FUTURE ENERGY PROJECT
A comprehensive energy policy is long missing from the American scene. Initiatives to develop such a policy have been consistently blocked by a combination of the industries producing oil, coal and natural gas and by an overextended environmental lobby which stopped the building of nuclear power plants. The producing industries had obvious motives to stop the nuclear power movement as it sprung from The Manhattan Project. While the United States has more reactors than any other nation, there is such strong resistance to them that none have been added in twenty years.
- Questions have been raised continually about the safety of nuclear power and fear of radiation leaks, chain reaction explosions or “China Syndrome” meltdowns.
- Opponents protest the movement of nuclear waste and the storage of it. A strategy is to shut down the American nuclear industry by blocking access to safe processing and storage of the waste.
- The nexus of the issue is the ratio of wastes in power generation. In the United States an estimated 2,800 million tons of carbon dioxide is released annually into the atmosphere from fossil fuel power plants. Millions of tons of sulfurous and nitrous gasses and fractions of toxic substances are similarly released, controlled to the extent possible. Substituting nuclear power would produce 30,000 tons of nuclear waste annually, controlled in every way.
- Meanwhile France has become the center of nuclear engineering. The production of electricity there is now totally by 58 nuclear plants aided by hydro plants. At a large and ingenious facility at La Hague in Normandy nuclear fuel rods from around the world are reprocessed to extract reusable fuel. The radio nuclides of waste are then reacted by vitrification into borosilicate glass inside stainless steel canisters. The glass is insoluble; the waste becomes atomistically a part of this insoluble glass which is then placed in controlled storage deep in granite beneath the plant.
- Alternate sources of electricity for the grid from the wind and the sun have been sought for decades. The prospects of costs and feasibility must be fully examined.
- Alternate sources of energy from hydrogen fuel cells or solar cells backed up by the present electrical grid have been proposed for use in every home or business.
A major initiative was launched in 1980 called “Synfuels” which was to be akin to the Manhattan Project to develop alternate sources of petroleum products. It was pressured by the industry lobbies and then abandoned during the Reagan administration. Had it been properly operated by now we might be getting the oil products we need from the oil and tar sands in the Rocky Mountains.
A model is needed to comprise all of the details of what makes economic and environmental sense in providing electricity and for powering transportation in a growing economy. It must also in the long term provide raw materials for the petrochemical industries. The model must optimize the safety of energy production to the nation and the world. Let the conversation and debate begin from there.
For additional information regarding our future energy project, please e-mail energy@ftad.org
