WILLIAM TUCKER: MEMO TO ANTI-COAL WARRIORS- MAKE NUCLEAR PEACE
http://online.wsj.com/articles/william-tucker-memo-to-anti-coal-warriors-make-nuclear-peace-1404170991
Mr. Tucker is the author of “Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey” (Bartleby Press, 2010).
It’s not too late to fix Jimmy Carter’s energy blunder of the 1970s.
The Environmental Protection Agency has issued a 645-page ruling whose basic aim is to cut coal plants out of the mix in producing the nation’s electricity. States will supposedly be given a choice, but the only real way to meet the agency’s demands for carbon-dioxide reductions will be to cut back on coal. All this will be a devastating blow to the Midwestern economy, driving up energy prices for everyone, while having only the slightest impact on global warming.
There is a great irony to this. In the early 1970s, coal was being phased out as the nation’s principal source of electricity. The initial concerns about air pollution had focused on coal, and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club were campaigning to lift the 20-year-old ban on imported oil so we could replace coal with low-sulfur oil from Libya and Indonesia.
All this came to a halt with the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. It became clear that burning oil for electricity in the U.S. was a luxury we could no longer afford. But there was a salvation on the horizon. The nation was just embarking on a monumental effort to implement nuclear power, with almost 200 reactors on the drawing boards or in the pipeline. This would supplant both coal and oil and solve the problem of air pollution once and for all. (Concerns about carbon emissions had not yet arisen.)
Work on more than 50 reactors had already begun when the effort hit a snag. With the new administration of President Jimmy Carter, environmentalists gained a foothold in the government for the first time. They were opposed to air pollution but they were more opposed to nuclear power. At the same time, Mr. Carter was under tremendous pressure to find a replacement for foreign oil, so environmentalists came up with a solution. Theorists such as soft-energy guru Amory Lovins argued that coal could be cleaned up through new technologies—the fluidized bed, for instance, which pulverizes coal for nearly complete combustion. This would allow coal to serve as a bridge to the coming legions of wind, solar and other renewable energies that would be ready to take over completely somewhere around 2025.
Given the choice between coal and nuclear, Mr. Carter chose coal. He canceled experimental reactors, shut down research, ended the reprocessing of spent fuel (a decision that created the unnecessary problem of nuclear waste), and effectively brought the technology to a halt. At the time, the nation was burning half-a-billion tons of coal a year. Mr. Carter vowed we would reach one billion tons by 2000 and that promise was fulfilled. Even as coal use declines today, we still consume just under one billion tons a year.
As a result, America has lost its lead in nuclear technology. There are now 60 reactors under construction around the world—including 26 in China—but only four new ones being built in the U.S. Russia, France and South Korea are even further ahead in the technology, selling their reactors all over the world. India and Argentina each just brought a new reactor on line in May.
On Friday, Russia fired up a fast breeder reactor, the holy grail that consumes all forms of nuclear waste. We abandoned the technology in the 1990s.
To illustrate further how far things have declined in this country: Fourteen years ago Bill Gates assigned Microsoft‘s technology genius Nathan Myhrvold to explore the frontiers for advanced energy. Mr. Myhrvold settled on a design using the traveling wave, a reactor that burns for 50 years without refueling and consumes its own waste. After waiting a year at the gates of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Rockville, Md., Messrs. Gates and Myhrvold realized there was no hope of experimenting in the U.S. So they took their reactor design to China. In 2011 Mr. Gates signed an agreement with the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation to develop the traveling wave.
The same thing is happening with thorium, which produces no plutonium and is therefore proliferation-proof. Most nuclear engineers believe thorium to be a far superior fuel to uranium. China and India are developing thorium technology, but not the U.S.
It is ridiculous to think we can go into the Industrial Belt of the Midwest and tell people they must close down coal plants without anything to replace them. Natural gas is offered as an alternative, but with gas leading a manufacturing revival, pressure building to export it, and attempts under way to substitute gas for gasoline in our cars, who knows how long the price will remain low?
We should be building nuclear reactors right beside every old coal plant. Had we pursued this path 40 years ago, we would not only have lowered U.S. carbon emissions, as have France and Sweden, but we could be helping other countries reduce theirs as well. We can still, if we go back to that road not taken and revive nuclear energy.
Comments are closed.
