Panel Discussions

Panel discussions are all the rage today - in our modern punditocracy, they're the new town hall meetings, I guess. And panel discussions on alternatives to fossil fuels are especially popular, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon mess, $110 a barrel oil, and mounting evidence that we're doing something evil to the planet, even if we aren't sure exactly what.

So they get some experts together, they have a panel discussion, and it's so goddamned frustrating. Once again, nothing can be done. The wind power pundits do nothing but debunk solar power. The solar power pundits do nothing but debunk wind power. The conservation people debunk everything. The conservatives (some of them, anyway) debunk the notion of climate change. The end result: intellectual gridlock, because everyone assumed that it's their way or the highway; that any "mind share" a competing technology gains is that much money they lose.

But one thing is a given: nobody takes a beating in these discussions quite like nuclear power. They practically take turns dragging nuclear power out to the woodshed and beating it like an army mule. But here's where I break ranks with my cohorts. I think nuclear energy is absolutely essential if we're going to be serious about reducing our consumption of fossil fuels. Let me reiterate: absolutely essential.

I am not saying that we should give up on solar power, wind power, hydroelectric power, and whatever other alternative forms of power generation there are. But if we're serious about significantly reducing our emissions of carbon dioxide and ending our dependency on "foreign oil", we're going to have to stop burning oil, gas and coal. That means taking millions of cars and trucks off the highways and replacing them with electric cars. That means closing gas and coal fired power plants. That means we're going to add a whole new load on our electrical generation infrastructure (battery-powered plug-in cars) just as we're taking a big chunk of our generating capacity off-line (coal and gas-fired power plants).

Can't get there from here. You can't double and triple the demand, reduce the generation capacity by 70%, and expect the books to balance.

Now, clearly, wind and solar power have a significant role to play. But even if we quadruple solar power and wind power generation in the next ten years, where are we? Doodley-squat times four is still roughly doodley-squat. Pursue it, by all means, and pursue it hard. But what do we do in the meantime? What technology can, relatively quickly in terms of economic cycles, gear up and generate a lot of power without increasing our consumption of fossil fuels?

Yes, that dreaded red-haired stepchild, nuclear power.

I don't make this stand frivolously. It only takes one "accident" like Chernobyl* to make the whole enterprise decidedly unappealing, and nobody finds the idea of thousands of tons of radioactive waste hanging around for thousands of years very pleasant. But if you want to generate serious megawatts of power, and if you want to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and if you want to stop writing checks to oil sheiks, well, the options seem pretty limited to me.

It strikes me that fusion power is the desired end state. We're able to generate scads of power with fusion, even today, but unfortunately the difficulty lies in harnessing the power. How exactly does one capture the output of a ten-megaton thermonuclear weapon? I don't know how long it'll take to develop the technology required to generate power by fusion in a controlled and reliable way. But once we do, all the other technologies become irrelevant. We can dismantle the windmills, recycle the solar panels, cement over the nuclear power plants, dynamite the hydroelectric generators, because the days of virtually free energy will be upon us.

We just have to get there. I figure it'll take about 100 years for this to happen, and I suspect it's going to require breakthroughs in magnetohydrodynamics that we can't even guess at today. But it'll happen. Stars do it all the time, so in principle we should be able to as well. So we've got to find a way to bridge the gap of about 100 years, and I think well-engineered nuclear power plants are the answer.

Emphasis on well-engineered. No RBMK reactors, no graphite moderator, no reactors with positive void coefficients, no harebrained experiments on reactors that have been poisoned with xenon, no guessing at water levels because the core itself doesn't have water level instruments... I'm kind of impressed by the Canadian heavy water reactors, myself, since they seem to sidestep the whole issue of fuel enrichment entirely, and I confess I find the very idea of "heavy water" groovy.

This means, more than likely, that the pundits will drag me out to the woodshed and give me a thorough thrashing, but that's okay. I haven't done any research or anything (heaven forbid), but I'd be greatly surprised (greatly surprised) if the combined energy output of all the solar power plants in America exceeds the output of just the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station near Buckeye, Arizona. And that's probably true of all the windmills in America too. Put that in your energy equation and calculate it!

(It bears noting that fission-based nuclear power has a limited lifetime. In a few tens of thousands of years, natural radioactive decay will have converted all the useful fissionable isotopes of uranium and thorium into useless stuff. So it's a case of use it now, in the next ten thousand years or so, because eventually the option to use it will expire.)

*Chernobyl was no "accident", any more than hitting another car because you're texting on your cell phone is an accident.