Al Gore braved a midwinter snowstorm yesterday to tell a Senate
committee that the world is heating up and the only thing that
can save us is “conservation and renewables.”
Gore’s testimony, of course, was a prelude to the national debate
that will soon be taking place over global warming.
“We’re firing with real bullets here,” commented Senator Bob
Corker (R-Tenn.) at one point. “I believe we’re going to end up
passing something this year. I’m just concerned about what it’s
going to be.”
Good point. I know the instinct among conservatives is to
stonewall on global warming and try to prevent anything from
being adopted. But the votes aren’t there. A much more
constructive strategy would be to use the opportunity to revive
nuclear power in this country — something that would benefit us
all anyway. “Reviving nuclear power would be the best way
possible to re-industrialize this country,” says California
Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, who is trying to remove some
of the barriers to a nuclear revival.
Much more likely, however, is that Congress will couple a limit
on carbon emissions to Al Gore’s bewitching vision of an America
built on wind and solar energy.
Gore began by asserting that wind and solar fuels are “free
forever” and therefore ready to do the job. As an example, he
cited “concentrated thermal solar” that uses mirrors to focus
desert sunlight, turning it into electricity. He cited a recent
Scientific American article, saying, “If we took an area
of the desert 100 miles on each side, we could provide ourselves
with all the electricity we need.” He wants to do it in the next
ten years.
The Scientific American article,
“A Solar Grand Plan,” by Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis
Fthenakis, appeared in January 2008. It did not say we needed an
area 100 miles on each side, which is 10,000 square miles. The
article stated, “To meet the 2050 projection [of electrical
demand], 46,000 square miles of land would be needed for
photovoltaic and concentrated solar power installations.” That’s
215 miles on a side. If you’re having trouble picturing this,
that comes to one-third of New Mexico (121,000 square miles).
But that’s just one aspect of the job. Such a facility would
produce electricity only while the sun shines. In order to power
a grid, you would also need a system of electrical storage, both
for nighttime capacity and cloudy days. (New Mexico does have
cloudy days.) No such system exists but the authors envision a
network of “vacant underground caverns, abandoned mines, aquifers
and depleted natural gas wells” all over the country storing “535
billion cubic feet of storage, with air pressurized at 1,100
pounds per square inch.” That’s about 1/16th of all the natural
gas industry’s underground storage reservoirs. The air would be
released to spin electric turbines when the sun doesn’t shine.
The authors estimated the infrastructure could be constructed by
2050. Gore is shooting for 2020.
Oh yes, all this will require rebuilding the entire electrical
grid to 765 kilovolts because the current 345 kV version can’t
ferry all this electricity back and forth across the country.
That’s another $1 trillion job.
After outlining this vision of a “world run on renewable energy,”
Gore was asked by Senator Corker about nuclear power. Here’s how
he responded:
“Senator, I’m not against nuclear power, but I’ve grown skeptical
about the degree to which it can expand. Unfortunately, nuclear
reactors only come in one size — extra large. They’ve very
expensive. The nuclear industry now has zero ability to predict
how much these things will cost. Wall Street is showing no
interest in investing. Therefore, I think it’s only going to play
a very small part.”
Gore has been throwing out this “extra large” line for many
years. In March 2007 I wrote an
evaluation in the Wall Street Journal but it didn’t
have much impact. To be brief, nuclear reactors can be built to
any size you desire. The reactor aboard the Cassini Space Probe
generated less than one kilowatt. Research reactors usually
produce 1-5 megawatt (1 MW = 1,000 kilowatts) and Navy reactors
generate 20-50 MW. When Duquesne Light and Power “beached” one of
Admiral Hyman Rickover’s 70-MW submarine reactors at
Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957, it became the nation’s first
commercial plant. The reason we build the 1,500-MW behemoths of
today is that that’s the cheapest way to produce
electricity. The bigger the reactor, the less heat is lost.
Coal plants are built to the same dimensions.
Nevertheless, many people are starting to build small reactors.
The Russians are putting 60 MW reactors on barges and floating
them into the Arctic to power Siberian villages. Hyperion, Inc.,
a California company, just introduced an 80 MW reactor the size
of a gazebo that can power a city of 50,000. At a time when Gore
& Co. want to cover entire states with windmill farms and
solar collectors, nuclear has become “small but beautiful.”
But the biggest shocker came when Gore explained that
reprocessing of nuclear fuel — the technology being employed by
the French — actually worsens the so-called problem of “nuclear
waste.” As reported
here last May, reprocessing has been a huge success in
France. The French now store all the their high-level waste from
30 years of producing 75 percent of their electricity beneath the
floor of one large room at Le Havre. On this side of the
Atlantic, however, the rumor has taken hold that the French are
only increasing the problem. “Reprocessing of nuclear
waste actually expands the amount of high-level waste,”
Gore told the committee yesterday. “I know this sounds
counterintuitive. I only learned this recently.”
Counterintuitive indeed. When challenged by Senator Johnny
Isakson (R-Ga.), Gore said he couldn’t remember where he heard it
but his staff quickly came up with the name of Allison
Macfarlane, at George Mason University.
AS IT HAPPENED, I interviewed Professor Macfarlane a year ago for
my book, Terrestrial Energy.
She has edited her own book on Yucca Mountain, Uncertainty
Underground, and seemed rather sensible on the issue of
waste storage. “Geological repositories are the ultimate solution
but there’s no need to rush into one right now,” she said at the
time. “Dry cask storage [the lead-lined containers that utilities
are now using for on-site storage] is safe on the order of 50 to
100 years.” Now she is being quoted as Al Gore’s principal source
of alarm.
So like any contemporary electronic reporter, I called Macfarlane
even as I watching the hearings wind up streaming on C-Span. She
told me she was indeed the source of Gore’s information — she
talked with him a couple of weeks ago. Surprisingly, however, she
hasn’t written anything on the issue. Her information comes from
other people’s papers. She couldn’t name any references off the
cuff but promised to send some (although nothing has arrived
yet).
In any case, Macfarlane said the reason reprocessing increases
the problem is that lots of chemicals are added in separating the
various radioactive isotopes in a spent fuel rod. This ends up
adding to its volume. She admitted that once the fuel is
reprocessed, 95 percent of a material is natural uranium, the
same stuff that comes out of the ground, except that the
fissionable isotope now constitutes 1 percent instead of 0.7
percent. “You could just dump it back into the ground if you
wanted, but GNEP [President Bush’s Global Nuclear Energy
Partnership] has defined it as ‘low-level waste,’” she explained.
“It’s a matter of definition, but you can call it low-level
waste.”
So it isn’t high-level waste — the really radioactive stuff —
that’s increased. It’s the low-level waste — material at the
level of contaminated hospital gowns that is usually deposited in
landfills.
Yucca Mountain now consists of a five-mile-long underground
railway tunnel dug into the side of the ridge. In order to
accommodate the 40,000 tons of unreprocessed fuel rods headed its
way, another sixty miles of side tunnels and storage vaults will
have to be carved into the mountain. All this will be to store
the same high-level waste that the French keep under a floor the
size of a basketball gymnasium. Does that suggest that
reprocessing might make some sense?
“Volume doesn’t matter,” said Macfarlane. “It’s the heat
generated by the waste that’s the problem. Even though you’ve
concentrated it down to 5 percent of the volume, the high-level
waste is still generating the same amount of heat.”
But heat is energy! Instead of burying it, why not put that
energy to use? James Lovelock, Britain’s outstanding
environmentalist, has asked that his portion of nuclear waste be
sealed in a lead container and buried in his backyard. “I’d use
it to heat my home,” he says.
“It would still be highly radioactive and you’d have
proliferation problems,” said Macfarlane. “Plus reprocessing is
very expensive.”
Given this prevailing lackadaisical attitude toward nuclear
technology, is it any wonder that all the new nuclear facilities
in America are being built by Areva, the French giant, while the
American industry is essentially moribund?
As the hearings wrapped up, committee chairman John Kerry
(D-Mass.) still couldn’t get over Gore’s vision of a Solar
America. “So if we just took that hundred mile square and used it
for solar collectors, we could completely free ourselves from
fossil fuels,” he asked at the end. (Point of order, Mr.
Chairman, Mr. Gore is talking about electricity. More than half
our fossil fuels go into transportation.)
Hang on to your wallets, Citizens of America. These guys are now
running the country.
