...
...In Lovins' first scenario, hydrogen will be extracted from natural gas at the wellhead, geologist has challenged Gold: "How can you argue with a fossil...
...Of course there is...
...The real problem here in the United States was the sequestering of the technology in the old Atomic Energy Commission...
...Tile 440,000 pebbles slowly drop through the core as if it were a giant gumball machine, with one exiting at the bottom each hour as another is added at the top...
...The practical result is that now we burn 400 million more tons of coal a year than we did in 1980-This has resulted in "acid rain," which has done measurable damage to forests in the United States and Europe, and raised the specter-whether illusory or not-of"global warming...
...The results have been astonishing...
...The Synfuels Corporation lumbered along for almost a decade, making gas from coal and oil from tar sands, until it collapsed under its own weight in 1986...
...When people ask me about nuclear bombs, I tell them I don't even know how a bomb works," says Gosekamp...
...Solar energy became the target of every subsidy known to man...
...From the first australopithecines venturing out onto the savanna to the Pilgrims boarding the Mayflower or investors plunking down millions on the new new thing, human progress has been nothing if not a story of accepting risks...
...The amount of matter converted to energy at Hiroshima was one gram...
...Always ready to redirect progress, California has mandated that by next year 2 percent of cars produced for the state must be "zero emissions vehicles"electric cars...
...You're on call 24 hours a day, whether it's 8 o'clock Saturday night or 2:30 Wednesday morning...
...In 1877, Dmitri Mendeleev, originator of the periodic table of the elements, published a paper entitled "The Origin of Petroleum," Mendeleev noted that oil discoveries seemed to correspond more with large-scale crustal features such as mountain ` ranges and great valleys than with specific sedimentary strata...
...Hydrogen cars, hydrogen trucks, the whole idea of a new "hydrogen economy" is plausible-if we have a reliable fleet of nuclear reactors ready to provide us with the fuel...
...Heffner promptly found gas below basement rock in Oklahoma and Arkansas, but the whole effort fell apart when President Reagan deregulated all natural gas prices in 1985...
...Freed from being a regulated monopoly, the merchant nuclear industry has raised reactor performance to a level hardly ever imagined...
...The only central generating station added to its power grid was Diablo Canyon, a 2,130-MW nuclear station commissioned in the 1970s, but delayed until 1986...
...Both organizations have put forth national energy plans encouraging utilities to "back out" aging coal plants and replace them with cleaner, more efficient natural gas.The Sierra Club even wants a pipeline across the Arctic tundra to bring natural gas to the West Coast from Alaska's Prudhoe Bay...
...While the old Atomic Energy Commission had been a cheerleader for nuclear power, the renamed Nuclear Regulatory Commission became obsessed with safety...
...We've cut our use of fossil fuels as much as possible," says Dorothy Schnure of Green Mountain Power, which serves a third of the state and has just built a 6-megawatt (MW) wind farm, the biggest east of the Mississippi...
...This pattern defies the fossil explanation...
...He subscribes to the yet-unproven theory of Cornell astronomer Thomas Gold that natural gas deposits are essentially infinite...
...The public-which is not stupid has done an end-run around this strategy, buying bigger, stronger sport utility vehicles, classified as trucks (and therefore exempt from CAFE...
...This discouraged domestic production, encouraged consumption and created an effective shortage of domestic oil...
...Assuming-not unreasonably-that this meant danger, the operators concluded that the water levels in the core had become dangerously high.They shut off the cooling system...
...In each scenario, he writes, enough hydrogen could be produced to run a "hydrogen economy" without adding to air pollution...
...America is a declining oil province," says John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute...
...This might have passed quickly had not Congress responded by imposing price controls on domestic oil supplies, ostensibly punishing "Profiteering" American oil drillers for what the Arabs had done...
...These companies know their future is riding on safety...
...It frees us potentially from a debilitating dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf and other volatile parts of the world...
...Retired Cornell astronomy professor Thomas Gold lives quietly in the professorial suburb of Cayuga Heights, just north of the burgeoning Ithaca campus...
...Lovins, remember, does this to eliminate the greenhouse gases...
...Helped along by the general ignorance of anything scientific, Three Mile Island traumatized the American public...
...After Three Mile Island, there was a big push to have the federal government take over nuclear training...
...Because nuclear power overthrows their real agenda of stopping human history...
...They accelerate poorly, cannot maintain highway speeds, lose their charge after a couple of hours and have very limited range...
...It is a pretty good predictor of human history...
...The capital fact is that petroleum was born in the depths of the earth," he wrote, "and only there must we seek its origin...
...Because each fuel capsule is self-contained, the loss of a coolant will not send tem peratures soaring...
...First, a significant portion of our energy comes from the most volatile part of the world, the Middle East.There is enough oil in the world to last for centuries, but unfortu MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55 nately the cheapest supplies lie beneath the Persian Gulf...
...Unfortunately, before it was over, the "Energy Crisis" became a pretext for even more government planning...
...Electrics are basically glorified golf carts...
...Never one to let previous abject failures get in his way, Amory Lovins himself has sketched out two possible scenarios, using either methane or water...
...His answer, just as 25 years ago, is the old Soft Energy dream that hydroelectric dams can carry the entire base load...
...In barely 10,000 years, the sun itself would be a cinder...
...By 1970, no new design for a toaster or blender at General Electric could get off the drawing board without being examined by an expert in human factors...
...Although we may think of ourselves as the center of the world, the oil industry sees us largely as a spent resource...
...Are there reserves enough to support this...
...At 12,500 feet the drillers encountered a tarlike sludge that contained hydrocarbons...
...In fact, the tiny traces of uranium in coal contain more potential energy than the coal itself...
...Suddenly, Heffner's more expensive gas became uneconomical...
...One ambitious state tried to do without both-coal or nuclear...
...ReliableVermontYankee's reactor in Brattleboro supplies a third of Vermont's own power and exports the rest to neighboring states...
...In 1999, Three Mile Island's Unit I (the one that didn't melt down) set an all-time record by running for nearly two years without interruption...
...Gasohol, of course, is still with us, thanks to every Cornbelt senator...
...But problems linger...
...J n the 1890s, Henry Adams, perhaps the greatest aristocratic thinker in American history, became obsessed with the idea that the world was coming to an end...
...There's a sense of responsibility and professional dedication...
...On paper, natural gas looks fine...
...So if Gold's theory does turn out to be true, does it mean an end to the Energy Crisis...
...The reduction in using oil to generate electricity is one of the most remarkable In 1975, we generated 15 percent of our electricity with oil.Today, the figure is 3 percent...
...It will be enough to help us colonize the moon and the planets if we ever become that ambitious...
...In 1967, when strange, rapidly pulsing radio signals were received from places around our galaxy-taken by some to be messages from an advanced civilization-Gold immediately advanced the hypothesis that they were from rapidly rotating, super-dense neutron stars, which had been theorized, but never observed...
...As a result, control panels often looked like Buck Rogers sets with little regard to utility...
...It is also why civilizations of the past have always become mired in their own inertia...
...In 1976, B.M,Valyaev and P.N...
...The private sector has joined hands...
...Meanwhile, the improved mileage has only encouraged people to drive more...
...24 percent goes for industrial purposes...
...The National Academy of Sciences estimates that CAFE causes between 1,300 and 2,600 additional traffic deaths a year...
...Utilities cope with this pattern by building "base-load" plants that run 24 hours a day, then adding more expensive "peaking" plants, which run only a portion of the dayor even a few hours a year...
...The reason nuclear scientists developed nuclear power reactors was to assuage their collective guilt," wrote Dr...
...As a result, we find ourselves much in the same position as England at the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars...
...And neither has the same risks of going to war to protect our oil imports...
...Scientists assumed the sun ran on chemical combustion...
...California has dammed every river and stream in sight and still gets only 20 percent of its power from hydro-half of that imported...
...just as we drifted into burning three times as much coal as in 1980 without considering its limitations, so we are now drifting into relying more on natural gas.AsVerrnont has shown us, there is a better way...
...Redundancy is the key to this operation," says Gosekamp...
...About once every five years, he invades a new field of research and proposes an outrageous theory that arouses intense opposition from the professional experts in the field," wrote Freeman Dyson in an introduction to Gold's 1999 book, The Deep Hot Biosphere...
...The second although precipitated by madcap price controls-had its origin in 20 years of retrogressive environmental fantasy...
...While parked-"96 percent of the time" the vehicles will be sending power back to the electrical grid...
...Entergy bought reactors in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, then acquired Con Edison's Indian Point in Buchanan, New York, and Boston Edison's Pilgrim Nuclear Station in Plymouth, Massachusetts...
...Just in case natural gas doesn't turn out to be infinite, however, Lovins has a second, more complex scenario for producing the requisite vast amounts of hydrogen...
...Ultimately, they are not interested in clean air or preventing global warming...
...Each contains 15,000 uranium particles, coated with a silicon-carbon barrier so dense that no gaseous or metallic radioactive products can escape...
...We made up the difference by increasing imports...
...By far, the most promising vehicular scenario is a car run on the most common element in the universe-hydrogen...
...In that year, we produced 3.6 billion barrels of oil and consumed 5.4 billion...
...Now notice what's being done here...
...I often sit here wondering how anyone could ever use our technology for a weapon...
...What's never been incorporated in the language is that these compounds can form astronomically...
...It's environmentally friendly...
...A red light came on...
...Kropotkin-a descendant of the 19thcentury anarchist prince-published a paper claiming to find conclusive evidence of upward migration...
...Volcanoes, he says, are places where methane first breaks through the earth's crust, creating a path for magma to follow...
...Natural gas is much more abundant than previously realized (and may be nearly infinite, if some contemporary theories are to be believed).Then there's nuclear power...
...Methane also gathered traces of helium a byproduct of uranium fission...
...Thirty years later, he was proved right...
...Nature published his analysis within a week without peer review...
...With apologies to Amory Lovins, we can have the best of all possible worlds...
...I don't know why Lovins needs to convert to hydrogen," says Gold, "You can just use methane...
...The critical year was 1970, when both American oil production and oil reserves hit their all-time peaks...
...Mainstream Russian geologists have followed...
...As a result, plants can be built without expensive concrete containment structures, more than half the construction costs.This will bring the costs of nuclear power well below any other fuel...
...Uranium is as common as tin...
...It solves global warming, whether or not such a threat is real...
...Free hydrogen exists only in outer space...
...All this training enables us to find the employees we want," says Gosekamp...
...California under Governor Jerry Brown planted its feet firmly on Amory Lovins' Soff Enev1y Path...
...It comes down to this: Can we find another way to run our cars...
...This is a classic perpetual motion machine-a machine that runs on its own output...
...If the earth and other planets did indeed coalesce out of a huge revolving cloud of stellar debris-and there isn't much doubt of this-then methane would have been plentiful in the young earth...
...Another possibility often discussed is running cars on natural gas...
...Reactors only occasionally adjust their output...
...Just about every nuclear reactor ended up with one-ofa-kind features...
...The quality of people you end up working with is unparalleled...
...Lovins has an answer for that, too: He argues that his system would only "level" the grid, by utilizing power from off-peak sources...
...Yet the same company was designing, manufacturing and delivering nuclear reactors that had never been seen, much less exam fined by an engineering psychologist...
...Dent & Sons in London, disappeared like, well, a stone...
...Instead, all reductions must come from forced conservation and general impoverishment...
...The government would confiscate these "excess profits" and invest them in alternative energy strategies-solar, conservation, synthetic fuels...
...Even so, six years of experience aboard nuclear submarines only earns you a ticket to the civilian nuclear sector's front door...
...Using basic commercial techniques, these companies have revitalized the industry...
...By 1979, Congress' idiocy had pushed imports to nearly 50 percent...
...Uranium costs have actually decreased, from .92 cents per kilowatt-hour in 1990 to .50 cents in 2000...
...Good as it looks now, the future of nuclear is getting better...
...In plain English, nuclear plants don't count in reducing carbon emissions-even though they are the world's best technology for doing so...
...A people that refiises to accept manageable risks will eventually face something far worse-as California discovered in 2000...
...At that point, they can work in the plant as auxiliary operators...
...F finally, even as safety and performance increased, the economics of nuclear power has improved...
...Exelon, formed from portions of PECO Energy (Philadelphia) and Chicago's Commonwealth Edison, bought a fleet of 17 reactors at 10 sites in Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania (Three Mile Island, among them...
...Some of the manufacturers of nuclear power reactors had highly competent engineering psychologists working for their other divisions, but the AEC insisted on keeping nuclear reactor work secret and isolated...
...It's time Americans learn to stop worrying and love nuclear power...
...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wanted to establish an academy for nuclear operators in Washington...
...They prefer, as Veblen put it, "a reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life...
...Having already encouraged demand with price controls, Congress attempted to offset its mischief by imposing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy target on the auto companies, known in the industry by its acronym CAFE...
...This means the energy available from matter is its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light-a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (102').Thus a handful of uranium contains more potential energy than a 100-car freight train filled INPO, the Institute for Nuclear Plant Operators...
...Although the region's bedrock is entirely igneous, gas and oil seepage has been noted for centuries...
...This gives reactor owners an enormous incentive to cooperate on safety matters and share information...
...Toyota's Prius accelerates to 15 mph with an electric motor, then adds its 1.5-liter, 70-horsepower gas engine...
...and 3) solar and other renewables could be ramped up to take over around 2025...
...Carmakers were required to improve gas mileage by 1985 to 27.5 mpg for cars and 20.7 mpg for trucks...
...Coal and oil are formed instead, he argues, as upwelling gas meets different conditions of pressure and temperature...
...Despite being downwind from Midwestern coal plants, the Green Mountain State has been able to lower air pollution to unprecedented levels...
...But this CO-) will be pumped back underground, facilitating the extraction of still more methane, while keeping the greenhouse gases safely in the earth.Voila...
...That's just the beginning...
...Tucked into an inconspicuous cinderblock building just north of Brattleboro,Vermont,Yankee's control-room simulator duplicates bolt-for-bolt the actual control room at the 540-megawatt reactor, 10 miles south on the Connecticut River...
...Since the time of Aristotle, he notes, there have been reports from around the world of strange gas emissions and "pillars of fire" accompanying earthquakes...
...I can see no other explanation of why we find helium in all petroleum deposits...
...It is not difficult to mine and turning it into electric power is a fairly straightforward task...
...ener gy...
...Their main concern is to stop human progress...
...After Congress deregulated the electrical industry in the 1990s, utility companies began selling off their nuclear capacity...
...Electric vehicles have long been a favored candidate...
...As with electric power, hydrogen's only Bottomless Oil Wells...
...Kyoto's purported aim is to reduce the world's output of carbon dioxide and other so-called "greenhouse gases...
...Even critics of the industry have been forced to admit that truly private enterprise runs it better...
...Kudryavtsev, echoing Gold, believed the movement is upward, from the earth's core...
...The remaining 68 percent-the toughest nut to crack-is for transportation...
...In 2001, SUVs outsold standard autos for the first time in history...
...Still, the myth has persisted that nuclear energy isn't really practical-too dangerous or (relatedly) too costly...
...At almost the same moment,William Conrad Roentgen, working in Germany, discovered a type of"invisible light" that penetrated paper and left photographic shadows of solid objects...
...Very often you find gas on the bottom, oil in the middle and coal on top," Gold says...
...The first was a temporary wartime problem that Congress expanded into a decade-long trauma by imposing price controls...
...We still refer to methane and simple hydrocarbons as `organic' chemicals," says Gold...
...reserves-the amount of a resource that can be developed at current prices-stood at 39 billion barrels.Today, by contrast, production has fallen to 3.2 billion barrels a year, while consumption has risen to 7.1 Bb/y Reserves have been cut nearly in half, to 22 billion barrels...
...As of now, there is no payoff not to mention profits-in producing hydrogen:You get less energy out than you put in...
...It's not even a matter of discussion...
...Although some in Congress would be loath to admit it, there is no way to conserve our way out of oil dependence...
...People move here just because of the quality of life...
...Total miles driven has risen from 1 trillion in 1970 to 2.5 trillion today...
...We think nuclear, hydro and renewables give us a very diversified power supply...
...They want to stop the world...
...As a result, we were sitting ducks when the Shah of Iran toppled and international supplies were once again disrupted.The result was another "gas shortage," which only solidified the notion that we were "running out of resources...
...Coupled with cheap hydroelectric power from Quebec, this enablesVermont to keep its lights lit, yogurt cold and computers humming, while burning almost no coal, oil or natural gas to generate electricity.The state's largest carbon-based fuel is wood, which powers 5 percent of the grid...
...Control rooms were built to satisfy regulators' notions of what looked "space age...
...Is there really enough natural gas to power large portions of the grid...
...Combined-cycle plants burn more cleanly and operate at 60 percent efficiency (as opposed to 30 percent for oil and coal), providing twice the electricity for half the pollution...
...All this came to a head at 4 a.m...
...Recharging takes almost an hour...
...There's only one problem...
...At a certain point it becomes more important to prevent other people from climbing the ladder behind you than ascending any further yourself...
...The U.S...
...His theories are certainly intriguing and could indeed be true...
...How does Lovins respond to this...
...Freeman's solution was simple: have the federal government commandeer the oil industry...
...Few people believe that anyone will buy these cars...
...There are two principal reasons...
...Even more astounding, the industry's safety record has improved in lockstep...
...So why write a no-nukes provi sion into the Kyoto accords...
...No sulfur dioxide, no nitrous MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 oxides, no particulates, no smog, no acid rain...
...Its main problem is that it conflicts with the agenda of environmentalists-which is to freeze the status quo forever...
...but no one seriously believes electrics can replace the internal combustion engine...
...Gold, how many other astronomers believe your theory that methane exists in other parts of the universe?' I had to tell him that there aren't any astronomers who don't believe it...
...It is the environmentalists' best friend...
...But what few people realize, Gold points out, is that when the theory was originally formulated in the 19th century, very little was known about the earth's astronomical history...
...It was only after the loss of the Three Mile Island plant in 1979 that engineering psychologists asked what the hell was going on in nuclear power plant control rooms.What they saw made them shiver...
...Sometimes it turns out the experts are right and he is wrong...
...Headquartered in Atlanta, INPO now runs the National Academy of Nuclear Training, which accredits and supervises the on-site training schools...
...Meanwhile, it subsidized and developed every conceivable renewable-geothermal, wind, small hydroelectric dams, solar collectors and methane from garbage dumps (about 1 and methane from garbage dumps (at 1 MW per dump...
...Extracting hydrogen from these sources requires...
...Coal is supposed to be the compressed remains of organic materials, he points out...
Vol. 35 • May 2002 • No. 3
