energy production review

posted an article about nuclear power, and asked what it was missing. I started this as a reply to ‘s response, but it rapidly mushroomed into a fully formed post. And so here you have it.

You make excellent points. I’d say the author’s problem is that he approaches the problem with a solution in mind, and goes out of his way to point out why it’s the right solution. I have my own axe to grind, and it’ll take up most of what I have to say. I hope to someday replace my half informed polemicism with careful research. =)

A few things the author fails to take into account are the energy intensive nature of uranium mining and enrichment, its toxic byproducts. Keeping the radioactive byproduct on site means situating your plant on a suitable disposal site, which may be nowhere near the place that needs the power. Placing the plant near the site needing power means a long trail spreading a significantly increased risk of cancer in its wake on the way to the containment facility. That may be technologically viable, and the statistical odds may be low, but you’ll never get that anywhere politically.

Three other things he fails to take into account are largely economic factors: peak oil, the rise in oil use by developing nations, and the declining US dollar. So basically, we’re running into supply constraints, demand is increasing, and our purchasing power is dropping. This could have some very ugly consequences for us. This basically is to say that foreign oil is not a sustainable energy source for the US.

And mining is an oil intensive process. To get at the sparsely located mineral supplies we desire we have to drive to them with big machinery, and use alot of liquid energy to get the solids out of the ground. There is a hidden oil cost everywhere.

The author also neglects the fuel cell as an alternative to the internal combustion engine. Reasonably enough because low-maintenance, affordable, hydro-carbon-using fuel cells are currently research projects rather than marketable products.

Your solar/wind/tidal proposal, sadly, is about as viable as the author indicated. At least, if we use photovoltaics for the solar. No matter how efficient our economy becomes, those particular renewables are just not going to cut it.

What is required to my mind, is a shift akin to the agricultural revolution. Prior to the agriculture revolution, our species went chasing the food hither and yon. Afterwards, we stayed put and developed the food. As it turns out, the latter strategy supports a much larger quantity of people on a much smaller footprint of land. It’s also worth noting that this did reduce dietary diversity, and the health of the early agriculturalists. But they were more efficient and more populous, and they outlasted the hunters and gatherers.

So, basically, instead of chasing the increasingly difficult to obtain, well-aged biomass (coal, oil, natural gas), or mining (hint, mining is oil intensive) toxic, radioactive materials, which we then make even more radioactive, we can work on developing technologies, possibly including engineering a great many organisms, to better cultivate and harvest energy, preferrably in a liquid, energy dense form, such as ethanol or biodiesel. Plants, which themselves harvest solar energy far more efficiently than photovoltaics, and likely our waste products as well, represent a seriously underused renewable energy source.

Current technology is not quite up to the task. Corn’s conversion to ethanol doesn’t use most of the plant, as it relies on the more easily digestible carbohydrate components. Biodiesel is a product of plant or animal oils (not sure about other lipids, say wax), and is again wasteful of much of a plant’s energy. If we bred a plant, or even genetically engineered a simple single-celled organism to convert sunlight to easily harvested oil/sugars with a minimum of other materials produced, we’d be doing much better on the energy front. We could decentralize production, avoid worrying about toxic wastes, and take the farmers currently living on the federal dole and give them something useful to do. Historically, we’re good at this kind (plant breeding to specific goals) of technology.

Fusion, another hopeful, as currently planned (with deuterium and tritium), also involves an excess of neutrons, and consequent radiation (if I’m not mistaken, it’s nothing compared to fission, but still not pretty.) Further, it’s not yet a productive technology. Then there’s focus fusion (which I read about in ‘s journal), still a far from mature technology, no radioactive by products, though also consumptive of water. I doubt we’d run out of water any time soon, but I wonder how much water we could consume before we serious start messing up the composition of the oceans, and how much worldwide energy consumption that translates to. I’m sure it’d be long after we’re dead, even if it started yesterday, but it’s still a slow burn, rather than a true renewable.