Nuclear blackmail -- not what you think.
I was reading the WSJ yesterday when it occurred to me....
It real and upon us: the energy crunch. Even if I am right and oil goes back to, say, $100 a barrel, there is no doubting the Earth has reached a tipping point in its use of fossil fuels. We could start to mine the oil shale and oil sands of Canada and the U.S., but for the first time we may have seen the spectre of too many users demanding too much oil.
And if the eco-weenies are right, and there is some form of anthropogenic climate change happening, we need to reduce or eliminate the gross carbon-based energy bonanza that passes for industry today. If they are wrong (and I believe that they are), why should we schmutz up the world anyway. Or worse, hand over trillions of dollars to those who would rather see us dead? We put bread in the mouths of those that would kill us, those who would see the world turned into a stone-age theocracy?
The immediate anwer is nuclear power. Clean -- carbon footprint of "nil" -- efficient, producing the energy source of choice for eco-weenies: electricity. Renewable through breeder reactors. But why does France produce 99.8% of its electrical energy from nuclear power and in the U.S. it is about 20%. France even exports about 18% of its production to other EU members -- most of which are held hostage by their environmental movements and cannot build their own plants.
AND THAT, friends, is the key point here: environmental movements across the globe (except notably in France and Russia) have managed to throw up hurdles to the exploitation of nuclear energy, at the same time loudly decrying the use of fossil fuels. The eco-weenies want "renewable, clean energy" but apart from pointing vaguely at wind, solar, geothermal and tidal source offer NO real solutions. None. I can't continue to write "eco-weenies" so hereafter they shall be known as EWs.
The real impact is socio-political ... the EWs want to shut down international trade (except when they want solar panels from New Zealand), and force us to scale back to living in mud-huts freezing our butts in the Winter. Riding bikes for ALL purposes. Only legitimate government officials would have access to or need cars and trucks, we could all live together in harmony, tilling the Earth in an eco-friendly manner ... nobody getting too rich and flying off in their Citation jets to second or third houses where it is warm. The EWs want to use the "energy crisis" as a means of advancing a secular-progressive agenda: modern communism, enforced by care for the Earth and concern for equality of the people everywhere in terms of carbon footprint. We, bad Americans, should have the same footprint as Babu in Bangalore, or Mbuki in Mbabane.
And nuclear power is a problem because it effectively "short circuits" their political agenda and goals. The EWs remember the great protests of the 1970's and '80's -- their fathers and mothers successfully managed to scare the elected government into erecting a barrage of bullshit regulations, planning commissions, agencies (which have to generate paperwork, or go out of business) -- all to prevent the construction of nuclear power plants. I have always suspected that the USSR was behind that, or even a cabal of far-sighted Saudis and their counterparts in the energy companies, or both. But the proto-EW movement were nothing short of Lenin's useful idiots. And while they failed to force us to "cave" to the East Bloc -- largely thanks to the Reagan Revolution -- and while they have been proven wrong on essentially every single geopolitical issue they have ever demonstrated for, their legacy remains a poison to a prosperous, modern America.
Today the anti-nuke movement sees the following themes as the main arguments against nuclear power: (1) cost; (2) number of plants required; (3) knowledge; (4) subsidies drawing resources away from other potential sources; (5) safety; (6) waste storage; and (7) proliferation.
And in looking at these "problems" I realized that every single one of these issues is either a "non-issue" (scare tactic) or a problem created by the EW movement themselves. Let's look at costs.... Since no new plants have been built since 1977, nobody has any idea of what the costs might be. We could guess that the expense of the first couple of new plants would be heavy, both with engineering permits, legal wrangles (the self-same EWs fighting against the plants would fulfill their prediction of high costs), financing costs, skills training, initial parts production .... All of which would drop significantly as more were built. "Cheaper" fossil fuels are going to look a lot more expensive when you have to count in the carbon costs imposed by the EWs, not to mention the environmental costs.
The number of plants required to cut into the need: larger and more efficient plants is one solution, but hiding our heads in the sand and saying "too many" is absurd. You need however many you need, given acceptable numbers of coal or oil fired plants and the availability of other energy sources -- all in the context of predicted energy requirements. More plants also means lower unit costs. Costs are unfavorably compared with solar and wind power ... maybe if you can guarantee that those sources will provide continuous power, but since nobody can get my 24 hour forecast right, why should we presume to be able to predict the weather? Also, suitable sites for wind farms and solar arrays are often too far from the end user of the energy being produced to make it sensible at all.
The EWs wring their hands about the lack of knowledge and skills available for the building and running of nuclear plants. Har-har. The EWs' parents are responsible for that lack, having virtually killed off that industry in the 1970's. We could always buy nuclear plants from France ... that ought to please the EWs. But fortunately, the military has been able to pick up some of the slack and has kept current on matters nuclear -- isn't that ironic. But consider the dangers of coal-fired plants ... aren't the EWs telling us fossil fuel plants are killing the Earth? Causing everything from global warming to mass lung disease and cooties? Or that the wind turbines in Vineyard Sound will kill all the seagulls and damage their views? What's worse, nuclear risks or the "surety of global warming?"
But the inevitable subsidies will take away money from ... other industries requiring subsidies that just might fall within the rubric of politically correct wastage? We know that nuclear power produces electricity - where and how required. Can you say that about wind or solar power? In the Northeast?
Where to put the spent nuclear fuel? So far, in the US, the sum total of all nuclear waste would cover a football field 15 feet deep in toxic crap. That's it. Some of this is now "cool" on a radioactive horizon and can be stored in a different way from the recent hot waste. To be sure, that's still one seriously toxic football field, but finding room for storage is NOT one of the problems. Finding a place for it is. And that problem is created by the same EWs who claim that there is a problem. Voila. Reprocessing of spent fuel also decreases the amount of waste, but as EWs point out, that also means that such dangerous byproducts as Plutonium are available for separation -- a proliferation problem. Compare that waste problem with the emissions creating global warming....
And we come to the ultimate EW nightmare: proliferation. Oh dear! Look, it is not as if anything we do "to set an example"' will in any way affect the actions of other nations. And if other nations are going to try and "nick" some of our reprocessed stuff, why would they bother to get it here? Why not France or Russia? Or build their own D.I.Y. nuke kit from Kim Jong-Il or Pakistan? Just worrying about our ability to keep tabs on our own nuke-stuff is nonsensical compared with the global risk already out there. The Genie is already out of the bottle.
Also ironically, it turns out that the best system for producing gasoline from oil shale and oil sands involves using a nuclear plant to hyrdolize the raw material, heating it, using superheated steam, etc. -- under current plans, 30% of any fuel produced has to be used in the making of each gallon of good stuff. Kind of expensive when you consider how cheaply it could be done using the by-products of nuke electricity production.
Weird.
It real and upon us: the energy crunch. Even if I am right and oil goes back to, say, $100 a barrel, there is no doubting the Earth has reached a tipping point in its use of fossil fuels. We could start to mine the oil shale and oil sands of Canada and the U.S., but for the first time we may have seen the spectre of too many users demanding too much oil.
And if the eco-weenies are right, and there is some form of anthropogenic climate change happening, we need to reduce or eliminate the gross carbon-based energy bonanza that passes for industry today. If they are wrong (and I believe that they are), why should we schmutz up the world anyway. Or worse, hand over trillions of dollars to those who would rather see us dead? We put bread in the mouths of those that would kill us, those who would see the world turned into a stone-age theocracy?
The immediate anwer is nuclear power. Clean -- carbon footprint of "nil" -- efficient, producing the energy source of choice for eco-weenies: electricity. Renewable through breeder reactors. But why does France produce 99.8% of its electrical energy from nuclear power and in the U.S. it is about 20%. France even exports about 18% of its production to other EU members -- most of which are held hostage by their environmental movements and cannot build their own plants.
AND THAT, friends, is the key point here: environmental movements across the globe (except notably in France and Russia) have managed to throw up hurdles to the exploitation of nuclear energy, at the same time loudly decrying the use of fossil fuels. The eco-weenies want "renewable, clean energy" but apart from pointing vaguely at wind, solar, geothermal and tidal source offer NO real solutions. None. I can't continue to write "eco-weenies" so hereafter they shall be known as EWs.
The real impact is socio-political ... the EWs want to shut down international trade (except when they want solar panels from New Zealand), and force us to scale back to living in mud-huts freezing our butts in the Winter. Riding bikes for ALL purposes. Only legitimate government officials would have access to or need cars and trucks, we could all live together in harmony, tilling the Earth in an eco-friendly manner ... nobody getting too rich and flying off in their Citation jets to second or third houses where it is warm. The EWs want to use the "energy crisis" as a means of advancing a secular-progressive agenda: modern communism, enforced by care for the Earth and concern for equality of the people everywhere in terms of carbon footprint. We, bad Americans, should have the same footprint as Babu in Bangalore, or Mbuki in Mbabane.
And nuclear power is a problem because it effectively "short circuits" their political agenda and goals. The EWs remember the great protests of the 1970's and '80's -- their fathers and mothers successfully managed to scare the elected government into erecting a barrage of bullshit regulations, planning commissions, agencies (which have to generate paperwork, or go out of business) -- all to prevent the construction of nuclear power plants. I have always suspected that the USSR was behind that, or even a cabal of far-sighted Saudis and their counterparts in the energy companies, or both. But the proto-EW movement were nothing short of Lenin's useful idiots. And while they failed to force us to "cave" to the East Bloc -- largely thanks to the Reagan Revolution -- and while they have been proven wrong on essentially every single geopolitical issue they have ever demonstrated for, their legacy remains a poison to a prosperous, modern America.
Today the anti-nuke movement sees the following themes as the main arguments against nuclear power: (1) cost; (2) number of plants required; (3) knowledge; (4) subsidies drawing resources away from other potential sources; (5) safety; (6) waste storage; and (7) proliferation.
And in looking at these "problems" I realized that every single one of these issues is either a "non-issue" (scare tactic) or a problem created by the EW movement themselves. Let's look at costs.... Since no new plants have been built since 1977, nobody has any idea of what the costs might be. We could guess that the expense of the first couple of new plants would be heavy, both with engineering permits, legal wrangles (the self-same EWs fighting against the plants would fulfill their prediction of high costs), financing costs, skills training, initial parts production .... All of which would drop significantly as more were built. "Cheaper" fossil fuels are going to look a lot more expensive when you have to count in the carbon costs imposed by the EWs, not to mention the environmental costs.
The number of plants required to cut into the need: larger and more efficient plants is one solution, but hiding our heads in the sand and saying "too many" is absurd. You need however many you need, given acceptable numbers of coal or oil fired plants and the availability of other energy sources -- all in the context of predicted energy requirements. More plants also means lower unit costs. Costs are unfavorably compared with solar and wind power ... maybe if you can guarantee that those sources will provide continuous power, but since nobody can get my 24 hour forecast right, why should we presume to be able to predict the weather? Also, suitable sites for wind farms and solar arrays are often too far from the end user of the energy being produced to make it sensible at all.
The EWs wring their hands about the lack of knowledge and skills available for the building and running of nuclear plants. Har-har. The EWs' parents are responsible for that lack, having virtually killed off that industry in the 1970's. We could always buy nuclear plants from France ... that ought to please the EWs. But fortunately, the military has been able to pick up some of the slack and has kept current on matters nuclear -- isn't that ironic. But consider the dangers of coal-fired plants ... aren't the EWs telling us fossil fuel plants are killing the Earth? Causing everything from global warming to mass lung disease and cooties? Or that the wind turbines in Vineyard Sound will kill all the seagulls and damage their views? What's worse, nuclear risks or the "surety of global warming?"
But the inevitable subsidies will take away money from ... other industries requiring subsidies that just might fall within the rubric of politically correct wastage? We know that nuclear power produces electricity - where and how required. Can you say that about wind or solar power? In the Northeast?
Where to put the spent nuclear fuel? So far, in the US, the sum total of all nuclear waste would cover a football field 15 feet deep in toxic crap. That's it. Some of this is now "cool" on a radioactive horizon and can be stored in a different way from the recent hot waste. To be sure, that's still one seriously toxic football field, but finding room for storage is NOT one of the problems. Finding a place for it is. And that problem is created by the same EWs who claim that there is a problem. Voila. Reprocessing of spent fuel also decreases the amount of waste, but as EWs point out, that also means that such dangerous byproducts as Plutonium are available for separation -- a proliferation problem. Compare that waste problem with the emissions creating global warming....
And we come to the ultimate EW nightmare: proliferation. Oh dear! Look, it is not as if anything we do "to set an example"' will in any way affect the actions of other nations. And if other nations are going to try and "nick" some of our reprocessed stuff, why would they bother to get it here? Why not France or Russia? Or build their own D.I.Y. nuke kit from Kim Jong-Il or Pakistan? Just worrying about our ability to keep tabs on our own nuke-stuff is nonsensical compared with the global risk already out there. The Genie is already out of the bottle.
Also ironically, it turns out that the best system for producing gasoline from oil shale and oil sands involves using a nuclear plant to hyrdolize the raw material, heating it, using superheated steam, etc. -- under current plans, 30% of any fuel produced has to be used in the making of each gallon of good stuff. Kind of expensive when you consider how cheaply it could be done using the by-products of nuke electricity production.
Weird.
posted by Zaphod at Tuesday, July 01, 2008
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